NEWS FROM TEHRAN: I haven't really been following the news these past few weeks; it is baseball season and the Yankees are only a game back in the American League East and so there are more important things to do than watch politicians blathering on and on about what a great job they are doing or would be doing or could be doing if only champagne flowed from the washroom taps. So I was a bit surprised to hear that the President of Iran had written a letter to President Bush; I was under the impression that the Islamic Republic of Iran had no earthly use for the United States of America, that we were, in that now quaint and homey phrase, the Great Satan, and I was equally surprised to learn that the president of Iran could read and write and maybe even do long division as well. I know the nuns couldn't beat the proper way to divide a fraction into me and the good Lord knows how hard they tried to do just that from the second grade onwards. I suppose we here living in the House of War should be happy that the leader of a great Islamic nation has deigned to notice our miserable infidel existence and wishes to lift us out of our lives of benighted pagan savagery, but I learn from Wikipedia that the Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a position that gives the holder no real power to do anything except parrot the views of the Supreme Leader, a gentleman named the Grand Ayatollah Khameini. As it seems His Reverence has not been sending us any love notes lately, the best course of action that President Bush could take here is to simply ignore this missive, in my humble opinion. It just seems to me that from no matter what angle you choose to look at this development, the President of the United States does not conduct serious bilateral negotiations on an issue as serious as nuclear proliferation with Mortimer Snerd.