Take your seats, class. Pop quiz:

Here is a transcription of a Facebook posting made by Cliff McCance, a Midland, Arkansas school board member, as presented by CBS News.

For reference, here is a screen capture of the very same posting, as presented in the Advocate. I advise taking at least a peek at this, so you can see the picture of the guy posing with a largemouth bass. In Arkansas, I don’t think any other single image would so indelibly establish his good ol’ boy credentials.

What you’re looking at is a question news editors wrestle with often. The posting is riddled with errors. How many do you fix?

In this case, the mistakes are mostly missing punctuation, which is forgivable. At least, it’s something we have to tolerate, at a time when so many people “write” on tiny smartphone keyboards. My own smartphone is pretty smart, and automatically changes “Ill” to “I’ll,” which I’m grateful for 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent I’m irritated, as I meant to write “Ill I am at the thought of eating pasta for the third night in a row.” But in general, it’s pretty damn smart. If only it had a caps lock key, so I could YELL MORE in my text messages to Kate. But I digress.

The biggest booboo was this: McCance wrote, “We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE.”

What do you do with something like that? Run it by itself, run it with the fancypants (sic), or fix it? I think you run it, but I’m unsure on the siccing, so to speak. McCance is, after all, on a school board. He sets policy governing education in his community. And he says “thereselves.” Among many other sins.

As I think I’ve noted here before, once upon a time Ohio had a good ol’ boy for governor, big Jim Rhodes, and the papers routinely polished his mangled Appalachian-inflected English. Before TV was most voters’ primary window onto a candidate, they could get away with it. Every time he said the name of our state — Ahia — my nerves would jangle, but you all know what an elitist I am.

Do you even notice McCance’s usage? Does anyone other than our little smartypants tribe care? I’m with Gin and Tacos. I think it’s ghastly.

It goes without saying that what McCance actually said was far worse, but he’s already resigned on that score, under the terrible withering gaze of Anderson Cooper. A.C. wields the gay Sword of Justice.

No jokes, please.

If it’s Wednesday, Thursday or Friday morning, I’m late for something. We’re pulling the boat today, I have a meeting, and I need to get dressed. So let’s go bloggage:

Coozledad had the last word in the last thread’s comments on this matter, and I think he said it succinctly and well: Pubic hair a deal-breaker? It’s a wonder fratboys get fucked anywhere outside the hazing room. Yes, exactly!

Have a great weekend and fun Halloween. And stay out of the Reese’s Cups!

Moe et al, take note: The New York Times has parachutes on the ground in Defiance, Ohio. I always wanted to see this, maybe in a movie: A gathering on the village green…the sound of a low-flying aircraft, all eyes look up and see THREE SKYDIVERS descending, and soon they land — a WRITER, a PHOTOGRAPHER and a MULTI-PLATFORM NEW MEDIA GRAPHIC ARTIST. As the trio gather their PARACHUTES, the townspeople approach. The WRITER steps forward and extends a hand.

Anyway, the Times is, was, in my husband’s hometown. I read him the headline, Democratic Ohio Town Loosens Its Party Ties and we both sort of scratched our heads. Defiance is Democratic? Maybe in the ’60s. Maybe when the UAW still had something to swing. But as far as I can tell, the little D is the textbook example of the Reagan-era strategy of the GOP — get working- and middle-class blue-collar types to vote against their own economic interests through strategic dog-whistle “values” issues. Despite a move toward blue in 2008, it’s still in no danger of holding a gay pride parade anytime soon. However, don’t let that get in the way of the temperature-taking:

Will Parker, 24, finished college in 2009 with a degree in marketing and communications. In six months of looking, he found no work here in his hometown and had to take a Web-page job in Columbus, 115 miles to the southeast, that he feels is a dead end. Mr. Parker voted for Mr. Obama and said he now felt “voter’s remorse” because “it feels like we’re creating a welfare state.”

