Regular readers may notice something new on the nightstand — the Warren Zevon biography, the existence of which I only learned about a few days before it appeared in stores last week. In years past, I’d have known for months ahead of time, had the date circled on the calendar and been among the first to buy a copy when Border’s unlocked its doors. Ah, well. Groupiedom really doesn’t become a woman as long in the tooth as I am.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” weighs in at 450 pages or so, a lot for a rock musician who remained stubbornly unpopular until the end of his life. No matter — if his popularity wasn’t wide (and personally enriching), it was deep. The right people loved Zevon, writers and filmmakers and politicians and other musicians. David Letterman, Martin Scorsese, Carl Hiaasen. Every journalist I know loves him; it seems half the Zevon concerts I attended were with carloads of colleagues, driving to Chicago or Indianapolis in raucous caravans and pounding the table along with “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Ah, memories. Zevon died in 2003 of mesothelioma, a rare lung cancer linked to asbestos, not smoking, a bad habit Zevon had for most of his life. As has been chronicled a million times by a million sympathetic journalists, smoking was the least of it.

Well, there’s always room for one more. Crystal Zevon, the man’s long-suffering ex-wife, says Warren himself asked her to write his story, more or less on his deathbed. He promised her his diaries, and told her to tell the whole truth, “even the awful, ugly parts.” That she has done, delivering a manuscript that still has the power to shock and dismay, even longtime fans/students like me, who thought they knew it all. Note to all my caravan buddies: We didn’t.

It’s not the big stuff that’s appalling, although some of it really and truly is. It’s the little things that pile up. The compulsive shopping, the vanity, the child-support dodging, the casual cruelty to the people who cared most about him (his children, notably, especially his daughter), the lying, the cheating. He withheld LeRoy Marinell’s share of the “Werewolves of London” royalties for a number of years, a five-figure sum. After he quit drinking, he seemed to transfer his addictive behavior to women — housewives by the score, you might say — and plowed through auditoriums full of them. (Combining two vices in one, he even details getting laid at a tanning salon, on the damn tanning bed, which made me think of my friend Emma, who once worked at such a place. People were always peeing in the wastebaskets and doing other vile bodily functions behind closed doors. Maybe medical science can investigate the effect of UV light on human inhibitions.) He battered his wife in a blackout and later cursed her for trying to pin her black eye on him.

You start to wonder, what exactly did anyone find to like about him?

Well, that’s there, too. He was hugely smart and very funny, great with the quip — no wonder journalists liked him. Musicians admired him, too. You look at the list of guest artists who played with him, everyone from Neil Young to Bob Dylan to George Clinton, for cryin’ out loud. He wrote great songs, right until the end — “The Wind” was the record that won the Grammys, but for my money, “My Ride’s Here” was the creative peak, the title track being one of the all-time great death songs. It begins:

I was staying at the Marriott
With Jesus and John Wayne
I was waiting for a chariot
They were waiting for a train
The sky was full of carrion
“I’ll take the mazuma”
Said Jesus to Marion
“That’s the 3:10 to Yuma
My ride’s here…”

Rhyming “mazuma” with “3:10 to Yuma” — that’s Zevon all over. Played in the key of laughter-through-tears, they way so many of them were.

The underlying theme to all this, if there is one, is just how much havoc one addict can wreak, in their own lives and in the lives of others, acts that reverberate through generations. I was halfway through “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” when I stopped and wrote a fan letter to Crystal Zevon (her e-mail is public). It’s hard to write about being an alcoholic’s wife without lapsing into one or two predictable slots — victim or fool. She doesn’t do that, perhaps because at some point she realized she had her own drinking problem, which she acknowledges, and what it took to quit. The tone is not one of pity-me but of clear-eyed, dispassionate truth-telling. I have a feeling some people are going to portray her as the embittered ex seeking revenge now that the man who hurt her is unable to protest. I hope that doesn’t happen, because she fulfilled every writer’s No. 1 obligation: She told the truth. People, especially creative people, are complicated, and very few have public and private faces that would recognize one another. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” doesn’t affect my opinions on the music, only what it took to make it. It ain’t that pretty at all, as the man himself once sang. If we didn’t hear it, then maybe we weren’t really listening.

