You never believe it’ll ever happen until it does, and it happened last night (I think): My Mac is fried. There I was, stealing a moment to examine photos of the Great Game Robbery when the screen froze and would not unfreeze, and a hard restart only produced a status bar that resets twice, then quits again. Tried this approximately 10 times with the same result every time.

I’m thinking it’s a motherboard or something similarly vital. Given the age of all involved, I’m also thinking I’ll be shopping for a new laptop in a few hours. I did a backup recently, all my reallyreallyreally important data — writing projects in progress, etc. — is doubly backed up in the Cloud, but I’ll probably lose a few passwords or snapshots here and there.

Let that be a lesson to you. Back up your data. Twice.

So this will be it for me today. Maybe a little bloggage:

Over the years in Indiana, I was aware of what happens at graduation time in Fort Wayne high schools — commencement ceremonies tend to be protracted, testy affairs for all involved. No matter how often principals plead from the stage to hold applause until all graduates have crossed the stage, the reading of names is marked by screeching, air horn-blowing knots of bonehead parents and relatives in the audience, who pride themselves on mini-filibusters of noise as their kid’s name is called, which necessitates long pauses, so the next kid’s name doesn’t get drowned out and/or his own jerkwad parents deprived of their own celebration. The hooliganism has gotten so bad that diplomas aren’t actually physically transferred until the crowd files out, so that any kid who isn’t wearing a mortar board — i.e., the hat-throwers — has to schedule a conference with principal and parents, one last stern lecture, before taking possession.

Like I said, I guess I was aware of this, via the annual letters to the editor and the annual statements by principals, but I hadn’t realized just how bad it was until I stumbled across a guest column in my old newspaper — which, I recently learned, now has one-third the circulation of the other paper in town — by one of the school district’s PR warhorses, floating a trial balloon that, because of the thoughtlessness of the few, maybe they won’t hold any commencement ceremonies at all, and I hope you get that this sentence is a weak attempt to capture the voice the school disciplinarian. But let her do it herself:

Although state law determines who is eligible for a diploma, there are no laws governing how that diploma is to be presented. Indeed, “Pomp and Circumstance” is not required music. Caps and gowns are not legislated attire. There is no requirement for schools to rent at their expense a facility for the event or hire security for crowd control. There is no legal requirement for schools to pay for embossed diploma covers in school colors. There is no requirement for schools to have a graduation ceremony. Has the time come to drop commencement exercises and mail diplomas home or hand them out in home room?

Such a move would be so unpopular I’m taking this as another empty threat from the stage. Still, there’s some good detail there, including this — that Bobby Knight recently received an honorary doctorate from Trine University, and showed up in an open-neck shirt and a sweater. Why? Because he’s Bobby Knight, and you’re not. And what is Trine University? You say you’ve never heard of it? Well, it used to be called Tri-State University, and changed its name two years ago. Trying to class up the joint, I’d imagine. I wasn’t aware they granted doctorates, period, but I guess when the degree is honorary, it doesn’t matter. In that part of Indiana — hey, Pilot Joe, Jen and many others here — they could have named him Philosopher-King and gotten away with it.

Off to the Genius Bar, there to weep and/or spend money.

I keep reading today about the “failure” of the Gores’ marriage. A little pressed for time today, I’m not going to look up all the links, but surely you’ve read the same thing, in so many words. Having just celebrated their 40th anniversary, normally an occasion for letting your kids pick up the check and dandling grandchildren on arthritic (or artificial) knees, the Gores are throwing in the towel on their marriage, separating amicably. Which must mean their marriage has failed.

Hmm. They stayed together four decades, raised four children, each as glossy and gorgeous as their parents. They have grandchildren. They’ve seen one another through military service, government service, soaring success, bitter defeat, all in the pitiless stare of the public eye. They’ve come out the other side into a sort of monied, luxurious final act that most of us would give a kidney for.

Here’s how fortunate Al Gore Jr. is: David Chase gave him a top-secret advance DVD of the final episode of “The Sopranos,” because Gore was going to be on a transatlantic flight when it aired.

If that isn’t a successful marriage, I don’t know what is. Why pull the plug on it now? Have you all learned nothing along the way to 10:07 a.m. EDT, June 2, 2010? Here’s why:

1) Because no one knows what goes on in a marriage except for the people in it, and;
2) Because there is no mystery in the world as deep and unfathomable as the human heart.

Sometimes I think the problem is, we live too long. In just a generation or two, we’ve gone from the gold watch at your retirement party followed by a fatal myocardial infarction five years later to lengthy final acts marked by entrepreneurship, world travel and lots of golf. The idea of marriage as a lifelong commitment was born in a time when it was understood that men would have mistresses from time to time, when women could have an occasional non-procreative fling themselves, and besides, nobody lived all that long to begin with. The Gores could each easily see another silver anniversary with new marital partners. Kind of strange to think about, but still true.

