A world class Liechtenstein skier has set a stylish new standard for retiring athletes.

Rather than a maudlin news conference with somber emotional trappings, Marco Buechel went out with aplomb.  Buechel made his last run of his career the other day at the World Cup in Garmisch-Partenkirchen Germany dressed for the occasion.

“It was rather chilly” said Buechel, sporting a Tuxedo paired with black Bermuda shorts.

Liechtenstein’s Buechel has competed in a record-tying six winter Olympics.

Twice in the past two days the topic of eating alone in a restaurant has surfaced.

This morning I was reading an article which started off with a quotation pulled from Keith Ferrazzi’s book,  Never Eat Alone. The book reveals the steps one takes to become a master networker.

Just yesterday, a friend was telling me about a new restaurant under construction he had visited. He mentioned that it will have a counter where parties of one can sit so they don’t have to eat alone at a table.

Looks like I missed another memo. You’re just not happening if you eat alone in a restaurant. And god forbid if someone you actually know catches you in the act of pranzare flagrante.

If there is a stigma attached to eating alone, if this is the unmistakable emblem of a social misfit, how sad.

Let me confess, at what seems to be the high risk of surrendering an extraordinary secret crunched into the darkest corner of a troubled psyche, that now and then I sort of like to eat alone in a restaurant.

Perhaps I should admit there have actually been times when I have deliberately not reached out to a client or a friend to join me for dinner when I’m out of town.

Being alone is, well, just fine.  And in those situations when you are indeed dining alone not out of choice, but because you don’t have anyone to join you, so what? Why pin the loser’s tail on the solitary dining donkey?

As a bit of a sidebar, people who have racked up significant business travel particularly understand the delights of room service. You decide not to go out or even downstairs in the hotel to eat alone because of the lure of solitary sluggishness in a terry cloth robe, or getting some work done. I get it. And I’ve done it… a bit too often.

But I don’t get this eating alone stigma that people such as Keith Ferrazzi are incubating. I suspect Greta Garbo has a better grasp of all this than Ferazzi.

When I see somebody eating alone, perhaps the woman who is having lunch by herself and reading a book, or the guy having dinner working his iPhone, well, I look at these people and instinctively I like them.

I don’t think they’re losers. I suspect they too appreciate the delights of downtime in a world where solitude seems increasingly difficult to find.

Hosni Mubarak was in Germany earlier this week, and at a news conference with Chancellor Merkel was asked what he thought about the groundswell of support for his new worst nightmare, political rival Mohamed ElBaredei.

The reporter who asked the question referred to ElBaradei as a hero. So Mubarak figured the heroism theme was as good as any to discredit ElBaradei, suggest ElBaradei was not an Egyptian, and launch into one of his classically bizarre, contradictory, and ambiguous reponses…

There will always be heroism among the people. The entire people are heroes. We don’t need new heroes from abroad. If he wants to join a party, he can choose any party. If he wants to have a candidacy through a party, by all means. If he wants to run as an independent, then by all means we should respect the constitution.

But Mubarak knows full well that while touting respect for Egypt’s constitution suggests legitimacy and justice, articles 76, 77, and 78 effectively neuter an ElBaradei candidacy.

Will Hosni Mubarak give Mohamed ElBaradei a fighting chance?

That may be the only question in Egypt that matters.  As Egyptians celebrate, take note of, or downplay the return of ElBaradei, as pundits speculate on his ultimate political future, there seems to be only one question worth asking.

Will Hosni Mubarak be able to get away with his chronic election rigging?

Emboldened with the nourishment of history, it is tempting to chart the inevitable path that will lead the pitiful President of Egypt and his military thugs out of power.

But history comes to us shadowed with baffling shades of nuance.  We are reminded that what once appeared as an inevitable path may become rutted with uncertainty. Repression often works as intended.

Seedlings of popular sentiments, no matter how secure their roots, do not inevitably mature to revolution.  Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Iran in 2009 suggest that repressive regimes don’t fold easily.  And this may hold particularly true in the Islamic world.

