I know I’ve spent most days in recent weeks opening with a whine about how much work I have to do and how I shouldn’t be wasting time blogging, and today? Today will be no different. Maybe I should just put it on a user key. For now, accept a macro:

[Whining boilerplate.]

In my defense, there is much to do and much to cover of late. The big news here is the Twilight of the Dealerships, and as you might expect, the Reaper is not sparing us. Go ahead and scoff, but what’s happening here is…well, it’s very bleak. Families who have been in business selling cars for decades are going to be stepping off a cliff in just a few weeks. History is so much less alarming when you’re watching it on television. Living through it can be a real bitch.

But hey, the Red Wings won last night. There’s always that.

So let’s go bloggage-plundering, shall we?

As you might expect, Obama killed at ASU yesterday. Here’s a YouTube link to the first part of his speech. You only need to get through 4:00 and change to hear the joke that cuts the legs off their stupid diploma-mill pretentiousness. Of course, the Daily Show was funnier, and meaner.

And then there was this, waiting for him at home. Sasha is my favorite Obama.

Brian wants you all to read this very nice profile of Robert Gates, from the WashPost. A taste:

In a small building next to the tarmac, an officer briefed the defense secretary on the four deceased troops arriving that evening. They had been driving along a rutted road near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when their Humvee hit a powerful roadside bomb.

Gates flashed with anger, according to people with him that day. He had spent most of his tenure in the Pentagon pushing to replace Humvees in Afghanistan and Iraq with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, built to withstand such blasts. “Find out why they hadn’t gotten their goddamn MRAPs yet,” he snapped at his staff.

Clad in the black suit he had worn to work that morning in the Pentagon, Gates climbed into the cargo hold of the white 747 bearing the remains. From the ground, troops could see the defense secretary as he knelt, alone, by the flag-draped transfer cases. Five minutes passed.

Prayer is private (or should be). But I’d love to know what he said to God. (I bet it wasn’t, “Sorry for the blasphemy.”)

Funny story about what happens when police respond to a report of a black panther crouching menacingly in a culvert. They draw their Tasers! They approach! They fire! And then…well, I hope they laughed.

And now I see the morning is waning and I still have too much crap to do. Be good, and we’ll try for a little more calm next week.

I’m so tired — how tired am I? — I’m so tired that a howling thunderstorm passed over my roof last night, the kind that everyone discusses over breakfast and into the midmorning coffee break, and I slept right through it. Given that the hissing of summer sprinklers at dawn can wake me up, that’s saying something. I’m still not 100 percent functional, but a bike ride is on order now that the lovely weather behind the storm is on full display. That will help a great deal.

Just what a stressed-out person needs — another to-do list.

The class went fine, thanks for asking. As I mentioned in comments, this is an independent-study deal, and so far my little crew seems ready to go. Wayne State students are different from the ones I got to know in Ann Arbor a few years back, in that so many more of them work full-time, sometimes with multiple jobs. My student questionnaire asked them about their work hours, and let me tell you something — some of these folks work harder than any of us, and for no money, either, the paid summer internship having gone the way of the dodo.

When I was in college, the luckiest and smartest students got summer gigs at the big Ohio dailies, in Cincinnati and Cleveland and Dayton, mostly. There, the Newspaper Guild set intern pay in the contract, and as I recall it was 75 percent of a starting reporter’s salary, which even then was quite generous for a college student. The idea of working free was unheard of.

Of course, that was before Arianna Huffington came on the scene:

How bad is the job market for media types? A charity auction for a two- or three-month internship at the Huffington Post has collected bids as high as $13,000. …The auction’s beneficiary, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, seems exceptionally worthy. But are unemployed media wannabes really this worthless?

To be sure, she’s not the one charging for the chance to sit at her feet — or, more likely, at the feet of her third assistant — for three months, but it’s fitting that the idea of paying someone else to make their coffee should be done at the HuffPost. It didn’t invent the idea of “exposure” as payment enough for one’s work as a writer, but it’s certainly made the most hay of the idea.