But they got through the hard part! I can hear you saying. They are the among the lucky few whose golden years can really be golden — with plenty of money, the best medical care in the world and salon-quality hair coloring. They married young, they had their children young and now it’s time to sit in that new house in Montecito and enjoy the ocean views, picking and choosing whatever important, worthwhile work they feel like doing. (In that great office! With all those monitors!)

To which I would say, see No. 1, above. Also, No. 2.

As believers in both, I really have nothing more to say about it, except this: The marriage and partnership of Albert and Mary Elizabeth Gore was no failure. It just ran out of gas short of the finish line. Along the way, it delivered the marital goods, i.e., a family.

So, some bloggage? Sure:

Time to add Bill Maher to the list of “things that are on HBO late at night that are not a credit to the network.”

We had a tragedy here a couple of weeks ago, in which a 7-year-old girl was accidentally shot to death during a police raid. The stories say she was shot in the neck. Local attorney Geoffrey Feiger paid for a second autopsy, which showed, no, she was shot in the head. The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office has now changed its report. To which I can only add: Sheesh. Gunshot wounds to the head — the new thing it’s easy to miss, evidently.

But hey — being wrong, and admitting it, is the latest thing. A friend keeps raving about Diane Ravitch’s new book, in which one of the architects of No Child Left Behind now says, in essence, oops. I give her lots of credit — it takes guts to admit that a social policy you advocated turned out to be a colossal failure — but I wonder who else will climb on the Strange New Respect bandwagon.

Anthony Bourdain is today’s passenger, and while he’s talking about food and culture and not social policy, it’s still not a bad lesson:

I’ve experienced that kind of wrongness a lot in the Muslim world. The idea of otherness kind of evaporated for me there. You know, sitting down in a Saudi home, observing Saudi Arabians, seeing that they, too, watch Friends, that they’re funny—you know, sense of humor often surprises me most. That, and random acts of kindness. I used to believe, deeply, that people were basically bad—that given a slight change in the our situation, we would all revert to packs of wild dogs who would devour each other and sell each other out. I took a very dim view of human nature. Travel has made me more optimistic. I believe now that for the most part, the world is filled with people doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Finally, while I despise the sort of back-and-forth ass-kissing that goes on between too many bloggers, I direct you to Roy, this morning, who by way of noting last week’s banking rant here, makes some good further points about how it applies to BP and current events in the Gulf of Mexico. I guarantee you it will be the only blog you’ll read today that will use the word pikestaff.

And now I’m outta here, but not: An epic thunderstorm is about to unfold outside my window, and I want to watch it for a while.

The Free Press ran a story this weekend that said a customer boycott of British Petroleum “won’t accomplish much.” It will hurt independent station owners, who have zero power and influence over the corporate policies that have led to so much misery in the Gulf of Mexico. Leave it to an academic to lay it out:

Michigan State University economics professor Charles Ballard said a boycott “will have very little effect” on BP.

“For one thing, not all of BP’s products are bought by American consumers of gasoline,” Ballard said this week. The public would be better off supporting a tough congressional examination of the April 20 explosion and stricter regulations on offshore oil operations, he said.

Hmm. Well. Can we put a dollar value on the satisfaction it gives me to drive past the BP on the corner — a station I have patronized many times — and give my business to the Shell down the street? If so, I’m putting it at one hillion jillion dollars, and I’m going to keep doing so until I get tired of my imaginary money piling up. If it hurts the independent operator, I’m sorry, but at this point it is the sole concrete action I’m capable of at the moment to express my rage at this colossal fuck-up, so, there it is.

I’m also encouraging all cultural portrayals of BP as a bunch of arrogant, incompetent numbnuts. Yes, I have signed on as a follower of BPGlobalPR, the joke Twitter account:

Best part of the BP Memorial Day Picnic? The custom made oily dunk tank! So far we’ve dunked 4 ducks, a dolphin, 2 otters and @bpTerry!

Due to public outcry, our “Spill Or Be Spilled” flash game will be taken off our BP Kidz Klub website. “Smack the Greasy Manatee” stays.

Yes, I intend to heap ridicule and scorn upon BP, its staggeringly clue-free management team and anything else I can think of. I know it’s silly and possibly hypocritical — I still drive a car, don’t I? — but at the moment, it’s what I can do. It’s all I can do.

What do you call a boatload of BP executives sinking in oil-covered seas with no lifeboats, each one leaping into the vile mix of crude and salt water, flailing to stay afloat before their lungs fill with the poisoned mixture and they sink to the bottom to be eaten by oil-mutated bottom-feeders?

