(S-R file photo)

Wow. The long weekend is almost here.
The day sped by as we shoveled copy and wrote some stuff to fill those shovels. Our fearless leader was off this week and we never realized before how much he does on a Friday. (How's that for buttering up?)

Anyway, I was surprised how many people seemed to be at work today, too. Not just in the newsroom but elsewhere as we made some calls and e-mails for information.

Anyway, enjoy the celebrations, wherever you find them! Thanks for chatting with us this week. Duck in over the holiday weekend. We should have some brief posts there, if our home computers haven't been devoured by a virus that's circulating.

(AP file photo.)

Today's editorial applauded a state program that helps low-income smokers kick the habit. It should save taxpayer money, plus help people find jobs. Whether anyone admits it, certain negative assumptions are made about job candidates who smoke.

Several of my family members once smoked and gave it up in recent years. They struggled mightily. For about a year after they quit, they got physically sick and experienced the blues. "It was like giving up a best friend," one of my sisters said.

So today, let's share kicking-the-cigarette habit stories.

The unexamined life’s no different from the examined life—
Unanswerable questions, small talk,
Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments—
You’ve got to write it all down. -- Black Zodiac by Charles Wright at Poetry Foundation.

Long-abandoned arguments, unprovable theories and theorems, bring 'em on. This blog is officially open for business.

The day is done.

It's been busy around here...

How about your day?

(S-R photo by Rajah Bose)

From today's Civic Elder profile:
(Lois Stratton served in the Washington Legislature, first in the House and then in the Senate, from 1979 to 1992.)

•I spent one night on the streets of Spokane with street kids. If I had a little daughter like the girl who took me around, I wouldn't sleep at night. You have to see it and feel it to fight for things.

•My husband, Allen, was on the City Council. Between us we put in 23 years of public service.

•When you first go to the Legislature, they give you this malarkey about "we'll write a bill for you and help you get re-elected." I couldn't support the bills they wrote for me. So I got off to a bad start.

•I got the reputation of working with Republicans. To get anything done for Eastern Washington, I had to. I think we accomplished a lot.

•I had a granddaughter who was 14, and I'd never been to her birthday party because her birthday was in January. I was ready to quit. It was time. I was 65.

(Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich talked with children in the West Central Community Center Headstart in March. S-R archive photo by Jesse Tinsley.)

From our editorial today:

States pondering the best way to devise early childhood education ought to look at two recent studies. They conclude, in essence, that if high quality isn't the focus, then don't bother.

In a study published Friday in the journal Science, Georgetown University researchers found improved cognitive skills in students who attended prekindergarten and Head Start programs in Tulsa, Okla., public schools. That sets up those students for success in math, reading and writing. Oklahoma leads the nation in access to public schools for 4-year-olds, and those students develop beyond what would be expected through aging.

Plus, researchers found that Oklahoma's programs somewhat offset traditional socioeconomic factors that cause disadvantaged children to lag behind others.

Those findings ought to be an eye-opener in California, where a new Rand Corp. study found that the quality of that state's preschool offerings falls short and the children of low-income families suffer most.

"Few of the centers we studied provide the types of high-quality early learning experiences that can help prepare children to succeed when they enter school," wrote the Rand study's lead author, Lynn Karoly.

What was your first experience of education like? How did it matter later on?

(AP file photo.)

If sunlight fell like snowflakes,
gleaming yellow and so bright,
we could build a sunman,
we could have a sunball fight,
we could watch the sunflakes
drifting in the sky.
We could go sleighing
in the middle of July
through sundrifts and sunbanks,
we could ride a sunmobile,
and we could touch sunflakes—
I wonder how they'd feel.
-- Sunflakes by Frank Asch found at Poetry Foundation.

What's on your brain -- snowflakes, sunflakes, opinions? Blog lines are officially open.

A reader called and asked if anyone had ever died from being waterboarded. If no one has, he said, why are so many people objecting to its use. I said I didn't know. I told him I'd send his question into blogland to see what response it generates.

So here it is. Blog lines are open.

* Waterboarding: A type of torture in which the victim is immobilized, has rags placed over their face, and has water poured onto them, which creates the sensation of drowning.

(Photo by Brian Plonka/The Spokesman-Review)

From our editorial today:

Emma Wasson died in the hospital, while down the hill in downtown Spokane, basketball players competed in Hoopfest. Emma was 83, and she hadn't been sick too long. She had no reason to doubt that she'd make it to her 37th season cheering on Gonzaga University's basketball team. The ringside grandma was almost as famous as the team. Ronny Turiaf, now with the Los Angeles Lakers, gave her a hug before each game.

We don't often write obituary editorials in this space, even for famous people. It's an opinion area, usually reserved for public affairs issues. But Spokane just celebrated another successful Hoopfest, with few complications, despite record heat and crowds. And it's Fourth of July week; Emma held values that represent the best of who we are in this country.