A few weeks ago I read something horrifying. Is writing for the rich? asked Francis Wilkinson, who worked for the devil herself:

In 2007, I was in charge of recruiting writers for the expansion of The Huffington Post. I calculated that I would need 75 unpaid blog submissions per day, Monday through Friday, in order to make the site work. That target seemed absurd at first. Yet within two months, hundreds of willing bloggers had signed up, the majority of them credentialed authors published by major publishing houses.

The high end of publishing—books, magazines, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—has always contained a contingent of wealthy worker bees who don’t actually live off their often meager salaries. But even a couple decades ago, a writer without independent means could still scrape together a living writing about something other than movie stars. Not a good one necessarily, but a living.

…But on the whole, the writing game seems likely to become even more a province of the upper middle class and flat-out wealthy than it is already. The offspring of the affluent, branded college degrees in hand, can afford to give it a go. But anyone hailing from more hardscrabble environs may find it too difficult to get traction before succumbing to the dismal economics of it all.

In other words, get ready for a lot more Megan McArdles. (By the way, has anyone summed up and flushed someone in a phrase better than Roy Edroso, who described her as “Eloise at the Atlantic”? Don’t think so.)

What the world needs is more Jack Londons.

Actually, what the world needs is me at my desk, on task. So adieu for now. A little bloggage:

David Edelstein disposes of “Angels & Demons” in four tight paragraphs with several memorable phrases, my favorite being “loaves and red herrings.” Also, this:

About that carnage: Angels & Demons is rated PG-13 in spite of multiple splattery shootings, brandings, gouged eyeballs, and close-ups of holy men writhing in flames. Of course, there’s no nudity.

Of course.

Speaking of phrases, two that if you get them too close together? Will cause your skin to break out in rashes: “Gov. Sarah Palin has issued a statement” and “I applaud Donald Trump.” Get the cortisone cream!

Later, all.

Guys, I have my first meeting with my Wayne State class in a few hours, and of course I have a combination of stage fright and impostor’s syndrome, that feeling that you’re going to ask for everyone’s attention, only to be interrupted by two goons with badges who will come through the door and arrest you on suspicion of being a big ol’ fraud.

In other words, I’m a bit nervous and distracted. Fortunately, there’s some good bloggage in the world.

First up, another absolute gem from the anonymous scribe who writes in the Metro Times under the pseudonym Detroitblogger John, probably because in his day job at the News or Free Press they have him on the better-parenting beat. It’s a story about the attempted rehabilitation of one of the most notorious strip clubs on Eight Mile Road, the All Star Gentleman’s Club:

(The new manager) was a DJ at All Star for years before convincing the owners to pour a quarter-million dollars into its renovation — a gamble to convert a ghetto dive into a glitzy club. They made him general manager.

First thing he did was ban pot smoking in the bar. Then he tore down the VIP wall, turning what was essentially brothel space into a display area with little privacy. Next, he ruthlessly culled the crew of strippers.

“When the bar went upscale, I had to let go of a lot of girls I really care about because they’d gotten on in years, gained 30 to 40 pounds, 33 years old now,” he says. “In the old days you had a little longevity dancing. Now you burn up a girl in a few years.”

Just one of ten thousand gems within. OK, one more:

“Lots of things let you know not to let somebody in,” he says. “Twelve guys wearing white T-shirts with the dead guy on their T-shirt and they just came from his funeral — uh-uh, you’re not coming in here, baby, ’cause I know what happens. They want to grieve, and ‘grieve’ means pouring alcohol on the floor and slapping girls around.”

Highly recommended. Be a mensch and hit the MetTimes site for the traffic, then cruise over to Detroitblog for the extra photos, which are borderline NSFW.

Elsewhere, I have to take back at least some of the mean things I’ve said about Rod Dreher over the years, because he’s how I found part one of a Naples Daily News series on the ongoing train wreck of Ave Maria, Tom Monaghan’s little Catholic outpost down in Florida. It’s a big country and there’s room here for everyone, but talk about things that would make Jesus Christ say, “Jesus Christ,” here’s this:

When Kathy Delaney moved a year and a half ago with her two teenage sons from Maryland to Ave Maria, she believed certain rights remained unalienable.