A GREAT start!

If that makes me un-American, well, screw you, Rand Paul.

I hope you all had a pleasant Mem Day weekend. I was struck by this comment by MichaelG, late yesterday:

My father served during WWII, I went to Vietnam twice, my son in law will be leaving for his second trip to Afghanistan in July and my daughter will be a single mom again for a year. I am righteously offended by fatuous assholes who have never served urging me to “remember the troops this Memorial Day.” Sorry. I’ll get off my soap box now.

Funny. Alan’s father was a decorated combat infantryman in World War II. He got the shit shot out of him en route to winning three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, the works. You know what he told his son as he grew to manhood? “Keep playing that trumpet. Get good enough so that if you get drafted, you can play in the Army band. Those guys never see combat.” I find it fascinating that of the whole Bush administration hall of shame that got us into this shitstorm in Iraq, the one guy who had serious doubts was the one guy who actually went to Vietnam and didn’t work deferment after deferment, or get a National Guard post keeping the homeland safe from Canadian invasion.

Have I got some bloggage for you:

First, related to the above: What Gold Star families want you to know. No. 1: Don’t say “closure” unless you’re talking about a door.

Mom says giving birth while driving was “no big deal.” In a Chevy Cobalt? It most certainly was.

Time to make Kate’s lunch and push forward into a new week. But a short one. Enjoy yours.

Pie of the weekend: Strawberry rhubarb:

Yeah, yeah, to be absolutely correct it should be a lattice top crust, but I didn’t want to screw around with lattices when there was solar radiation to be frolicked under. And if Nick Malgieri says it’s OK to put a crumb crust on strawberry rhubarb pie, well, I ain’t gonna quibble.

Have a great holiday.

A short, relatively restrained rant about banks:

Our bank was recently swallowed by another bank. Yay, invisible hand of the market, which punished our previous bank’s bad business practices with death. Now we have a new, better bank. Theoretically.

Of course, the last bank was a swallower too, once upon a time. I moved to Fort Wayne in 1984, back when a bank was a bank, rewarded you for your business and generally followed the rules of an ordered universe. I was new in town, invited to dinner at a new friend’s house.

“I’m looking for a bank,” I said.

“I go to Fort Wayne National,” he said.

“Sold.”

Fort Wayne National’s marketing slogan at the time was, “That’s my bank.” Simplicity itself. All I really cared about was whether they had a lot of ATMs, and whether any were near my home and office. They were. I stayed with them until they were sold to National Spitty (name cleverly disguised to fool some PR agency’s Google alerts), and had the sort of relationship you have with a bank in those days — they kept my money, sold me traveler’s checks before I hit the road, exchanged U.S. dollars for Canadian before our annual theater trip.

The problem came when we moved here. There were National Spitty banks in reasonably convenient locations, and although Indiana’s unique banking laws (i.e., rooted in the 12th century) required us to open new accounts in Michigan, we stayed with them. Why? Because when you’re a Midwesterner, you plod through your life like a mule down a furrow, that’s why. Because we’d been NatSpit customers for years.

Not long afterward, I deposited several thousand dollars in miscellaneous checks at an ATM at the closest location (in Detroit), went about my financial business and, a few days later, received a sheaf of overdraft notices, at $30 per. I called the branch where I’d deposited them and asked what the hell. The manager treated me the way she might treat a panhandling bum, only with less charm. I might be committing check fraud, she said, so she’d held the funds for 10 business days. Who were these payers, anyway, these obscure businesses like “The Detroit News” and “Hearst Publications.” Anyway, I was a new customer. I fit the profile of a sleazebag fraud artist to a T.

“I’ve been a National Spitty customer for 15 years!” I said.

I called the other National Spitty branch nearby, the one in Grosse Pointe Farms. The woman on the phone said, “Oh, you NEVER want to do business in Detroit if you can avoid it. Deposit your checks here, I handle the ATM, and I’ll credit you right away.”

Yes, they actually tell you that here. It’s like Eddie Murphy’s Mr. White sketch, only (Psycho violins) …real.

So things have been bumping along with NatSpit, and over time I realized, like all Americans, that banking had slipped beneath the waves, insofar as customer relations go. My relationship with the people who facilitate my bill-paying and otherwise spare me the hassle of keeping my cash buried in the back yard is cordial enough, but there’s no part of the experience I’d describe as pleasant. In fact, one of the things I generally liked about NatSpit was the way they made it easy for me not to interact with them, by keeping their online service fairly robust. Woe betide if things didn’t go well, however — reaching a human being, at least one with the power to make anything right, was nearly impossible.

(I did visit the Detroit branch where they’d held my checks, once. It resembled nothing so much as a ghetto liquor store, the tellers behind inch-thick bulletproof plexiglass. No wonder they were so testy.)

