Richard Condon was a writer of best-selling, high-toned thrillers such as The Manchurian Candidate. He lived the last part of his life in Dallas, and above his desk he kept a saying which, paraphrased, went like this: Think of the worst you can imagine and it's probably even worse than that.

It has not been a good season for science. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations, has come under attack because the IPCC issued a report three years ago saying that the Himalayan glaciers could be all but gone by 2035. This came from an interview with an Indian glaciologist in1999, according to press reports, and never was put to the test of a peer- reviewed study. Other experts have insisted that those glaciers might hold up for hundreds of years. Indeed, another working group that contributed to the IPCC survey has attributed the problem to a sloppy error by "social and biological scientists" who allowed a faulty prediction to slip into their study. Some trace that mistake to a transposition of figures in the date 2350, a forecast to which many, apparently, can repair.

If at first you don't secede, try, try again. It was last April 15, the cruelest day of the cruelest month, when Gov. Rick Perry appeared at a tea party in Austin and told an agitated crowd, disturbed about taxes due that moment, that the country was being strangled by taxation, spending and debt, this from the Huffington Post. Afterward, he explained to reporters that Texas could secede from the U.S. anytime it wanted to, though he wasn't pressing for it then. However, he said, "Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori came to Dallas this month to spend a weekend at St. Michael and All Angels, where I am a member. During her three years as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of America, she has ridden a whirlwind of acrimony with a steady, determined drive to bring calm to chaos and to dispatch those who would rather be elsewhere anyway, or so they say.

The Wyly Theatre and Winspear Opera House have burst into being, bringing with them glamour, glory and great promise of things to come. Now Deedie Rose, one of the major movers of the performing arts center, and her husband, Rusty, have put up $2 million (from a gift of $5 million to the Trinity Trust) to create the Dallas City Design Studio, an essential effort if Dallas is to build on the brilliant beginning in the Arts District.