I gave my wife a c-note for Mother's Day and told her she's not my mother...like I do every year. That's a hundred bucks to blow on herself instead of tossing it into the furnace of our household's war effort. Granted, it's now a paltry sum. Time was, a hundred bucks meants something. Now it's a twenty. I don't even know if you can fill a car up for a hundred bucks. Anyhow, we are living under a London-Blitz style program of austerity here in order to launch our kid as far forward as we can - like salmon or spiders. That's actually a better moral guide than the prevailing demonstrations of contemporary religion or politics....those last refuges of scoundrels.