Long story short, now we’re with another goddamn bank, and already I hate them. They changed all my account numbers and sent me a new debit card, screwing up my gym membership, which is automatically debited. And we discovered a new wrinkle: Unlike National Spitty, which allowed you to transfer money between accounts online and access the funds from the receiving account immediately, ThreeCapitalLetters Bank does not. At least not if it’s a weekend. If you dare to move your money — YOUR OWN MONEY, which I feel the need to add in caps — on a Saturday, you can’t spend it from the receiving account until MONDAY NIGHT. The woman on the phone didn’t even feel the need to apologize for this. Screw you, sucker, we know you’re not going to take your business elsewhere. What, and redo all your direct-deposit arrangements and go through this hassle again? Besides, every other bank in town is going to give you the same deal. Why? Because we can. Have a nice day, and go get your fuckin’ shine box.

Oh, why bother with this? You all have your own tales of pain and woe, if not with banks, then with health insurance companies, mortgage holders or whomever. Here’s what amuses me most about them — how, in our allegedly perfect market-based system, our customer experience should be improving year to year. In some ways, it has, although I credit technology (the ATM) more than management. But mostly, banking — and many other allegedly service-based businesses — has only become more Soviet with time, more monolithic, less sensitive to customer complaint, more frustrating to deal with. Yes, I enjoy checking my balance online or over the phone. No, I don’t like being nickel-and-dimed — or ten-dollared and thirty-dollared — to death over every little thing.

But hey! It’s a holiday weekend! Let’s change the mood:

In the minutes after a cascade of gas explosions crippled the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, confusion reigned on the drilling platform. Flames were spreading rapidly, power was out, and terrified workers were leaping into the dark, oil-coated sea. Capt. Curt Kuchta, the vessel’s commander, huddled on the bridge with about 10 other managers and crew members.

Andrea Fleytas, a 23-year-old worker who helped operate the rig’s sophisticated navigation machinery, suddenly noticed a glaring oversight: No one had issued a distress signal to the outside world, she recalls in an interview. Ms. Fleytas grabbed the radio and began calling over a signal monitored by the Coast Guard and other vessels.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon. We have an uncontrollable fire.”

When Capt. Kuchta realized what she had done, he reprimanded her, she says.

“I didn’t give you authority to do that,” he said, according to Ms. Fleytas, who says she responded: “I’m sorry.”

OK, sorry. Here’s something else, genuinely interesting. The death of the one-word exam at All Soul’s College, Oxford:

The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.

This is the sort of thing that would have terrified me at 19, but today I think I’d totally ace. What is blogging, if not a daily essay with a one-word prompt? (“Banking.”) However, what I find most interesting about this story is the glimpse at how they arrange things at Oxford. One of my former colleagues’ girlfriends was a Rhodes Scholar, and enrolled at New College. Punchline: Founded in 1379. Those Brits. Such a sense of humor.

The best single line from a “Sex and the City 2” pan (and this, friends, is a crowded field): “…essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.” Respect to Lindy West, The Stranger.

And with that, I guess it’s time to start the weekend. Have a good long one. I intend to get outdoors. You?

The New York Times has a front-pager on the fate of Larry King’s show on CNN, which seems pretty cloudy. The web version features a photo of King taken at the correspondents’ dinner this spring, looking 112 years old. I was shocked to learn he’s only 76; I thought he was 91-year-old Andy Rooney’s college roommate or something.

Everybody lucky to live long enough gets old, but not everybody in their eighth decade is old. I met an 81-year-old man at the Economic Club gala last week who looked like he could tow a tanker down the Houston Shipping Channel with his teeth. King, on the other hand, fairly dodders. If his show goes away at the end of the season — the once-mighty ratings colossus is already well behind Sean Hannity’s and Rachel Maddow’s shows in the same time slot — it will have died of nothing more than terminal geezerhood.

I lost patience with it years ago. I don’t even understand why the show is named after King, as all he does is show up, sit there and occasionally announce a commercial break between unchallenged chunks of celebrity blathering. Jon Carroll once called him a tabula rasa, and that, in my opinion, would be a much better name for the hour: Tabula Rasa with Suspenders Man. Tonight, Kate Gosselin!

