Linda Campbell

You've gotta love Justice Antonin Scalia when he gets on a First Amendment roll.

Writing the majority opinion as the Supreme Court struck down a California ban on selling violent video games to minors, Scalia buzzed through like an expert gamer.

"The Free Speech Clause exists principally to protect discourse on public matters, but we have long recognized that it is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and dangerous to try," he wrote at the outset.

NEW YORK -- Looking across the street from a viewing area inside the World Financial Center on a sun-drenched Saturday, it was impossible to comprehend the horror that engulfed lower Manhattan almost 10 years ago.

The hum of insects and the occasional bird call punctuated the last Sunday morning in August at Springwood, Franklin D.

At the end of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," after swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones has retrieved the fabled Ark of the Covenant from the evil Nazis, the treasure with its devastating, face-melting powers is hammered into an innocuous crate then hauled to the bowels of a massive U.S. government warehouse packed with umpteen identical containers.

They called it the "nearer and nearer" book.

And at first, we had no clue what they meant.

When our children were barely verbal, they clamored for a bedtime reading of a book they could describe only as "nearer and nearer."

After much frustrated sleuthing, my husband and I discovered that they meant a James Stevenson book called "Could Be Worse!" in which a grandpa spinning a fabulous yarn about being chased by a blob of marmalade and squished by a giant something-or-other tells his grandkids at one point, "I heard footsteps coming nearer and nearer."