Here’s how I remember it: It was Friday night, and I’d just finished watching “Millennium.” It was a spinoff series, sorta, of “The X-Files.” And as far as I recall, it was one of those Aura shows — there was the sense that Something Large and Evil was lurking just offstage, part of a Huge Conspiracy of Shadowy Forces, and it was all tied to the coming turn of the millennium, which was then, what? A little over three years away.

The credits were rolling, and I felt a contraction.

Damn. False labor.

I was in false labor, I was sure, because I’d just been to the doctor that day. Of course I knew the baby was coming eventually, but the nurse practitioner had checked everything out down there and pronounced my cervix “long and closed,” which meant she was willing to bet money I wouldn’t go before my due date, still five days away.

I was ready. My suitcase was packed, the camera loaded with film, the “Kind of Blue” CD ready in case the room had a player. The crib was set up, the little onesies in the drawer, the mobile of black-and-white shapes — supposedly the only thing a newborn could see — assembled and ready to be gazed upon. It was called the Infant Stim-Mobile. Stim is for “stimulation.” Everything was all about stimulation back then. Of course, the first thing you learn about newborns is, they’re already getting all the stimulation they can handle, and when they can’t handle it anymore, they scream. This was the first lesson of parenthood, and I pass it on to you now: Someone’s always trying to sell you useless crap, and 95 percent of it you don’t need.

I was ready, but there was still work to be done. I had to help Alan clean the gutters, the last onerous outdoor chore of the year, and I had to shop for and prepare a meal for Alan’s 40th birthday, which was Saturday. Once Saturday was over, I’d be all the way ready.

Only now, damn: False labor. I went to bed in the guest room. Alan had a cold, and I didn’t want to catch it with the delivery so close. Tried to sleep, but the false labor continued. Hey, I kept thinking. My cervix is long and closed, and I don’t need to be up all damn night with this false labor. I need my rest. I have to clean gutters and make a semi-elaborate meal. Give me a break, uterus.

I managed to doze a while, but still, all night — contractions. Some were sort of strong. Once I whimpered a little, and Alan said, from the next room, half-asleep: “Try to breathe through it, hon. Zzzzzzzz.” By dawn, I was beginning to think we were going to have to go to the hospital. Not for the baby to be born, mind you, but for the doctor to look at me again — long and closed! — and send me home. This happened to everyone we knew. And here I’d have to make dinner and a cake on a night of interrupted sleep. Damn this false labor; it was ruining my plans.

Second lesson of parenthood: Someone’s always ruining your plans.

I got Alan up, told him we were probably going to have to go to the hospital, and he should walk the dog. I called my parents and told them we were going, but not to get their hopes up, because my cervix was long and closed. The contractions were pretty strong and grueling by now, but honestly, I still thought they were false alarms. This ability to ignore reality when it’s right in front of my face explains a lot about me, including why I stayed in the newspaper business so long.

On the way to the hospital, I noticed the contractions were now three minutes apart, down from five. It began to occur to me that I might, possibly, be having the baby that day.

At the hospital they offered to check me in under an assumed name. Really. Apparently this service is available to certain VIPs, and as a newspaper columnist, I qualified. “I really don’t think that’s necessary,” I said through gritted teeth and another contraction. “I think the photographers are still staking out Madonna’s apartment.” Madonna was my celebrity pregnancy doppelganger and had delivered a month earlier.

We got up to the intake ward, where a jolly nurse checked everything out. “You’re six centimeters dilated, almost seven. You’re in transition.” I told Alan to call his mom and tell her dinner was definitely off.

I had the epidural, which I now regret. The day stretched out to its full length. I was no longer in pain; all activity seemed to be taking place on the other side of a glass wall that passed through my waist. The jolly nurse went home, replaced by a less-jolly but seemingly far more competent one, who ordered a pitocin drip. I pushed and pushed and pushed and nothing happened. They tried the suction-cup thing and it didn’t work. I looked up and saw my ya-ya, illuminated by halogen lights, reflected in six pairs of glasses, which was weird. At one point I blacked out, although I never lost consciousness. There’s just a long gap in my memory, which I’m thankful for, because apparently that’s when the episiotomy happened and the forceps appeared. All I know is I was pushing unsuccessfully and then the doctor said, “The head’s out,” and I thought, cool, I didn’t need an episiotomy. And the next thing I knew, they laid Kate on my stomach, all hair and huge, staring eyes.

