Misc readings from today's Wash Post

Interesting article on what believers have in common.

Confess to Steven Reiss how important eating, exercise and vengeance are to you, and he can divine the role religion plays in your life.

Reiss, an Ohio State University professor of psychology and psychiatry, said these and 13 other "sensitivity points" -- a set of values held to different degrees by nearly everybody -- can predict not only whether a person is likely to be religious but also what form that belief may take.

Read the whole thing here.

Howard Kurtz on the all-Reagan news:

All this may prove meaningless by November, but at the moment, as you may have noticed, there is no other news. It feels like I'm back in the '80s: Baker, Meese, Deaver, Shultz all over TV, lots of talk about Gorbachev and the commies. All that's missing is a sound track by Billy Joel, Barry Manilow and Bob Seger.

I figured the '04 speculation wasn't far off when I saw Andrew Sullivan declare: "I have no doubt that Reagan would have endorsed the war to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq from theocrats and tyrants." Personally, I have no doubt that we ought to be careful about extrapolating what a dead person would have thought about any subsequent issue.

Finally, this from Letters to the Editor:

I read with interest the recent article about the singing-cicada invasion ["Whistling Sweet Nothings, Cicadas Abuzz," Metro, June 1]. Of course, my in-laws in Annandale keep us abreast of the sensory saga, but I wanted to share an interesting cicada encounter.

As part of their flying stage, cicadas continue to pit themselves against Southwest Airlines Boeing 737s. They give it their all.

When taxiing for takeoff recently at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, my first officer and I noticed a cicada perched on the windshield wiper. The cicada initially faced aft, but as the taxi speed increased, it rotated itself to point into the wind.

I wondered just how long it would hang on once we took off. To our amazement, the cicada didn't let go until we accelerated past 110 knots (about 125 mph).

If it was a he, I wonder if he was singing all the way down the runway.