Above all, she valued education, because she understood it as our country's way of moving the poor out of poverty, of moving individuals from ignorance into enlightenment.

What older person holds values you'd like to emulate? Blog lines are open.

(Spokesman-Review archive photo by Christopher Anderson)

Welcome, rain or tempest
From yon airy powers,
We have languished for them
Many sultry hours. -- From A Summer Shower by Henry Timrod found at Poetry Foundation.

It's muggy like the weather "back East." But storms are coming -- allegedly. What storms brew in your brains? Blog lines are open.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on the D.C. gun ban raises a troubling question in my mind. The question is sociological rather than legal. We live in a very different world from the one known to framers of the Second Amendment. (...) The social problems of our day differ too, ranging as they do from environmental degradation to the illegal drug trade and striking disparities of economic wealth. Longitudinal crime statistics argue that we are also a more violent society, with rising rates of weapons-related homicide, rape, robbery and assault over the half-century since 1960.

Striking the D.C. gun law promises to facilitate individual access to deadly weapons. Given the increasing violence of modern society, the question that therefore haunts me is this: Has the high court's firearms ruling left us safer or not? -- Elwyn C. Lapoint, Spokane

We should have learned as we grew up that all liberties come with responsibility. My current relatives and those of my husband have always followed sensible actions with all weapons – even kitchen knives. I see no reason whatsoever why everyone can't do the same. Then, our country wouldn't be using so much time and money fussing about it all the time.

Would there be disastrous fighting in the streets if folks like the gun haters attempted to take away from us the First Amendment? Just imagine a group of banning people representing each of those four subjects: speech, press, assembly and petition. Someone would have to call out the National Guard plus the Marines to restore order. -- Lillian Forster, Spokane

Does the Constitution need an update to reflect changing sociological needs, or are gun rights among the corollaries of the "inalienable" rights the Founding Fathers referenced?

(The cast of The Brady Bunch is shown in this 1975 AP file photo)

From a Sunday column by Robyn Blumner:

The work of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren indicates there is a coming collapse of the middle class. Warren compares the median American family of 1970 versus that of 2003. She unpacks why our savings rate has dropped to zero from a rather healthy 11 percent of take-home pay in 1970, even as the family added mom as a breadwinner.

She says that Americans are actually spending far less in inflation-adjusted dollars for things like clothes and food, including eating out, than they did in 1970. What has substantially changed, Warren reports, is the cost of big-ticket, fixed expenses.

Housing costs for a medium-size house... have increased 76 percent. Health insurance costs are up 74 percent. Also up sharply are taxes (due to the second income), child care and car-related expenses. Americans keep a car more than two years longer than they did 30 years ago, but they now need two cars to get to two jobs.

Are you better off now than your family was in the 1970s?

(Photo of Chaeanna Lett and daughter Avacyana by S-R's Rajah Bose)

From my Sunday column:

Summer is here. Thousands of Inland Northwest boys and girls will attend camps — day camps, sleep-away camps, scout camps, sports camps, computer camps.

This column is directed to adults who staff and volunteer at Inland Northwest camps. You possess tremendous potential to shape a young life in ways you'll never know. Don't take my word for it. Listen to the wisdom of Chaeanna Lett. She is 20 now. I met her when she was 9, when The Spokesman-Review helped out at The Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center's version of summer camp. It was called the Summer Youth Academy. I'm tracking down the MLK kids we taught in 1997. Chaeanna is the first one I've interviewed. Recently we brainstormed lifelong lessons from summer camp.

Kids pay attention to your essence, not necessarily your words.

You can open up a kid's future with just one simple activity.

Kids pay attention to camp slogans.

What did you learn at camp? Blog lines are open.

(A jogger runs into the sunset along High Drive. S-R Archive photo by Christopher Anderson.)

When you move away,
you see how much depends
on the pace of the days—how much
depended on the haze we waded through
each summer, visible heat, wavy and discursive
as the lazy track of the snake in the dusty road. -- Ellen Bryant Voigt, excerpt from Landscape, Dense with Trees, found at Poetry Foundation.

We're open for opinions, dusty, wavy, discursive.

The sale of Empire Health to a for-profit, out-of-state corporation has many concerned about the quality and accessibility of care. However, with the rough and worsening financial condition of the nonprofit, we urge that the sale go through as quickly as it responsibly can. There aren't any other attractive options, and this one will only get less attractive by waiting.

The affordable housing task force started by then-Mayor Dennis Hession a year ago is still working, and we're glad to see that a change of administration hasn't stalled progress on a number of fronts in solving affordable housing problems in the area. Vigilance will be key in avoiding another crunch like the downtown closures brought last year.

Comments?