I’d like to tell you we all burst into tears like the moms on “E.R.,” but all I remember thinking was: Wow. Get a load of those eyes.

There was a lot of busywork then. A pulmonary tech hoovered out her lungs, because there had been meconium in the amniotic fluid. The nurses rubbed her rather vigorously. The doctor said, “She had a rough trip.” I didn’t know, then, that her one-minute Apgar score was a mere 4. Finally I said, “Is she OK? Can I see her?” And the pulmonary tech turned around and said, “Sure.”

(That’s the competent nurse on the right.) I told Alan, “Happy birthday. Don’t expect me to top this for 41,” and everyone made a big fuss.

I sometimes think back on this comedy of errors and wonder if it set the tone for anything. The denial of the obvious, the convenient blackout at a critical moment — what does this say about my chips-are-down mettle? Nothing, I hope. Third lesson of parenthood: Nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.

Anyway, this was 10 years ago today. Today, little Miss 4-on-the-Apgar woke up and caroled, “I’m in double digits now!” She and her father wished one another a happy birthday. Presents were unwrapped at the breakfast table; it was an electronics theme this year. Ten years of water under the bridge, more than halfway to adulthood (legal adulthood, anyway). I’ve made approximately seven jajillion mistakes but I think, for the most part, they were all non-fatal, and I’ve tried to learn from them.

The latest lesson of parenthood: Birthdays are special. Time to go make some cake. Have a good day.

Nearly all my junk mail comes from spammers these days, and man, those folks are still the hardest-working people on the internet, aren’t they? I get at least 100 pieces of pharmaspam, pornospam and lonelyhearts spam a day. I can’t say I haven’t learned anything from it; did you know that the world’s top-selling erectile dysfunction medication now comes in “soft tabs”? Wouldn’t you think “able to swallow a small pill in the conventional manner” might be kind of a bottom-line test for one’s ability to withstand the rigors of sexual activity? I mean, if you need to gum your e.d. pills, maybe you’ve got bigger fish to fry. So to speak.

I should probably add that spam doesn’t make me as crazy as it does some people. I figure, how long does it take to hit the delete key? It’s a nuisance, but I keep it in perspective.

But the other day I got a piece of junk that had obviously come from one individual. It has 25-count-’em-25 layers of forwarding headers on it. Subject line: PLEEEEEEASE REEEEEAD! IT WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA TODAY SHOW. I actually skipped to the bottom to discover what was so important that more than two dozen people had found it worthy of bugging their friends with. Ready?

“Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. …For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.” And so on: “…two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a check for $24,800.00.”

Now. I’ve received this before, but not since, oh, 1999. Surely, in the last five or six years, every sentient person with an e-mail address has figured out that Bill Gates is spending his fortune on vaccines for the world’s poorest children, not in an effort to find the internet’s dumbest users. Right? Is there a single soul who believes these anymore? I half expect to find a follow-up note warning me of the Good Times virus.

Anyway, I took a moment to hit reply, and wrote, “I don’t know you. Stop sending me your junk-mail forwards, or I’ll report you to Yahoo and Gmail as a spammer.”

And he replied, and guess what he said? “You shouldn’t put your e-mail in the newspaper, then.” I had a couple of bylines in the Free Press over the weekend, which included my Gmail address.

Huh.

Of course I don’t know where this guy lives, but if I did? I’d send him a letter, by regular mail, no, FedEx. It would include a check for, say, $32,998, signed “Bill Gates.” On the memo line: “Thanks for helping with that e-mail beta test!”

I mean, it might be a disproportionate response, but it would feel really, really good.