Elections, she thought, followed the rule she’d known all her life: Her vote counted as much as anyone’s. Delaney could only assume the government of her new town operated the same. …What Delaney didn’t know is that Ave Maria’s founders already had decided how the town northeast of Naples would be ruled. They would have the power to control the town forever. This power, some say, is so great, it might be unconstitutional.

Long story short: Monaghan and his co-developer successfully lobbied the Florida legislature — the members of which would find a lot in common with the tricking strippers at the All Star Gentleman’s Club — into passing them their own little law regarding Ave Maria’s governance:

The law gives Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos. more power than any Florida developer in at least 24 years, power perhaps not seen since the days of the early 20th century land boom. The law makes landowners, not registered voters, the ultimate authority in Ave Maria. The law ensures Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos., as the largest landowners, can control Ave Maria’s government forever.

Or, to put it another way, move to Ave Maria, exit the United States of America. The whole series is here. Years ago, I sent an e-mail to Carl Hiaasen’s Miami Herald address — in other words, I spit down a well — suggesting Monaghan would be a good person to base a character on in one of his novels. However, I don’t think even he could have dreamed up a twist like this.

Oh, look: Sarah Palin has figured out a way to keep herself in the news that doesn’t involve parading her daughter and grandson around the morning talk shows — she’s “writing a book.” God help her editor:

“There’s been so much written about and spoken about in the mainstream media and in the anonymous blogosphere world, that this will be a wonderful, refreshing chance for me to get to tell my story, that a lot of people have asked about, unfiltered,” the Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate said during a brief telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Palin’s logorrhea is truly a thing of beauty. Not just written about, but also spoken about. Not just in the mainstream media, but in the anonymous blogosphere world. This won’t just be a chance to tell her story, but a wonderful, refreshing chance (because God knows, this woman really has been forcibly kept from microphones, hasn’t she?) to tell her story, unfiltered.

I suggest her publisher really and truly leave it unfiltered. Give her a microphone and a stenographer and let the story rip. The book will weigh in at 1,200 pages and be so boring no one will get past chapter one.

And now, you must please excuse me, because I have to go obsess over my syllabus and handouts. If you see those goons coming to arrest me, try to distract them.

I’ve never been a fan of his fiction, but I’m thinking maybe Harlan Ellison is a man worth admiring:

Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he said.

Now there’s a copyright warrior I could march into battle with. Sooner or later something will cut him down; I’ve come to the realization that the gurus are right, you can’t fight free, even law-abiding people don’t think it’s stealing when the person on the other end is just some face on a back cover, and anyway they’re probably rich and I’m not, so go ahead and download their book onto your Kindle, what’s the harm?

I’m getting ahead of myself.

The NYT looks at the latest frontier in copyright theft — books. Until now, stealing books didn’t pay, so to speak, but with the Kindle and other e-readers, the doors are open:

Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them. Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said it was his “gut feeling” that unauthorized editions represented only a small fraction of the site’s content. …An example of copyrighted material on Scribd recently included a digital version of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” a collection of fairy tales by J. K. Rowling. One commenter, posting as vicious-9690, wrote “thx for posting it up ur like the robinhood of ebooks.”

I’m trying to separate my intellectual reaction from that of my gut, which thinks vicious-9690 is most likely a 300-pound jerkoff with one hand buried in his pants and the other in a box of Froot Loops or, as Stephen King puts it succinctly later in the story:

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

I suspect King is wrong, that there are Russian and Chinese and American hackers working on sites to sell the Twilight novels for half off the retail e-reader price. Or maybe not — maybe this is all a matter of the cheap and sleazy undercutting the talented and successful. “The robinhood of ebooks” says a lot about the ignorant mindset of the people who do this, as Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. I’ve known a few authors in my life, and they range from middle class to upper-middle. A few more can’t quit their day jobs (usually teaching). All of them work harder than most of us, and if you saw what they earn for every copy they sell, you’d be amazed — it’s far less than you probably think. The Stephen Kings and Stephenie Meyers and J.K. Rowlings are rare exceptions.

