Columns

One of the sweetest phrases a man will ever hear comes directly from the heart:
“I love you, Daddy.”
Whether the words originate from the mouth of a toddler, teenager, full-grown offspring or somewhere in between, something magical happens when they’re spoken.
Precious little girls can bat their eyes and melt their old man’s heart, all the while wrapping him around their pinky fingers.
Little boys can lower their heads, shrug their shoulders and weasel themselves out of all sorts of trouble with the simple four-word phrase.

Things started heating up in our corner of the world last week.
I don’t think it had anything to do with Memorial Day and its unofficial heralding in of summer.
But I must admit, the constant humming of our chillers at the office last Monday reminded me that spring will soon be behind us.
I pretty much had the place to myself as I worked through some interviews, project deadlines and telephone calls on the holiday.
Our air-conditioning units were my only company when the sun really started bearing down.

We need to stop and take a deep breath.
So much has happened over the past two weeks.
Not being much of a network TV watcher, I only caught snippets of chatter here at the office and around town late last week.
Apparently many of my colleagues and friends enjoy spending their evenings with reality TV.
I heard one friend practically swoon when she mentioned that Hines Ward won the top prize on “Dancing with the Stars.” It was news to me.
Ward is a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers in my mind.

Gentle reader, we suspect that you, like we, despite wishing it were not so, share a certain prurient interest in the pecadillos of the rich, the famous, and most of all, the powerful.
So it is that we have followed the reports of the egregious behaviour of IMF chief, Dominique Strauss Kahn, formerly considered most likely the next president of France, and his assault on the housekeeper in the luxurious New York hotel, Sofitel.