Thanks to all who stopped by yesterday. This has happened a time or two before, and most people don’t come back afterward, but we sometimes pick up a few new readers. For them, a briefing: This blog isn’t about anything in particular. My politics are center-left, but I try not to harp on them. I live in the suburbs of Detroit, a city of spectacular weirdness and great stories and frequently awful weather. I’m a freelance writer, living with my husband Alan, daughter Kate (10 going on 30), dog Spriggy and a few bad habits. My interests are small-c catholic but I’m particularly fond of good writing, movies, strange current events and domestic life. “Daily life, with links” — that’s the log line for this blog. I came up with it six years ago, and it seems to fit as well today as it ever did.

I think I’m done talking about Lileks, but feel free if you’d like to continue the discussion. I was struck by a point some people made yesterday, in all the comments — that there are many who find Lileks’ writing “hilarious.” I’m not one of them, obviously, but it got me thinking about humor writing, in the newspapers and elsewhere, and sometime in the next few days I’ll try to wrestle them to the ground. I don’t expect it to be terribly funny, but if you feel like it, stick around.

I wasn’t going to write anything about James Lileks’, er, sudden change of assignment. I mean, talk about your inside baseball. But reading about the right-wing blog star / Minneapolis Star Tribune “humor” columnist’s predicament — abruptly told the paper had other plans for his FTE, and that he was to report to the metro desk a week from Monday for general-assignment reporting duties — rang a bell, you might say. It is, with a few details changed, pretty much exactly what happened to me five years ago at a fading p.m. daily in far-less-glamorous Fort Wayne, Indiana. Perhaps I can offer the pint-size pundit some perspective.

Sometimes I feel like journalism’s coal-mine canary. All the stuff that started happening in 2002 at our paper, the stuff that had my friends at bigger papers saying, “Wow, that’s terrible. So far, knock wood, we here at the Major Metro Times-Bugle are OK” — that’s happening everywhere now. Even Lileks, if he could stop the furious cycle of his narcissism for five minutes, would have to agree that having a job as a full-time humor columnist at a large-circulation daily is a little like being Henry Ford’s buggy-whip polisher in 1905. I’m sure his vision is somewhat clouded, though, by his status as a right-wing web star; his allies’ gift for understatement (“newspaper suicide”) is already muddying the waters. They forget the Lileks they know, with his daily Bleat and radio appearances and one-joke books, is not the Lileks the Star-Tribune readers know, the writer who offers 250-word dispatches on his sniffles, his dessert choices and …oh, I seem to have reached my limit of free Star-Tribune stories for today, but you can do your own explorations here. To them, the effect of killing the Daily Quirk is the destruction of their boy’s meal ticket. He gets paid for the Quirk; the rest of the stuff he does free. If they like him so much, they need to get acquainted with that 20th-century concept of paying for content.

As a long-time reader of Lileks in print and online, I’ve found him a fascinating study. I used to like his Newhouse column, until his hardening right-wing sensibilities ruined it for me. Close your eyes, and you’d swear his words were issuing from the mouth of a 33-year-old Grosse Pointe soccer mom in a blonde pageboy, about to climb into her Hummer H2 without guilt, thank you very much, because it makes her feel safe. He never irked me as much as Albom or Greene, probably because he never made it as big as they did, but many times I set aside his work with my eyes crossed in either boredom, rage or frustration, wishing I had the last three minutes of my life back. But what really bugged me about him was his Janus-faced b.s. about the news media and the internet, the way he threw meat to his MSM-hatin’ buddies by hatin’ right along with them, and then quietly cashing his check on payday. His complaints about news coverage, whether in Iraq or St. Paul, ring hollow from a man who stands up today and frankly admits “writing straight news is a skill I lack, and I take off my hat to those who’ve mastered that discipline.” Really? You do? I must have missed those Bleats. They must have been hidden between the ones hailing the Web as the end of the lecture-based form of journalism, and explaining the secret liberalism that stalks American newsrooms, this from a man who works from the kitchen table in his $600,000 house. And it will be amusing, in the days to come, to see the defense of Lileks coming from people who, days ago, would have agreed that newspapers are overstaffed and need to get some more shoe-leather reporters out on the street. To see them begging to have their humor columnist spared will be quite the entertainment.

