Here are a couple of rants that will firmly establish me as an aging, crusty old codger.

When I first met Miriam Nisbet, earlier this year at her office at the National Archives, we quickly fell into a discussion about fountain pens. As it turned out, both of us really like to use old fashioned fountain pens, and that day she was using a Lamy much like a couple that I have. She's a Mont Blanc person, and I'm a Waterman guy (I've been carrying my oldest Waterman for over 25 years), so we agreed to disagree about that, avoiding conflict and finding the common interest like good conflict resolvers.

So what, you ask? Well I have a Waterman pen that was given to me by Julia some years ago that is one of my favorite pens. The barrel is made of an olive branch - it is a beautiful instrument, and the olive branch seemed to me to be a good material for a conflict resolver to have in hand, so to speak.

This rant was prompted by the fact that Waterman isn't Waterman any more, and customer service isn't what customer service used to be. (I told you I was going to sound like an old codger.) When the nib began to leak on my olive branch pen, I looked up the service center for Waterman and found that now Parker and Waterman are owned by Tupperware. The only time I used Waterman service in the past they were still an independent company, and it was a joy. Their guarantee was that any time, for any reason, if the pen failed to work properly, they would fix it. The Parker-Waterman Service Center, brought to you by Tupperware will gladly honor that guarantee - if you can produce the original receipt for the pen. What are the chances of that after 25 years? So, I paid my $66.00 to get the pen fixed. I'll hang on to my Waterman pens, but I just might go over to Miriam's Mont Blancs in the future.

My second rant has to do with preachers who think they are free to say whatever they want about whomever they want without taking responsibility for their words. Billy Graham's son was uninvited from offering a prayer for DOD because he referred to Islam as "evil." On today's Washington Post web site he authored an article entitled, "Prayer is not Political," in which he argues that we should all be OK with comments made in the name of God - as defined by him, apparently. Just as people were angered by Louis Farrakhan's reference to Judaism as a "gutter religion," we should all be angered by Graham's reference to Islam as "evil." My response to his contention that prayer is not political, is that whenever a person who has chosen to be a public figure, as he has, makes a remark that is divisive and clearly charged with politics, as his comment was, religion has crossed into the political arena. So, for me, in Graham's case, "Prayer is not Apolitical" and I'm glad DOD uninvited him.