New Zealand is the westernmost corner of the Polynesian triangle with Hawaii on top and Easter Island anchoring the east. Incredibly large portions of the north and south islands are uninhabited, with preserved glacier formations, breathtaking mountains and sky-blue waters, making the commonwealth monarchy perhaps the last friendly frontier on earth.

The number 56, representing baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941, is the most resonant numeral in sports. Nothing approaches it — not in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, darts or kick the can. To deliver hits every day, amid constant inspection and increasing pressure, leaves athletes in all sports slack-jawed.

It has long been evident that we need a new national anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner is tough to memorize and tougher to sing, and it celebrates a war we didn’t even win!

My candidate for a quintessentially American song, one that acknowledges pain as well as pride in our history, is City of New Orleans. Composed by the late Steve Goodman, who also wrote A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request, this bittersweet folk song grew out of a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans that Goodman and his wife took to visit his wife’s family.

Barack Obama has been sprint ing so rapidly to the center that we need binoculars to find progressive ideas in the 2008 election.

So I was open to Looking Back From 2101 (Xlibris) by Steve Halpern. Based on Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887, the Halpern book imagines a Philadelphia factory worker awakened from a 104-year trance to discover a socialist utopia in 2101.

Rarely does the genteel card game of bridge merit both a news story on the front page of the arts section and an editorial in The New York Times, but that’s what happened recently during a raging controversy over free expression.