But I’m losing the plot. All this has nothing to do with anything, and the sooner Lileks faces a few facts, the sooner we can cut this whining short.

Fact. No. 1: It’s not personal, Jim. Try to remember that. It will be difficult for quite some time. I can still tick off at least half a dozen newspaper managers who, if I saw them in flames on a sidewalk today, would prompt no thought more vexing than “Damn, where’re my marshmallows?” But really, it’s not about you. It’s about your salary. You’re fat, and the paper is on a crash diet. They don’t really want you to be a reporter; they want you to quit. They’re just making sure you’ll be in a mood to do so when, in a number of weeks or maybe months, they offer you a buyout to leave. Take it. There’s no guarantee the next staff reduction will be voluntary. Keep in mind, many of us didn’t get buyout offers; we just got the humiliating reassignment. You’re better-positioned than 90 percent of journalists to make a soft landing; you have a reputation, a sideline (the books), fans and, far more important, a fully employed spouse with a professional degree. Presumably you have a health-insurance alternative. (I’d say at this point that you should thank the Newspaper Guild before you leave, not only for your living wage but for the buyout offer, but I don’t expect a nice conservative union member to do anything that drastic.)

Fact. No. 2: Change is good. Yeah, yeah, it’s a cliché, but it’s a good one. When my job was crumbling beneath me, when I moved first to columnist/reporting/editing and later, post-fellowship, to the copy desk, I was beside myself with rage and frustration and self-pity. But here’s the thing: I kinda liked the copy desk. The move was designed to make me insane, but for the six months it took us to find new employment and shake the Hoosier dust off our shoes and move to Detroit — I should say here you’ll probably not be required to move to Detroit — I actually liked sitting behind a giant bank of monitors, enforcing AP style. The hours were insulting, 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., but that meant I was free to enjoy summer from lunchtime on. I enjoyed driving to work at 4:45 a.m., listening to “Coast to Coast” or Eminem and trying to break my land-speed record in the deserted streets. Who knows, you might like covering breaking news as a g.a. reporter — trust me, you can “master the discipline” of the five-W inverted pyramid in about 12 minutes — and, if you open your mind a bit, you might see things that could end up, oh, changing your outlook. You might see how hard it is to be poor, how racism is the metastatic cancer of American life, how…oh, but that’s crazy talk. Still, though, a change of perspective is always good. Seriously.

Fact No. 3: You have alternatives. Freelancing should be a breeze for you, and it will enable you to dote on your kid and bake bread and whatever else you do all day at home. It may require some early belt-tightening, until the cash flow equalizes; you may not be able to buy every new Apple gizmo the first day it ships from the factory. (I know this will be hard, having endured the Bleat after your wife was unexpectedly canned, and you actually lamented having to let go “the woman who does the woodwork,” as though this was a chain reaction of economic catastrophe unlike any the Twin Cities had seen. Most people married to an unemployed lawyer might be able to hold their tongues for a few weeks before turning their pockets inside-out, but not you. You have standards! And woodwork!) Your kid may not be able to go to private school immediately. But eventually your life will assume a new form, and you’ll be fine. You’ll be different, but fine.

Well, looky here — give me an inch, and before long I’ve gone on as long as Lileks can about the new soap choices at Target. And I know no one asked me, either. But as I said before, I’ve been down this path, and I’m looking out for the people who are following. It’s rocky, the thorny bushes need to be trimmed and there’s no lighting but the moon. But it leads somewhere, and so far I’m still advancing under my own power. So will you, Jim. So will you.

UPDATE: I must be getting some outside linkage, because I’m getting a lot of first-time commenters today. That’s great, but for you newbies, our policy: First-timers go to moderation first, as an anti-spam measure. I’ve been approving everyone promptly so far today, but I have to step out to do some errands, so more will have to wait a bit. If your comment doesn’t turn up immediately, rest assured it will eventually, and don’t re-submit.

Every day this week, my neighborhood roars from morning to late afternoon with the sounds of power tools. Mowers, edgers, blowers, whiffers, whaffers, that thing-that-digs-up-your-lawn-and-makes-it-look-like-geese-crapped-all-over-it, but is somehow good for it. (Oh yeah, an aerator.) My neighbors will be doing their second mow of the season this weekend. We have yet to do our first.

