I think it’s safe to describe my mental state this morning as “knackered,” and can I get a huzzah for British English? We need more words like knackered. I think Gawker did a thing a few days ago, about what British terms we need to import, and my answer is: All of them. Take the lift to the fifth floor and tell your mates how your flat is being sprayed for insects. My brother’s favorite is “artic” for the tractor-trailer most Americans call a semi. (It’s an articulated lorry.)

And while Gawker mentions the bathroom/loo thing, I think we could do worse than adopt the even blunter toilet.

Second cup of coffee and I could still go back to sleep. So let’s make this a link-a-licious day, if I can find any.

From the Department of Elections Have Consequences, a couple of dispatches from the field. We’ve already seen that when one party is swept into office, crowing, “Jobs are our only priority,” it’s only a matter of time before we get a bunch of bills about abortion. It’s what you do when you have a safe majority — ram those suckers through before the tide turns. And so, in Wisconsin, we have a bill that would change what teachers are required to tell students about birth control (yay, abstinence! Contraception? What’s that?). Here in Michigan, a Republican from over there in Dutchistan is trying to strip domestic-partner benefits from staffs at state-funded colleges and universities. It would save the state “millions,” although I’m not sure how, because presumably the people who lose their bennies would be more likely to leave the employ of, say, the University of Michigan, and be replaced by heterosexuals, who would then take advantage of the benefit, but go figure.

Note this representative’s bio — he’s a retired airline pilot, and looks exactly like Leslie Nielsen in the “Airplane!” movies. I guess he really took those “ever seen a grown man naked” jokes personally.

P.S. He doesn’t use the term “domestic partner.” His website prefers the douchier “taxpayer-funded healthcare for roommates.”

Keep it classy, College Republicans.

Someone please tell me this is a joke.

Just because I want to be an equal-opportunity critic of bad ideas, someone tell me how the subway disruptions are going today.

If I understood high finance better I wouldn’t be blogging at 9 a.m. on a weekday, so I need some help here, too: Is it really possible MF Global actually lost $600 million in customer funds? Or was it all taken by Jeremy Irons, avenging the death of his brother, Hans Gruber?

Finally, a moment of silence, please, for the composer of “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” dead at 87.

Off to the showers.

Grantland, the sports/culture website with all the big names, has been a must-read since this Penn State business began, and I’ve been stopping by daily. Yesterday they posted yet another Michael Weinreb essay on State College, his third since the scandal broke and, for the record, the one that finally broke my patience.

Weinreb is a good writer, and I appreciated his pieces on what it’s like to grow up there, and another on the riot, but with this one, on going home for the Nebraska game, is one mournful sax solo too far:

In State College, we liked to think we looked after each other, and then we found out that some of the most prominent members of our community had failed to look after helpless children, and because of our lifelong emotional attachments we now feel like we are being branded as complicit in these crimes.

“It’s like people are on the outside, saying, ‘You don’t get it,'” I heard a man say. “And we’re on the inside, saying, ‘You don’t get it.'”

May I just say this? I get it. We get it. Everyone gets it. And by getting it, I’m sorry, but maybe it’s time you faced the truth, Weinreb and Eavesdropped-Upon Man and everyone else there who might be monitoring their shock and dismay and sense of loss. Ready?

YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL.

Sorry, but it’s true. No one thinks you’re complicit in evil, but maybe, by promulgating this myth of Happy Valley and Success With Honor and all the rest of this Big 10 bullshit, you’re a tiny part of the problem.

That’s what I think is happening here: It’s not that we are condoning child rape, and it’s not that we don’t recognize our obligation to the victims above all else. It’s that we are condemning all that Jerry Sandusky is accused of and trying to make it right while also dealing with this involuntary response to the death throes of a way of life.

“You have to live in the middle of this contradiction,” a Penn State sociology professor, Sam Richards, told a class that Lori Shontz of the Penn Stater magazine sat in on. “You have to live in this zone where both [situations] can be true, and it’s very, very, very difficult. But part of becoming a thinker is to sit with two contradictory thoughts in your head and see them both as being true. And not go crazy. And not immediately try to resolve them. And so we’re offering that to you. Sit with that. Because this is big. That’s big.”

