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I love buying used books. Besides getting to feel thrifty, there's a little thrill in knowing that somebody else has enjoyed a book that I'm enjoying. As you might expect, I spend a lot of money on bird books, and there's nothing I like more than finding a book that somebody has clearly used to identify birds while on vacation, with sightings from the 1960s or 1970s marked in the margins. Sometimes I'll read a book, and if I particularly enjoy it, I'll find the author on the web and send an email. Several times I've received a reply, which I print out and tuck in the front cover of the book. After I'm dead, I'm hopeful that someone else will find the book, and see the correspondence, and will enjoy it in the same way I do.

This guy sent me a hilarious series of emails. If you want to read a fun, funny book about birding, this is the one.

We're the same age and were captivated by the same thing. Remember 13? My school was saying daily prayers.

If you haven't already read it I recommend Borman's Countdown. Not as good as Carrying the Fire but that one stands alone in my opinion. Lost Moon also very good.

One of my favorite passages in Countdown is Borman's reprinting of an unsigned letter he got when 8 returned from the moon. "Dear Mr. Borman, You saved 1968."

...and dead dogs in roadside ditches, maybe the occasional rotting corpse, lots of garbage. Under the Volcano stuff.

But Lowry's masterpiece is 70 years old and my last visit decades ago, so it's probably cleaner now.

Read.

Terrorism, properly done, should be aimed at making some jurisdiction ungovernable. You assassinate the chief of police, the governor, the tsar. You kill the judge, the policeman, the bailiff. You make people afraid to be the instruments of oppression. You pose as the friend and protector of the civilian.

Of course, as time went by, the ruling classes got much better at protecting themselves, so the targets became symbols of authority by the 1960s. In Canada, the FLQ blew up mailboxes.

Then, somewhere in the late 60s and early 70s, things took a much darker turn, particular with segments of the IRA and PLO - both secular organizations, by the way. Just blowing up random places containing random people somehow became the goal - disrupting commerce and travel, in particular. But even these organizations had real-world, if seemingly impossible, goals - reunification of Ireland and Palestine, respectively.

In the late-20th and early 21st centuries we have seen the introduction of an explicitly religious terrorism with entirely nebulous goals. They have adopted the methods of terrorism without any of the moral and ethical constraints of earlier movements that used terrorism as a tool. For an organization like Al-Qaeda, terrorism is the goal, and anybody is the target.

Had our reaction been more measured and thoughtful (and compassionate), I felt this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Only so many people are willing to blow themselves up for no particular reason. But, when you continually create martyrs, others become eager to join their ranks. So, anybody, anywhere, any time, now has a small chance of experiencing sudden, fiery death for no particular reason.