OK, first: Will? If you’re looking for work in marketing and communication, you’re looking in the wrong place. Generally speaking, towns of fewer than 20,000 souls don’t support much work in that field, even less so in recent years. Even Fort Wayne saw the loss of small ad shops and related jobs in the post-internet crash, as business consolidated in places like Chicago. If you desire that small-city lifestyle, Will, you should have picked a different major, and if you feel you’re in a dead end at 24, you lack imagination. Among many other things.

The rest of the story has that cognitive dissonance I hear so often these days, people who think that stimulus-funded bridge being built down the street is a great idea, but OMG health care! “Rammed down our throats,” was the phrase employed by, get this, an insurance agent. Yes, a woman who sells insurance frets about a bill that requires Americans to buy insurance. She’s probably worried about the death panels. They also dislike the bank bailout, but that of General Motors, which provides the highest-paying jobs in town? Mumble, mumble.

And this?

Local suspicion of government has also been fueled, (Mayor) Armstrong said, by a costly federal mandate to build a sewage system to protect the Great Lakes, requiring huge increases in local water rates.

Good lord, they were talking about that in Fort Wayne — upriver on the same waterway that flows through Defiance — when the first George Bush was president. This is the separation of storm and sanitary sewer lines, an expensive but necessary process brought to a crisis in many Midwestern cities by booming housing development through the ’80s and ’90s, all these new subdivisions flushing their toilets into inadequate, outdated systems that sent excrement into the rivers every time it rained. Let my husband offer an eyewitness report:

“We used to fish for carp off the bridge by my mom’s house and watch turds, rubbers and tampons float by.” This is when he was a boy. Damn President Obama for making us stop doing that!

Anyway, as this liberal-media report clearly indicates, the people of our nation’s heartland have turned against our president:

Karl Kissner, the restaurant’s owner, may represent a more vocal and influential attitude in Defiance. He calls himself a Democrat but says he did not vote for Mr. Obama, and his opposition to the administration has deepened.

A Democrat who didn’t vote Democratic in 2008? ‘Round these parts, we call those folks Republicans. But then, I don’t work for the New York Times.

Discuss. There’s a pretty good Metafilter thread about the same story, here.

Bloggage? Sure. Jim Griffioen at Sweet Juniper, along with his wife, have a knack for making the cutest Halloween costumes for their kids. But this one is extra-cute in situ: Ladies and gentlemen, Robocop.

And let’s leave it at that. I’ve reached the point of mega-saturation with politics at the moment, and would rather think of cute kids in Halloween costumes. Have a great day — I’m off to Wayne State.

“Last Call” has been on the nightstand, over there in the right rail, for a while now, but I’m still not done with it. It’s a time issue, not one of content; plus, I added “Freedom” to the mix, diluting my attention even further. But “Last Call” — a new history of Prohibition — is a great book, and I’m savoring it like two fingers of good scotch, a sip at a time.

Also, it’s dovetailing with the central plot lines of “Boardwalk Empire,” which takes place in 1920 Atlantic City, immediate after passage of the Volstead Act. It’s about the birth of American organized crime (or, at least, its vault into the big money) and a lot of other things, too, all of which were wrapped up with Prohibition, specifically the emergence of women as a political force to be reckoned with.

Women bore the brunt of their husbands’ drinking, sometimes quite literally cleaning up the mess it left behind, and became the driving force behind Prohibition. Many of the suffragettes came out of the temperance movement, and vice versa. A woman newly empowered in one area might look around for some other things to make right in her life, and so this week’s “Boardwalk Empire” episode introduced the once-taboo subject of birth control.

One of the dowagers of the local temperance movement hands a younger woman a pamphlet, which gets a significant-prop closeup: “Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger. Once it’s opened it’s a chamber of horrors — Lysol douche, anyone? — but it was a necessary step along the way. Everyone fights with their biology to some extent. This was how women had to do it, once upon a time.