I can never, ever in a million years improve upon this James Wolcott takedown of King, pegged to the last week of June 2009, when Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson all kicked the bucket within days of one another. King is at his best, or worst, or whatever-you-call it when celebrities die. I remember reading this in the car on our way down to Defiance one day last summer, and laughing so hard Alan told me to put a sock in it, I was distracting him from the road. A lengthy passage, but all in one paragraph:

For his June 26 show, he assembled an A-list trauma team to pay their respects: Liza Minnelli, Usher, Quincy Jones, and Deepak Chopra. O.K., maybe Deepak dragged the overall grade down to B-plus, but the next evening Larry gave us Cher, Celine Dion, Smokey Robinson, and Corey Feldman—Cher and Celine on the same show being Christmas come early for the drag-queen community underserved by cable news. For the next two weeks, Larry King Live was wall-to-wall Michael Jackson in memoriam, the guest list and the quality of insight being offered beginning to betray moth holes—in a surreal interview with renowned dermatologist Dr. Arnold Klein, rumored to be the biological (sperm donor) father of two of Jackson’s children, King asked, “Is it true that he wanted to look like Peter Pan?,” to which Klein replied, “I didn’t see him implanting wings on the back of his back or doing anything like that, right?”—until the addled nadir was reached during an interview with Jermaine Jackson at the Neverland Ranch when, as an inside tour was being conducted of the vacated rooms, a shadow crossed the end of the hallway. To those who dare to believe, who dare to hope, it was the ghost of Michael Jackson returning to his place of solace. On YouTube, the shadow was there for all to see. “Plenty of America’s most staggering dipshits saw it,” reported Gawker, “so CNN devoted an entire segment on King’s show tonight to solving the mystery. And the answer to all of this is—A crew member walked [past] a lighting fixture, creating a shadow on the wall. Yep, that’s it, just as any person with moderate levels of oxygen flowing to the brain should have deduced on their own.” I’m not sure how large a percentage of CNN’s core demographic fits the definition of “staggering dipshits,” but it is reassuring to know that the network isn’t ignoring their needs.

But that’s King at his best. Most nights he just sits there, grunting. Wolcott again:

Eloquence is not his thing. He solicits and accepts banal clichés that convert every celebrity death into a crunchy meal, while tossing off non sequiturs that keep everyone guessing. Part of what makes King perfect for his role is that he came out of the Walter Winchell world and thinks in staccato three-dot segments (as witness his widely mocked column in USA Today), equipping him with a built-in short attention span that some believe makes him the unofficial godfather of Twitter. A typical Larry King Live is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject. Sitting across from him may be former Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno—whom Larry mistakenly refers to as “Lou Ferragamo,” corrects himself, then repeats the error—and Marlon Brando’s son Miko, dressed in a festive Hawaiian shirt, followed by a panel exploring “the world of celebrity autopsies.”

There was some talk in the NYT story that the reason Hannity and Maddow are thriving and King isn’t is because they appeal to people on the ends of the political spectrum, who want nothing but an amen corner for their own beliefs. Um, no. It’s because they have a pulse. I can’t watch Hannity — those close-set, beady eyes just creep me out — but Maddow registers with me because she seems to have all of her big brain engaged with whomever she’s interviewing. Of course she goes easy on lefties and hard on their opponents, but even a few lobs are more tolerable than King’s non-engagement. You get the idea he’s thinking about his alimony payments.

Or maybe he’s thinking about his replacement. The story speculates on who might replace him. Katie Couric? Eliot Spitzer? But then, once again, comedy gold:

Mr. King has said in the past that his first choice for a successor is the entertainer Ryan Seacrest.

I’d watch that if he wore suspenders.

OK, another morning when I’d like to get the exercise over with early — it’ll be mid-80s before too long. I leave you with a bit of bloggage:

The non-link between vaccines and autism, as explained by Dr. Andrew Wakefield… in comics! Via Metafilter, where a commenter adds the Jenny McCarthy Body Count.

And may I just say, yesterday’s comment thread was fantastic? I never knew that about Austin Peay, the college whose name rhymes with “pee.” Basset, last night: Back in the, I don’t know, late 60s or early 70s the star of Austin Peay’s basketball team was one Fly Williams… which led to the cheer, “The Fly is open! Let’s go, Peay!” You guys are great.

And now I’m off. Rumor has it Greg Kinnear is shooting a movie in the Farms, so I’m off on bike patrol to gawk.

Already-plowed ground alert: I try not to take all my cues from “This American Life,” but ever since I heard #1 Party School earlier this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about drinking on college campuses, which from recent descriptions, sound like the new Indian reservations, alcohol-wise.

In comments yesterday, one of our Marks pointed out this Smoking Gun report on a wild debauch held by the Ohio University chapter of Pi Beta Phi sorority for their spring formal. This follows an earlier report on the same sorority, at Miami University this time, doing much the same thing. And a different sorority at Miami, same behavior.

If, by “debauch,” you’re thinking stained tablecloths and broken chairs, I encourage you to read the reports. I’m talking about vomit so copious it’s practically an intermezzo course at dinner, pee everywhere but where it belongs, poop on lawns and in urinals, and, of course, public sex.