If I had to think of one thing that’s different about adult life in my generation as opposed to my parents’, it would be…well, about a million things. But today I’m thinking about restaurants.

My parents went out to eat only occasionally, more often as they got older and started hanging with my dad’s gang of handball buddies, but as I recall, going to a restaurant was still a dress-up-and-shine-your-shoes deal for the most part. Fast food, a daily fact of many of today’s children’s lives, was fairly rare for me, something my mom treated me to when dad was out of town on business. We went to Arthur Treacher’s, the Original Fish & Chips. (If you’re old enough to remember Arthur Treacher, you’ve definitely entered the Bifocals Years. Of course, I can sing the jingle.)

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about restaurants lately, except that I was trying to decide which was the worst restaurant I’ve ever eaten in. There have been so many contenders, but I finally settled on one that was, top to bottom, a disaster. The concept was bad, the decor was bad, the food was bad, the service was bad, and everything else? Bad.

A little background: For years, there was a restaurant on West Fifth Avenue in Columbus called Presutti’s Villa. It was a typical ’50s-era Italian place, checked tablecloths and chianti-bottle candles and spaghetti and meatballs. If there wasn’t a Venetian gondola scene painted on the wall, it sure would have fit right in. It was beloved by its neighbors and customers, the sort of place you’d think would be there forever.

But one night they had a fire. And the restaurant never reopened as Presutti’s. There was a period of mourning, and then remodeling crews started work, and before anyone knew it, the place had reopened, but not as Presutti’s.

As JoAnn’s Chili Bordello.

At first I thought this was simply a spectacularly bad one-off, some coke-crazed sex addict’s idea of fun, sort of a proto-Hooter’s. The slogan was something like “17 varieties of chili served in an atmosphere of sin,” and was the cue for everything else. The place was decked out as a Hollywood version of a New Orleans whorehouse — flocked wallpaper, red everything — and the waitresses wore underwear. Really. Merry Widow corsets with garters, stockings and panties. Honestly, I think Playboy Bunnies wore more, and they were mostly serving drinks. The idea of eating actual food, which doesn’t have the disinfecting properties of a stiff drink, served by a woman whose junk and all its filth are covered by only a thin film of polyester, well — someone probably thought it was sexy, but I just thought it was gross.

Anyway, at first I thought it was just a single bad idea. I was wrong. Googling around, I see it was part of a chain. A chain! Someone opened one and thought, let’s do this again! I’m speechless, even as I acknowledge that this fact means some have left documentary evidence behind.

I ate there once. The waitress’s corset was green, and I have rarely been so embarrassed for another soul in my life. The chili was barely average, but the place had an ambitious dessert menu, so I tried to salvage the night with a piece of chocolate cake. A really exquisite chocolate cake is hard to do, but a truly bad one is almost equally hard. (I mean, it’s chocolate cake.) It was called Better Than Sex Cake. I think the restaurant critic for one of the dailies described it best when he said: “It isn’t.”

Anyway, it lasted longer at its other locations than it did in Columbus, where it opened and closed pretty quickly. I hope this is a testimony to my hometown’s superior taste in eateries, but it probably has more to do with women not wanting to accompany their husbands and boyfriends to a place with that much cleavage.

OK, the bloggage: Slate takes an entertaining look at that journalism perennial, the bus plunge: Bus plunges had become an inside joke, with editors scouting the wires for new ones. “If a bus fell anywhere, they would cut that story from the wire and send it to the copy desk and put it in the paper, whereas earlier perhaps they wouldn’t have,” Siegal says. It was no longer a matter of how badly shorts were needed. “They became newsworthy in and of their own right because it was amusing to get the expression ‘bus plunge’ into the paper as often as possible.”

I liked this part: At the Times, the shortest stories—a one-line hed and a single paragraph of copy—were called “K-heds.” “The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense,” Siegal says. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One of Siegal’s favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety:

Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.

