Don’t be too upset now that your Idol fantasy has come to an end.
We still have reason to keep our dialing digits limber.
A University of Virginia graduate is in the newest Fox reality show, “On the Lot.”
If you watched Thursday night’s “Audition Round” you would have seen a glimpse of Jarrett Conaway in action. Last night, 36 hopeful filmmakers were grouped in teams of three and given 24 hours to make a film. Jarrett, Jason and Tamila made an eerie but beautifully shot short called “Wilted.” Fox didn’t have time to show all 12 films on its half hour show Thursday, but you can watch them at http://www.thelot.com.
On TV they listed Jarrett as a Los Angeles resident. True, he’s there as a student at the famous USC Film School, but the Virginia Beach native is much loved by his former faculty members at UVa. In fact, they are hoping that once the audience vote begins, that we will all rally around Cavalier graduate.
I know I will.
He’s already passed some amazing hurdles. First he was chosen as one of the 50 semifinalist, and that was out of 12,000 applicants worldwide. Then he passed the second test: The film pitch. His idea got him into the top 36. Last night, his 24-hour film project moved him into the elite 24.
Those 24 will be trimmed to 18 on the strength of their ability to plan a one-page scene in 30 minutes and film it in one hour.
On Monday’s two-hour “premier” we will find out if Jarrett made the cut.
Then he will need our help. Tune in and have your cell phone handy.

Bob Gibson
Daily Progress political blogger

One of the most interesting and accurate political exercises at any university gets under way Thursday at Washington and Lee University.

Bloggers might want to visit Lexington on May 24 and May 25 for the spring kickoff of this student-run presidential nominating convention, the best of its kind in the country.

W&L’s Mock Convention predicts the nominee of the party out of power in the White House every four years and 95 percent of the student body participates, making it a fun event with high spirit and many spirits. (This is a university event at a wet campus that has never known drought.)

Gen. Wesley Clark will give the keynote address Friday at 5 p.m. on the lawn outside Lee Chapel, following in the footsteps of Al Sharpton, who gave the spring event a lively kickoff four years ago.

On Thursday evening, a Lee Chapel crowd will hear Mike Allen, Larry Sabato, Steve Jarding and Chuck Todd debate the merits of the crowded presidential field, starting about 7:30 p.m.

Then on Jan 25 and 26, the university’s convention will select, or at least predict, the next Democratic presidential nominee a few days before the early primaries determine the real winner.

W&L might eventually have to move its convention up to keep pace with the ever earlier primary states now in a race to nominate the White House choices of each party almost a full year before the national election. At least the W&L students have fun with the early pick of a possible winner.

I have put off writing to you because I didn’t know what to say.

Scruffy is gone.

I got the call last week while I was on vacation.

Scruffy, the one-eyed cat with a runny nose and swayed back, spent the winter in foster care. A very nice lady hand fed him, gave him his medicine and nursed him back to his old robust self.

Except that he still had the runny nose, the one eye and swayed back.

He couldn’t shake the things that made the neighborhood stray “scruffy.”

But Scruffy was stronger and his foster mom had taken him back to the SPCA so he could be neutered. Before Scruffy could be neutered, however, the SPCA took a blood test and discovered that he had feline immunodeficiency virus.

FIV to cats is like HIV to humans. It is infectious and there is no cure.

While he had been in foster care, he had escaped one day and got in an altercation with a stray. It was later discovered that the stray had FIV.

The foster mom called me Thursday to fill me in. She knew that I had hoped to adopt Scruffy and bring him back to his old stomping grounds.

Now Scruffy would never be allowed to play with other cats, not that he played that much. He just liked to sit nearby and watch his neighborhood friends cautiously out of his one good eye.

If he came home with me he would have to be kept isolated in one room so that he couldn’t come in contact with my other cat, Dexter.

I was heartsick. I couldn’t stand the thought of putting an animal to sleep just because he had a disease. But was it fair for a cat that once ruled an entire neighborhood to spend his remaining days locked in one room?

