First words out of the radio this morning:

“…and we’ll reach a high of 36 on this first day of spring.”

You want to know the roots of true moral decay in this country? It has nothing to do with thong underwear or church attendance or any of the rest of it. It’s the mass migration to the Sunbelt, where you’re far less likely to hear news like this before you’ve even had your coffee. Eh? Am I right? Buck up, Arizonans.

Actually, I visited Arizona, southern Arizona, a few years ago. In fact, I was there on the first day of summer. And the forecast was for a high of 100 degrees. And never mind that dry heat crap; 100 degrees is its own kind of character-builder. Weighing the two, I prefer 36 on the vernal equinox.

OK, then.

The tax project is unfinished. I didn’t have all my records assembled. Of course, who ever has all their records assembled, intact, on the first try? I’m a person of sometimes-casual organization but above-average intelligence, and every year I come through tax season thinking I just barely made it. Why in god’s name does it have to be so complicated?

When cleaning out my parents’ house a few years ago, I ran across their tax returns. Of course they’d saved them going back to the dawn of time. The earliest one I could find was nineteen-fortysomething, I believe. One page. You could have filled it out in 20 minutes, once you had all your records assembled. Today it’s like trying to choose one of those Part D prescription drug plans. The accountants and professional tax preparers of the world thank you, Washington.

Ah, enough bitching. Let’s move on. I was struck by this Richard Cohen column — which must have run in the WashPost, but I don’t know when — about drinking. No, about drunkenness:

Curses on William Ryan. Back in 1976, he published a book called “Blaming the Victim,” coining a valuable phrase and making it virtually impossible to do what his title suggested. Ryan was on to something, but he has nonetheless made it a lot harder to say, as I am about to, that some of the people we have made into victims had a hand in their own fate. Specifically, they were drunk.

On the Mediterranean last year, George Smith vanished from his cruise ship, Brilliance of the Seas. (This was another “justice” show staple.) Smith was on his honeymoon and both he and his bride Jennifer had been doing some hard partying. She was in fact so drunk that she remembered nothing of the night her husband disappeared. Did George Smith fall overboard? Was he pushed? She’s a victim, he’s a victim, no doubt about it. But, in truth, they both might be back in Greenwich, Conn., had they been a bit more sober.

He goes on. I’ve written about this myself. It’s a pot-kettle thing, because I drink myself. Although my seeing-double days are over, I will be the first to admit I have No Room To Talk. But really. Really.

The current culture of campus drunkenness was just getting revved up when I was there — the drink ‘n’ drown nights, which I recall fondly not because they were a license to get hammered, but because the pay-$5-and-drink-all-night pricing was good for a college kid on a budget. Later came the Wacky Shots model, which I always associated with frat boys, where they put you in a dentist’s chair, tipped you back and poured tequila and other noxious liqueurs directly into your mouth, which you opened like a boated bass.

I remember that once the novelty of getting wasted wore off, which it did quickly, I mainly liked alcohol as a social lubricant. I liked the way it loosened tongues and got everyone relaxed and chatty. I like sitting with friends in a bar and talking talking talking; my confession is that I always preferred talk and a jukebox to live music and the necessary loss of conversation.

Getting hammered is counter to good conversation. Getting really hammered, as Cohen points out, is counter to good sense, to self-preservation, even. I’ve ignored the Natalee Holloway case as much as it’s possible to ignore, but I’ve read a story or two, and they all left me thinking: What the hell sort of parent lets an 18-year-old girl go to Aruba with a giant group of kids to celebrate high-school graduation? I don’t care how smart and mature she was; we’re talking Devil’s Workshop stuff here. Wasn’t her mother ever young herself?

Probably she was, and probably she went on a trip or two like this herself, and survived, and figured oh well, a little puking won’t kill anyone. I used to wonder how I’d handle situations like this, and now I know: Tell yourself, your job has changed, it’s different now, and it’s time to do your job.