If this were just a fraternity I might not have even taken note, but it so happens my subset of the baby boom happened to be the leading wave of new traditionalism, after the ’60s. All those Time magazine stories about the return of prom were written my senior year — 1975. If you’re all of a sudden going to prom again, you’re also going to pledge a fraternity or sorority, too.

Not me, I hasten to add. I’m about as un-Hellenic as you can get. Plus, Ohio University was a filthy-hippie haven at the time, although there were Greeks there. They didn’t dominate the social scene they way they did at Miami — the antimatter version of OU — or Ohio State, but they made their presence felt, and one of the things you learned about them was their pecking order. At the bottom, the “ugly-girl” house, was Phi Mu. Mark the Shark’s very pretty wife was a Phi Mu, and he taught me the frat-boy snark:

Rattle rattle rattle
Here come the cattle
Phi Mooooooo

But at the top were the Pi Beta Phis, the alpha girls, the mean girls, every single one of them blonde, beautiful and no larger than a size 2. The worst of the worst. Their male equivalent was Beta Theta Pi, and I expect they were paired off in a top-secret basement ritual, so that they’d only breed with one another and turn out a new generation of blonde tennis pros and Junior Leaguers.

I’m sure they drank plenty behind the doors of their respective houses, and I’m equally sure there was vomit, but I’d have been shocked if the peeing was done anywhere but the bathroom and the pooping? Please. These were the Pi Phis. They didn’t poop. Their waste was extruded in an even more secret manner than the pairing ritual, and when it emerged, smelled only of blueberry muffins.

Truth be told, it’s the public-sex part that concerns me most. The letter written by the owner of the trashed venue of the OU Pi Phi party this year mentions:

…”a couple engaging in sexual congress, while surrounded by a cheering throng,” and that a bathroom sink was broken as a result of “one of your members and her date attempting to have sexual relations on it, an act which was witnessed by the event’s caterer, who walked in on them.”

I know alcohol lowers inhibitions. I have had plenty of forehead-smacking moments of shame on many pitiless mornings after. I have been drunk in my life, believe you me. But even in my crazy early adulthood, I can no more imagine myself having sex surrounded by a cheering throng than I can imagine flying a plane into an office building. If this is what campus partying has come to, I’m worried.

In “#1 Party School” — which I encourage you to listen to, via stream or podcast — the statistics fly by in a blur. The two most depressing: Penn State (and many other schools like it) records about one alcohol-related student death a year. And the only thing, the only strategy that has proven even minimally effective in curbing the sort of blackout-seeking drinking that prevails on college campuses these days, is draconian police action — drunk-driving dragnets, aggressive ID policing in bars, raids on house parties, basically.

It’s pretty depressing, when you think about it. OU was a party school when I was there; rumor had it we were on a list somewhere, maybe in Playboy magazine. The main drag was one bar after another, and as any Econ 101 student can tell you, that meant lots of competition for customers. I believe I spent time in every one on Court and Union Streets in my college career, and I was familiar with them all — drink ‘n’ drown Monday, Texas Cocktail Tuesday, two-for-one Hump Day, daiquiris by the pitcher, beer by the bucket, you name it. Senior year, one of the bars installed a dentist chair for the latest wrinkle: You paid your money, sat in the chair, and they reclined you. You opened your mouth, and they poured several shots straight in, followed by a wheeeee spin in the chair to mix everything up. Then you were righted and sent on your wobbly way. I found this repulsive. By senior year, I was too sophisticated for such juvenile shenanigans.

Maybe that was the tipping point. It seemed to take drinking from social lubricant to blackout hastener. Where it is now is hard to say. I expect the Pi Phis will start drinking their hairspray next.

So, bloggage? Sure:

In re our discussion yesterday, the last days of Sen. Chris Dodd. Note the disconnect:

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd completed what might be the capstone of his legislative career last week by shepherding a major banking overhaul through the Senate, the guest book in his office offered a glimpse of why he is not seeking re-election. It includes these recent greetings from visitors who stopped by to pay their disrespects:

“Good bye and good riddance to you,” wrote one guest on May 16. “I know it’s tough, but I expected better,” said another (April 15). “Thank you for being corrupt” (March 26).

…“A natural, intuitive legislator,” Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, calls him. “Easily one of the best-liked members here,” said Senator Robert F. Bennett, Republican of Utah. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said Mr. Dodd embodied “everything that is good about this place.”

Given the yin-and-yang dynamic that governs today’s political landscape, Mr. Dodd offers a basic object lesson: the more entrenched someone is in Washington, the less popular he is at home.

