(Editor’s note: Today’s column ought to be titled “Work of Art(‘s Son.”) The guest writer is Stan Adam Trujillo, a Robertson High School graduate who wrote four books on computer programming, all before age 28.
    He has taught college-level programming courses for E-Institute. Currently he is a writer-programmer for Microsoft in Seattle.) ———
    Matters such as religion, politics and education are never black-and-white. No matter how persuasive an argument one advances, someone else can always cite chapter and verse and contradict it.
    Optic editor Jesse Gallegos is sweating next week’s flight to Louisville for training with the newspaper’s parent organization, Landmark Inc.
    An admitted aerophobe, Gallegos is not looking forward to the layover at Dallas-Fort Worth airport. He will need to clear security. In light of heightened measures in the aftermath of 9-11 , we thought it best to convince him that joking about carrying a bomb is no laughing matter. I know.
    We needed to attend two funeral services in Las Vegas, Saturday and Sunday, in addition to a rehearsal dinner and wedding in Albuquerque on the same days. Though rushed, the trips were trouble-free. They made us wonder whether such trouble-free driving would have even been possible in the old days of Highway 85.
    Rosie O’Donnell appeared recently on the Tonight Show. As an unbelievably wealthy and influential woman who gets listened to, she rattled off some information about other celebrities.
    Thanks to a maddening mannerism of hers, I cannot remember the subject matter. What I paid attention to–and tallied–was “like.”
    Like millions of my generation, I grew up in a household that encouraged the use of English at the expense of everything else.
    My father, J.D., an admitted Hispanophile, was obsessed with the Spanish language, often telling us tales of his father, who’d traveled overseas and acquired a command of several languages, the most important of which was Spanish.
    A flyer came in the mail today offering more than 100 TV channels for a low monthly fee.
    Even without reading it carefully, I’m convinced the package will contain a host of religious channels, which I don’t watch; oodles of home-shopping-network-type stations, which should be banned; scores of sports channels, which probably feature the all-time pro table tennis championship and muskrat hunting.
    In 1956, several of us National Guard recruits were sitting around a campfire during encampment in Fort Bliss. As we smoked our cigarettes and drank warm beer, it feel on each one of us to “tell a story guaranteed to curl our hair.”