Oh, please. Did that statement really require three verys? It’s not big. It’s not big at all. It’s not so hard to understand, either. Ask any Catholic who’s been paying attention in the last decade or so, and what’s more? It’s a lesson they should be learning in college anyway: The arrival of Columbus in North America was the beginning of a genocidal disaster for native populations, as well as a march toward freedom and wealth not only for the Europeans who followed, but for the rest of the world as well. Discuss.

What exists in State College exists in many, many other places. Columbus and Ann Arbor, to name but two of my immediate experience. Let’s think of some more, starting with the easy ones — virtually any city with a Big 10 school in it, with the obvious exception of Bloomington, although if you’re talking basketball, that’s another story. Tuscaloosa, Gainesville, Tallahassee. Wherever Texas A&M is. Oklahoma. Et-freakin’-cetera. All have vigorous football programs and devout fan bases, and aren’t so different from central Pennsylvania. Maybe they don’t have coaches they refer to as Pop-Pop or Baba or Gramps or whatever, but the depth of feeling for the team and the experience of going to the games? The same. Your stadium’s smaller than Michigan’s and less grand than Ohio State’s. They party hard elsewhere, they have beloved rituals and favorite chants and jeez, have you even been to a football game elsewhere? Ever met a Notre Dame fan, a Domer? They’re as bad as you guys. I’m sure you’d get along like aces.

All this you-don’t-understand-stuff is part of the collective defense mechanism. Every 19-year-old kid who had a mic stuck in his face in the last week and said, “It’s different here,” needs to learn it’s not true. Because while it’s benign coming out of his mouth, it’s only the flip side of the justification that allowed everyone who participated in this coverup to do so in the name of the special-special Penn State football program and special-special-special State College, which must be preserved at any cost.

It’s hard for younger people to get over themselves. Most of them haven’t been beaten down by life yet (except for the unlucky ones in Jerry Sandusky’s Second Mile program), and they’ve grown up watching themselves on TV, of seeing their fifth-grade soccer team preserved between the pages of a book (custom-made by the clever mom with the Shutterfly account), maybe in a video (made by the same Mom, the one with the iMac) with slo-mo effects and the “Chariots of Fire” theme music.

And they’re enabled by pieces like this. Why don’t we stop? It’s a special place, State College and Penn State, but it’s no more special than any other, and if it’s a rude awakening for everyone who loves it to learn it has rot at its core, then it’s time to learn, and stop writing this self-indulgent nonsense.

I think that’s why that Charles Pierce column the day before was so bracing. It’s nice to hear from someone who doesn’t speak with the alma mater playing softly in the background.

So, then. Bloggage? Hmmm…

I see Florida finally executed Oba Chandler. I couldn’t remember why the case rang a bell, until I read the details — Chandler killed a mother and her two teenage daughters, who’d lived in Willshire, a tiny Ohio town I used to drive through between Fort Wayne and Columbus. It was a ghastly story that got a little more play in our part of the world than yours, most likely. The Ohio women were vacationing in the Tampa area, and apparently met a nice guy who offered to take them all on a boat ride. All three were raped and strangled before he dumped them in the bay. I recommend this story about Hal Rogers, the husband and father who survived them. There’s a note of bleak November in it:

The first snow of the season fell over Van Wert County late last Thursday afternoon, not long before dark.

Hal was busy inside a drying bin, shoveling corn toward an auger that ferried the grain into wagons waiting outside. When the snow came blowing in, it swirled with red chaff from the corn and engulfed the wagons in a cloud of white and maroon.

A strange and beautiful sight, but Hal had no time to notice. Already a month behind schedule, he was lost in concentration.

“I haven’t shoveled corn this wet in thirty years,” he said.

Shudder.

Lighten up with a brief roundup of three Mrs. O looks, detailed by T&L. I liked the first and last, meh on the second, but she certainly looks presentable in all three. I especially like the pink-and-gray dress, probably because it’s a look I couldn’t work in a thousand years. Or a thousand shoulder presses.

Online slide shows are cheap eyeball bait and this one — New Gingrich looking at people condescendingly — isn’t even funny, but there are some closeups of his horrible mug that sort of made me barf a little.

Office hours today, gotta run. Happy birthday to Adrianne, my husband and daughter. Not to mention Elvis Whitehead, r.i.p.