I’m impressed the Times had a special name for what everyone else called fillers. Fillers were on their way out when I entered the business in 1979, but still, every Friday the wires moved a few stories that consisted of nothing but hermaphroditic snail factoids, and if you had time, one of the duties in our department was to slap little heads on them and typeset a bunch in three column widths, to be used whenever a story came up short. I know editors who collected them, which is one reason they can be such pains in the ass when you play Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! opposite them.

In Columbus, we ran a one-line filler about some museum that hung a Matisse painting upside-down for a year before someone noticed. The headline: “Matisse hung wrong.” Another carried the headline: “Jaguars fear dogs.” The text: “Jaguars are afraid of dogs.”

Go ahead, laugh. But that was a time when circulation was strong. Chili, anyone?

Alan was on his way into work Friday when he passed a homeless man, who had taken the top off a sidewalk garbage can and was rooting around inside for whatever treasures he could find. (People in states where you don’t pay deposit on cans and bottles think the whole idea is an unbearable nuisance, but I’m telling you, it’s like having your own state scrip. Keeps trashpickers busy, too.)

The guy popped his head up suddenly and said, “Man! You gotta come look at this!”

Alan, well-versed in the art of ignoring the homeless, did what anyone would do — put up his urban blast shields and quickened his step.

“No, man, you gotta see this! It’s some crazy kind of bird!”

The man who gave me both Audubon’s Baby Elephant Folio and Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America could resist no longer. He approached the garbage can, and looked inside. There was, indeed, a bird there.

An American woodcock.

A peacock would have been less surprising. The Hare Krishnas have been known to keep those at their headquarters at the Fisher Mansion. Peregrine falcons are well-established in many U.S. cities, where they nest on skyscrapers the way they nest on cliff faces in the wild; that wouldn’t have been such a shock. And of course Detroit is home to a thriving pheasant population. But a woodcock? This reclusive, perfectly camouflaged game bird lives far from cities. In Michigan they prefer forest floors near swampy areas where they can easily find the earthworms that make up 75 percent of their diet. Their long, curved beaks are made for probing soft ground. Some people call them timberdoodles.

“What is it?” the homeless guy said. “Some kind of woodpecker?”

Alan told him what it was, reached in and took it out. He placed it on the sidewalk, where it flopped around uncontrollably. One wing was badly broken. By this time another reporter had shown up, and the three of them watched the wounded bird struggle.

I’ve never seen one myself. Alan says he kicks them up sometimes in the woods when he’s fishing up north, particularly at night — they hide until the last minute, then flush almost into your face. Once we went out to Fox Island, a county park in Fort Wayne, hoping to see them do their spring mating display. While the females stay on the ground, the males rise in long, slow spirals, then suddenly fall zig-zagging to the ground. They do this well after they’ve charmed the girls into mating; some theorize the males do it to keep the females entertained during the tedious nest-sitting.

How did it end up in a covered garbage can in downtown Detroit? The possibilities seemed endless, and impossible to know: Migrating along the Great Lakes flyway, it went astray, hit a building and fell to the ground. Perhaps. Maybe the hole of the garbage can looked like the open end of a log, and it somehow managed to fly in. Hit by a motorist? Escaped from a chef? (They’re beloved by adventurous gourmets, particularly French ones, who eat them right down to the trail, the earthworm-filled intestinal tract.) Whatever brought it here, it wasn’t going to make it to any wintering ground in the non-frozen south.

“This bird doesn’t deserve to suffer like this,” Alan said, scooping it up again. “It needs to be put out of its misery.”

“I don’t need to see that,” the homeless guy said, scuttling away. The reporter did likewise. Alan paused a mournful moment and broke the bird’s neck, then placed it back in the garbage can.

“It was a bad way to start Friday,” he said. “Kind of put me off.”

I told him that if I tell this story here, some people will say he did the wrong thing, that he should have called the Humane Society of Animal Cops or whoever, who would have tenderly nursed the bird back to health and released it in a bird sanctuary somewhere. Alan, the outdoorsman, shook his head. “It wasn’t going to get better. It was miserable. This was the right thing to do,” he said.

