Our encouraging thought for the day goes out to this season’s graduating classes: Cheer up. Those same qualities that brought scorn, shunning and outcast status in high school often bring the most success in adult life.
So says author Alexandra Robbins, writing in our sister newspaper the Los Angeles Times. As examples who were shunned by the Cool Table in the school cafeteria, she offers country star Taylor Swift, fashion icon Tim Gunn and Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling. Take that, snobs.
"The most heartbreaking consequence of this treatment is that tens of thousands of students—imaginative, interesting, impressionable people—think that they have done or felt something wrong," writes Robbins, yet “being different is not a problem but a strength."

When I heard that CBS finally fired Charlie Sheen, I reacted in the way Dorothy Parker responded to news that a mediocre president had died: "How can you tell?"

After parading his narcissism from one TV show to another for a week of escalating insults against his employers --and rambling babble about “winning” and drinking “Tiger blood” Sheen seemed to be all but begging to be canned.

Or perhaps caned, perhaps by the president his father played on West Wing. I would have bought a ticket to see that. 

"Who is John Galt?" That haunting refrain from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is being asked by a lot of people about Rand Paul, the libertarian who won last Tuesday's Republican primary for the U. S. Senate in Kentucky.

I'll have more on Paul and his fiesta of gaffes in my Sunday column. But I'm posting this video in case you wondered, as I did, whether Kentucky's libertarian rising star of the Tea Party movement  was named after the world's probably-most-famous libertarian author, Ayn Rand.

It would make sense, after all, for the famously libertarian eye doctor to be named by his famously libertarian Republican dad, US Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, after the famously libertarian and perennially best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

It would also be wrong.

Rand's real name is Randal, it turns out, and that's how he was known until his wife started calling him "Rand" for short-- and it stuck.

Re: The running Stewart-Goldberg debate. At least Jon Stewart was not simply preaching to the choir with his Dick Cheney-style "Go F*** Yourself" opus. He's got the choir preaching with him, too.

Let the church say "Amen!"

Palinfest rolls on. As I wrote in my Sunday column, politicians in both parties need to pay attention to Sarah Palin's appeal, even if her actual chances of winning the White House are close to those of an ice cube in the Sahara.

As the voices in this video attest, captured by some lefty video makers at a Palin book signing in Columbus, what she believes is less important to her loyal followers than what she represents. To them she's offers a vision of the America they think they used to have before all the jobs went overseas and that skinny guy with a funny name got into the White House.

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Who knew? When Sarah Palin was campaigning with John McCain, she wanted more running time in the fresh outdoors.

But John McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt didn't care about that. He wanted her to just eat more carbs because it was good for “cognitive connections and blah-blah-blah.”  Gee, I wonder why Team McCain might be so concerned with boosting Palin's brain power, not to mention all that "blah-blah-blah."

With Woodstock retrospectives popping up everywhere in recent days, a lot of my fellow boomers can't help but wonder how much we're going to hear a few weeks from now about a less cuddly concert memory: Altamont.

Altamont was to Woodstock what the Charles Manson family was to the Summer of Love.  It was a free Dec. 6, 1969, concert headlining the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in northern California.  

Also featuring Santana, the Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash and a show-stopping set by Tina Turner, among other treats, the show was promoted as the West Coast's attempt to snatch back its leadership in '60s cool from that upstate New York event.

It is also remembered for murder and mayhem caused by pool cue-wielding Hell's Angels. Some dim bulb reportedly decided to hire as security and compensate with free beer, although nobody would own up to that in the finger-pointing afterwards. Angels Chief Sonny Barger says in the Albert and David Maysles' documentary "Gimme Shelter," excerpted above, that they were to hang out, drink beer, guard equipment and keep the stage clear. They got carried away.