I believe I’ve mentioned that my husband has a new job at the paper. Alan’s the Detroit News auto editor now, which comes with new responsibilities, a laptop, a BlackBerry and the special perks an automotive journalist in Detroit enjoys, or as I’ve been putting it lately:

“When are you going to bring mama a big pimpin’ Escalade?”

The car companies keep a few sets of keys circulating through the newsrooms of the dailies and the trade papers, for reporters, critics and editors to test drive. One of our neighbors works at AutoWeek, and whenever their beige Camry is replaced in the driveway by something a little less beige and Camry-like, it’s a fair bet he’s enjoying the perks of the job. So last night I was out and about, and what do I come home to? A BIG PIMPIN’ ESCALADE. IN MY DRIVEWAY:

“You remembered my birthday!” I exclaimed, squealing over more than $70,000 of an $85,099 luxury SUV like the Midwestern girl I am. Then I commenced worrying. It’s so big we didn’t dare risk putting it in the garage overnight and having one of the bikes scratch its Black Ice paint job on the way in or out, so Alan tucked it into the second-most-secure parking space on the property. I’m sure the reason I woke up before 6 a.m. today was a nagging worry that we’d find the thing sitting on bricks this morning, or gone entirely.

But it’s fine. Now all I have to worry about is him getting carjacked on the way to work. One of our neighbors leases an Escalade every couple years, and both of fates described above — wheel theft and carjacking — have befallen them. The wheel theft came at daybreak one morning, and was accomplished by a crew of professionals who worked so fast they could probably find gainful employment with NASCAR. The theft was by two teenagers so young she thought they were kidding, until one lifted his shirt and showed her the gun in his waistband. And yes, you saw it first on “The Wire.”

It’s too bad we can’t take this behemoth on a road trip. You should see the back-seat entertainment system. Kate and I would hang back there, watching DVDs.

OK, then.

This ham-fisted p.o.s. was circulating a bit yesterday, Walter Russell Mead’s j’accuse against the baby-boom generation. I expect we’ll hear about a million more iterations of this before they lay the last of us in the ground, or, more likely, sprinkle our ashes in a sylvan glade somewhere, because we’re not into having our corpses pumped full of chemicals, man. Others with more time on their hands have handily disposed of this one, but all I have to say is, whaddaya mean “we,” white man?

Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.

Oh, shut up. I guess I missed the double-secret boomer briefings at which all this was laid out, but I also expect we’ll be paying for that Who song for a long time. As far as I’m concerned, much of the model for that which he describes, the sha-na-na-na-na-let’s-live-for-today mindset, was put in place by Grampa Reagan, and he was no more a baby boomer than I am an Escalade buyer. There are many, many of us who save for what we want, raise our children right, work hard and otherwise don’t expect much in the way of handouts. Mead himself writes:

What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity.

“There are many honorable individual exceptions,” yes, enough that the whole essay pretty much falls apart, especially when he tries to hang Jerry Sandusky on us, considering Sandusky (d.o.b. 1944) isn’t a boomer.

Speaking of which. Can this case get any more awful? “I shouldn’t have showered with those kids,” he says now. Really? Ya think? And this lawyer of his who thought this interview was a good idea? I’m speechless. I need to stop reading about this story. It’s making me too crazy.

You’ve already read this Charles Pierce jeremiad on Penn State by now, I expect, but just in case you haven’t, you should.

And now I get to edit a bunch of city council meeting copy.

Among the weekend’s action: Dinner with friends, the market, book club, the usual laundry and grocery chores, and what else…oh, right. Apparently there’s this book:

I’ve been robo-written. In a fit of late-night Googling, Alan found this eponymous volume, consisting of “high-quality content by WIKIPEDIA articles.” Yes, for a mere $45, you can get a print-on-demand edition of the Wikipedia article about me and my three-years-past celebrity brush with greatness. It’s 96 pages. That’s gotta be some big type to fill 96 pages. Maybe they cut and pasted the 570 comments that followed that day. But I think I need to deliver some disclaimers before anyone buys it:

1) My Wikipedia entry contains errors, which I freely acknowledge and will not fix, in the name of keeping those who rely on Wikipedia on their toes.

2) That is not me on the cover.