It’s not that we don’t care about our lawn. We do. We just don’t care that much. Once again, we’ve found ourselves out of step with our neighbors.

For much of my life, I found myself living near at least one person who objected to lawn care as bourgeois bullshit. You know the type: Obsession with a weed-free patch of grass in front of one’s house is the ultimate distraction from the stuff in life that really matters, and so they opt out. That “the stuff that really matters” tends to be “sitting in front of the TV watching basketball” is only evidence of their superior sensibilities. And so they let their lawn grow long and shaggy, and sometimes they glance out the front window and say, “Thank God I’m a Libertarian, and above all this shit.”

To these people I have but one thing to say: Move to Mongo. (Mongo is a small town in northern Indiana, but in this usage it’s more representative of that outback town where civilization is always kept at bay. In the 1980s and ’90s, when the city of Fort Wayne was aggressively annexing its urbanized, unincorporated neighborhoods, a knot of whiny individualists could always be counted on to write tiresome letters to the editor about the changing city-limits sign. These missives always contained some version of the line, “But Marge and I moved here five years ago to get away from the city,” as though buying a three-bedroom house in a subdivision where volunteer soybeans still occasionally sprout in the back yard, close enough to the city limits to lengthen one’s commute by no more than eight minutes, gave one an eternal claim to some sort of “country” life. A colleague and I came up with “Move to Mongo” as a way to say, “If you really want to get away from it all, then get away from it all. And stop complaining”)

In matters of the lawn, as in so many things, I’m a committed moderate. You will never catch me out there fretting over crabgrass and dandelions, but I accept that I live in a neighborhood, and neighborhoods only look as good as their crummiest property, and I promise not to be that property. I will never be the nicest one, either, but I’ll do my part.

Here in the GP, we find ourselves falling closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum. People here tend their landscaping with the tender loving care of a pothead with hydroponics. Some people here simply live to putter in the yard. Most of our neighbors have automatic sprinkler systems, which go on at 5 a.m. with a loud, sibilant hiss, awakening certain late-staying-up journalists in the neighborhood, not that I am complaining. But it’s damn hard to keep up with these folks, so I don’t try. “Maintenance-free landscaping” — there’s a Realtor’s phrase to steal my heart. We’ll have to get the mower out this weekend at the very latest, or risk becoming Those People. We’ll hold up our end, keeping up, if not with the Joneses, than certainly the Smiths.

Whew. This week has been less-than-good, but at least I now have new prescription bottles littering the coffee table. I’m asking Kate to “bring Mommy her medication” so that she’ll have lots of good stories to tell her therapist. As soon as I can teach her to mix a daiquiri, she’ll be well on her way.

So, bloggage:

When it comes to colorful, you really can’t beat a colorful lawyer. The DC Madam’s mouthpiece is a case in point:

You do a computerized database news search for Sibley, and what you get is information on his representation of Arthur Vanmoor, better known as the aforementioned “Big Pimping Pappy.”

BPP ran an escort service in Fort Lauderdale a few years back. He got busted and deported (he’s Dutch), then sued his clients for having sex with his employees. Sibley was his attorney.

It was the same tactic Sibley is using now to advise Palfrey: The manager of BPP’s escort service was merely providing “quality time with a quality woman,” Sibley told MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson in an on-camera interview in March 2006. Customers had to sign a receipt saying they wouldn’t engage in illegal sexual activity. If they did, then they broke the law.

Sibley sued them for breach of contract.

Let’s go to the videotape:

Carlson: “You sound like you look down on these men. That they would somehow get the idea that just because you call an escort service . . . and have a girl in a tube top and a vinyl skirt come over to your hotel room — that somehow they got the idea sex was involved. You sound like you’re unimpressed with their judgment.”

Sibley: “Well, Tucker, is that what the girls look like that come to your hotel room?”

Carlson: “I don’t have girls come to my hotel room who I’m not married to.”

I don’t know about you, but when I saw that Joan Baez was getting some ink earlier this week, claiming military officials refused to let her perform for the troops, I had a few questions, including:

1) Joan Baez is still performing?
2) Someone wants her to perform for them?
3) People young enough to be soldiers? Come on.