One of the obvious traits of the so-called pro-life movement that isn’t often discussed is the large percentage of its adherents who oppose all artificial birth control, as well as abortion. To them, it’s very simple: Don’t want children? Don’t have sex. The act is designed to bring babies into the world, and in order to do it in the way God intended, you always have to be open to the idea of increasing your tribe. Nice Catholic married couples can practice something called Natural Family Planning, which works on the same principle, and if you look around the web you can find many enthusiastic adherents talking about how hawt it makes their marital sex lives, how in-tune they are with their bodies, etc. It always puzzled me why it was OK to consciously avoid making babies by regulating your sex life but not OK to use a device or drug. Isn’t this imposing one’s own human will on the Lord’s business, as well? Yes and no. There’s a concept called “prayerful consideration” involved, and well — I check out at this point. Whatever these folks are selling, I’m not buying.

A friend of mine works in upstate New York, near Kiryas Joel, that odd Hasidic town where everyone is orthodox Jewish (and many of them are on public assistance, because if there’s one thing a small town can’t provide for that many people, it’s a living). Orthodox Jews also condemn birth control. My friend tells me the No. 1 most-asked-for service at the public-health clinics in the area is the tubal ligation done on the QT (i.e., without the knowledge of husbands and/or rabbis), perfect for that population, because their own religious practices take women out of the sexual rotation for about two weeks out of every month anyway, and laparoscopic procedures leave no trace and have short recovery times. The women come to the doctors trailing a brood of six or seven, exhausted, impoverished, with one goal uppermost: No more. In many ways they are the counterpart of the women of 1920 — oppressed by their biology but smart enough to know there’s a way it can be different. And that way is worth fighting for.

I have a feeling Margaret Schroeder, the woman at the center of “Boardwalk Empire,” is going to discover the limitations of Lysol as birth control. I salute her, and all her real-life sisters of the period, just the same. It was worth the fight.

So, some bloggage:

The Onion AV Club on “Family Limitation.”

George Soros calls for an end to the other kind of prohibition.

Hysterical clip of John McCain, with the applause line that keeps on giving, via the Daily Show.

Office hours. I must give guidance to the young! Have a great, windy day.

The weather forecast today, as indicated by the Yahoo weather app on my phone, is a series of horizontal lines. That indicates wind. Big wind. Wreck-of-the-Edmund-Fitzgerald windy. Four-to-six-foot-waves windy. Windy, I tell you. (I tried to embed some Gordon Lightfoot music for the occasion, but the stupid code didn’t work. I have better things to do than flyspeck HTML. Or PHP. Or whatever it is. Just hum along in your head: The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche-gumee…) I’m just grateful we’re not pulling the boat today. Here are the forces at work, if you like:

Me, I have another stuck-inside-all-day on tap, but I’m going to try to get outside for at least a while. Maybe get hit by some flying branches.

Which may be preferable to being a MoveOn.org supporter in Kentucky these days. Good lord, what is wrong with people? I already see a cultural divide between even the description of this event was — lefties are calling it a “stomping,” with right-wing blogs favoring “stepping.” I call it aggravated stepping, and that stupid geezer and his stupid friends ought to be charged; that is simply beyond the pale. Is this what it’s come to? Is this how the teabaggers take their country back?

By the way, there was more than one camera at that event, and one got clear images of one of the assailants. I expect he’ll skate, too — him and his “don’t tread on me” button, that is. Ha ha.

The more I watch that video, the more irritable I get, and I need to go pick up Alan at the Subaru shop. Let’s all take a happy pill and look at some snapshots from Basset’s housewarming, with some before shots thrown in to get a sense of the scope. I envy his first-floor laundry.

Back later.

Quite an evocative photograph in the Daily Telegraph this weekend. I love pictures like this, which flip the perspective from the usual view; there was one of Ryan White, the grade-school AIDS patient, back when he won the right to go to school — this skinny little boy facing a wall of photographers and reporters. How do you feel, Ryan? Great, thanks. I’ve never been 100 percent proud of my business. That was one of the bad days.

The news peg is, what? The president is seen interacting with an iPad, I guess. But the story is in those faces, especially of the two young women. I don’t know about you, but it would freak my cheese to see that sort of thing on a regular basis, which I imagine he does. That’s when you need a good consigliere, or a good wife, or someone who knows you as you and can tell you who you really are. Which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not still going to start believing what you see. No wonder Bill Clinton stumbled.

