It's one of the dangers of scanning your emails.

The title read, "Honor the Dead by Helping the Living."

I read it as, "Humor the Dead by Helping the Living."

As a verb, "humor" means 1 to comply with the mood or whim of (another); indulge 2 to act in agreement with the nature of; adapt onself to.

What would be the mood of the dead? What would they want to tell us right now? What message would they send us, if they could?

It might be a worthy exercise to imagine the mood of the dead and "humor" them by passing that mood on to the living.

Then we might be more ready when our day comes to join them.

Somebody wrote this, no name attributed:

A mission statement is defined as "a long, awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly." All good companies have one.

I don't know the context of his statement, but it appears true:

"Brains, like hearts, go where they are appreciated." --Robert S. McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Appreciation can also mean remuneration.

Appreciation can be a cause of the feared "brain drain."

But on the other side of the equation, it can be a cause of the desired "brain gain."

Just depends on how you look at it, I suppose.

In today's local paper:

I blinked and June has almost slipped by me. Next weekend I'm off to Fortaleza for a seminar. Last Saturday, I spent most of the day in Sao Paulo in a meeting. Thursday was a holiday, so lots of people took off Friday and made it a long weekend.

My day today was like that, too. It's 8 p.m., and I think it ought to be 3:00. Time to wrap up.