So bully for Ellison and his 240 takedown letters. He may be fighting a losing battle, but he’s on the side of the angels. (I sent a takedown letter of my own a while back. It was a beautiful feeling.)

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

Of all the things written about Elizabeth Edwards, this is the best. And the saddest: It’s from Double X, the spinoff of the XX blog at Slate, which I’m still exploring.

As someone who wrote about the Vanessa Williams/Miss America explosion a thousand years ago, there’s something about seeing a headline like this — Pageant Double Standard? Steamy Photos of Miss Rhode Island Won’t Threaten Her Crown — that makes me feel 1,001 years old.

Dear Tom Friedman: In the past eight years my feelings about you have moved from admiration, to grudging admiration, to dislike, and now to contempt. With good reason, you greedy bastard.

We saw the preview for “Up” at the movies the other day. I can’t wait. Roger didn’t have to.

I have so much work to do this week I feel pre-emptively crippled by it. So I think I’ll do a little, right now.

The short version: If you get a chance to see Leonard Cohen on his current tour, take it. You won’t see a better show this year.

In fact, if tickets are available, stop reading now and go buy some, fool. They’re pretty ridiculous, pricewise — the cheap seats at the Fox Theatre in Detroit Saturday were $65 plus service charge, ranging up to $250 — but like I said, this is a rare pop-music outing that’s worth the price. The 74-year-old Cohen plays for more than three hours, and if you have a favorite song, you’re likely to hear it. Alan is not an easily pleased concertgoer, and he turned to me after the third number and said, “This is a top-fiver.” That’s not an annual ranking.

An elegant stage set — a riser for the band, simple scrims lit by changing-color lights, everyone in black and white — walked a careful line that suggested the gravitas one of the greatest living singer-songwriters has accumulated over his long life, but never edged into pretension. This guy worked hard for the money. There was less love-me vibe coming from the stage than you’d find at the American Idols also-rans show. Cohen spent five years in seclusion at a Zen center during the 1990s, and he must have learned some powerful lessons about simplicity and understatement.

Oh, what am I saying? He’s known that for a while. Truth be told, I didn’t leap at the chance to go when Alan suggested it; it’s been my experience that singer-songwriters frequently put on lousy shows, and the sole time I saw Bob Dylan live will remain a lifelong disappointment. Get them in a small enough venue and it works, but what is Cohen about? The lyrics, and that mournful, whispery baritone. He plays best on CD, when you’re alone and able to concentrate and stare out the window at some Canadian landscape. The thought of seeing him overpowered by an electric guitar didn’t sound worth $130, plus service charges, parking and add-ons.

I shouldn’t have worried. The sound mix was a miracle — you could hear every word, even while the musicians did anything but fade into the woodwork. There was everything from a Hammond B3 to an oud to a gong onstage, and you heard every one as well as you did Cohen’s voice. Add three angel-voiced chick singers, one of them Cohen’s longtime collaborator, Sharon Robinson, and that was a stage full of talent that could have supported any singer capably.

At the final encore, everyone took a quick solo, and Cohen lined up the whole gang for an extended farewell that sounded like a valediction. “I don’t know when we’ll be passing this way again,” he said. In other words: This is it, folks. (The story goes that this tour was necessitated by money troubles, but ah well — even the greatest artists have to eat.) As the last show of a distinguished career, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.

[Pause.]

In other news at this hour, Kate and I went to see “Star Trek” on Sunday, and that was pretty good, too, although once time travel gets introduced into any movie plot, that’s my signal to stop asking questions and just let it wash over me. Fortunately, it was a pleasant bath.

If you’re looking for a way to intellectually justify your attendance at the same movie, take one op-ed and call me in the morning:

I can still remember the first time I saw “A Piece of the Action,” which was set on Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-movie planet, on which Kirk and Spock donned fedoras and pinstriped suits to blend in. As a boy in grade school, I found it excitingly ridiculous but baffling. Why was Spock waving around a tommy gun?

Fortunately, my big sister, then already in high school, was on hand to explain the wondrous narrative physics of the episode. I was watching a puzzle made from three things, she said: one, the “Star Trek” I understood; two, a period crime movie our father liked, called “The Roaring Twenties”; and three, the clownish “Soupy Sales Show.”