This phenomenon rang a bell, which sent me a-Googling, and I found this NYT piece, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?,” a clever title explaining that the robots are wrangled by a German company, which I flat do not believe, based on the email exchange one subject had with its managing director, one Wolfgang Philipp Müller. That sounds like a German name a robot would come up with. I’m thinking this is Skynet we’re dealing with here. This is only an early effort.

Monday, o day of suck, have you at least kicked up some tasty linkage for my long-suffering readers? Let’s see…

I went off on a little rant about Mitch Albom yesterday on Facebook. I’m thinking I’m not going to reproduce it here, as we’ve heard it all before and as Mitch’s work product goes, it was no worse than any other Sunday column. But it prompted Jeff Gill to post a YouTube of another Sunday offering with about the same level of numb predictability, which y’all are welcome to check out, particularly if you’re megachurch attendees.

Chelsea Clinton is changing jobs again. Now she’s going to be a TV correspondent, reporting NBC News’ “Making a Difference” segment on the evening news, which is to say she’s going to be a glossy show pony appearing in — I refuse to use a word like “reported” — happy-happy stories for a very large salary. Yes, she’s donating all her salary to charity, and she’s not just going to be a famous face, nuh-uh:

But Mr. Capus emphasized that this, and the others, are all serious hires by NBC News. He said Ms. Clinton had “made it very clear that this is not going to be a surface-deep relationship.” He added, “She wants to be in the field for the shoot and in the edit room for the edit.”

A dues-payer! Gotta love it.

Because I know lots of you are Elizabeth Warren fans, a profile on her senate campaign from New York magazine. Haven’t gotten all the way through it, but it’s a good read so far.

Me, I must strap on armor and prepare for my week. I hope yours goes well.

Autumn has gifts besides the traditional foliage displays and apples right off the tree. Behold, an attempt to capture one:

Setting Sun Lights Tops of Trees, as Dark Clouds Bulk in the North, by yours truly. Pretty weak, I’d say, although it was a nice moment.

So, a little inside baseball for some of you, but I have to get this off my chest. Is anyone else disgusted that, with all the problems journalism has at the moment, someone at the Poynter Institute thought the way Jim Romenesko crafts his blog entries was cause for a public shaming? It’s a little hard to follow (and probably impossible for non-journalists), to grasp exactly what the problem is, exactly. I’ve had three or four pieces linked/promoted by Romenesko, an inside-media blogger, over the years, and I’ve never, not once, felt that he misappropriated my work, or quoted even a single phrase of it improperly. I’ve been reading him since the beginning, pre-Poynter, and can’t recall anyone, ever, thinking he did aggregation any way other than the right way. He was one of the very first to do so, in fact, and blazed a trail, showing journalists how this crazy internet thing could work for us, rather than against us.

Romenesko, who had been ramping down his Poynter output for some time, leading to a semi-retirement/switch to part-time status in a few weeks, reacted the way anyone would: He quit, leaving his boss, Julie Moos, to reap the whirlwind of damnation from the trade, who have quite correctly called her (and whoever put her up to this, if there is one) a spectacular forest-misser due to tree examination. I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here, but I get the feeling I’ve known people like her throughout my career, officious little twerps who bustle around kissing ass up the chain and assigning demerits down. I could be wrong. Someone closer to the newspaper bidness these days tell me if I am.

Anyway, this piece from The Awl, about the blog’s evolution (and devolution) is worth your time.

So is the Kitten Covers, perhaps the first LOLcat brand extension I’ve seen in a while that I found genuinely amusing.

And since we’ve already gone to the bloggage, let’s go all the way!

The Harrisburg Patriot-News gives up a special report on the Penn State scandal that doesn’t really uncover a lot of new information, but lays it out in relatively succinct linear fashion, underlining how many chances there were to stop Jerry Sandusky, and how all of them were missed. They emphasize how the central shocking event of the grand jury report — the grad student’s eyewitness account of the anal rape of a 10-year-old — was passed up the chain of command and became less serious with every stop on the telephone tree:

According to the grand jury, then, here is how McQueary’s eyewitness account became watered down at each stage:

McQueary: anal rape.
Paterno: something of a sexual nature.
Schultz: inappropriately grabbing of the young boy’s genitals.
Curley: inappropriate conduct or horsing around.
Spanier: conduct that made someone uncomfortable.
Raykovitz: a ban on bringing kids to the locker room.

