Hi neighbors. I'd like to make some comments on several things this week. Feel free to start talking about these things yourselves because you certainly know as much about most of them as I do.

First, the movies. Is there anyone still alive who heard the original radio show "War of the Worlds?" I'd like to talk to them. My Mom said she was just a child, but remembers the adults talking about it. Apparently people even committed suicide over the fear of Martian invasion.

Of course in this movie they don't blame the invasion on Martians -- thank goodness. I've always thought Martians were much maligned for no provable reason. Every time something goes wrong the Martians were blamed. I'm glad we've finally seen Mars and can leave those long gone folks alone for a while at least.

This latest edition of War of the Worlds is very well done. The scares are non-stop. I know a lot of people out there think Tom Cruise is the man, but the real star of this show is the little girl, Dakota Fanning, who brings all the human fright reactions to the screen. Cruise's emotional reactions seem much too wooden to me.

Dakota seems to be a very gifted child. Her professional bio says she learned to read by age two, had her first acting job (in a Tide commercial) at age five, and has been in the following movies since 2001 when she was 7 years old: "Father Christmas," "Tomcats," "I Am Sam,:" "Trapped," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Taken," "Hansel & Gretel," "Uptown Girls," "The Cat in the Hat," "Kim Possible -- A Stitch in Time," "Man on Fire," "Nine Lives," "Hide and Seek," "War of the Worlds," "Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch," "Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story," and

"Charlotte's Web," due out in 2006.

This kid is destined for a long run in Hollywood if she doesn't burn out too soon. She seems pretty grounded in her interviews on television. Her hobbies are knitting and collecting dolls.

Anyway, if you haven't seen War of the Worlds, you should. Take a sweater so if your knees start knocking you'll know if it's the movie scaring you or the air conditioning.

Moving on ...

What do you think of the new eminent domain law? The dictionary defines this strange situation like this: "The right of a government to appropriate private property for public use, usually (I guess not always!) with compensation to the owner." (American Heritage Dictionary.) That's the old law we all understood and it usually pertained to highways, hospitals or building a dam like at Stockton a few years ago.

June 23 of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court said local governments have a right to force citizens to sell their private property in order to allow an industry or business to buy the land for development.

I'm not certain I understand this new law at all, but I think farmers with land near cities might be in trouble.

What I would like to know is who lobbied to get this law passed?

Between Homeland Security issues and the blending of the FBI and the CIA, I sometimes wonder when the saying the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, goes too far.

America is, after all, built on the assumption that the one, the one created equal with the inalienable rights, is the one who forms the many.

Personally, I think we could best protect our country by keeping an eye on each other. I guess crime is down in London as where else could briefcases of bombs be left laying about without someone stealing them?

I hope things don't get so bad I have to donate my two guard dogs to the CIA. They notice everything that happens in the neighborhood -- two blocks in all directions. Not a bird hops nor box turtle crawls that they are not sounding the alarm.

Maybe we should all do the same. When we see something out of place just start jumping up and down and yelling, "Look! Look! Look!"

On another note ... I was interviewed this week by Carolyn Gray Thornton for the senior page in the newspaper. She told me I barely qualified as a senior. She might have changed her mind when she realized I couldn't remember my personal history timeline.

Until the next time friends remember; there's lots of silly things and scary things going on in the world today -- just like there have been for every generation before us. They say our attention span is getting shorter, and that might be true. We know it's fiction, but we still let "War of the Worlds" scare us -- again.