I realized years later that I had heard the future in my sister’s cheeky teasing out of the pop-culture influences in one wonderfully, unashamedly preposterous episode of “Star Trek.” Today, my 22-year-old daughter talks that way about everything.

If you want to relate “Star Trek” to the new world of Hope and Change, well, you take that shit down to the comments, because in this bar, we take our big-explodey-movie fun straight.

Related: Hank Stuever on the Trouble with Quibbles, or how fanboys ‘n’ girls ruin everything. Or try to.

A final bit of bloggage: My poor suburb made it to the front page of Sunday Styles. Of course, it could have been better news — Grosse Pointe Blues.

I looked around for Coozledad, but I think he was back at the production facility.

Big slab o’ beeswax, $45.

Things you don’t often see at a garage sale: boxes of condoms. But such a good price!

Despite my best efforts, not to mention my nearly superhuman powers of procrastination, I cannot read everything on the internet, so this mustard thing nearly slipped past me. Can it be true? Did Sean Hannity actually poke the president as a fancypants elitist for having ordered “spicy mustard…Dijon mustard” on his cheeseburger? Video evidence confirms he did. Wow. I’m impressed.

It so happens I have a little experience in this area — mustard-related class issues, that is. Alan’s dad was tickled by the Grey Poupon commercials Hannity references in that segment, the one where the two Rolls-Royces pull up beside one another and the fancypants poofters inside borrow mustard. So one year for Christmas, as a joke, Alan bought him a jar. His mother took him aside later and said, “You shouldn’t have spent all that money,” having perhaps, like Sean Hannity, absorbed the wrong lesson from the ad. Of course Grey Poupon and other Dijon mustard isn’t expensive at all. It’s just…spicy. And brown. When those ads started running, when the Great Democratizing Push of Dijon Mustard began in the 1980s, mustard was yellow and that was that.

Oh, hell, you’re all graybeards like me. I don’t need to tell you this.

The Rolls-Royce ads worked the way ads are supposed to — they branded Dijon mustard as the choice of Rolls-Royce passengers everywhere, even as Kraft (its owner) was selling it to the masses for a couple bucks. I most often use it in salad dressings of all sorts. It really enlivens a potato salad, if you ask me, and it is the only choice for deviled eggs. In my opinion, Obama’s greater mustard sin was putting it, or any mustard, on a hamburger. I don’t think mustard and beef go together anywhere except on a hot dog. A friend of mine who once worked at McDonald’s told me there’s a strict order to the condiment application there, and that mustard always goes on top of the ketchup blob, because mustard, even plain old McDonald’s yellow mustard, is too strong a flavor to directly touch the meat.

In fact, if you put me in a dark room under a single hot light and sweated me, I’d lay out my whole condiment/meat philosophy: Ketchup, and only ketchup, is for hamburgers, and mustard, and only mustard, is for hot dogs. The start of grilling season at our house really begins with the ritual Sneering at Alan’s Condiment Choices for his Hebrew National, dramatized here by Clint Eastwood:

I like a single stripe of Plochman’s and a few chopped onions, m’self, although I’ve been known to use Dijon and even sweet relish, but never, ever ketchup. Some things are sacred. (Before you Chicagoans weigh in, let me just say that so-called Chicago-style dogs are gross, too — cucumbers? Tomatoes? Bitchpleeze.)

The Straight Dope tackles the mustard question with customary flair, here.

And that’s gotta be the end of it for me, today. I finally scored a new printer, and had planned to start a new Friday feature called Embarrassing Pictures, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to figure out the scanning function, and the work will not let up until mid-afternoon, at which point I’m going to celebrate with a few garage sales, not an owner’s manual. Besides, I know you people love nothing better than a big discussion about nothing — thanks for all those ringtone updates early in the week, btw — so I’ll let you take it from here.

Or maybe we’ll end up talking about torture again. Or stress tests. Or whatever. All I know is, I gotta lotta copy to edit in about two hours. You have a good weekend, you Rolls-Royce driving poofters, you.

