I’m late getting to this, but Dahlia Lithwick had a typically excellent column a few days back, about so-called “conscience clauses” — all the rage among some lawmakers, who want to exempt certain individuals from performing parts of their job they find morally objectionable:

The problem isn’t conscience clause legislation so much as what we might call conscience creep: a slow but systematic effort to use religious conscience claims to sidestep laws that should apply to everyone. Recalibrating who can express a right of conscience (i.e do corporations have a conscience?) and what the limits of that conscience might be, may well be the next front in the religious liberty wars being waged in courts around the country.

I think most reasonable people would not require, for example, a doctor who is opposed to abortion to perform them. But speaking just as a private individual, if some snot-nosed pharmacist told me I couldn’t have my birth-control pills because he wanted to stay in the Pope’s good graces? I’d be coming across the counter. Lithwick:

But it hasn’t stopped at health care providers, and the list of objectors now encompasses pharmacists and ambulance drivers, cashiers in supermarkets and business owners who object to same-sex marriage. Last year, for instance, a prison guard withheld an abortion pill from a prisoner who’d been raped on the grounds that it violated her personal religious beliefs. And it hasn’t stopped at abortion, birth control, or sterilization, but may include activities like counseling rape victims or teaching AIDS patients about clean needles.

Have we always been such prickly little shits, or is this something new? We’ve had conscientious objectors, of course, but that was about war, not contraception. And may I just say, I don’t think I’m being a prickly little shit when I ask, where does it end? Does an employer’s, or a pharmacist’s, or a prison guard’s conscience allow them to paw through the rest of my prescriptions, or records, or whatever for something else that might be offensive?

Because that would be offensive.

Jeez, I’m tired, and I have a big day today, so let’s go blogging:

I’m on record as hating the “open letter” trope, but this Sally Jenkins column about the Washington Redskins is pretty good. Bonus: Rick Reilly’s father-in-law says: Get your ears checked, sonny boy.

A friend of mine used to work in a bar. Every so often a guy would come in with a Labrador retriever on a leash. The guy wore sunglasses all the time, and would drink quietly while his “seeing-eye dog” laid quietly at his feet. Everyone liked the dog, so no one said anything, but everyone knew it was bullshit. It’s a trend! Fake service dogs are a growing problem, at least according to the AP. The story’s a little thin on evidence, but there you go.

Finally, the former Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, got a whopping 28-year prison sentence Thursday. You can read about it any number of places, and I encourage you to do so.

Me, I’m starting my weekend.

No one ever guarantees anyone that a career they enter at 22 or so will be the same 20, 30 or 40 years later. When I went to J-school, it was soon enough after Watergate that half my classmates were intent on toppling a government before their 30th birthday. “I want to ferret out crooks,” a very talented colleague told me when we were both young and wet behind the ears.

He took a buyout a few years back. Not sure what he’s doing now.

Me, I like to think I’m adaptable. And so, in the great tradition of 13 reasons Washington is failing, and seven habits of highly ineffective political parties, let’s get listicle!

XX reasons Nance is blogging instead of raking leaves (I’ll fill in the number part later)

Because crazed truckers are descending upon the nation’s capital, and when I say crazy, I ain’t whistlin’ Dixie, sister. One of its co-organizers — and I’ll grant you, the connections get a bit tenuous here — is said to believe Osama bin Laden is alive and living in the White House and guess what name he’s known by now? Not Larry the Kitchen Custodian, for starters.

Because yesterday I went on a bike ride after work and picked up a buddy. Guy pulled up to pass and struck up a conversation. Turned out we were heading out for about the same place, so we rode together. He went fast, which made me go faster than I’d intended, and it felt pretty good. The conversation ranged from this to that, and ended, as it inevitably must, on Miley Cyrus. I have decided that from now on, I will defend her to all comers. I am now on Team Miley. Team Twerk. Team Tongue. Yeah, girl! You go ratchet, you! (I have no idea what that last part means. I do know her current look is something called ratchet, and it comes from African-American culture. Of course.) Also, I’m with T-Lo: I sort of like the white ensemble she’s thrown together in this two-shot critique, and her hair is downright cute.