I believe him. Sometimes, the hardest thing is the only thing.

If you haven’t heard, Jesus Camp voluntarily shut itself down yesterday. I guess, in the climate of anti-Christianity swept in by Tuesday’s elections, they no longer felt safe. Whatever. Haven’t seen the movie — except for that righteous clip of Ted Haggard, tee hee — and now I don’t have to, although I probably wouldn’t have, anyway. I lived in Jesus Camp for 20 years; I am no stranger to this demographic. I wish them no ill. I can only hope they feel the same way about me.

But in meandering through a thread on the subject over at Metafilter, I came across this hilarious account of standing in opposition to a prevailing Jesus subculture at one person’s North Dakota high school. It reminded me of the various Jesus subcultures at my own, which were in evidence even during the Ford administration.

One was The Way International. Most observers identify it as a cult, and from some of their activities, I wouldn’t be surprised. At one point they were instructing their management layer in marksmanship and weapons-handling, and calling it “hunter safety courses.” The kids who were into The Way did something that was mystifying to a girl raised Catholic and living among mainline Protestants: They spoke in tongues. They were “taken by the spirit” at prayer, opened their mouths and supposedly ancient languages poured forth, praising God.

A few of my friends were into this, but not for long; by the time we grew close, they’d fallen out with The Way (out of The Way?) and heavily into ridiculing it. One liked to get so wasted he started slurring his words, at which point he opened his eyes wide and said, “Hey! Tongues!” Another pointed out that when one still-faithful member spoke in tongues, if you listened closely you always heard the phrase “Yoko Ono,” proof he was faking it. (Although, when you think about it, it may have been an early sign that John Lennon was a divine being, not so hard for some people to believe.)

Although our community was WASPy and generally not into this sort of thing — I’m still uncomfortable in any church where people lift their hands above the level of their shoulders while praying — they were respectful. Also, drugs were spreading through the schools like the Norwalk virus, and anything that kept kids away from that was seen as worth a try. In junior high we were all released one afternoon to attend an assembly, and when we arrived were treated to a half-hour concert by a rock band called the Free Fair. There was no obvious point to the show, although we were all invited back for a longer one that evening at the high school. I should have known something was up, as normally our principal didn’t opt for midday rock’n'roll breaks, but my friends were going to the show that night, so I did too. And sure enough, after the music came the Testimony: Drugs ruined my life blah blah but Jesus Christ saved it blah blah. The lead singer said he’d once been so strung out, he’d sold his winter coat for marijuana.

I was no expert on drugs, but even in eighth grade this sounded like crap. Marijuana, all the magazines said, was non-addictive and a fairly mild high, and this guy sold his coat for some? Maybe if he’d recently moved to Florida, maybe if it was already April, but otherwise even I — who had never been high in my 13 years — knew that marijuana would be no match for the misery of being outside without a coat in winter.

I left and went outside, where a few of my friends were in the baseball dugouts, smoking cigarettes with one of the Free Fair’s roadies. He had his arm around my friend Ann’s shoulders. She said he kissed her, stuck his tongue in her mouth and copped a feel. This was my very first experience with this sort of youth-culture Jesus-freakery evangelism, and you might say it left a mark. Lies on stage, jailbait groping outside — I had these folks’ number early. There were many parents who had good reason to worry about the various religious movements taking their children away — Hare Krishna, the Children of God, the Moonies — but mine never did. The Free Fair was my immunization.

Thank you, Jesus. The Lord truly does work in mysterious ways.

Well, OK then. Faith restored, balance forthcoming, etc. etc. For the record, I don’t think 2007 promises a geyser of ponies on every lawn, but maybe it serves as a wake-up call.

Nothing demonstrates my state of mind better than my vote in the Michigan governor’s race. Seldom have I pulled a lever with less enthusiasm than I did for Jennifer Granholm yesterday. As I explained earlier in the fall, there is only one issue of concern to Michiganians, and likely will be for some time: Economic development. This state is going through a paroxysm of agony over the draining of good-paying manufacturing jobs, jobs that are likely never coming back. The time is long, long overdue for every business leader and policy maker in the state to be thinking creatively about how we diversify our state’s economy so that we aren’t so dependent on one sector. I don’t expect government to fix the problem, but I expect it to be part of the solution. I expect public office holders to be paying attention.

