Jeanne Marie Laskas

Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay doing a movie about the single most devastating, most holy day in United States military history? Why, that's like the Three Stooges doing a Holocaust movie. Or Barney doing 'Hamlet'.

Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.

In a pine tree behind me, an eagle waits out the rain, hunched into himself, brooding. Crows squabble, a murder chasing a raven. Seals cruise the lines of fishing nets bobbing in the water, hoping for an easy meal, the tender bellies of salmon.