Because this is a pretty good story, Detroit-centric, but it surely applies to parts of your town, too. You know how you’ll be traveling through a real ghetto neighborhood and suddenly come across one little house that is kept in apple-pie order?

When (Dorothy) Wafer moved to the east side in 1975, there were only well-maintained homes, she said. Today, a dozen buildings on her street are empty, including the elementary school that her three girls attended. The Detroit Future City report, a master plan for reconfiguration created by political and business leaders, designates the area for an alternative use.

Still, her mother back home in northern Louisiana’s Claiborne Parish instilled the importance of keeping her property nice, she said. The family, including Wafer’s domestic-servant mother, construction-worker father and nine siblings lived in a one-story home surrounded by cotton fields. Wafer remembers that besides corn, greens, sweet potatoes and watermelons, her mother also took time to plant petunias.

Bless Dorothy Wafer’s heart. And I don’t mean that in the southern sense.

Because I think I owe Antonin Scalia an apology. There is a devil, he’s real, and his name is Ryan Murphy, creator of “American Horror Story:”

Coven opens in 1834 New Orleans, with a vicious Kathy Bates playing Madame LaLaurie, a scheming society woman who delights in dreaming up new ways to torture her slaves. Early on, she daubs blood, sourced from human pancreas, on her face like Noxzema. In her attic, she gruesomely tortures men she keeps in cages: The camera shows us a man whose face is all but peeled off, another whose mouth has been sewed around a mouthful of excrement, and another who’s been made into a minotaur.

Because I remember Ohio, and apparently it’s not the current version.

Because I had a lousy Pilates class today.

Because it’s time to eat. Have a good Thursday, all.

I think that’s seven reasons, right?

Prompted by the advent of cooler weather and a desire not to have to suit up for a Michigan winter night every time the dog needs her bedtime pee, Alan and I have embarked upon a long-discussed back yard renovation project. It’s modest, really, but as usual, it’s not cheap.

So we’ve applied for a home equity line of credit. I remember when banks were giving these away like logo keychains, but evidently things have changed. This is good — anything to keep banks a little more sober — but honestly, once I got the letters informing us of our credit rating I thought we’d get the money within a couple of days. We’re both above 800! Platinum level, they call that.

Instead, it’s been phone calls and send this document, no, send that document and today was the worst — an email telling us our loan status had been updated, without explaining was it was and what it is now, concluding with this appalling sentence:

If needed, we will be contacting you shortly to collect any additional information that may be required to fully decision your loan request.

Fully decision our loan request, yes. I can’t stand it. Or rather, I am lacking tolerate for this.

Really good piece by Ezra Klein today, arranged BuzzFeed style: The 13 reasons Washington is failing. It’s stuff you think you know (Polarized media makes it easier for politicians and voters to fool themselves) and stuff you probably haven’t thought of (Earmarks are gone) and, well, 11 others. Best single line:

The problem with living in an age when you can choose your own media isn’t just that it’s easier to surround yourself with people who agree with you. It’s that it’s easier to surround yourself with people who, purposefully or not, mislead you.

I know I don’t get much response when I post items about the news media, but this one struck me today, a complaint by a TV producer about aggregating websites — some of which, like the Daily Mail, don’t really own up to being one — outright stealing original stories and repackaging them as their own, sometimes with errors inserted:

Saturday, a “reporter” from thinkprogress.org cribbed from several stories about of an Alaska Supreme Court case with no explicit attribution for any of his news sources. He also introduced several factual errors, and appears to have done virtually no firsthand reporting. The most egregious copying was of a bulleted list of three questions on which the case hinges without quotes.

I see, via social media, how often people post stories from sites like these. That’s not to say they’re all crap, but please, if you do: Consider the source.

I’m watching a great “Frontline” as I write this, about the head-trauma scandal in pro football. Watch it if you can, and certainly if you have a child who plays football. (Suggest he try golf instead.)

How can it possibly be only Wednesday? It feels like next Tuesday.