Granholm’s “plan” for economic recovery hasn’t done squat so far and likely won’t in the future. Dick DeVos spent $40 million of his own money to point this out; for months and months, he’s been advertising on television, pointing this out. She was wide-open and vulnerable.

However.

DeVos didn’t have much of a plan of his own, other than the usual: Tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts. He had no clear answer for how he was going to reconcile these cuts with political reality in Michigan — what do we cut elsewhere? Mumble mumble. Still, he was only pointing out the obvious, and for much of the summer and into the campaign he had a handy lead over Granholm, until she started her own advertising, and his lead shrank to nothing more or less overnight.

And the next words out of his mouth were: Intelligent design.

I was appalled. Rarely have I felt so insulted as a voter. It was flag-burning and Willie Horton all over again.

DeVos advocated Michigan schoolchildren be taught ID in science class. Now. By my reckoning we’ve already fought this battle twice, once on the local level (Pennsylvania) and once on the state (Kansas), and both times the issue was a stunning defeat for the pro-ID camp. Presumably DeVos is not so dumb that he thinks he could just slide this one by the people of Michigan, and knows that even if he could push it through the state board of education, it would lead to yet another months-long, outrageously expensive and ultimately pointless court battle. Recall, again, that we’re in a one-state recession here, unemployment above 7 percent, and Job One is convincing the employers of the 21st century that Michigan will be a good place to do business, with its priorities straight and its workforce well-educated and ready.

Isn’t that just what we don’t need? The third rerun of the Scopes monkey trial? National ridicule, cable-news hot air, the Discovery Institute poobahs testifying again about their “alternative” theory?

You’d think.

So you have to figure DeVos knows this, too. If he believes God made the world according to his design, that’s his business. He can’t possibly think Michigan’s monkey trial would be the third-time charm. And he knows that, in a state as blue/purple as this one, his chances of taking the idea very far are pretty low. So what was he really saying when he said, “Let’s teach ID in science class”? Just this:

Psst, religious right. I’m just like you!

And that, finally, was enough for me to say, uh-uh. Because if there’s one group of people I have, finally, heard quite enough from, it’s those guys. Enough culture warring, please. You see what happens to the art of political compromise when you deal with extremists; you say, “OK, look, no one feels totally hunky-dory about abortion. So let’s sit down together and see what we can do about it.” And their reply is, “There is no compromise. My position is the only moral one available, but while we’ve got you, be advised: Our next fun issue will be to make it perfectly legal for your pharmacist to insert his own pious moralizing into your relationship with your doctor, and make you drive 100 miles to get birth-control pills.”

The Schiavo case was hideous enough — the governor of Florida and U.S. Congress poking their noses into one family’s agony, not to mention the spectacle of Catholic priests going on talk shows to insinuate Michael Schiavo beat his wife into a coma and now wants to finish the job. As though this pathetic woman with her brain turning slowly to pudding was about to wake up one day and say, “Don’t let him finish the job.”

But suppose there was hope for Terri Schiavo, and it lay in stem-cell research. Those same lying priests would have said it was better for her to spend her life flicking her unseeing eyes across the walls of her nursing home than for one 16-cell blastocyst to be used for science. Because to do so would be just like Dr. Mengele’s experiments on twins, don’t you know.

So farewell to those folks, too. Bye, Rick Santorum; dogs everywhere appreciate your interest in their welfare, but alas. (Yes, I know: Bob Casey is pro-life, too. But he’s not Rick Santorum. An improvement.)