So. I’m starting to wonder about the Washington Post op-ed operation. I’m wondering about all of them, actually, but this Charles Murray troll bait over the weekend got on my nerves. I guess it was supposed to be funny (although there’s not a wink or smidge of self-awareness anywhere in it), or maybe publishing it was just supposed to be buzzy — there are close to 800 comments on the thing, so hey, mission accomplished.

Toward the end of the piece, Murray lays out the failings of the fancypantsers in a series of paragraphs which I won’t make you read; fortunately Gawker has boiled it down to a list. A few key questions:

Do you have any idea who replaced Bob Barker on The Price Is Right?
Have you ever watched an Oprah show from beginning to end?
Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? Or a Harlequin romance?
Would you be caught dead in an RV or cruise ship?
Have you ever heard of Branson, Missouri?
Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club?

My answers: No, no, hell no, sure why not, of course and yes. I once opened a Left Behind book in the library, to see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t get 12 pages into it, although I skimmed some of the rest, just to make sure it sucked all the way through. It did. So here’s a message from an elitist aimed at all you proles: Your taste in literature sucks. If you’re spending time in Branson when you could be in Vegas, you’re a fool. I have a secret wish to take a cruise vacation — at least if I could locate my deck chair far from the proletariat — but I could never persuade my husband to accompany me. (He’s an elitist with claustrophobia.)

Here’s Murray’s concluding paragraph. You tell me if he’s trying to be funny:

The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

The isolated pot calls the ignorant kettle black? That’s rich, pals.

How was your weekend? Mine felt…productive, I guess. Got my exercise, restocked the pantry, did the laundry, neatened this and tidied that. Watched some catchup on “Boardwalk Empire,” which I am loving. A few weeks back, on one of the elitist NPR shows I love to listen to, “Sound Opinions” I b’lieve, the show’s music director was a guest. He talked about finding songs of the period (1920s) and re-recording them with contemporary artists. Last week’s episode closed with Loudon Wainwright III singing “Carrickfergus,” the old Irish ballad which is probably not of the 1920s, but dovetailed perfectly with the episode’s subject matter — the first St. Patrick’s Day in Atlantic City post-Volstead Act. It was so sad and beautiful I’ve been humming it ever since, because if there’s anything an elitist like me enjoys, it’s having a song in my head that’s not by Toby Keith.

OK, I’ll stop now.

BLoggage? Oh, surely you’ve seen Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things by now, but just in case you haven’t… Very funny.

And that’s it. Must commence Monday madness. I hope your own is tolerable.

It seems a week doesn’t go by without the New York Times doing a story on Detroit. I don’t think it’s ever been something I didn’t know about already, but that’s the Times’ job — to be the gatekeeper and curator of Our Vast Interesting Nation for its readers. To the extent that they’re trying to dispel the image of Detroit in the right-wing media, i.e., Detroit is a place where women have sex with pit bulls in dank drug houses (thanks, Weekly Standard!), I approve.

Anyway, everyone who lives here and pays even minimal attention knows the Slows Barbecue story. I see the piece also dug up that obscure, underexposed source, Toby Barlow. But it’s nice to see Supino’s Pizza getting some love — I like to stop here on Saturdays from time to time, but since I’m almost always alone, I have yet to try their signature pie, the Bismarck, which features an egg cracked over the top just before it goes into the oven. They don’t sell that one by the slice. One of these days.

Next stop for the NYT will doubtless be Saturday’s Halloween party at Theater Bizarre; fingers crossed they overcome the downside of success before that. Which is? What else?

Organizers say the city is demanding they get a temporary liquor license to give away beer to patrons — and fear inspectors will issue more requirements in days leading to Saturday’s affair.

Alan and I went to one of their summer events a couple years ago, and I was delighted to see Detroit police officers mingling through the crowd, which was peaceful and fun-loving. This Saturday-night party is truly one of a kind, and it would be a tragedy to see it shut down over this. (Hear that, Republican readers? I am coming out against regulation.) Watch the video at that link. That gives you a good sense of the place.