Well, it’s more complicated than that. The invitation was extended by famous Hoosier grump John Melly-mel Cougar Mellencamp, to “play with him,” suggesting a role shaking a tambourine and singing backup on “Small Town,” not crooning “Joe Hill” in her own soprano warble. Whew. I was fearing a comeback tour.

Have a great weekend. Back, and feeling better I hope, next week.

The pain situation has escalated. Mrs. R. Knee has now been heard from. Yesterday I found myself longing for a cane, and cursing the one truth of being female: The body you hated yesterday will be the one you long for today. When you’re younger, you think, “Remember four years ago, when I thought I was so fat? I wish I was that skinny now.” And then you get older, and you think, “Remember four days ago, when I was merely sore? I wish I was sore now, instead of crippled, too.”

The doctor has been called. I’ll spare you more details.

Well, this: While I was recuperating yesterday, I found the most awesome bra store online. I usually buy my chest hammocks from Harp’s in Birmingham, which along Town Shop in New York City may be the two greatest bra stores on the planet. Amusingly, both stores share a secret weapon: A tiny Jewish lady behind the counter who has seen every boob shape under the sun and can tell your size through a winter coat with 99 percent accuracy. Excuse me, make that “shared.” The New York Times has a way with obits:

Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B.

Mrs. Harp is also in her 10th decade, and still works most days. The last time I interviewed her, I asked if she was passing the store along to her heirs. She said “none of my grandchildren want to work as hard as Nana.”

In this economy, I’m not taking my business elsewhere. But I like the customer comments on the website, where I note that nearly every woman refers to her breasts as “the girls” or “the twins.” Taken along with Kramer’s famous line about tighty whities — “My boys need a house!” — this would seem to be a universal preference. The closest I ever came to giving my own a separate identity was when I was nursing a newborn, and they were so stripped of eroticism that one day I nearly answered the door with my shirt open to the waist. That would have given the UPS man a jolt, I’d say, although to me, they were just another couple of hard-workin’ body parts. Like my feet.

OK, now that I’ve, uh, lowered the tone, let’s see if we can’t wallow around down here for a while.

This is why I hardly ever read science fiction. Slate unpacks Mitt Romney’s fondness for “Battlefield Earth,” L. Ron Hubbard’s, er, novel:

For those of you who didn’t study it in school, “Battlefield Earth” takes place in the year 3000, when the human race is nearly extinct and the planet stripped of its natural resources. Mankind has been enslaved by evil aliens with very bad breath that explodes when it comes into contact with radioactive material. A young slave wielding lasers and draped in a tennis cardigan leads a rebellion and retakes Earth, only to be attacked again by a series of foes including a race of interstellar bankers trying to collect on bad debts. (There may be kung-fu fights and a championship football game, too; I confess that I haven’t read it all.)

Remember that Jon Carroll column on miracles? Here’s the 20 Most Amazing Coincidences, including the James Dean car curse. In doesn’t include one I heard about many years ago, when a photography magazine ran a famous tabloid photo of a man being carried into an ER with what appears to be a telephone pole driven through the center of his chest. The man was awake and calm, and the story was that the pole somehow shoved all his vital organs aside on its trip into his viscera, sparing his life. He spent months in a hospital recovering, only to be released and, just a few weeks later, swept off a jetty on Long Island by a freakishly large wave, never to be seen again. A superstitious person might say the devil had come to collect one way or another, but I say: Life is strange.

Shower-bound, I am. Don’t spend too much time with the boob pictures, guys.

Last night I was coming downstairs after doing my nightly tuck-in duty when my foot, in a sock, slipped out from under me and I fell, in solid and spectacular fashion, directly on my butt. Even my cushiony bum couldn’t handle a load like the rest of me. Turned 180 degrees and relocated to a wrestling ring, the move would be called the piledriver. As it was, I counted myself victorious because I merely howled amorphous sounds of pain, not the stream of obscenities that bubbled to my lips.

Long story short: I’m flat on my back in bed, and I plan to stay here for a few hours. If you care to, answer my plea today: Ice, heat or Vicodin? (I’m making do with Tylenol.)

A wee bit of bloggage to bring a smile to your lips; I know it did to mine, even twisted as they are in pure, pure agony: Ken Levine’s Idol recap. A sample:

For his part, I thought Jon Bon Jovi gave the best advice all season, even better than Diana Ross advising the kids to start getting face work done now.