When we think about Egypt we can’t help but speculate on personal desire. It is unclear exactly how far Hosni Mubarak is willing to go to either cling to power himself, or set things up for a lateral to one or both of his sons.

As for ElBaradei, similar questions of desire surface.  To what extent has his appetite for political and diplomatic sparring been sapped?

But desire is not limited to Mubarak and ElBaradei.  We also wonder about the Egyptian people and the extent to which their distaste for what has happened to their country, the systematic gutting of Egypt by gluttonous generals, may be shifting from complacency to something more volatile.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has never bought into the notion of a free press. For decades Egypt’s state-run newspapers, radio and TV stations have ignored the Mubarak regime’s corruption and ineptitude.

I suppose Egyptians consume their state-run media with something of a sense of amusement, noting both all that has been overlooked and where the shrillest cries of propaganda ring loudest.

Curiously, this dismal free press landscape in Egypt has recently revealed pockets of promise. Whether they are real and enduring or short term slack to placate international pressures remains to be seen.

And a big story, the Mohamed ElBaradei story, is coming to a head.

Independent news outlets have been launched and are being allowed to stay in business.  Al-Dustour is such a newspaper and it blares like a Murdoch tabloid when it tears into the Mubarak regime, raising long verboten issues such as electoral fraud.

There are others… Al-Masry,  Al-Youm, and Al-Shorouk. But their impact is severely limited by circulation. The government paper, Al-Ahram, with its million a day circulation, outsells all the independent papers five to one.

Journalists in jail in Egypt are as commonplace as crooked bureaucrats.

In 2008 Ibrahim Eissa wound up in jail for writing an article which questioned President Mubarak’s health. The regime didn’t take kindly to reportage it believed posed a threat to national security and might prompt foreign investors to back out of existing deals or dismiss future ones.

As the Mubarak regime cuts a bit of free press slack, it will be telling to see how the return of Mohamed el Baradei to Egypt is allowed to be covered.

ElBaradei flies home to Cairo from Vienna today. Intrigue surrounding his political intentions is steamrolling into something quite unlike anything President Mubarak has yet to stare down.

The Nobel Peace laureate is arguably the single most formidable political threat an Egyptian dictator has faced since Nasser seized power in 1952.

And the way he is positioned by Mubarak’s propagandists will tell us much of what we need to know about this supposed new era of freedom of the press in Egypt.

How are you supposed to feel after reading “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?”

I’m not so sure I should be excited for Huck when he gets to “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.”

This lighting out is such an intoxicant that it glistens.

This territory Huck wants to light out for… precisely what is it?  Twain astutely leaves geography undefined.  Most of us interpret the “territory” as something west of the Mississippi.  But who knows?  And who’s to say the territory is geographical?

But it’s mostly the Jim question that puzzles me.  Being set free by the late Miss Watson seems the best of all possible outcomes.

Perhaps Twain didn’t see it that way.

In 1840, roughly 12% of America’s blacks were free.  But even a free black had a tenuous grasp on civil liberties.

If the book is about a successful search for freedom, and if Huck and Jim each find themselves free at its conclusion, we should probably feel good about everything.

Yet murkiness is wrapped around the degree to which Huck and Jim are free.  To be a free black in the late 1830s and early 1840s was a risky proposition.  Whatever was in store for Jim couldn’t have been pretty.

Perhaps Twain was asking us to consider Jim’s future.  Perhaps he left us just enough to consider the price of freedom.

The novel is endlessly doted on and dissected.  We are reminded by Hemingway that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called “Huckleberry Finn.”

From time to time, well-intentioned unfortunates jump up and down over Twain’s use of the N word.  Scholars have both defended and attacked this.

Some of the same louts who conveniently overlook the fact the word “God” does not appear in the United States Constitution seem to think Jim is referred to in the book as N word Jim.  Nowhere in the novel does this moniker appear.

Since its publication in 1885, crackers on school boards and library committees have deep-sixed the book because of its language.  Ultimately the truest light we can shed on the novel comes in the two paragraphs Twain wrote before the novel begins, where he discusses dialect.

We each define our relationship with any book.  With “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” we can’t help but consider its exalted position in American literature.