Saturday's editorial called for an update of the 1872 mining act, which is virtually the same as it was in that year, over 13 decades ago.

Times have definitely changed, and while mining isn't dead, it needs to learn to share space with equally important uses for the land.

It's Hoopfest weekend. In the spirit of the Slice, here are a few warm-up questions:

(A) How many Spokanites never play basketball except at Hoopfest?

(B) How many Spokanites intentionally plan vacations on Bloomsday and/or Hoopfest weekends just to stay away from the hoopla (pun intended)?

(C) Will any out-of-town ballers notice any of the differences downtown since last year (Fox Theater, Knitting Factory, etc.)?

(D) Other

The picture of the Olympic Sculpture Park on the Seattle waterfront (Sunday Outdoors and Travel section) blows my mind. What am I looking at? Is it a gigantic waste of money called "art"? Is it an example of West-Side excess that should have been devoted to the Alaska Way replacement? It seems to me to be nothing more than an expression of Seattle affluence. The next time they cry for the rest of us to share in one of their capital projects, I will advocate they have proven they can handle it themselves. -- Kay Morse, Spokane

(S-R file photo of "Eagle," by Alexander Calder, at the Olympic Sculpture Park)

Do you enjoy art, especially of the modern variety? Are visuals a priority in your budget?

Today's editorial holds the city planning department and developer Jim Reugh's feet to the fire to comply with planning rules adopted seven years ago. Though some corrections have been made to a slate of problems with Reugh's surface parking lot, the season for planting the required street trees has come and gone.

Got a link to a video of a man dying of ALS (Lou Gering's disease) who has spoken out against a proposed intiative in Washington state that would allow people with terminal illnesses to end their lives with prescription drugs. The initiative might be on the ballot in Washington this fall if enough signatures are collected.

Thanks to Chris Carlson, a Spokane man who has been very active in opposing the initiative. He sent it along.

Take a look here.

And read more about the man in the video -- and also about Chris Carlson here.

Then share your thoughts on this topic. If you had this terminal illness would you want to die when you chose? Blog lines are open.

As Allan deLaubenfels points out in a letter today, we don't use petroleum just for transportation and energy generation -- most of the products we take for granted contain some form of petroleum product.

It could be five years or 50 years. After then, we (or our kids) will have to be ready to live in a world without oil. It will take a long time and a lot of work to make the transition. The time has come to start the job. Those who are not ready will lose. Those who are ready will win.

It is especially important to start the transition when we realize that fuel is not the only purpose of oil. Medicine, fertilizer, plastics, road construction and a host of other products upon which we depend also come from oil. They will also need a substitute. Maybe we should stop burning oil and use it just for its higher-value uses.

Plastic has only been around for a century or so, but I can hardly imagine a world without it. I wonder what will be next.

In today's editorial, we have commendations and concerns for the police ombudsman plan, which now goes to the City Council for consideration. Considering Spokane's history of failed police oversight plans, this is definitely a good start. We hope the Police Guild's excessive power in the process will be tempered and the result will be a fully independent ombudsman.

On your way home, remember to take it easy. Gunning it to the red light will cost you at the gas station.

Better yet, take the bus. I'm all over that.

Oh, and here's a loose thread for whatever comes to you in the evening hours.

The Supreme Court just drastically cut the punitive damages for the 1989 Exxon-Valdez disaster off the Alaska coast. Story here.

I don't imagine this ruling will be popular with the people, many of whom are already angry at oil companies for the exponential growth in gas prices.

Says Sen. Patty Murray, "Nearly 20 years later, the Northwest's fisheries and environment are still affected by Exxon's negligence, and years of legal wrangling shouldn't allow them to fall short of their responsibility to make amends."

As the name implies, punitive damages aren't so much about amends as punishment. They've paid $500 million in economic losses to the victims. Though the court has not set an amount Exxon will probably still pay as much again in punitive damages.

Do you think Exxon has been sufficiently punished for its culpability in this horrific oil spill?

(AP file photo of tugboats pulling the Exxon-Valdez after the 1989 disaster)

I found Nancy Runyan's letter today interesting and compatible with my observations.

Here's an interesting experiment: a bunch of brain scientists measured the amount of energy people's brains use when doing certain kinds of thinking. It's amazing how many kilocalories a brain uses: it is quite the energy hog. However, they discovered some interesting facts.

For instance, the brain uses an absolute minimum of energy when someone's mind is already made up. It's easier. Changing your mind – going from one belief to another – that's more energy intensive: too much work for some people. But the most energy-consuming state for a brain is the suspension of belief – waiting for facts to come in, weighing, comparing, synthesizing. Now, that's some real work.

I will add to her points that neither conservative nor liberal, religious nor atheist, politician nor voter have cornered the market on mental laziness. It's pretty easy to find almost anywhere.