Sorry for my scarcity yesterday. And apologies in advance to whoever might encounter me later in the day. Feel free to wrestle the dagger or hanging rope out of my hands; reader, I will be doing my taxes. Good thing it’s St. Patrick’s Day; I suspect I’ll need a drink before the day is over.

So it seems as good a time as ever to mop up some puddles.

Dorothy, I got the quarter. Yours will be en route by end of business today.

After a year here, I’m still finding gems about this place, and I suspect I’ll be doing so for years to come. And while I’ve exited I-75 at Big Beaver Road dozens of times — it’s home to the region’s hoit-to-the-toitiest mall — I never noticed the exit number. Of course, others have. And have made an entrepreneurial enterprise out of it. That’s good, because soon there won’t be any other jobs here.

Generation X enters its Franklin Mint Period.

J.C., who taught me the Internet, learns one of its earliest lessons: Never correct another person’s grammar.

Finally, thanks to Amy for finding the winners of the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest. I recommend the slide show. Let the rioting begin!

I may be checking back in today. And now, to screw my courage to the sticking place…

One more round of proofreading, and the Busy Period draws to a close. This will be followed by a Fallow Period, then a Broke Period, then a Panic Period, followed by another Busy Period.

Ah, the circle of life.

My goal is to become John Scalzi, freelancer and blogger, who just revealed the shocking news — to me, anyway — that he typically tops 100K in a single year. Most of it, he says, is for “corporate work,” which may have the disadvantage of being highly boring, but hey — cash money has a way of taking the sting away.

(Note: This Busy Period will also be followed by a Housecleaning Period; a tumbleweed of dog hair just blew past my feet near the kitchen door. And the sunshine is bright and clear today, revelatory of every flaw in my rather lackadaisical housekeeping. Best start Swiffering. Today.)

So what’s on the agenda on this unscheduled Wednesday? How about a little Sopranos dish?

I think David Chase writes these shows with all the high-quality screenwriting bells and whistles, including Big Themes and Seasonal Arcs. In the past, they’ve been, of course, the Nature of Good and Evil, Corruption, the Bystanders, etc. We’ve had it shown to us time and again, starting in season two, that Tony is not just a big suburban shlub with an unusual line of work and a fondness for animals, but a true monster, bred by monsters, breeding more monsters, fouling all that he touches. If some mobster entertainments have taken pains to show these guys are only playing a game that everyone enters with open eyes, give “The Sopranos” credit for showing that there really are innocents in “our thing.”

Look at what being a Soprano has done for Tony’s children. Remember the second-season plotline with David Scatino, Tony’s old high-school buddy with the sporting-goods store? Scatino joins Tony’s “executive card game,” loses big and opens the door for a bust-out of his business. Tony takes Scatino’s kid’s car in partial payment and tries to make a gift of it to Meadow, who rejects it — she knows it belongs to one of her classmates. But when that classmate, Eric, yells at her about his father’s indebtedness to her father, she defends him. Daddy’s girl, and not even out of high school.

This season, I suspect, will be All About Choice. And I think the person to watch will be Carmela, who has obviously found the salve for her tortured conscience, and it has lots and lots of zeros on the end. Because I saw a lot of old episodes in the run-up to this one, I remembered the one where Tony buys her a giant sapphire ring for her birthday, out of guilt over his new mistress. She knows what’s behind it, not the specifics, but the general idea, and can’t look at the ring without a little frown, and finally puts it away in her dresser drawer.

But look at how she pees her pants when Tony gives her a new Porsche Cayenne in the first episode, how she flaunts it to her less-fortunate friends. No more tortured confessions to Father Phil for her. She’s decided a possible eternity in hell is nothing compared to a lifetime of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

And I suspect the last victim will be revealed this season, and it will be A.J. He’s the last one left who’s still somewhat salvageable, if only because he’s dumb enough that he could be steered in another direction. But he never had a father to do that, and his mother just gave up the job, too.