We know about its flaws, its detractors, and its soaring beauty.

What we don’t know, or at least what I don’t know, is how optimistic we should be about the ability of Huck and Jim to handle their freedom.

This post-river experience is something Twain originally intended to include in the book.  But his plan to unfurl the story so that Huck would be followed into adulthood was abandoned.

Twain may have figured an apparent happy ending resulted in a more commercially successful book.  After all, sales were of more interest to Twain than critical acclaim.

So when I wonder how Huck and Jim made out, I like to think Jim made it to Ohio or beyond and lived a rewarding life.  I like to think that Huck never lost his spirit.  And that the Civil War somehow spared them both.

You hope that with countless decks stacked against them, they were as accomplished at drifting through America as they were at drifting down America’s river.

And you hope that America will always be a place where our Hucks and our Jims can drift and flourish.

Hosni Mubarak is an increasingly crotchety 81 year-old.  The Egyptian President has weathered sufficient criticism to break a man of less stern stuff.

But as the years pass by the President’s patience withers.  As befits a dictator, there is less and less room for voices, both inside and outside of Egypt, which fail to harmonize with the regime’s agenda.

Note President Mubarak’s strident reaction to recent Hamas criticism of Egypt’s construction of underground fences which block the maze of smugglers’ tunnels connecting Egypt with the Gaza.  Tunnels which some say are a lifeline of food and medicine, and which others say are a pipeline for weapons.

The works and reinforcements on our eastern border are a matter of Egyptian sovereignty. We do not accept a debate on the issue with anyone.  It is the right of the Egyptian state, and even its duty, its responsibility.  It is the right of every state to control and protect its border.

For Mubarak to publicly engage in verbal sparring with exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is to redefine his relationship with the Arab world.  This is not his first criticism of Hamas… the Egyptian government has suggested Hamas is making a mistake in refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas now says no talks with Israel about exchanging prisoners.  And this probably means no new peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.  The U.S.  State Department’s misguided but predictable belief that Mubarak could somehow engineer Middle East peace talks if we started writing him more checks has been discredited.

Back along the frontier, American DEA agents point Egyptian crews to tunnels which need blockading.  Laborers drive sheets of steel down into the hard soil.  The blockade sinks about sixty feet below the surface.  Smugglers react as expected, boasting they remain open for business and will simply dig deeper.

But behind this bravado come reminders that smuggling is not a carefree and cavalier craft.  Arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhou, who uses the Gaza tunnels almost to the extent New Jersey Transit uses the Lincoln Tunnel, turned up dead in a Dubai hotel room a few weeks ago.

All of which leaves Hosni Mubarak unable to deliver much of anything diplomatically substantive to his American paymasters.  No wonder the Egyptian President is irritable.

The prospects of losing some of his billion and a half American dollars in foreign aid every year, the increasingly awkward relationship with the Palestinians and others in the Middle East, and the ever- growing disgust of his own people are not conducive to placid days in the Presidential Palace.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner needs to check himself into rehab.

Boehner, and an unsettling number of other Republicans on the hill, need to work on their own political recovery while America, without their constructive participation, works on its economic recovery.

Boehner can’t seem to say anything that is not cast in partisan political negativism. The latest attempt at delivering a cheap shot witticism appears in this morning’s New York Times.  It attacks President Obama’s proposals to freeze spending on some federal programs.

“Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.

Note to Representative Boehner… you’re no Rush Limbaugh.  You are not an entertainer paid to scintillate.  You are a legislator paid to lead.

Perhaps you could find it in yourself to say something such as…

This is a start. Perhaps it is not sufficiently far-reaching, but it’s a start. Let’s work together to give this important issue the fix it really needs.

Note to Michael Steel.  Read some Will Rogers or some H.L. Mencken or something to sharpen your dull wit.

You’re just not interesting, relevant, or in touch with our nation’s needs.

If you were to brainstorm a list of names for organizations guaranteed to rattle the cages of America’s security apparatus, it would be tough to top The Muslim Brotherhood.

