LEGENDARY . . .

For sure, with the passing of the years, living legends stop living. Boris Yeltsin, dead today at age 76, was a living legend in my eyes, being the one who stood at the helm of the former Soviet Union right at the time I was starting to fall in love with all things Russian. In my juvenile, high-school eyes, he was the "good guy," come to do away with the "bad guy" times of Mikhail Gorbachev. How embarrassingly simplistic I was in those days! Still, it's fun and warm to look back and see the people that stick in my memory and heart, merely by their association with the things that became important and special to me.

I wonder if we have a sufficient appreciation these days for things and people of historical significance, those that made a difference and impacted the world for better or for worse, those kinds of folks that really only come around once in the lifetime of a nation. We excoriate them when they're around, we laud them when they're in retirement, and we wish we had paid more attention when they're dead. That is the way of things, I suppose, and there is a rightness to it, in a strange way. Nevertheless, men like Boris Yeltsin ... they sure don't make them like him anymore.

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LOVELY . . .

What a lovely article about the solidarity of university students. Long live intellectual freedom and education.