I’m sure, given two more stops, it would have been that Jerry Sandusky tousled a young boy’s hair, and some weenie thinks it’s a huge scandal or somethin’.

I think we’ve well-covered the outrage angle of this case, but a lot of people are linking to this piece by John Scalzi, so I will too, mainly because it reminds me I should read more sci-fi, perhaps my second-least-favorite niche of genre fiction (although fantasy, sci-fi and romance are all pretty close).

And with that, I have to run. Must clean the entire house and Cliff Notes (that’s a verb phrase, I just decided) tonight’s book-club assignment. Who can summarize “Rising from the Rails” in a few paragraphs? I’d be most obliged.

Oh, and happy eleven-eleven-eleven!

I think it’s fair to say that whatever damage was done to Penn State University in recent days by the adults in charge, the cherry on the sundae was placed by its student body, members of which poured into the streets of State College last night to proclaim their anger that Grampa Joe was fired.

And that cherry was extracted from the bottle of maraschinos by the assembled nitwits of the media, who seemingly gasped as one when the representative of the school’s board of trustees announced last night that they’d found a shred of decency in their souls and done not just the right thing, but the only thing they could do in these circumstances. The press conference didn’t have the professional setup of a presidential one, i.e., the questioners weren’t mic’d, and there was only one camera. So I’m going on admittedly imperfect information, but I detected a challenging note to many of the questions, with such phrases as “resign with dignity” emerging from the murk.

If nothing else, this week has been instructive in many ways. You want to know how these things happen? Now you know. It also gives me a new appreciation of Myles Brand, the Indiana University president who gave the boot to Bobby Knight way back when. While no rioting was involved,* it was hardly a popular move, especially outside the university. And when it comes to IU basketball, and Penn State football, and most other college sports, it’s mostly outside the university. Thanks again to Sherri, who found this excellent essay earlier in the week, with this key passage:

…this is why college football evokes such extreme emotion, and this is why schools work so damn hard and often take ethical shortcuts to forge themselves into football powers: If they are successful, then the game serves as the lifelong bond between alums and townspeople and the university, thereby guaranteeing the institution’s self-preservation through donations and season-ticket sales and infusions into the local economy. It is a crass calculus, when you put it that way, which is why there will always be skeptics and there will always be those of us for whom college football is (other than our own families) the purest emotional attachment of our adulthood, and there will always be some of us who bound between those two poles.

I wonder if anyone inside the Penn State bubble has a sense of how the story is playing outside, how agog the rest of the country is. Which seems as good a time as any to direct you to #1 Party School, a “This American Life” episode about the drinking culture at Penn State. Definitely worth a listen; seek out the “play” button and let it roll while you do other things. It has to be said that the behavior described therein is not confined to Penn State; the drinking culture on college campuses is similar across the country, but at its worst at big schools like Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State, etc.

If you don’t have time for the whole hour, just listen to Act Four, in which the relationship between alcohol and college athletics is briefly examined. Graham Spanier makes an appearance, too.

So. Today is? November 10, 36 years after the cold-weather hurricane that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald, and 35 after Gordon Lightfoot’s famous one-take recording of his song about it. Today’s cold-weather hurricane is taking place in the Bering Sea, where they’re expecting the equivalent of a Category 3 storm, only a lot colder. I wonder where Sarah Palin is spending November. Wasilla? Or Arizona?

So, conventional wisdom says Rick Perry is out of it. We’ll see. Was it over when what’s-his-name bombed that place, I can’t think of it. Oh, hell — it’s on the tip of my tongue.

So late already? Time to get moving. Happy Thursday.

EDIT: * I’ve just been handed a bulletin in the form of an email from a longtime correspondent, to wit:

There was rioting involved when Knight was fired.

I know, because I rioted, and saw Brand burned in effigy on the lawn of his presidential home….

Said correspondent is now a learned scholar working on his doctorate at a top-drawer university. There is hope for all those punks who turned over the TV truck last night. That is all.

