Posted 3:13 PM by Robert

Kitty Kelley Extrudes

If the rest of the world takes the view of Michiko Kakutani then President Bush has absolutely nothing to fear from Kitty Kelley's new pathography.

Judging from Ms. Kakutani's review, it appears that the best that can be said of the new load of Kitty litter is that it may be loosely based ("inspired" would be a misleading term, to say the least) on somebody's true life story.

By the way, word has reached me that Ms. Kakutani's father, the incomparable and brilliant and kind Yale mathematician Shizuo Kakutani, has passed away. It is almost certainly the case that Messrs. Bush, Kerry and Cheney all passed within a few feet of Shizuo Kakutani. Who knows, perhaps one or more of them actually took a class from him. He was an excellent teacher of both basic and advanced mathematics.

One wonders if any of these three men now struggling for our attention like political fireflies has ever realized how physically close he stood as a youth to the kind of greatness that ultimately matters, that endures for centuries, that Shizuo Kakutani had in abundance. It's too late for the dullards at the Nobel Committee, but there's time yet for others to understand.