Sanity

Roderick Gonzales and his brother, Raul, lurked in the darkness with the patience of predators. Their target -- Franz Aliquo, the Supreme Commander of the Shadow Government -- had already spotted them once and, with his bodyguards, slipped away into the San Francisco night. But in his haste, Aliquo had left the door to his North Beach safe house ajar, a mistake the Gonzaleses were quick to exploit. The brothers slipped inside, guns ready, and waited.

IN the 10 years since Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington first argued that the 21st century would unfold as a "clash of civilizations," the term has become shorthand for a certain kind of sloppy thinking about relations between pluralistic Western democracies and traditional Islamic communities. Troubled as that relationship may be -- and it's plenty troubled -- there's very little going on that evokes the epochal grandeur of Huntington's catchy phrase.

Opening his public campaign for approval of the $2.77-trillion budget he had sent to Congress 48 hours before, President Bush said Wednesday that his call to reduce spending on social services -- a central feature of his proposal -- represented necessary fiscal discipline and was not really a cut. Bush said that the $65-billion reduction in entitlement programs, such as Medicare, would come from slowing the rate of growth. "People call it a cut in Medicare. That's not a cut," he said.

PATENT LAWS MAY BE AN inventor's best friend, giving someone with a groundbreaking idea the means to capitalize on it. But on many levels, the U.S. patent system is profoundly flawed. Too many patents are issued for "innovations" that are obvious, vague or already in wide use. Too many patent holders try to extend their claims to devices and services that weren't even contemplated when the patents were granted.

I CONSIDER AN autumn trip back to the Midwest a success as long as I don't get picked off by hunters. Now, I am being tested like never before, taking a red-eye flight to Chicago with just the toddler -- a leprechaun with his mother's eyes and licorice on his breath. The smart money is on the leprechaun. As he pretends to sleep, I look at his face. Back home, his mother and I spend hours divvying up where he got his features. Eyes and chin from her. Smirk and Santa cheeks from me.

ADAM PHILLIPS repeatedly makes the point in his new book that sanity is the "weak antagonist" of madness, and that although we have richly textured accounts of psychic suffering, when it comes to defining sanity, the Western tradition has had little of interest to say except that it's the opposite of madness. We like our literary and cinematic characters to behave excessively and we tend to associate intelligence with a propensity for neurosis.

After three weeks of upsets and busted brackets . . . after Vermont over Syracuse and Bucknell over Kansas and West Virginia over Wake Forest . . . after Patrick Sparks toeing the line and three regional finals going overtime, it turns out the final matchup of the 2005 NCAA men's basketball tournament could have been e-mailed in months ago. Monday night in St. Louis, with the national championship at stake, it will be No. 1-seeded Illinois against No.

When my son was 3, my wife and I sent him to a progressive preschool, one that claimed to value autonomy and personal development, and encourage self-esteem. I'd attended a private school, where the uniform included a coat and tie and final exams were given beginning in the fifth grade. For my son I wanted something more free-form, more child-centric. The school promised an environment in which students set the agenda and learning was geared to individual needs and abilities.

A judge declared a mistrial Tuesday in the sanity phase of the trial of a woman convicted of killing a 65-year-old man with her car outside a Van Nuys bagel store in September 2000. Jurors had found Marie Elise West, 39, guilty of second-degree murder. But they deadlocked on whether she was sane when she repeatedly ran over Jesus Plascencia, then called him "road kill."

What a pleasure to read Christy Hobart's "A Family Sanctuary" (Aug. 19). I am an avid gardener, and my interest was further piqued when I read that she had a seriously ill child. I audibly gasped when I realized that her son has tuberous sclerosis; my 11-year-old son also has TS. Hobart's discussion of her garden -- what it means to her and her family, how it adds to their lives -- helped crystallize for me many of my own thoughts and feelings about gardening -- and coping. Laura Jensen Kenmore, Wash.