> There sure has, and a depressing amount of it has been fairly precious and, >> to my ear at least, pompous as hell. >> >> "Desecrate" Mark Twain's name?? Give me a break; the man himself leased out >> his name to sell shaving soap and stove polish, for god's sake! I knew this thread would be highly amusing, and I was right. As Terry said, deja vu all over again!! ; ) I noted in my original post the obvious breakdown of the "issue" at stake in all of this. Again, I went back and looked at the way the award is described on the website, and the list of honorees, and lo and behold, I love every one of those guys and gals! And the award is clearly for humor and comedy --not writing novels, or being the "conscience of the nation" (a title that Bob Dylan famously mocks and vilifies, btw). Yes, the could have called it the Will Rogers Award, or the Bob Hope Award, or for that matter the Josh Billings or Petroleum Nasby Award --but they didn't! Twain is being invoked as a great humorist--which he surely was!! Why not just celebrate that tribute? The stakes are very very high, when it comes to the public memory of our dead heroes. How dare those silly folks besmirch the name of our beloved Mark Twain by comparing him to the lowly Billy Crystal! Yes, much of the consternation also strikes me as "fairly precious"--a delightful phrase--if not entirely pompous and (dare I say it??) verging on the idolatrous! There, I said it -- Yes, now the fur will fly!! Harold K. Bush Saint Louis University