I like his new hair this season. He’ll make a fine mobster. Discuss.

Talk about your irony. I finished the project that’s been occupying too much of my brain — and running my printer cartridges dry — and sent it off to my editor at the Indiana Policy Review Sunday night. It’s set to run in the spring issue.

So of course I open my browser today and find it on a website! Dang new media! Eating dead trees for lunch ONCE AGAIN!!!

Actually, it was all shared on the up-and-up. Since the IPR takes no advertising and exists not to sell magazines but to disseminate ideas, it’s all good. I think I’ll let you steal Fort Wayne Observed’s bandwidth; you can find it here. (Warning: It’s very long. You know you’re working for a non-profit when you ask how much they want and they say, “Oh, you know, 4,000 to 6,000 words.”)

I will tell you this: It’s a subject upon which my own ideas continue to evolve. So if you feel like talking about them, you know where to click.

More is becoming clear in the wake of the Knight Ridder sale. (Note to self: Does any normal human being use the phrase “in the wake of” in everyday discourse? I didn’t think so.) The staff of 20 papers have reason to sleep far, far better at night, knowing they’ve been adopted by a good family. Twelve other staffs can look forward to a few more weeks of stomach-lining damage and 3 a.m. staring-at-the-ceiling sessions. My ex-paper is among the Dejected Dozen.

McClatchy, the good family, has already said it plans on a clean break, that it won’t even accept delivery of the unwanted 12, that the marketing begins today. Some prospective buyers are emerging, or at least being talked about. Fort Wayne is a particularly odd duck. What are you buying? A 75-percent share in a two-newspaper agency (the smallest city in the country to still have two dailies), combined daily circulation around 100K, family-owned dominant morning daily and a gasping, dwindling p.m., which would be yours. What’s more, the publisher of the a.m. partner is now saying she’s not interested in selling.

I don’t know what the choices would be. Could you buy the agency and fold the p.m. and just be a landlord to the a.m.? Don’t know if the JOA would allow that. Make the p.m. a shopper, or some other dead-man-walking publication, while you wait out the a.m. publisher’s resolve not to sell? Or is that resolve another way of saying, “My price just went up”? I really don’t know.

Here’s what I do know: A few days ago, a market analyst, speculating on this sale, said that whatever the outcome, the affected papers will be in for some serious cost-cutting, that it’s time to “cut the fat, and maybe even the muscle,” to service the debt a buyer would incur. I laughed out loud. Fat? The fat at my paper went out the door sometime in 2002. Much of the muscle followed. Today The News-Sentinel is a double amputee. An entire department has vanished from the newsroom, and others operate with skeleton crews, although the desks remain, or did. That was one of the long-term goals about the time I left — to rearrange the furniture and get rid of all those empty chairs that were bumming everybody out.

I’m going to stop reading about all this, I think, and just file it all in the drawer marked Why It Was a Good Idea to Leave. Page? Turned. Future? Uncertain. Path? Murky. Also: Bet on Gannett.

The fate of my ex-employer is semi-known — McClatchy gets Knight Ridder, plans to immediately sell 12 papers, including Fort Wayne. Beyond that, I’m as clueless as anyone. Again, discuss.

Note: Fort Wayne Observed seems to have the energy to go after this one, and is speculating that whoever the buyer is, it’s already a done deal. We live in interesting times.

UPDATE: FWO now backtracking and saying the sale isn’t a done deal.

Of course everything there is good to say about “Big Love” is now a cup of thin gruel, because “The Sopranos” rocked the llama’s ass last night. I mean. Discuss.

P.S. Thank God for DVRs.

Every job has its perks, and the big one traditionally enjoyed by newspaperfolk — a really nice obituary, well-played — is entirely in keeping with the job’s other rewards. That is, fairly useless. However, I think I’ve found another: Alan brought home a DVD, cadged off the TV writer, of the first five episodes of “Big Love,” HBO’s new dramedy about polygamy.