And then, finally, there’s the war. Already the airy arguments are beginning. Sniffed HTML warrior James Lileks: “…perhaps it’s possible for a country to win a war with apologies and investigations.” Uh-huh. Funny. Of course, it wasn’t possible for us to win the war with Donald Rumsfeld in charge, either, WHICH WAS THE POINT, AFTER ALL. I could accept the war, opposed to it as I am, if I thought it were being run competently, but it’s the Hurricane Katrina of foreign policy, and instead of accountability, what we get from the Bush administration is: Heckuva job, Brownie! We need more soldiers; what we should be hearing from the 101st Fighting Keyboarders is why the frat-house row at Dartmouth isn’t empty, because all the patriotic young Republicans have marched off to fight in this war they believe so fervently in. But we don’t hear that. We don’t hear much at all, other than, “I guess we’re going to cut and run now.”

Cutting and running makes more sense, at this point, than more wasted American lives. Unless we could put Rummy in body armor and put him on the turret gun of a Humvee, patrolling Tikrit.

So that’s the mood of one voter, today. I’m not exulting over the GOP shellacking, but I am pleased to see they’ve learned about pendulums and what they do. This was a corrective, and it was long overdue.

Yesterday’s most interesting robo-call: The voice of a young African American woman tells me Jennifer Granholm “takes our money and gives it to the suburbs.” She doesn’t care about “us.” “We” can’t trust her.

It’s like the old punchline of the Lone Ranger joke: What do you mean “we,” white man?

This is interesting on several levels, starting with the assumption that, because I live in the 313 area code, I’m black. If you saw “8 Mile,” you remember that last rap battle scene, where Rabbit asks everyone in the crowd to th’ow it up for the 313. Like everything here, it’s a racial code, as well as telephonic. Wayne County, where Detroit is located, is the 313. Oakland and Macomb Counties, where most of the suburban communities known as “metro Detroit” are located, are the 248 and 586, respectively, although there may be some 734s over there in western Oakland. However, Grosse Pointe, overwhelmingly white, is in Wayne County, too, so if I’d been at that rap battle in a pink cashmere cardigan, pearls and a cute madras headband, I’d have been entitled to th’ow my hands in the air for the 313, too. (I’ve always found this image amusing, yo.)

However, if you robo-bomb 313 phone numbers with a coded message aimed at African Americans, chances are you’ll get more hits than misses. Detroit is something like 82 percent black, after all.

The other level upon which this is interesting? Um, consider the alternative.

Ah, but it all ends today. Election Day. I was a newspaper reporter long enough that I feel like its rhythms are part of me. Reporters get to sleep in on Election Day; traditionally, if you’re covering a race, you don’t come to work until polls close. So it’s a day to catch up on your errands and watch “The View” or whatever. If you’re not covering the race, your job is to vote on your way in to work and ask the poll workers how early turnout looks, then report it to the city desk when you arrive. Either way, the long stretch of voting is, shall we say, down time.

If you’re a copy editor, at least for a p.m. newspaper — and I may be the last journalist left in American who never worked for an a.m., and how the hell did that happen — you come to work extra early on Wednesday. Frequently you greet the reporters leaving in the wee small hours of the morning.

The reward for both shifts is food, which the company springs for. Reporters get pizza, editors get donuts. If you like salty things for breakfast, there’s usually a cold pizza left to chew on.

(If this sounds pathetic, it is. Small-market journalism is a study in self-debasement. Hey, free pizza!)

In between, though, my but it’s fun. You go to campaign headquarters, where someone writes the incoming results on a blackboard. There’s liquor, which means some of your interviews will be with people half in the bag, which means you have half a chance of getting a quote that doesn’t sound like it came from a robot. Although don’t count on it, because there’s always spinning galore.

I was never a political writer, but I did my share. Two vivid memories:

In 1984, shortly after I’d been hired in Fort Wayne but before my column started, I was drafted to cover the election-night festivities of the third parties — at the time the Libertarians and a weird splinter called (I think) the American Party. Both were wan, cheerless affairs, but the American Party vigil was the Island of Misfit Toys. I think they were meeting in an Eagles hall or something, with a few 2-liter bottles of pop and potluck snacks. The folks were right out of Diane Arbus, and the official spokesman was turned out in a vivid polyester leisure suit with contrasting topstitching, the sort of thing that Herb Tarlek used to wear on “WKRP in Cincinnati.” I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I remember that evening as my first exposure to the can’t-catch-a-break, pissed-off, paranoid demographic that would fuel the crazier frequencies on talk radio. And that leisure suit. It belonged in a museum.