I’m sure everyone has heard by now about Sarah Palin’s new neighbor, whom she, in typically restrained fashion, basically accuses of looking at her tits and maybe even her sweet little girl. Now it’s time for the second-day story, which if I were assigning it would be: Who owns the house, and why did he or she rent it to a snoopy journalist in the first place? In other words, why do Sarah Palin’s neighbors hate her? (I suspect the answer is in the two-story, 6,000-square-foot TV studio/man cave/lady cave they’re building, but that’s just off the top of my head.

Dave Weigel:

She describes McGinniss as the author of “the bizarre anti-Palin administration oil development pieces that resulted in my Department of Natural Resources announcing that his work is the most twisted energy-related yellow journalism they’d ever encountered.”

Another way of putting it would be that McGinniss is an investigative journalist who wrote his first best-seller at age 26 and was shopping a book about Alaska and the oil industry when Palin was named John McCain’s running mate. And another way of describing those “bizarre” pieces is that no one has ever challenged the facts in them.

Palin, who has an undergraduate degree in journalism, should understand that articles don’t become untrue when the subjects don’t agree with them.

Mary Schmich: Hoarding is not entertaining. We had a case in the suburbs here a few months back, an elderly couple who died, along with their disabled daughter, when a fire broke out and they couldn’t reach the single clear exit to their house, because the rest were blocked by junk.

Ten a.m. already? Time to get moving.

We went sailing Sunday, and the long stretches watching the water go by were conducive to deep thinking. So I tried to remember:

When was the last time I was represented in the House of Representatives by someone who didn’t make me fume, wince or cringe?

It wasn’t yesterday, certainly: Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, mother to the vile Kwame, is my representative now. Her tripartite name seems born to be married to “grand jury investigation.” CAR-o-lyn CHEEKS Kil-PAT-rick. GRAND JU-ry in-vest-ti-GA-tion. It’s not quite iambic pentameter, but it works. She leases a vehicle, at taxpayer expense, to carry her around her district. True to the Kilpatrick School of Public Service, it is a Cadillac.

Before her, Mark Souder. No need to rehash that one.

Before him, Dan Coats. I remember Coats most for being author of the Communications Decency Act, although, to be sure, this was when he was a senator, after he’d been replaced in the House by the Goober. The CDA was overturned by the Supreme Court and by other courts in dribs and drabs, but what I mainly recall about it was, the law appeared to be written by people who still thought “the internet” = America Online.

Before Coats, I lived in Ohio. Ah yes — how can I forget Chalmers Wylie? Wylie made headlines when he tried to strip the Library of Congress of $103,000, the precise dollar amount it took to produce Braille editions of Playboy magazine.

Think about that for a minute.

If nothing else, it gave the city’s newspaper columnists enough fodder to fatten a feedlot. “I’m only feeling it for the interviews” was but one of the witticisms our own came up with.

For all the college degrees among its voters, Columbus was in general not well-served by its delegation when I lived there. In fact, this reverie was also prompted by the death this week of Donald “Buz” Lukens, another right-wing hypocrite. He left Congress after he was caught on tape negotiating with — Kirk, correct me if I have the details wrong — the mother of a teenager he wanted to come over for some sexytime. As I recall he was fond of African-American girls, whom he would require to wear fluffy white bathrobes.

Again, the wags and goofs and talk-show hosts gathered at the trough for a heaping pile of slops. My favorite was the classified ad that ran deep in the Dispatch real-estate listings, for a piece of property close to a middle school, touted as a BUZ LUKENS SPECIAL. May God bless all classified-ad takers and their dear, dim dictation. I’m sure after the first week, it’s all Xs and Os.

When I was in college, registered to vote in Athens, it was some guy named Clarence Miller. All I know about him is, he didn’t court the student vote.

I’m probably forgetting somebody, but these are certainly the lowlights. As an American, I hope to someday have the experience of sending someone to Washington whom I feel represented by, someone who, if they don’t share my beliefs, at least understands them. Where do I have to move, guys?

Some quick bloggage today, because I have to start the errand mambo in mere moments:

Jon Carroll salutes the police blotter at the Arcata Eye again:

“Thursday, April 15 9:21 a.m. A TransAm’s inherent awesomeness was kicked up a significant notch with an impressive burnout demonstration (a symbolic representation of the young buffoon’s ever-so-agile sperm motility, though he likely wasn’t thinking about that, or much else) at Sunset and Western avenues. But the display of reproductive prowess took a humiliating plummet when the mouth-breathermobile slammed into a fire hydrant, unleashing a prematurely orgasmic fountain of wa-wa.”

And so on. (You know, a TransAm does have inherent awesomeness. More than a Prius, anyway. You Californians, always harshin’ the domestic product.)

You know, at the military academies’ graduations, when the graduates all throw their hats in the air? I always wondered how they went about retrieving them. Turns out they don’t.

And now I am off.

