I am proud to say I have spot­ted a new meme — the “if you had read (blank), as I have, you would know (blank)” smack­down.

Just for the hell of it, Google “schi­avo + ‘read the autopsy report’” and look at all the autopsy-report-readers out there. Michelle Malkin has read it (“…some­thing which, it is clear to me, most of the cal­lous gloaters on the other side of this debate have not both­ered to do”). The posters on Free Repub­lic have read it (“I have read the autopsy report and am more con­viced than ever that Terri was harmed by Michael those fif­teen years ago. What else would cause a healthy twenty-six year old to go into res­per­a­tory arrest?”). And so on.

I didn’t read it, per­son­ally. Oh, I looked at it. I’ve looked at lots of autopsy reports — in Ohio, they were actu­ally pub­lic record (not so in Indi­ana), so there were always a cou­ple lying around the news­room. Usu­ally, I got lost between “the patient is a 67-inch white male weigh­ing 165 pounds, and seems to be con­sis­tent with the stated age of 53 years old…” and the rest of it, where we get reports on how much the liver weighed. The prob­lem is, I’m not a pathol­o­gist, so while I can fig­ure some stuff out — “the patient’s upper torso shows evi­dence of 13 sep­a­rate stab wounds, each from a weapon appear­ing to be 4 cen­time­ters wide and pen­e­trat­ing to a depth of 10 cen­time­ters” — most of the rest of it is Greek to me.

But then, I’m not Michelle Malkin, whose tal­ents know no end.

Nor am I Tom Cruise, another multi-talented indi­vid­ual. Last week, he chal­lenged Matt Lauer’s night­stand con­tents: “You don’t even know what Ritalin is. If you start talk­ing about chem­i­cal imbal­ance, you have to eval­u­ate and read the research papers on how they came up with these the­o­ries, Matt, okay? That’s what I’ve done.”

The mind bog­gles:

“Honey, you want to run that scene again? ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ starts film­ing in only three days.”

“Not now, Nic. I’ve got two more research papers to get through.”

Well, he did spend half that movie telling peo­ple, “I’m a doc­tor.” Maybe it’s sort of like…transference.

The plain truth, I’ve seen through direct obser­va­tion, is that too many of us don’t read enough, much less stuff like research papers and autopsy reports. I’m read­ing pretty much all day, and at the end of it, I’m con­vinced I’m the most unin­formed human being on the planet. The more you read, the more you real­ize you haven’t read, and then you have to write about it, too.

It’s frankly amaz­ing I even feel con­fi­dent enough to form opin­ions. Which, any­one will tell you, are con­sis­tently ill-informed. Because I didn’t read enough.

A long, hot week­end. It started Thurs­day night, when I was awak­ened around mid­night by what seemed to be a lot of yelling and horn-honking far off in the dis­tance. It took me a minute to look at the clock and reg­is­ter: Right, the bas­ket­ball game. I laid there a moment longer, wait­ing for more info, and then it came — gun­fire. Nine shots bam bam bam right after the other, the unmis­tak­able sound of a semi-automatic weapon being emp­tied in, what? Cel­e­bra­tion, I decided; if it had been a fight over the game’s out­come, it wouldn’t have been nec­es­sary to fire the whole clip. The Pis­tons must have won, I thought. And went back to sleep.

So it was a big sur­prise to awaken the next morn­ing and dis­cover that was a grief dis­play, not cel­e­bra­tion, which I sup­pose varies mostly in where the gun is aimed. I hope no one got hurt.

Alan got hurt this week­end, although not in a gun bat­tle over the ref’s calls in game seven. He has a pur­ple fin­ger­nail and a fat knuckle, the result of the strug­gle on Fri­day to get his new boat loaded onto the truck for its trip to Michi­gan. He was helped in this strug­gle by the seller and the trucker, but I’m informed I’m the des­ig­nated helper for its reassem­bly on Mon­day, when the mast will be raised and the shrouds reat­tached and we sail from the com­mer­cial marina where the deliv­ery hap­pens to the new slip at the city dock. Oh, I can’t wait. Some­times it seems Alan and I have spent half our mar­riage yelling at one another, not over sub­stan­tive issues like infi­delity or drunk­en­ness, but over whether I am hold­ing the flash­light at the proper angle or let­ting my end of a 4-by-8 sheet of ply­wood droop while he runs it through a saw or whether bacon should be started in a cold or hot skil­let. What is a boat but merely a new venue for our squab­bles? Cou­ples need com­mon inter­ests, don’t they?

At least, this is some­thing I read some­where.

Pic­tures tomor­row, if I sur­vive.

Oh, and blog­gage: Lance and Nance go to the movies. Or don’t go. At the Amer­i­can Street.