The other was one night in Columbus. The publisher’s dad liked to go over to GOP headquarters and tip a few, then come back to the newsroom to soak up the atmosphere. What the hell, he owned the place. One election night, late, he was trying to leave the parking lot, only couldn’t get out of his parking space. He would pull forward and tap the bumper of the car ahead, then back up and tap the bumper of the car behind, up and back, up and back, tap tap tap, never making any progress. A reporter was leaving work at the same time and saw this, and said, “Sir, why don’t you let me help you? Step out a minute and I’ll get you out of this spot.” So he did, and the reporter had his car out in half a minute, and even though the old man was probably too drunk to drive, the reporter let him get back behind the wheel.

As he climbed back in, the ex-publisher pressed a fiver into his hand. The reporter still believes, I’m sure, that the old man thought he was the parking attendant.

Go vote if you haven’t. I’m headed for the showers and the polls, in that order.

Those of you in the Fort Wayne orbit have already seen this, so I apologize for the lateness. (DIF fumes clouded my brain.) However, the Josh Jennings for Congress campaign, created and executed by our online penpal Nathan Gotsch, is pulling off a last-weekend stretch run that’s really turning heads.

Also, it’s funny. Enjoy:

There are other spots, too.

Holy freakin’ monkey on the moon, would you look at these poll numbers in Ohio? If the results come even close to these, they’re going to have to invent a new word for how hard the GOP goes down.

The numbers, for you non-clickers, are from The Columbus Dispatch’s poll, and show the Democrats winning by margins so lopsided they’re positively…Soviet. Ted Strickland over Ken Blackwell in the governor’s race by 36 — that’s thirty-freakin’-six — percentage points. Just for starters. My pal Jennifer Brunner over her opponent in the secretary of state’s race by 21. And so on. And if you’re preparing to play the Liberal Media card in interpreting them, know two things first: The D is not a liberal newspaper, and their poll is well-respected, with a strong track record. (It was one of the few to predict the Reagan landslide in 1980, for starters.)

This is just Ohio, mind you, and Ohio was hit particularly hard by GOP corruption in the last four years. But if Ohio is any kind of bellwether, this is one loud bell.

A former colleague of mine died unexpectedly last week in Fort Wayne. He was a great guy and I remember him fondly. If I were still in Indiana, of course I would have attended his funeral and most likely a newspaper wake, where we would gather at a bar somewhere and tell stories about him.

But I wasn’t, so I made do with reading the online guestbook at Legacy.com linked to his obit on the paper’s website.

I considered leaving an entry and decided not to, but in poking around, I came across this disclaimer near the “sign this guest book” button: Entries are free and are posted after being reviewed for appropriate content.

My first thought was, spambots have probably infested Legacy, but the NYT informs me no, it’s worse than that:

Dissing the dead, as these screeners call it, has become a costly and complicated problem for Legacy and other Web sites where people gather to mourn online. Legacy, which is now eight years old, carries a death notice or obituary for virtually all the roughly 2.4 million people who die each year, but few foresaw how nasty some of the postings to its guest books would be.

“Reading the obit, he sounds like he was a great father,�? says another, which is signed, “His son Peter.�?

The company employs 45 screeners to read the entries before they’re posted to the online guest books.

Amazing. A great Sunday read.

By the way, in e-mailing the news about my ex-colleague, Joe Sheibley, some people shared their own stories. Here’s one of the best:

I remember the time Ed Treon set his desk on fire with his loose match habits while lighting up his pipe. Joe calmly looked up from blue-penciling copy to say: “Ed, your desk is on fire” and then went back to editing.

You see why he was management material.