What else is going on this weekend? Elsewhere in the same story:

On Tuesday, the City Council denied a permit for a Highland Park company that has operated a “haunted bus tour” for a month through East Robinwood near Woodward. Organizers from Creative Images and Things acknowledged the desolate, burned-out street made a perfect stage for the 15-minute tours that include fake zombie attacks. But council members worried about a lack of streetlights — and the city’s image.

“I just think it sends the wrong message at this time,” council President Charles Pugh said.

For the record, I disapprove; most of the houses on this street are abandoned, but not all of them, and the poor souls who are stuck here deserve better than to have a bunch of suburban d-bags rolling through in buses, not to mention the fake zombies. (This is the street, by the way; Jim at Sweet Juniper put together a panorama that gives you an idea.) However, Charles Pugh’s silly comment almost makes me want to take the opposite view.

This has been a long, exhausting week. I know I say that every week, but this week is super-duper long and extra-schmextra exhausting. Productive, though — that always mitigates things. But I’m ready for the weekend. Let’s see what sort of bloggage we can dig up:

Scott Lemieux on Juan Williams. Key passage:

For the role of being a Washington Generals Potemkin “liberal” on Fox News, his former NPR affiliation, lazy sub-mediocrity and uncritical immersion in shallow center-right conventional wisdom are major assets.

Exactly right, and this is why, while I disapprove of the current practice of booting pundits for not being perfect, I can’t get upset about this one. Williams never dispensed a single comment, anywhere, that I found insightful or even interesting. Booting Dave Weigel from the WashPost was a loss. This? Not so much.

CDC finds regional disparities in teen-pregnancy rate. Bottom line:

Whatever the reason, the regional disparities are stark. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, for instance, 2008 birth rates were less than 25 per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19, CDC found. In the same year, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had rates topping 60 per 1,000 teens.

Mississippi had the country’s highest rate (65.7), CDC says, while New Hampshire had the lowest (19.8).

Leslie Kantor, national education director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the report “makes it crystal clear that the teen birthrate is lower in states that provide students with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s interesting just the same.

Clarence Thomas’ old girlfriend says he loved the porno. Shocked, shocked, etc.

The weekend awaits, eventually. Hope yours is great.

The news would be easier to keep up with if it would just stay put. The missing banker I keep referring to? He’s a local resident who disappeared from his office in Macomb County a month ago, an office found “in disarray,” one of those cop/journalist words no actual human being ever says. It was a Sunday night, too, so he was alone there, just another CEO banker burning the midnight oil at his flatlining bank. This, the bank’s precarious status, was seen as interesting, as were rumors of a gambling problem (denied by family). The usual barstool detectives weighed in. In my mind, the possibilities boiled down to two obvious ones — he drained the accounts and fled for a country with no extradition treaty, or else flung himself off a bridge.

When his corpse was found by duck hunters a few days ago, floating in the lake not far from his office, the bridge theory gained credence. The autopsy revealed …something. No blunt-force trauma, probably drowning. It’s hard to find evidence on a body that’s been in the water for a month. I know it’s his job, but the medical examiner had my sympathies.

The family said they wanted a second autopsy, their legal right if they were willing to pay, and they were — they have the means. So the body is turned over to the m.e. in Oakland County, and what’s this? Why, it’s a bullet hole in the base of the skull. Back into the water the sheriff’s department goes, and what’s this? Why, it’s a .38-caliber handgun belonging to the deceased, not six feet from where the body was found.

This story has officially outpaced the efforts of a small hyperlocal website to keep up with it, just when it becomes really interesting. This is why we still need newspapers, folks.

I don’t expect it will do much for Oakland-Macomb relations, either. The wound was detected, the sheriff said, using a “sophisticated X-ray machine” that spotted the bullet fragments, a machine the Macomb m.e. did not have. Way to rub it in, richer county. Also, the sheriff is running for county executive, and this is an October surprise he doesn’t need. Finally, it raises the obvious question: Who killed the banker? He or she has had a month head start on the forces of justice. I expect all of this is being discussed in newsroom meetings all over the metro. Well, as I said, we just don’t have the boots.