Argh, where are my drugs?!

Some years ago, I offered the theory that the back-pages, business card-size ads and classifieds in any print publication constituted the id of its readers. It was always so amusing, back when the newspaper I worked for actually had the budget to subscribe to political journals, to turn to the back and see all those increase-your-word-power pitches in right-wing publications. (The lefties leaned heavily on meet-women-who-will-appreciate-your-genius dating services. Woody Allen got a laugh out of this in “Annie Hall”: Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. “Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who’s interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy.”

I’m still deciding what porn spam indicates. I get so much of it in my comments, 99 percent of it caught by filters, but occasionally I like to poke around (sorry) there and see what’s what. I can report two trends: 1) absurd sub- sub- sub-niche specialization (mature hairy black Texas Hold’em nudes); and 2) comical trickery. As to the latter, I just deleted a comment that said “fried chicken recipes here” and linked to you-know-what. Ah well. As Willie Dixon said, “I eat more chicken than any man ever seen.” He wasn’t talking about the wings.

Today is, we’ll be reminded approximately a million times, the four-year anniversary of President Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. Alan just recalled the fond memory of sitting in the morning news meeting that day, gazing at the Page One proofs, which featured that memorable phrase in tombstone-size type. “We were discussing how to note the casualties,” he said. “There had been something like 66, and someone said, ‘We’ll run that on Memorial Day.’ I said, ‘I guarantee you there will be more dead by Memorial Day, and in two or three or four or seven years, we’ll still be fighting in Iraq.’ They looked at me like I was a communist sympathizer. Especially Name Redacted.” Ah, well. That was another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

What I recall of that time — invasion to Mission Accomplished, which petered out into counting the days to my Ann Arbor fellowship — was how strange that time was. Obviously our little newspaper didn’t have correspondents in Baghdad, or even Washington, or even Indianapolis by that point, but we were doing our part to cover the home front. There was a list of story ideas that boiled down to “How is (name of public institution) preparing for the war?” The schools, the police department, etc. I was baffled; what were we looking for, duck-and-cover drills for second-graders? Blackout exercises, lest we be bombed by the Iraqi Air Force? “Pray For Our Troops” signs covered lawns — freebies from the local G.O.P. — and every so often a tiny knot of anti-war protesters would show up at the Courthouse Green for a demonstration, and people would honk at them. I felt like I was speaking to my fellow Americans through a thick sheet of plexiglas.

In the midst of this, someone handed me a slip of paper with a name and a phone number, a local Iraqi of fairly recent immigration who might be willing to give an interview. I went to the guy’s house and we sat for a while watching the war on Arab satellite TV. (He was out of work, and watched it non-stop.) He switched between Al Jazeera and stations in Abu Dhabi and Lebanon. Obviously I couldn’t follow the audio, but I noticed the video emphasized not heroic images of soldiers in Hummers, but civilian refugees walking down the road with their belongings on their back. My subject, a Shiite, told of the ill-fated rebellion after the first Gulf War, how the U.S. had led the Shia to believe we had their back and then oops, we didn’t. He spent a couple years in a Saudi refugee camp before making his way to Indiana, which must have been a strange transition, to say the least.

He was of the opinion — this was April or May 2003, around that time — that now that Saddam had been booted, it was time for the U.S. to leave. He did not express gratitude; it was more like, “OK, we’ll take it from here.” He also said the longer we stayed the more we’d be resented, and that the prime reason we wanted Saddam out after all this time was to get our hands on the oil fields. He also shared his belief that the Mossad had used remote control devices to fly the planes into the World Trade Center. The copy desk cut that part, but they left most of the rest. At least one reader wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that my Iraqi should be more grateful.

A crystalization of the war, right there. Mission accomplished.

So, bloggage:

Readers frequently call the work of columnists “musings,” as in, “I was reading your musings the other day, and…” Jon Carroll is one of the very few who can muse, in print, and lead you along from the first word to the end. Today: Musings on miracles.

I was away with the Girl Scouts when this story broke, so I missed it until yesterday. If it weren’t so jaw-droppingly shocking — another GOP hypocrite caught with his pants down, literally — I’d have reported it then. As it was, I had to call for smelling salts to get off the floor.

Off to Flex Appeal. Back soon.