Apparently I had the preferences on my iPod set in such a way that, um, the Shuffle function was turned off.

Boy, am I embarrassed.

Back to work now.

Editor’s note: I realize the following is disjointed, themeless and makes little sense. I’m tired. Also, you get what you pay for.

We are not churchgoing people, and as a Michigander of very little body fat, Kate is not one to have a closet full of dresses. And so, on the rare occasion that she is required to wear one, we tend to react like the Three Stooges: I usually run straight into a wall going whoop-whoop-whoop the hour before she’s supposed to get dressed, and I realize the last skirt still on the “possibles” closet bar now hits her at mid-buttock, and her tights might make it to her knees. Might.

The occasion: A piano recital. The shopping: Sears and Target. The take: One pair of tights. I found a still-decent plaid flannel skort from last year, crossed my fingers and hoped the beauty of her musicianship would sweep the audience away. It was all fine. I’d post pictures, but they weren’t that good. One of the other players did a vocal number, too — “Memory.” Kate didn’t know it; I barely did. What was I saying last week about showtunes? We need to beef up our CDs in that regard; it pains me to think my child may graduate from high school not knowing the words to “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Certainly, my digital music collection is lacking. My primitive third-generation iPod doesn’t have a shuffle function, but it does have Browse, and if you put it into the Songs menu, close your eyes, give the tracking wheel a few whirls and then hit “play,” you can find yourself in an approximation of shuffling, in that it throws up songs from the library you’d forgotten you had, albeit in alphabetical order.

(Was that one sentence? Man. Do not attempt this at home. Remember, I am a professional.)

Anyway, today I was in the A’s, and heard “Athens County,” one of the also-ran tracks from the eponymous album of Jonathan Edwards. (Poor J.E. He had to settle for a .net domain, the .com taken by fans of the 18th-century preacher who wrote “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”)

Anyway, as an alumnus of Ohio University, I guess I’m required to own this record. O.U. is located in None Other, and Jonathan Edwards came to Athens regularly during my time there, and for a brief shining moment we were all bluegrass fans. Bluegrass is the indigenous music of southeastern Ohio — a thousand tragic stories in search of a 24-verse tune. A little goes a long way, but one of the happiest musical memories of my life was driving through the Appalachian counties of Ohio early on a Sunday morning, listening to local radio play its weekly allotment of religious programming in the form of bluegrass gospel music.

It was…heavenly.

Athens County is — or was — full of hollers and back roads and other places offering excellent privacy and marijuana-growing possibilities. We used to go to parties out there, carrying on a long tradition of mischief in the foothills. Good times, good times.

That’s what oldies do for us, I guess — take us somewhere else for about two and a half minutes. When I woke up, I was back in Grosse Pointe, and George Clinton was singing “Atomic Dog,” followed by Billie Holiday and “Autumn in New York.” Alphabetical order, the great equalizer.

That was the better part of the weekend. The worse was the time I spent on Sunday, cleaning the drains on all the bathroom sinks and tubs. I dismantled the traps and removed great wads of hair from each of them. If women were required to do this job regularly, we’d all shave our heads. On the other hand, there’s something about cleaning out a drain, having it go from slow-running to fast under your very own hands, that’s deeply satisfying. No wonder plumbers don’t care that their cracks show; they’re happy!

Not much bloggage today — still working my way through my late-coming NYT — but for now, try Lance on teaching the Bible as literature.

Not quite a year ago, Alan, Kate and I traveled to Milwaukee for my best friend’s birthday party. We stayed at the Country Inn and Suites, one of those places with a breakfast buffet, always handy when traveling with children, who have non-coffee nutritional needs in the early morning.

I wrote something then about the appalling manners demonstrated by our fellow travelers, who arrived in the breakfast room in their jammies and, I suspect, their underwear.

I structured the post in the form of a letter to an etiquette columnist. Since then, about once a month I get either an e-mail or a comment on the original post from someone seeking etiquette advice.

Despite the obvious joke here — me, an expert on comportment, snork — I wonder what it says about how savvy people are about what they find online. I mean, other than the form of the post, there is nothing about this site that suggests I’m some latter-day Emily Post.

One of my ex-bosses hated when I wrote satirical columns, not because he hated the columns (although he wasn’t a fan), but because he believed there was a significant portion of readers who simply didn’t get satire, and would always take it the wrong way, and he’d spend a significant portion of the following day on the phone, telling them, “It’s a joke.”

I think the Milwaukee paper used to run a humor columnist, with a huge disclaimer: “This is a humorous column of satirical opinion.” Talk about a buzzkill.

Anyway, here’s the original post. Note the last half-dozen comments. Soon I’m going to forward them all to Amy Alkon.