Fortunately for bloggers, however, today is rich in material. Bob Guccione died, I see. In Plano, Texas. What the hell was he doing down there? Seeking out the sun like a lizard, maybe? Or just looking for cheaper housing:

The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. A $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, “Caligula,” was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.

The government took chunks of his fortune. In 1985, the Internal Revenue Service demanded $45 million in back taxes. In 1992, he had to borrow $80 million for another tax bill. In 1986, after a scathing federal antipornography report, Penthouse was withdrawn from many newsstands and circulation revenues — a major source of income — fell sharply.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s as Internet pornography grew increasingly available. Mr. Guccione responded with more explicit sexual content that drove advertisers and vendors away, limiting many sales to pornographic bookstores.

…Mr. Guccione, who developed throat cancer in 1998, sold artworks, media properties and his Staatsburg estate as revenues dwindled and debts soared. Penthouse posted a $10 million loss in 2001, General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Penthouse International. Creditors foreclosed on the Guccione mansion, and he moved out in 2006.

I saw the skeleton of the Atlantic City casino when I was there to cover the Miss America pageant one year. It was stalled at the ironwork stage, and every beam was branded with the Penthouse key logo. It loomed over and beside and around a tiny, shabby little house, one of those infamous old cusses who simply will not sell at any price.

The story went that construction stalled when a libel judgment Guccione won against Larry Flynt — something like $75 million, the highest ever awarded at the time — was appealed and knocked down to something closer to $1.98. Now there was a story, unfolding in a Columbus courtroom in 1979. The paper still didn’t have its act together, and it was covered by the usual courthouse reporter with no great fanfare. Hunter Thompson could have gotten a book out of it. I remember going over to J.C. Burns’ mom’s apartment (she lived three doors down from my parents) to visit one night, and she was laughing over it so hard she had tears running down her face. Her comedic sense was obviously more developed than the metro editors at the Dispatch, and could see there was something hysterically funny about one pornographer suing another pornographer for damaging his reputation. At one point Guccione took the stand and wept over the offense done to “the woman I love,” Kathy Keeton, his life and business partner, who sat at the plaintiff’s table knitting throughout the trial.

I forget what the insult was. Probably one of Flynt’s aggressively stupid humor pieces, like the one about Jerry Falwell, memorialized in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” God knows what the jury was thinking, but the story went that the Gooch, flush with the anticipation of all that cash, decided to get in on the Atlantic City gambling boom when it was still young. Alas, it didn’t work out. Lots of stuff didn’t work out. Funny how rich men go crazy — a nuclear reactor? Eighty-two scientists? Imagine getting that job, telling your family: “We’re moving to New York to build a small reactor for a guy who publishes a skin magazine, family! Let’s get packing!”

And then there was “Caligula,” proof Guccione, like all pornographers, also sought the holy grail of respectability — a dirty movie that would keep ’em in their seats after they got what they came for. (Or came what they got for. Whatever.) It didn’t turn out that way, and is generally acknowledged as one of the world’s most expensive all-time stinkers. A few of us saw it one night, in some down-at-the-heels art-movie house in Columbus. There’s a scene where a female character masturbates by pedaling some sort of exercise bicycle that propelled a wheel of feathers that hit her in the happy place. It raised some question in my mind about the technology available in ancient Rome for such a thing, but oh well. I really can’t do better than this archival Time magazine piece on the fiasco, which contains gem after gem after gem:

Where (original screenwriter Gore) Vidal was liberal with sex scenes, Brass has been profligate: there are enough orgies to satisfy even Guccione, and phalluses in all sizes decorate walls, dinner plates and nearly everything else—with naked girls taking up the spaces in between. “To the Romans,” notes (star Malcolm) McDowell, “sex was like driving a car.”

Poor Malcolm McDowell. He later said the movie served as a lesson in the career dangers of doing nudity early in one’s career; you become the guy who can always be counted on to “take his kit off.”