Against my better judgment, Kate and I have started watching “America’s Next Top Model” on Wednesdays. I figure it’s best to introduce potentially damaging cultural influences myself, so that she can learn the proper response to this nitwit propaganda — jeering mockery from the couch.

And so far, so good. I mean, what other possible reaction can there be to listening to that idiot panel of judges ganging up on these long-stemmed fillies for “not knowing your angles” or having “the wrong planes in your face.” As dumb as these girls are to line up for such treatment, theirs is the lesser sin compared to the rancid misogyny from the alleged adults in the room. And having never paid much attention to Tyra Banks until she was profiled in the NYT magazine not long ago — as a worthy competitor to Oprah, no less — I have only this to say: WTF? Why does she do that stupid caroling-voice thing in every other sentence? Of course, Oprah does that, too, so I see where she gets it.

I’m hoping that someday my progeny will be able to transfer these important life skills to judging photos like this. I don’t think Lucian Freud could have painted a more devastating portrait of decadence.

(It was Donald Trump, in fact, whom I first heard use the phrase “top model,” in reference to the first Mrs. T. Who never was a top model.)

I am down on celebrities these days. I turn to them for comic relief when politics gets to be too much, and what do they do? Disappoint me, every time, and yes, I’m including you, Oprah:

Chastising a celebrity is an exercise in futility. You feel like a kitten being held by the scruff of its neck, scrabbling wildly in the air without drawing blood. Pointless as this may be, though, I will try to talk some sense into Oprah Winfrey, who has decided to go into business with vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy.

Zingy lead, but he’s right — it’s ultimately pointless. That women like McCarthy, who not only claims childhood immunizations caused her son’s autism, but that she “cured” it through brave, “alternative” therapies, get soapboxes like this is not only unfair, but infuriating. I respect some aspects of alternative medicine. I’m not totally in bed with the AMA. (If I was, I’d hope they pay better.) But there’s an ugly undercurrent to causes like this that chaps my ass. If Jenny McCarthy can “cure” her kid’s autism, why can’t you? You must not care enough. After all, you got your kid vaccinated in the first place. I’m glad Arthur Allen, at the Slate link above, does not spare the details:

(McCarthy’s) boyfriend, actor Jim Carrey, is even more clueless. At the rally last year, I asked Carrey to give an example of a childhood vaccine we could dispense with. Tetanus, he said. That answer did not reflect a strong—or any, really—grasp of infectious diseases. Children who get tetanus—fortunately, it has been extremely rare in the United States since tetanus vaccination began in the 1920s—suffer horrendous pain, arch their backs, and go into terrible spasms before dying. It’s a very natural disease, to be sure, because the germ causing tetanus lives in dirt. It’s a germ that will be with us forever, and the only way to prevent it is through vaccination.

I wonder where these popculch dim bulbs stand on Gardasil, the cervical-cancer vaccine. In Hollywood, I’d guess you’re far more likely to know someone with HPV than autism. My guess is, they’re on board with it. Ditto with the push for an AIDS vaccine. No one is suggesting chickenpox parties for AIDS, or that pertussis and measles are no big deal, because once upon a time, everyone used to get them.

Perhaps our time spent saying the magic words along with Tyra — “four beautiful ladies stand before me, but I have only three photos in my hand” — will serve as early training on how to judge these pretty airheads who are so hard to avoid. It will be…a vaccination of sorts.

So, a little bloggage:

General Mills finds bloggers to be oh-so-much-more-compliant than pesky journalists. Ahem:

Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.

MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.

General Mills can be confident the program will fill blogs with positive reviews. One of the requirements for participation reads: “If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.”

Or risk losing your free cereal, I’d guess.

Bright shiny objects! Get them out of my field of vision! The NYT looks at the science of concentration. (Confession: I downloaded a program called Freedom, which disables all your computer’s links to the outside world — e-mail, internet, instant messaging — and can only be turned off by rebooting the machine. Of course I haven’t used it yet. Give up Google? How would I live? No wonder I can’t write anything of consequence.)

But I can write this. And now it’s off to the gym. Have a swell day, all.