In the Sunday, March 3, Fort Worth Star Telegram the editorial board of the newspaper used Mark Twain as an example in their attempt to send a message to today's entertainment industry leaders. Forum members may be interested in this front page editorial from the Opinion section: "Memo to entertainers: Less is more "There is a world to be said for leaving something to the imagination. "Consider this passage from Mark Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_. It is the point at which Mr. Bixby, a steamboat pilot, becomes enraged when his protege, the young Samuel Clemens, demonstrates that he has not been paying close attention. " 'This was like a red flag to a bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judged it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was; because he was brimful, and here were subjects who could talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with.' "What leaps out from this passage is that the full weight of the passion of the episode is conveyed without resort to a single syllable of actual vulgarity. "The movers and makers of America's entertainment media would do well to reflect on such masterful examples of the creative use of language to captivate their audiences. If they did so, they might avoid the kind of criticism to which they have been subjected by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and the jawboning of President Clinton. "There would be no need for a rating system if the entertainment purveyors would stop taking the easy route of substituting obscene language, graphic sexuality and mind-numbing, irrelevant violence for creative characterization and plot, sparkling and thoughtful dialogue and lyrics, and imaginative visual representation. "To avoid more public and political castigation, the entertainment industry should relearn the fine art of leaving something to the imagination."