Well, then. There’s so much good bloggage today, all of it from the NYT, which is sort of a carnival of Grim today:

In Indiana, Baron Hill could well be going down for daring to state heresy: Climate change is real:

A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.

“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

Blackwater will likely get away with it. With everything.

Does your kid play football? Check his helmet to see if it’s “certified” by a group consisting of helmet manufacturers. Yes, your kid can get a concussion from the Invisible Hand.

Well, I’m thoroughly propagandized. Off to Wayne State.

Good lord, how does this happen? Up at 7 a.m., make lunch for my kid, slurp coffee, post story on other site, pimp it out via social media, slurp more coffee, check schedule for today (haircut ‘n’ color, office hours), realize I have eight minutes to update my beloved little blog. Where I actually have some readers.

Sigh.

Well, I don’t think I need much more than eight minutes today, because what I really want to talk about is Mrs. Clarence Thomas, Ginni to her pals, and her — what’s the word? — gall. Unmitigated gall. Or maybe recklessness, calling Anita Hill at 7 a.m. on a Saturday to leave one of those passive-aggressive phone messages we’ve all gotten from time to time. A few things I find interesting about it:

1) The time stamp. You don’t call someone’s office at that hour expecting to get a human on the other end. She meant to leave a message. I guess she did.

2) Nineteen years later, she wants to “extend an olive branch,” she said in a confirming statement to the New York Times. The original story that went up last night said she wants to “get passed what happened,” later corrected to “past” without the (sic), so it’s possible it was the Times’ error, although I think not. Pointing this out is just mean, one of my infamous snarky comments, I hasten to add.

3) Although. She wants to “reach across the airwaves and the years?” What the hell does that mean?

4) TBogg may be on to something when he joked that “breakfastinis” were involved with this. I wouldn’t be surprised.

5) Her husband looks like he’s been living on a diet of church-basement casseroles for 20 years. Just sayin’.

6) The best single comment I’ve read on this is Scott Lemieux’s:

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that Ginni Thomas has been pickled for so long in the winger echo chamber that she seemed to take for granted that everyone, including the woman her husband treated inappropriately, would share her conviction that her husband was a victim subject to some kind of gross injustice.

Now you all add your own. My eight minutes is up. Have a great day, all.

Remember what I said last week about stories you don’t need to read past the headline? For this one, I stopped reading after the first paragraph. I didn’t want anything to ruin the picture in my head:

SEATTLE, Wash. – A mountain goat that fatally gored a hiker, then stood over the man and stared at people trying to help, had shown aggressive behavior in the past, Olympic National Park officials said Monday.

You know? I just don’t want to know any more.

Hello, Tuesday. The goat story isn’t even the highlight of the news roundup, which I’m hoping bodes well for the rest of the week. Although you never know. I need to get to the gymnasium at some point today; my architecture of my knees feels like a collection of loose scrap, and if I don’t tighten up everything around them, I’m one slip on the ice away from a torn ACL, or worse. Still might be. I wish I knew what I ever did to my knees to offend them so; it’s not like I played football or acted in porn movies* or anything. Even my high-heel days were fairly short, as these things go. I have always been clumsy, however — I was still getting skinned knees as recently as, oh, a month ago.

* A former editor of mine once interviewed John Holmes. He said he couldn’t stay in porno forever: “It’s like pro football — the knees are the first things to go.”

If I sound a bit scattered, I am. Big news this week on the hyperlocal front — besides the missing banker whose body was found yesterday, it’s high election season. Oddly enough, I have yet to see a single TV ad for our governor’s race, much less anything else. I know this constitutes a blessing, but it is sort of strange. It must be because the big races around here are mostly pretty lopsided, and the local ones are still competitive but unlikely to spend on campaign commercials. Tonight I’m going to a candidate forum, for the school-board seat up for grabs. Should be a packed house; people care about schools around here, and at least one of the candidates has been so understated I still know practically nothing about her, so it’s one of those civic-duty things. I don’t expect scrapping — this being Preppyville — but I’m hoping for some spirited disagreement falling short of your average Detroit school-board meeting, where they frequently yell and sometimes throw things.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, eh? There’s so much good stuff here, all in cryptic, short teasers to encourage curious clickers:

Lawyers! Watch this. Everybody else, too.

