A Look at The Sunday Times A Section

Sen. John Kerry is in Pakistan warning that it has to step up the fight against terrorism or U.S. aid - $3 billion in miliary aid and another $1.5 billion in humanitarian aid - will be cut or killed by Congress.

“I have had some of these conversations with Pakistan before,” Kerry said, “but never in the context of the world’s No. 1 terrorist being found 35 miles from the capital, next door to Pakistan’s West Point, and with the discovery he was fully, fully operational.”

Kerry’s leverage, the Times says, is Pakistan’s uncertainty about what is in the computer data taken from bin Laden's compound  about Pakistan's complicity in hiding bin Laden.

American officials, the Times says, think  the country's top leaders were genuinely surprised. But Americans also strongly suspect that others in the government, the military or the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, were aware of Bin Laden’s location.

Guitarist Cornell Dupree died. Here's some his work on Rainy Night in Georgia. Atlantic recording executive Jerry Wexler said he would hire three guitarists to back up Aretha Franklin and other headliners at recording sessions until he realized he only needed Cornell Dupree. Dupree was 82 and lived in Texas.

In 1970, Kate Swift became one of the first editors to do something about the predominance of masculine-gendered language in all types of writing and speaking. Many newspapers, textbooks and public speakers now avoid “fireman” and “stewardess" and always using him to refer to a person who could be a man or woman. Other of her ideas  fell by the wayside, notably “genkind” for “mankind, the Times reports. Swift co-authored several books. “We just wanted ... to make (people) aware of what was happening right underneath their noses,” the Times quoted her as saying. “We didn’t want to tell people, Do This or Don’t Do That!” Swift died in Connecticut Saturday at 87.

Times columnist Neil Genzlinger has some fun reminiscing about Blue Laws during a visit to New York's Museum of Sex.  Before the Museum of Sex opened nine years ago, you might have concluded from looking at our museums that the main things on New Yorkers’ minds were dinosaurs, TV shows from the ’50s and random splotches of color, he writes. He also has a suggestion for new Blue Laws which I reprint here in its entirety:

¶From 2 to 3:30 on Tuesday afternoons, no one’s allowed to send a text message, an e-mail or any other electronic communication that includes a smiley face.

¶From 10:30 to 11:45 a.m. on Thursdays, there is to be no eating of those overpriced cupcakes that have been so popular in recent years. (You can still buy them, though, because we don’t want to deprive the government of tax revenue, which is why the Sunday liquor laws were loosened up.)

¶From 7 to 10:30 on Wednesday nights, no men over 40 are to wear a baseball cap backward.

¶From 7 to 9 a.m. weekdays, no hot beverages are to be tippled from Adam and Eve Disappearing Fig Leaf Mugs. Let’s not start the day with our minds in the gutter; there’s plenty of time for that later.