I called the SPCA. I didn’t know what to say or do.

There was nothing I could do. I was too late.

The folks at the SPCA had tried to call me Wednesday, but they called my office number.

Since Scruffy had not fully recovered from his upper respiratory infection—and now that he had FIV—well, the vet said that it was not humane to make him suffer any longer.

They had put him to sleep Wednesday evening.

Dexter keeps going to the door wanting in and out, in and out.

I think she is looking for her old friend with the one eye, runny nose and sway back.

Me, too, Dexter. Me, too.

Everything in the universe is subject to change and it is right on schedule—Kay Allison

I woke today and found everything had changed. It’s been coming for sometime. I’ve seen it approaching like a train’s bright light as I performed mental gymnastics and my best deer-in-the-headlights impression as I debated whether to go left, right, retreat or bravely run straight into it with arms opened.

Change is one thing. Progress is another. Bertrand Russell

We talk a lot about change. We talk about instigating it. We talk about fighting it. We talk and think about the kind of change we want to see all the while we are changing and don’t recognize it.

The only thing that’s permanent is change. Johnny Rivers

I talk a lot about change. I talk about accepting it and welcoming it but while my lips move at the speed of sound, my heart flees in fear at the speed of light. I don’t do change well, never have and never will. I see it coming and I freeze. I smell it, taste and sense it and I panic. By the time I’m prepared to ride it like a hurricane swell riding body surfer it’s come, happened and gone.

Change is not made without inconvenience, Richard Hooker

Change happens and, when it does, routine is disrupted. I’m a creature of habits, mostly bad, and when those habits are disrupted, when those habits must change and new habits generated, I find it nearly impossible to function. I don’t know why. Habit, I suppose.

Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin. Denise McCluggage

I am a sinner. I look at the future and dream of the past. I see the new reality and struggle to maintain the old. It’s been happening for a long time now, a long, long, long time and you’d think—I’d think—that I’d get over it but I don’t. Things have changed and change must be accepted and people must adapt. Adapt or die.

And Change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;
Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
The wild deer’s walk: in golden umbrage shut,
--Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873),

It’s just past noon and U.S. 250 is one giant clot from Peter Jefferson Place to the Free Bridge, two lanes incoming stopped and crawling.

I curse my friend.

I’m trying to find my old buddy Sue and her mailing store Pack-N-Mail, which is replacing her former store in Rio Hill. See, I like to do business with people I know. I like to know that, when I complain, I’m being heard. I like to know that, should the finance fairies strike the bank account and screw something up, there’s someone I can call and warn and promise to make it good. I like to know that, when I go into a store, there’s someone with whom I can sit around and chat and waste a lot of time so that I don’t have to get back to the office quite so quick.

The problem is that I can’t find the new store. It’s supposed to be next to Food Lion but the traffic is a sucking hole of attention, requiring that I watch for morons turning left with right signals and right with left signals or going straight with their backup lights on. How odd, think I, that I’ve been coming out here all of this time—17 years in September—and yet I forgot that Food Lion is in the Pantops Shopping Center, the first development that sent the area on the slippery slope into urban congestion.

Instead, I drove to Giant.

I curse my friend.

Now, after finally turning around and creeping, creeping, creeping my way up and over the mountain and down the other side past the new car ghetto, I get in line and turn to the shopping center. It’s a zoo. People are stressed, in a hurry and driving like Hurricane Hell Drivers in the Million Dollar Demolition Derby. Pedestrians, tired of waiting for lunch hour demons who use all available horses to power four feet to stop again behind the car ahead of them, take their lives in their shoes and step off the parking lot curbs to cross the feeder lanes.

I curse my friend and negotiate the lanes without a fender dent.

I find the store. I park. I hold my heart over my head and cut and run across the traffic.

“Not as convenient to you as the old location, huh?” asks the clerk behind the counter as we do business.

Nonsense, I say, getting my breath and writing a check, it’s never too inconvenient to spend money with a friend.