I got plenty of nothin’ today. Municipal election rewrites tapped me out this morning, so let’s make today an open thread, your call. But I nominate:

* The Paterno/Penn State scandal, still unwinding. A good NYT column on it makes the obvious point:

In the world of big-time college sports, (the term “scandal”) has been cheapened by overuse. If these allegations prove to be true — Sandusky has maintained his innocence — they’ll be a far cry from football players’ trading memorabilia for discounts on their tattoos.

A better comparison would be the sexual molestation scandals that rocked another insular, all-male institution, the Roman Catholic Church.

The parallels are too striking to ignore. A suspected predator who exploits his position to take advantage of his young charges. The trusting colleagues who don’t want to believe it — and so don’t.

Even confronted with convincing proof, they choose to protect their institution’s reputation. In the face of a moral imperative to act, there is silence.

We like to say “never again” in our society, right before it happens again.

* Elections elsewhere. As Kirk observed in yesterday’s comment thread on the Ohio returns, particularly as it pertains to the Issue 2 blowout, “A law that just required state employees to pay a certain percentage of their health insurance and pensions could have withstood a referendum, but those dumbasses had to over-reach and try to bust the unions.” Exactly. They overreached. Heady from their 2010 victories, convinced the world was backing them, or perhaps fearful they’d never get another chance, the GOP went all-in. And lost. Interesting portents for next year, I’d say.

And a person is not a person, no matter how small — at least in Mississippi.

And whatever else you like. See you back here tomorrow.

An unseasonably warm Election Day here in Michigan, with morning fog that’s in no hurry to leave. We had a similar fog period last November, about four days of murk that stayed all day and only thickened at night. All my east-side Detroit friends posted tweets and status updates about the weather, while the west-siders remarked on the bright sunshine they were enjoying over there. I had an errand one day that took me west, and coming back on the freeway, I could see the fog bank lurking ahead, and then I was in it, the lights went out, and it was back to London.

I guess this was a reminder that the east side is just a few feet lower in elevation. According to the usual unreliable source, i.e. Wikipedia, we’re at 577 feet, and Royal Oak, on the other side of Woodward, a lofty 663. The difference between the two? Fog.

I should live in San Francisco. Next lifetime.

I’m a little foggy myself this morning. This being a school holiday, I indulged myself in a little extra sleep, aided by my OTC sleep aid. The NYT noticed this on their Sunday Styles front the other day, one of those NYT ON IT stories they do from time to time. As usual, it was framed in such a way to be patronizing to women; sleep aids are the new “mother’s little helper,” etc. And also as usual, it was one duh statement after another:

Sleep-medicine practices are overwhelmingly dominated by female patients. Dr. Nancy Collop, director of the Emory Sleep Center in Atlanta, said three out of four insomnia patients at the clinic are women.

Duh.

Many believe that sleep deprivation among women has worsened. In the “Women and Sleep” study, 80 percent of women reported being just too stressed or worried to turn out the proverbial lights.

Duh.

Dr. Collop points to the persistent creep of technology into the after-hours, a time once reserved for physical and psychological winding down.

You’re kidding! Duh.

“My brain is just going, going, going,” said Erica Zidel, a mother and a founder of a baby-sitting company in Boston, who takes melatonin to fall asleep. “It’s so active that I can’t slow it down.”

And so on. For those of you keeping score at home, women (and yes, men too) are now expected to work full-time (and be grateful for whatever job they have, where they’re most likely working 30 percent harder than they did a decade ago), run the household, take responsibility for everyone’s laundry, cook a meal or 10 during the week, shop for groceries, “support” everyone and turn their constantly morphing to-do lists off at 11:05 p.m. for six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Maybe when monkeys fly out my butt.

Until then, I have my personal media criticism to keep me drowsy. It’s amazing to me how, on a fast-moving story like the Penn State scandal, newspapers manage to be both out of it and, in their continuing embrace of their hoary old customs, almost so far out they’re back in. Here’s the Harrisburg Patriot-News’ front page today (and if you’re seeing this on any day other than Nov. 8, you’re not going to see what I’m talking about — I’m using the Newseum’s today’s-front-pages site to link to). It’s their editorial calling for something that, on day three of this tawdry affair, seems like the bare minimum of decency — for both Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier to resign or be fired — and yet, it is presented in a way to put it on a par with the Magna Carta. The entire front page is all words, no photos, no graphics. BEHOLD THE POWER OF OUR RINGING CALL FOR JUSTICE, etc. The byline is the traditional one newspapers use in these cases: “by the Patriot-News editorial board,” which the average reader knows precisely nothing about. (My newspaper started putting bylines on editorials some years ago: “By Writer’s Name for the editorial board.” It was by far the most popular change they adopted, ever.)