Conjuring images of robes and beards and the latest designer explosives, this is the kind of moniker that assures a spot on at least a few watch lists.

It is a particularly unsettling name.   Brotherhood suggests Teamster thugs and Muslim is not exactly America’s most comforting noun.   Stitch them together and you have what sounds like our latest fear du jour incarnate.

But Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is no recently cobbled together band of fanatics.   The organization has been around since Herbert Hoover was in the White House.

It is arguably the poster child for Islamic movements in the Middle East, including Hamas, and finds itself engaged in something of a rebranding, a repositioning, a puzzling transformation that may or may not enhance its role in whatever shards of the  political process Egypt’s dictators have scattered about.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an officially outlawed organization in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.   But its new leader, Dr. Mohamed Badi may be trying to alter that.

The group claims that its main goal is to change society, not the government.

“With regards to our stance toward the Egyptian regime, we emphasize that the Muslim Brotherhood were never opponents of the regime,” says Badi.

The newly elected leadership of the organization reflects Badi’s conservative policies.   Voices of the Brotherhood’s leadership that have been raised against the Mubarak regime have suddenly been silenced.

Former leader Mahdi Akef was tilting in dangerous directions.   A Pro-Iranian stance didn’t play well.

Even though it has been outlawed since General Gamal Nasser lost his patience with the group in 1954, and even though as many as 60,000 members may have been thrown in jail over the years, the Muslim Brotherhood fields a slate of candidates in Egyptian parliamentary elections.

In 2005, Hosni Mubarak figured that independent candidates lacked the clout and the unity to sustain a significant challenge.   He didn’t count on the Brotherhood leveraging the laws to win 88 parliamentary seats, roughly 20% of the total.

This is a cagey group that has survived on its wits.   Infiltrating unions has been one effective tactic.  Others include setting up student organizations and charitable groups.

Amidst the ambiguities, we are left with only two certainties.

One is the Muslim Brotherhood’s support of the Palestinians, specifically the Palestinian Islamic Party which governs the Gaza Strip.

The other is a baffling shift from activism and opposition to middle ground.   Some Egypt-watchers seem to think Dr. Badi will try to cozy up to President Mubarak.   They also suggest that the Brotherhood’s new found conservatism creates an opportunity for a more vigorous opposition group to gain whatever might pass for political legitimacy.

Murky intentions are as commonplace in Cairo as corruption.   Exactly what it is the Muslim Brotherhood hopes to achieve by this shift to the right is unclear.

There is nothing substantive to suggest Dr. Badi is a Mubarak plant, although it is intriguing to speculate on the possibility of an inside job, engineered by Egyptian spymaster Omar Suleiman.

But there is everything to suggest that because the Muslim Brotherhood has been so bedraggled for so long, this swerve to the right is possibly something more than a natural reaction to the perceived extremes of Mahdi Akef.

Now is the time of year when most of the ocotillo’s barbed shafts are silver.   The thin ones shine brighter in the winter sun than any of the other grays on the mountain.  Dead mesquite trunks are dull by comparison.   So are the boulders.

On these rugged slopes ocotillo do not grow straight but bend away from the mountain.   Their shafts stretch and twist into strange shapes making them the most exotic and improbable living things on this harsh land.

Where they shoot up out of the sparse soil, clusters of rock often encase the base.   For a few inches there is a single trunk and then the shafts bend out.   Sometimes there will be chutes but most of the ribbed shafts are free of the adornment of branches.

On this part of the mountain where they take the day’s hottest sun ocotillo are most often found where there is some shade.   And since shade is hard to find, so is the ocotillo.   Only a few protective shadows come slanting down these slopes.

Some of the ribbed ocotillo stalks are brown.   Close to the ground even a rare burst of green appears.   But it is the glimmer of silver that is most striking against all this dry brown of the west, dried out dirt speckled by the sun.

All of the small, delicate clumps of grass have long since shriveled and been blown away.   It is winter and there has been no rain for months.

This not the tourist’s blooming desert.   No visitors explore the quiet monochromatic mountainside.    Nobody sees these silver shafts of the improbable ocotillo glisten in the soft afternoon sun