Week of Feb. 19, 2007

Q. What TV shows does a historian watch? A. By the end of the day, I'm so sick of history, I just go home and watch trashy reality shows.

Take a sacred treasure. Add a secret conspiracy. Attach a name well known to scholars -- Dante, Poe, Wordsworth, Archimedes, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, the Romanovs, Vlad the Impaler, ''Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,'' whatever -- and work it into a story that can accommodate both the Glock and the Holy Grail. If there's any room left for the Knights Templar or DNA samples from Biblical figures, by all means plug them in.

Thanks, Dan Brown. Look what you started. In the sound-like-Brown genre the stakes are high, the scruples are absent and the copycatting is out of control. Your own next book (possibly to be called ''The Solomon Key,'' arrival date unknown) is already a pre-sacred text.

It's a blessed country. Wherever you dig you will find antiquities, and if you dig deeper you will find oil.

I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defence in history. [Editor's Note: Previously, McCain lauded Rumsfeld's tenure.]

Thrift, piety, and guilt conspire to give me good environmentalist habits. I bicycle to work every day. I periodically walk around our house, turning off lights and computers and the set-top satellite receiver on our television. Our tiny suburban lot has 10 trees on it, half of which we planted since moving in.

But I’m still a carbon-emissions nightmare, because last year I flew almost 50,000 miles, 40,000 of them for work. According to this carbon calculator (the only one I could find that lets you simply enter a total number of air miles), that means I produced 18.4 tons of CO2 by jet travel for my job. The site for An Inconvenient Truth says that the national average is 7.5 tons a year, so with work-related flying alone (i.e., irrespective of taxis, trains, and so forth, let alone my entire personal production of CO2), I’ve produced about two and a half times the ordinary American’s exhalations. No matter how much I also pedal and plant, I’m a global warmer.

Our great country has had 43 presidents. Many very good. A few pretty bad. On Presidents Day next Monday, it's appropriate to commemorate them all.

I remember every president since Herbert Hoover, when I was a grade school kid. He was one of the worst. I've personally met every president since Dwight Eisenhower. He was one of the best.

A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying"this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst."

"She's wrong," I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson [sic: Andrew Johnson?], James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon."It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list," I added.

I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top