“A routine mixup,” says J. Hobbes Affleck, Chief of Photo Intelligence for the AP. “Why he got identified as President Bush and not as, say, Grover Norquist, is anyone’s guess.”

Many images & a few videos are out there from his boyish twenty-something male cheerleader days, his partying thirties, and futile half assed attempts at playing businessman forties. He’s always looked exactly the same, either cocky or deer-in-the-headlights expression (when trying to be serious). This is probably because he doesn’t learn or mature.

I know from my own experience that the temptation to foist the favorite stories of one’s childhood on the Next Generation is hard to resist. Much of what my parents tried to force-feed me I couldn’t keep down, though I’ve managed to read some of it since reaching years of discretion. So I wonder whether this would be a generally valid proposition: Most children’s literature is good for one generation of fry; after that, it either fades away or becomes adult literature. One can find exceptions to this proposition–the “Alice” books amused the children of more than one generation–but generally speaking, what do you think?

When I was in high school, my sire took up jogging, owing to an adipose deposit. I viewed his efforts in a near state of shock, for he was the last person I’d have expected to take up any kind of a fad. Even so, I saw that he wasn’t on the cutting edge; I felt then that jogging had pretty much run its course as a fad. Little did I know!

My sense of the word itself, when I first heard it, was that it was something professional athletes did as part of a training regimen, and that the thing had now spread to amateurs. I don’t know what could have made me think so; my grade school and high school PE coaches never spoke of “jogging"–it was “laps.”