"That's horrible. After the crap we just went through. No. No, no, no."

Richard Heene — the father of the Boy in a Box, the erstwhile Boy in a Balloon — protested when asked whether the whole thing was a hoax.

"I'm kind of appalled after all the feelings that I went through, up and down, that you guys are trying to suggest something else."

I'm kind of appalled too, that the media and the whole country is so easily distracted and has so little of the ballast of skepticism.

These people were on "Wife Swap" — I've seen the episode — and somebody had made a flying saucer shaped balloon...

Oh, what can I say? I don't want to hear it — the inevitable defense that your heart went out to that sweet little Boy in Danger.

Anyway, I missed most of the nonsense. I myself was aloft — flying, sans balloon, to Washington, D.C., for this symposium on judicial review.

We began yesterday afternoon with an extemporaneous talk by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is an ebullient man, capable of bouncing up and down on his feet at the idea of the invention that is the American Constitution, buoyed up, not by balloons, but by ideas — ideas into which I must plunge headlong today.