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.