Dear Mr. Ahmadinejad: Please keep your shoe on.

There's a very unsettling sense of deja vu in the summer air. It feels like October. It has nothing to do with baseball, especially in poor, beleaguered Cleveland.

But I don't think you have sports on your mind when you and your boys start shooting off rockets, do you, Mr. A.?

In the summer, firing off a few rockets, heck -- making them -- is a perfectly normal activity. Museums and summer camps have programs that teach that very thing. Propulsion is an important part of physics. Watching the parabolic trajectory? Music and mathematics glorified! It sure is entertaining!

But you weren't doing what you were doing because you were bored. Or even because you thought we were bored, though that would gave been right neighborly of you... (gaaah!)

Saber rattling is a time honored method of grabbing another leader's attention. But once the shoe is off and used gavel-like during a world forum, there's really no going back.

Are you really sure you want to endanger your people, your neighbors, and the whole world with this dangerous activity?

Dare I suggest (and you know I will!!) that might be ever so slightly selfish?

I know I certainly could do without it.

If it helps, try watching the old movies of Mr. K. brandishing his brogues at the UN. You really don't want to look like him, do you? It's not a good legacy, and it's going to be the film clip they play over and over again when you're gone. It'll be especially bad, because you'll be The Guy Who Did What That OTHER Guy Did First.

Seriously. "We will bury you" got a line in a song by Sting. Not bad; he made it sound a bit wistfully poetic. This shoe thing? Just ridiculous. Stick to words. That's the lesson here.

So I ask you with great concern for the world: Mr. Ahmadinejad, please keep your common sense, keep your cool, and by all means, keep your shoe on.

Oh -- and one more thing. Please.

Keep the rockets -- "unjuiced", as it were -- on the ground. That'd be great.

Thanks.