When you ask Coozledad to give his bull a skritch on your behalf, he delivers.

If this guy were running for anything around here, I’d totally vote for him. Meet Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High party.

People think they have this town figured out. No one has this town figured out.

Just what America needs: A new way to lose your house to Wall Street.

Ready to take up my pickax and get to work.

We saw “The Social Network” this weekend. It was very fine, even if it did give the idea that all the women at Harvard — and Stanford, for that matter — exist mainly to simmer, occasionally leaping to a boil during frenzied bouts of speed-sex in restaurant bathroom stalls. But that’s a quibble. On the whole, very fine, a movie about a modern business with a theme as old as humanity itself, i.e., what is the nature of human connection?

And while I understand that the film is not entirely factual, I can’t even get too upset about whatever wrong ideas people take away from it, about the company or its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve been wondering what it takes to bug an internet company. Have you ever had a complaint with one? Facebook, Google, one of those? Have you ever tried to get a human being on the phone? Hell, have you ever tried to find a phone number? I guess now we know what it takes — make an expensive movie about them. How comforting.

But because all y’all are smarter than I am, can someone out there with some business experience explain the business model of Facebook? Because while I don’t doubt that Zuckerberg is a billionaire, I don’t understand how. Where is Facebook’s cash flow? I don’t pay for Facebook. I don’t see anything more than a rare ad or sponsored link, all for crap like acai-berry weight-loss solutions and so forth. So what, exactly, makes this company worth so much? Where does the money come from?

I am a business moron, but the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the dark side of the internet economy has been enormously helpful in answering this simple question, which I suspect is this: Nothing is free, and your payment is your information:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

You know how every time you have to submit your e-mail, you get that cross-my-heart statement about how your e-mail information is secure? “We never sell your e-mail address,” etc.? I’ve come to think of this as one of those soul-brother handshakes jerkoffs liked to give you in the ’70s. We all cool? No, I don’t think so.

I really hope the WSJ wins a Pulitzer for this project. I don’t think most people have any idea how much of their information is out there, being bought and sold on the internet. Some of it is pretty disturbing. Ever hear of “web scraping?” No? Well, then:

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

The story went on to describe the distress of one of the scraped, who had described his problems with depression under a pseudonym, but linked back to his personal blog, which used his real name. Think of all the ways insurance companies have tried to deny health insurance to people who might actually need it someday. Ask yourself if you think any are above a tactic like this. Yeah, I thought so.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little Ted Kaczynski. A friend of ours, a member of our little filmmaking crew who went to Vegas with us last spring, recently had her debit card disabled. She’d paid for some coffee with it at Starbucks next to the Golden Nugget back in April, and last week was presented with a $2,000 charge from that very same coffee shop. Obviously a data theft. Obviously she won’t have to pay $2,000. Obviously it will be handled by her bank, but don’t you wonder, once that stuff is out there, what else is out there? I’ve been thinking for a while of going to an all-cash lifestyle, seeing if it will change my spending patterns, maybe write a story about it and pitch it around. For someone who normally carries about 17 cents in my pocket at any given time, it might be an eye-opener. Certainly it would shield me from at least some data theft. Mark Zuckerberg, I’m not so sure about.

By the way, there’s an error on my Wikipedia page. It isn’t mine, as I’ve had nothing to do with my Wikipedia entry other than glance at it, note the error, and go somewhere more interesting. It appeared during the Goeglein Affair, and I have no idea who wrote it. Actually, now that I look at it, it has a couple of errors. I think I’ll leave them there. If someone’s going to trade in my information for profit, I might as well leave some bad stuff out there, too.

Now I must run. Breaking news on the hyperlocal beat — a missing banker was finally found floating yesterday — and anyway, Monday is always crazed. Later.