Busy Week at the Pottery Barn

It's been a busy week for me, and I feel obligated to make a blog entry just to show I'm still alive. Meanwhile, mosques turned to rubble in Iraq suggest we analyze this situation again from the Pottery Barn paradigm. As we all know, the Pottery Barn Doctrine (PBD) has 3 forms -- 1) If you break it, Pottery Barn will pay for it, throw it away, and get a new one; if you keep on breaking stuff, they'll kick you out; 2) If you break it, you pay for it; 3) If you break it, you fix it. Pottery Barn observes PDB #1. Colin Powell mentioned PDB #2. The Iraq war lengtheners are following PBD #3. We broke it, now we got to stay and fix it. Note that this is in some ways the opposite of PBD #1. In no retail store in the world does breaking merchandise grant one the right to remain indefinitely to try and fix it, particularly if their repair plans entail systematically destroying everything else in the store to effect the repair. The storekeepers of the actual Iraq have been screaming for months, "you've 'helped' enough, now just leave before you 'help' us any more!"

Foreign word for the day: zureparieren, German for "repair to pieces" (at least so Bill Heinz once told me).