I’ve been watching this Rand Paul story unfold for the past few days, and combined with the Mark Souder news, it mostly serves to remind me of my time as a Hoosier. The Wall Street Journal broke the news gently to its readership, whom you’d think would already be familiar with the type:

Republican candidate Rand Paul’s controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act unsettled GOP leaders this week, but they reflect deeply held iconoclastic beliefs held by some in his party, and many in the tea-party movement, that the U.S. government shook its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago.

Seventy years ago? Visit Indiana, gents! I once heard someone there say, with an expression of delicate pain on his fair brow, that it might have been better for the nation to shake off slavery “naturally,” rather than fight a war over it. In his explanation, the Confederacy would gradually come to its senses, while the invisible hand worked its magic, and little by little, state by state, the south would shed the peculiar institution, and we wouldn’t have had to spill a drop of blood over it. Except for that of the slaves who would have had to stay in bondage, that is.

“So if Mississippi, say, hung on until 1950 or so, that would have been OK?” I asked, wondering for the millionth time what happened to the nice, reasonable Republicans of my youth. Yes, it would be OK. In the long run.

I don’t mean to pick on Indiana. It’s just where I was at the time. I’m sure there are Randites everywhere in this great country. But now they’ve been dragged into the spotlight, and it’s a little unsettling for them.

Libertarians — or constitutional conservatives, or whatever Paul and his ilk are calling themselves these days — aren’t accustomed to this much attention. Generally, they confine their pontificating to blog comment sections, the dinner table and maybe the men’s grille at the country club, where they’re not going to face much opposition. Libertarianism isn’t so much a party as it is a philosophy, and being one means never having to say “so help me God” on swearing-in day, so you’re free to have any old crazy opinion you want. Let’s legalize all drugs! Let’s open the national parks to logging and mining! Let’s do away with zoning! Let’s carry guns everywhere!

Some of these ideas aren’t completely whack. Take the drug thing. I’m certainly in favor of calling off the war on (some) drugs and treating abuse and addiction as a public-health problem, rather than one for law enforcement. But ask a libertarian what we’re going to do with all the junkies, more of which will surely be created when there is no legal sanction whatsoever for using everything from marijuana to heroin, and they wave their hands. Details, details. Not their problem.

I’ve said in the past that being a Libertarian always strikes me as a political version of one of those role-playing games where your capabilities are determined by a dice roll — OK, I’m 10 feet tall, can fly and shoot fireballs out of my fingertips, but I’m allergic to water. Limit the government to police work, military and a few other functions, and nothing bad happens (to them), only good, wonderful, free-market things.

The NYT, Sunday, lays out the problem in a nutshell:

But Mr. Paul’s position is complicated. He has emerged as the politician most closely identified with the Tea Party movement. Its adherents are drawn to him because he has come forward as a kind of libertarian originalist, unbending in his anti-government stance. The farther he retreats from ideological purity, the more he resembles other, less attractive politicians.

In this sense, Mr. Paul’s quandary reflects the position of the Tea Partiers, whose antipathy to government, rooted in populist impatience with the major parties, implies a repudiation of politics and its capacity to effect meaningful change.

Sooner or later, everyone with strongly held opinions about public policy comes up on the hard, unbending truth about how we make it in this country, i.e., politics: It’s always a matter of compromise, of negotiation. The clear, pure air of theory belongs in universities, editorial-board meetings and the men’s grille at the country club, where you can mourn Lester Maddox to your heart’s content.

That NYT story is pretty good. Recommended.

Meanwhile, back in Indiana, Souder the Goober gave his exclusive farewell interview, to the Journal Gazette. It’s an instructive look at the way some people interact with their personal God:

“Subconsciously, was I wanting to get caught? Or was God so frustrated with me he said, ‘I’ve had it. You’re so stupid here I’m going to, in effect, out you.’

“It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. Because ultimately maybe I was getting – and she was getting – so reckless that it was a way for God to say, ‘You need to get your marriages back together. You need to get your lives straightened out.’ Maybe it was also guilt.

“Or maybe it was just an accident because we were really stupid, and God used it. But at the end of the day, if we get through all this, we’ll be better for having gotten caught.”

This is one reason I found it pretty easy to leave God behind. The Almighty just talks to these folks differently than he ever talked to me. (Or to Jesus, for that matter. As I recall my Scripture, the response to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was silence.) Such a micromanager, this God, messing with people’s car batteries and sending DNR officers to interrupt makeout sessions in state parks.

Ah. Well, it’s all over now, baby blue. Back to civilian life with him, and off to my Monday chore-a-whirl for me. Have a good one y’selves, all.

A Cobb salad of flowers, today. This is what backs traffic up down the freeway ramps — cheap annuals.