As the shutdown settles in, I’m wondering if we’ll ever see the other side. The government will roar back to life in time, but will we ever like one another again? When did the worst insult you could fling at someone morph from “go fuck yourself” to “go die in a fire”?

Yes, I’m bummed about this. I read the interview with Newt Gingrich in Salon and was so appalled, I wondered if it might have been a piece of performance art:

You called “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” “the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” Do you think events since then have proven that correct?

I think that the — what I was citing was a very interesting book, which became a movie, which I think does give you some sense of the origins of some of, of his values. I mean, go back and read his Cairo speech, and look at reality, and ask yourself how could somebody have been that wrong. And I think it’s because he actually believed the mythology of the left.

And which values are those?

Well, that everybody’s ultimately nice, that everybody wants to have a democracy, that we can really all get along easily, that the U.S. has to be very cautious and restrained because, after all, all these nice people mean well.

And how is that related to “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior”?

Look, I would describe – well, go read the book! I was making a passing comment about a book which I found useful, and which described basically an academic belief system. Now since you know, you can decide if you agree with it or disagree with it, but that’s what it was based on.

And that view, do you think that view has been vindicated over the past year?

Well, OK, I’m trying to suggest to you, first of all, I have no idea. I don’t spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing the president. I’m not going to spend a lot of time with you to set up some kind of absurdity. The fact is, I was citing a particular book I thought was helpful. You might want to read that book and decide if it’s helpful.

God, what a human toadstool that man is. The book he’s referring to is, of course, that Dinesh D’Souza piece of crap. It was, indeed, made into a movie. I was following a Facebook thread about it before the election. One enthusiastic viewer’s rave was tempered by a dark cloud — how, he wondered, could we get younger people to see it? All the heads he’d seen in the theater were bald or gray.

Here’s a day-brightener: I was investigating my fitness app for new activities to track, after learning that my morning dog walk is a full mile. (No wonder Wendy is growing so fit and sassy.) What else can I obsessively measure, I wondered, scrolling through the full list. Cricket, fencing, handball, and what’s this? “Intimacy.” I wondered about calories burned, so I entered a 15-minute session: 126. Hmm. It doesn’t even ask who’s on top or specify what the activity is. I bet Callista Gingrich burns that many just prepping for intimacy with her husband, what with having to wrestle herself into that hazmat suit and all.

God, I’m scattered. Let’s go to the links:

Eminem may be a recovering drug addict and about as far from Ward Cleaver as you can get, father-wise, but his little girl was named homecoming queen last weekend at her (public, but yes, suburban) high school.

A sharply written blog post at Esquire.com compares the public discussion over revenge-porn legislation to concerns over head trauma in the NFL:

In other words, the thinking on both issues combines to a riff on the old canard: if you didn’t want to get your brain raped, you shouldn’t have gone out dressed in such a revealing football helmet. …Kids might understand how to better say no if we we weren’t whispering yes into their ears the whole time. As if it couldn’t get any more hypocritical than that, our appetite for pornographic images, and the choreographed pornography of bone-shivering on-field hits is as big as its ever been. We’ve set up the standards by which young men and women are expected to perform, and then when they come out the other end of the gauntlet wondering whether or not they may have made an unwise choice or two along the way, we tell them it’s their own fault for giving us what we asked them for.

Further down on the same page:

Finally, what is there to say about the Antonin Scalia interview in New York magazine? He believes in the Devil:

Can we talk about your drafting process—

[Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.

You do?

Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

Memo to the justice: I was raised by Catholics who didn’t believe that nonsense. So speak for yourself. Also, he’s very selective in his news consumption:

What’s your media diet? Where do you get your news?

Well, we get newspapers in the morning.

“We” meaning the justices?

No! Maureen and I.

Oh, you and your wife …

I usually skim them. We just get The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. We used to get the Washington Post, but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.

Not NPR?

Sometimes NPR. But not usually.

Talk guys?

Talk guys, usually.

Do you have a favorite?