We watched three over the weekend. So far, it’s safe to say that while it’s not “The Sopranos,” it’s far better than I thought it would be, and like everything on HBO, I’m willing to give it a chance. These series tend to ripen very well, and if they have to hook you with the bizarre — a mob boss who sees a shrink! a funeral home with talking corpses! a cop show that bears a resemblance to reality! — that’s just the way these shows get it done. I think Daphne Merkin is a little tough on it here; I could see seeds of thoughtfulness planted throughout the first three episodes, and I think they’ll be bearing soon enough.

It’s interesting to see the contrast between Bill’s suburban home and the crazy backcountry polygamist compound he evidently was cast out of at 14 (as these compounds are wont to do — can’t have yearling studs competing with the ones with gray muzzles). And it’s interesting to see that the crazy place didn’t sour him on the concept of polygamy, just gave him a desire to do it better, which means a lot less dust, better furniture and a teenage son who’s still treasured. (Although it’s pretty obvious some sort of hookup between sonny boy and one of dad’s juicier sister wives is inevitable.)

Fingers crossed.

*Tom Shales used this obvious wordplay in his Saturday preview of “Big Love,” but I feel free to use it because I thought of it first. Really!

From the Department of What-Fresh-Hell-Is-This, a mailing arrived at NN.C Central yesterday.

“Natural gas prices have dropped. Lock in your rate now!” it exhorted. Inside, it encourages me to buy a…truckload? room full? bunch? of natural gas for the low low price of $1.098 per ccf. I hve no idea what a ccf is, but I assume it’s a recognized measurement of natural gas. “Interstate Gas Supply Inc. is now offering a guaranteed fixed rate of $1.098 per ccf for the commodity portion of your gas bill plus DTE/Michigan Consolidated Gas Company (MichCon) deliver charges and applicable taxes, through your December 2007 billing period,” I’m told. It goes on to say I’ll soon be paying $1.215 per ccf, and it may change based on market prices, and wouldn’t it be nice to have the peace of mind that comes with knowing I’ll be paying $1.098 through December 2007? Wouldn’t it?

Everything I know about natural gas I learned in school (it comes from the same wells as oil) and by editing business copy (utilities buy a lot of it in July, when it’s cheap, to sell in January, when it’s not). And that’s…about it. I don’t know how $1.098 stacks up, pricewise, over the long term — maybe if I wait until July, I’ll get a better offer. I don’t know what the “commodity portion” of my gas bill is, and investigation of my statements online offer no hints. What about that delivery charge? Seems like a pretty handy catch-all. How do I accept delivery of my gas? Does it arrive via pipeline? Is this like renting space in a grain elevator?

And then the terrible truth dawns: That thanks to such article-of-faith American values as “competition” and “the free market,” I will not only have to be the prime mover in selecting my household’s groceries, clothing, laundry detergent, coffee and the rest of it, I now have to keep an eye on the natural-gas market. I have to shop for heat.

And you thought choosing a long-distance service was bad.

All I can say is, if I’m going to trade commodities, I want a seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, complete with a loud jacket and hand signals.

Have you done this? What’s your advice? Or, to put it P.J. O’Rourke style, “What the f**k? I mean, what the f**king f**k?”

There’s a scrap of video going around, which I’m not going to link to because it’s expired from the Memeorandum page and whine whine whine…oh, OK: It’s here. But you don’t need to watch it. It’s a compilation of talking-head interviews with people at an anti-abortion demonstration. The questioner asks them two questions: Should abortions be legal or illegal? Everyone replies, “Illegal,” of course — they’re demonstrating against it. Well then, the interviewer presses on, how should women who get abortions be punished?

Hem, haw. I dunno. Haven’t thought about it. “Prayer.” “Counseling.” And so on.

