A. 喬治·沃克·布什 B. 比爾·克林顿 C. 理查德·尼克森

D. 林登·约翰逊 E. 本杰明·哈里森 F. 湯瑪斯·傑佛遜

Yup, it’s Wednesday again.  Let it never be said that the pleas of my readers fall on deaf ears.  That’s assuming, of course, that I would have been ready to get this out on Monday anyway.

Theoman returned to his old friend, logic.  And why not?  From a logical perspective, A was so obvious.  It has to be LBJ, because he’s the only one with three names.  Well, three full names, certainly.  I mean, the “W” in George W. Bush is just a letter, right?  It doesn’t stand for . . . oh wait, no, that was Truman.  The W is for Walker, which means that the A is for Bush.  But surely logic wouldn’t fail him a second time!  These characters are intended to represent sounds, so if you see two names ending with the same sound and two answers ending with the same character, you must have a match!  Because there are only two presidents on this list whose names end with “-son” . . . no, no, don’t be ridiculous, “Nixon” is spelled with an “x,” so it’s not . . . oh.  I guess it is.  Theoman still had a 50-50 shot at Benjamin Harrison, and you would have thought that after logic failed him luck would swoop in to pick him back up, but that’s not the way it works, apparently.  However, youthful sentimentality and 100% subjective observation paid off in the end: he found Clinton, whom A Fan called great and Shirley called attractive, at B.  You know, B for Bill.

A Fan sat right down in his director’s chair and, as usual, immediately began casting.  We don’t doubt that John Travolta would have made an intriguing Thomas Jefferson, or that Philip Baker Hall could have handled the role of Dubya.  We are also very curious to see a TV series that features Walter Cronkite as George Washington, Mario Cuomo as Martin van Buren, Billy Graham as James Garfield, and Colin Powell as Taft.  As usual, A Fan impresses more with his capacity for tangential thought than with his accuracy, though he did manage to track down LBJ at D (presumably by shouting “Hey, Hey!”)  Also, John Adams was the best character in 1776, but he couldn’t compare to Morley Safer’s Adams in The American President.

Shirley continued the trend of each participant getting one answer correct, though she may be disappointed to learn that her intuition served her best at A, George Walker Bush.  But her descriptions weren’t all so far off.  She called C, the one that looks good in the beginning but troubled at the end, LBJ, but couldn’t that description apply equally well to Nixon?  F, the cute one, may not be Bill Clinton, but Thomas Jefferson was certainly a looker in his day as well, or so 1776 would have us believe.  Also, he played the violin.

E is Benjamin Harrison, a shining example of the Era of Forgettable Presidents (1865-1901).  I wonder why he was included in this quiz . . .

I’m giving my lovely assistant the week off, so we’re back to Japanese this time around.  This week we’re going to try something different.  I’m sure you’re all tired of simply passively picking characters; wouldn’t you rather create some of your own?  Don’t worry, there won’t be too much creativity involved: I’ll give you the parts, and you simply have to put them together.  Here is a list of kanji parts that have the following meanings (in order): rice field, heart/mind, metal, bird, stand, sun, tree, and village.

A. 田　B. 心　C. 金　D. 隹

E. 立　F. 日　G. 木　H. 里

Of course, you are more than welcome to create any sort of combination, with whatever meaning you choose to assign to it.  But for those who like something to shoot for, you can try to build me characters with the following meanings: bell, think, sound, and gather.