I’m late getting to this, but there are still a few hours left, so Kate and her trick-or-treating pal say…boo!

Tonight’s seminar was Pat Oliphant, the cartoonist. The evening began with Charles recounting an incident that I guess I can sketch out for you, seeing as how it’s in the public record:

Oliphant came to Wallace House in the first days after it was purchased by the Fellowship (c. 1992), and was invited to draw on the wall. He sketched, with his usual marvelous economy, a picture of Bill Clinton jogging with a cheeseburger in his hand. Oliphant fans know about Puck, the little penguin who makes asides at the bottom of Oliphant cartoons. In this one, Puck asks Socks the cat something like, “Why did they get you and not a dog?” and Socks replies, “Mrs. Clinton said, ‘You like pussy so much, here’s a cat.’”

Well. I guess that, shall we say, tetched it off. A later speaker saw this thing and dropped the dime to the Detroit News, which did a story about it, along with various other publications. The drawing was called the “wall of shame,” and was the center of weeks worth of civil war between the Fellows and others, half of whom wanted it painted over, and others who thought doing so would be nothing short of capitulation to the forces of political correctness.

The drawing was painted over. But not before spirited debate, and lots of archival photographs.

Oliphant still has the touch. His caricatures of American leaders — on paper and in frames, not drawn on the walls — adorn our living room. They’re marvelous pieces; you can get a sense of them in the photo about halfway down this page. I’m no artist, and so the trick of conjuring a human face in just a few strokes of charcoal amazes me.

The conversation, and the drawing, went elsewhere, and I’m sorry I can’t talk about it, because there were some good ones.

Remember, in one of the Dirty Harry movies (but I can’t remember which), when we have the obligatory Harry-you’re-off-the-case scene, and he gets transferred to personnel?

Harry says, “Personnel? Only assholes work in personnel.”

And the sergeant says, “I spent 15 years in personnel.”

OK, you remember that. A new blog discovery, Whatevs.org, points out that some things never change. Even if they do call it “human resources” now. And with a Michigan twist!

(Disclaimer: One of my fF spouses is an HR consultant. Of course this does not apply to her, because she does it overseas. She probably gets to do cool things like chop off hands and whip people ‘n’ stuff.)

Just left my SI (that’s School of Information, for you non-Wolverines) class, “Understanding Networked Computing,” a.k.a. Technology Appreciation. It’s more interesting than you might think. Someday the authors of “Trivial Pursuit: Geek” will seek me out for question suggestions. A few:

1) Explain the inside joke of HAL 9000, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

2) Name the original seven internet domains. (Everyone knows the obvious .com, .net., .org., but the sixth and seventh will probably stump a few of you.)

3) On a peer-to-peer network, what is the slang term for a user who downloads frequently but chooses not to share? What is the usual corrective action?

I could go on. I won’t. But as long as we’re on the subject of technology, last night our screenwriting prof instituted a cell-phone fine rule. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru played by Brian Cox in “Adaptation,” hates cell-phone interruptions. If one goes off in class, he immediately stops teaching, singles out the offender for abuse and collects a $10 fine. Our own fine is somewhat less — a dollar.

And yet, even after he instituted the fine and gave fair warning with the first offender, another phone went off. In the words of the walkin’ boss, “Some men you just can’t reach.”

And one more tech note: Poyter has a fond look back at Viewtron, a crude precursor to internet news online, promulgated by my own employer, Knight Ridder. Several of my FW colleagues in the ’80s came there directly from Viewtron layoffs, right Adrianne? Andrew? Yes. My previous employer, the Columbus Dispatch, was also online in this era, via Compuserve.

Both efforts were ahead of their time, as the story points out.

Side note: The Bloomberg user interface? Very, uh, retro. Very Viewtron.

This picture is for Jones, and it will surely make him spit beer onto his monitor. The rest of you, just move along, nothing to see here.

When you hear me talk about how techno-centric the U of M is, do you ever think, “But what about the poor kids there on hardship scholarships who can’t afford a fancy laptop? What do they do? How can they ever bridge the digital divide?”

Don’t think that anymore. As you might expect, someone thought of it first.

Scattered around the campus are public computing centers like this, which is the largest, the Angell Hall “fishbowl.” They’re all stacked rafter-high with computers, a lavish assortment of powerful PCs and Macs, equipped with all manner of Zip drives, scanners and the like, with lesser models set up as e-mail-only centers. (The campus runs on e-mail; checking it hourly or at least several times a day is nearly essential.)

But I didn’t get really jealous until I wandered through the fishbowl this morning and saw half a dozen brand-new, smokin’-fast Apple G5 Macs, each one running with not one but two monitors. (People who run graphics apps frequently need the extra monitor, which works like an extension of the main one. If you’re doing photo retouching, for instance, you can blow your picture up big on one and keep all your Photoshop tables on the other.)

I think my last official act on campus may be to use my academic discount to buy one of those suckers. Or maybe not.

Some headlines speak for themselves:

City’s image blurry to top execs
Forum speaker advises against ‘boring’ as asset

When you read something like that, you know that the consultants are at their Sisyphean task again — rolling Fort Wayne’s “image” up a hill, only to watch it…well, you know what happens.

But this story, by the irony-free Journal Gazette, is too, too amusing:

Suri Surinder, Verizon region president, drew applause when he suggested that Fort Wayne should embrace its image as a good place to raise a family. He compared the city’s marketing challenge to the ones faced by Listerine and Avis, which used their perceived disadvantages of being bitter tasting and being No. 2 in the market to their advantage.

The city, he said, could adopt the motto: We’re boring, so you can raise a family here.

Hmm. Looks like the new NYT public editor is coming right out and saying what a lot of people have been thinking:

“I think Bragg is a wonderful writer,” Mr. Okrent continued. “But I always thought the quotes he had were just too perfect. When I interview people, they don’t say things quite that wonderfully. Everyone talked brilliantly, and they had names. Or nicknames.”

In the admittedly tiny readership of Those Who Read Knight-Ridder Editors Monthly Reports, the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News is a legend. At least when I was reading them, Zach Stalberg used to salt the standard chest-thumping on circulation spikes, noteworthy stories and the like with items he called “It’s a tough town” — usually police briefs about, oh, street toughs attempting to knock a window-washer off his perch with a snowball, or a mugging victim trying to get help from a passerby, who mugs him a second time. Like that.

So it’s in that tradition that I offer this chuckle from the Free Press this morning. A man calls Comcast to complain about losing his cable in the middle of the Michigan State game, and gets this reply on his voice mail:

“I cut your cable, you mother(bleeping) mother(bleeper), mother(bleeper). I cut your cable, you won’t be (unintelligible) mother(bleeper), mother(bleeper), mother(bleeper), mother(bleeper), mother(bleeper).”

Tough town bonus points: It was a woman’s voice!

Kate’s jack-o-lantern started life as a traditional, smiling face with the standard bad dental work. And then it was…vandalized. Actually, I kind of like the new face, but Kate is not amused. At all.