It’s a mild little piece of propaganda, and I don’t take it as gospel because it’s obviously coming from one side of the question and who knows? Maybe lots of people said, “Hang and flay the bitch!” and those interviews were left out. But it is safe to say that in the national conversation, not much time has been spent discussing this. Savvier pro-lifers have been wise about their talking points — the “two victims” of abortion, the “one dead, one wounded” argument. But if any have stated their bottom line, it hasn’t been clear. Which is:

OK, so we say abortion is murder. How do you punish a woman who has one? Hem, haw.

If any penalties come up in the discussion, it’s those prescribed for medical personnel who perform or assist in the procedure. But how about that big Tupperware container who showed up, placed the order and wrote the check? Oh, her. Well. Um. Perhaps her “wounding” will be punishment enough. But I doubt it.

This is one reason that while I don’t welcome recent events in South Dakota, I’m certain they’ll be interesting on many levels, and not in the Chinese-curse sense of the word. Let’s put our cards on the table. Lock up doctors? Lock up women? What are you willing to do?

A few years ago I read one of those articles that makes you happy you subscribe to The New Yorker. It was about nausea, maybe 4,000 words on this simple physical reaction and how and why it affects us the way it does. I was hooked from the second paragraph, in which it was explained that a man who breaks his ankle on a ski slope tomorrow will suffer great pain but, with proper care and rehab, will likely be back skiing this time next year. Whereas a man who overdoes it on tequila in the ski lodge tonight may never touch tequila again for the rest of his life, may well start to heave at the very smell of it for years and years to come. I love to read stuff like that. Such a simple observation, and yet.

Anyway, one of the through-line narratives in the piece was about a woman with a condition called hyperemesis of pregnancy, in which the normal morning sickness of early pregnancy becomes 24-7 puking for the entire nine-month term. It is a leading motivator for later-term abortions, contrary to the propaganda, which says women choose these procedures for fun and waistline-preservation.

The descriptions of the symptoms were nausea-inducing themselves — women are absolutely flattened by this. It’s not a question of being confined to dry toast and applesauce, it’s about long-term hospitalization and IV nutrition and life-threatening dehydration and still, even with medication, overwhelming nausea for months on end.

Of course, suffering is in the eye of the one who suffers. What one woman can endure another cannot. The woman in the story gutted it out and hung in there and had her baby and was happy she did (although I think it’s safe to say she never had another). Others can’t do it and throw in the towel. Anyone who’s had a bout of stomach flu can at least empathize.

So where do we draw the line here? What do we tell the weaker woman? Sorry, sister, but you have to go through this? Sorry if you can’t keep a glass of water down, but your condition isn’t life-threatening? What about the doctor who performs an abortion to relieve this woman’s suffering?

Let’s have the conversation. Let’s find out who the pro-lifers think are the criminals here. And how they’d punish them.

On the lighter side, Jon Carroll has some ideas about how we can all become South Dakota residents, for purposes of voter registration and influencing elections. It’s a crazy idea, but it just might work.

Big Busy Period of spring 2006 is winding up, at the end of which I hope to send invoices for several hefty paydays. That’s why I’ve been half-here and distracted. I’m also closely watching — and you Fort Wayne readers may want to click through — the next phase in the possible Knight Ridder sale, which will affect whether or not you have an afternoon newspaper this time next year. (Personally, I think things have entered the George Burns stage, i.e., don’t buy any green bananas. We shall see.) But here’s the money quote:

“The bottom line on Knight Ridder papers is that in order to make these deals work, someone has to get extremely aggressive with costs,” said Frederick W. Searby, an analyst with J. P. Morgan. “There’s no question that this means that any buyer has to go in with a very, very sharp knife and trim the fat and maybe into the muscles to get this to work.”

Hello, one-newspaper town.

UPDATE: In a nice convergence, here we have a wussified newspaper unwilling not only to ask the questions, but even to discuss the issue. How nice.