WE SPEAK AS ONE, AND WIELD THE SWORD OF TRUTH, this page says. BOW DOWN BEFORE OUR GRAPHICS-FREE CONDEMNATION. READ THESE WORDS, AND TREMBLE. And so on. So I did. It’s only the university president who has to go immediately, the editorial board opined as one; Paterno can finish out the year “with the honor and admiration he has earned since taking over as head coach in 1966.” Oh. Well. It’s just a couple more games. I’m sure the retirement parties will be no fun at all.

OK, the hour is growing late, and I want to get in a bike ride before the rain comes, the wind changes and more seasonable temperatures arrive. Until then, don’t forget to vote.

EDIT: If you want to read something about the Penn State case written with the more flexible Fencing Foil of Truth, Lawyers, Guns and Money has been doing some nice work.

As yet another child sexual-abuse scandal begins to unwind, this one in State College, Pa., I find myself moved to ask:

What sort of person, upon entering a college locker room later in the evening and hearing “rhythmic, slapping sounds” he believed to be sexual activity, and who walks further into that locker room and sees a boy “whose age he believed to be 10 years old,” with his hands up against the wall and a man in his late 50s having vigorous anal intercourse with that boy — what sort of person immediately leaves the room, “distraught,” goes home to tell his father, and supposedly tells the head coach of the football program, but doesn’t go into specific detail, so that the coach later says he only heard the two were “showering together.” What sort of person does that, I ask you?

The reeling back, I understand. The brain does that, asks, did I really see that? But give it a few seconds, and it sinks in: I just saw an AARP-eligible adult fucking a 10-year-old. What do I do now? The fact this graduate assistant did nothing of consequence, this I find astonishing. This wasn’t a teenager, but a boy. This was rape by even the narrowest definition. Who doesn’t walk back in and break things up? And even if he had a reason to leave, who doesn’t call the police immediately? And if he had a reason not to do that, who then would tell others but somehow leave out the nature of the act he witnessed?

I just don’t believe it. If Penn State football coach Joe Paterno claims he was told the boy and his former defensive coordinator were merely “showering together,” I say he’s lying. And if he isn’t lying, he’s taffy-headed. And if Penn State doesn’t have a row of heads — taffy, silver-haired and otherwise — on pikes by the end of the week, then I guess we have a situation like that Stephen Colbert quote people keep passing along, which I will modify to suit: That either we accept that criminal sexual abuse of children is wrong and we are morally and legally obligated to stop it whenever we can, or just admit that when it conflicts with the interests of the most powerful church in the world, or a college football program, we simply don’t want to do it.

What’s most disgusting is the fact the boy in this case was one the alleged perp, Jerry Sandusky, found through his special charity to help “at-risk” kids. I’ll say they’re at risk. And the thing is? Predators know this, and cut kids like this out of the herd like jackals. I recall a case in Fort Wayne, a lawyer of extremely minor reputation who would contribute columns to our op-ed page. He owned rental property, and one day he put aggressive moves on the daughter of one of his Section 8 tenants, pushing her against a wall and feeling her up. Fortunately, the girl and her mother refused to be cowed by this stuffed shirt, called the law and got his ass charged.

If you want to know why youth organizations now have to have elaborate, creepy policies regarding contact between teachers/counselors/coaches and the young people they serve, now you know. Thank Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, et al.

OK, then. Eastern Standard Time arrived this weekend with the usual fun of an extra 60 whole minutes of sleep, followed by nightfall at dinnertime, and friends? Not ready for that yet.

Do we have any interesting bloggage? Let’s see…

Dahlia Lithwick hardly ever writes a lousy column, but this one, about Herman Cain and sexual harassment in general, is particularly good. And in keeping with today’s rancid theme, I might add.

If you’re young, chances are you’re worse off financially, in comparison to your elders, than any time, ever.

Gee, can you tell I hate Mondays? So have a Monday, then. I’m off to have mine.

It’s a symphony of reds.