You know who my favorite is? My good friend Bill Bennett. He’s off the air by the time I’m driving in, but I listen to him sometimes when I’m shaving. He has a wonderful talk show. It’s very thoughtful. He has good callers. I think they keep off stupid people.

That’s comforting. One of the most powerful men on the planet listens to Bill “Double Down” Bennett. I think I’m going to bed.

Is Mercury retrograde? (Answer: No.) Something else must explain why I spent the weekend going from one sweaty-head interval to the next, slept badly, felt like I worked the whole damn time and still managed to slip on the sidewalk while walking the dog. The sidewalk in question was coated with a thin layer of mud, thanks to a recent sprinkler installation. No one in my neighborhood drags a sprinkler around the yard anymore; in-ground automatic watering systems are the only thing for a striver to have.

(The Derringers, with their laissez-faire attitude toward lawn care in general, are the Problem House of the ‘hood. Both of us have done too much environmental reporting to give a fat rat’s ass about lawns.)

In my neighbor’s case, the night after the old lawn was peeled off and taken away and before the new one was installed, enough rain fell to wash a fair amount of topsoil onto the sidewalk. I hit it in the murky moments of dawn yesterday and went sprawling. The only good thing to report is a) my injuries were limited to a scrape or two; and b) the string of curses I unleashed woke the family dog, who barked loudly and, I devoutly hope, roused the whole household.

I mean, the lawn went in days ago. Someone should have taken the time to wash away the mud.

And while the weather was unseasonably warm, it was accompanied by a certain Gulf of Mexico-ish humidity. Alan spent the weekend tearing up underbrush for a coming fence installation in the back yard, and looked like he was dredging oysters without waders.

In between these toe-curling episodes of excitement, there was a rotisserie chicken and some fine dishes from my Eastern Market foray. Made Alice Waters’ fresh shell-bean gratin and a shitload of brussels sprouts.

There was also homecoming. After freshman year, when we paid too much for a dress that wouldn’t be worn twice, I got a little smarter about the whole thing. Last year we found a $27 special from Forever 21 that wasn’t quite dressy enough on its own. But I was raised by a seamstress, and thought I could improve it immensely with a black satin sash, which I made myself from the best polyester satin I could find at the fabric store. We saved it, and found this year’s dress on ModCloth for a similarly modest sum. Out came the sash again, and I don’t know about you, but I think it works pretty well (this year’s model is the red one; the blue is year one of Project Sash):

You can see I also skimped on hairdressing this year, but so what? They had a great time, and went to a better restaurant beforehand. Some of the homecoming frocks I saw on my Facebook news feed look like ho gear. At least she looks cute and age-appropriate, and take off the sash, add a regular belt and shoes, and it’s a regular old dress again.

And it didn’t cost me $100.

I don’t really have much bloggage today, but if you missed Cooz’ comment late yesterday, you missed something great. Go read.

Never waste a good crisis, smart leaders say. And if necessary, you can always invent one.

A great week ahead, I hope. Let’s try to stay perpendicular to the pavement, eh?

My cell phone rang yesterday. I answered it the way I always do for a number I don’t recognize: “Hello, this is Nancy.”

“Nancy, are you in the Tea Party?” a belligerent male voice demanded.

“Who is calling, please?” I replied.

“It’s a simple question: Are you in the Tea Party,” he repeated, just as belligerent.

I hung up. The phone number was from Wilmington, Del., and the reverse lookup was for someone named Jackson. My cell number isn’t widely known, but it’s out there. Is craziness in the air these days? It must be. Why should only the U.S. Congress be affected?

It turned out the same guy called my colleague in Lansing, who started laughing. Might have been the better response.

I recall a guy who rang the city desk in Columbus one night and started raving about the IRA and the British monarchy. We were just leaving for dinner, and the editor who answered put the receiver down on the desk. We left and when we returned an hour later, the guy was still raving. I hung up the phone on the words “right down the queen’s chimney,” followed by a cackle.

It was a craptastic day all around. As I hinted yesterday, our health insurance in the new year is skyrocketing. Which means we’ll be moving to my employer’s plan, but that can’t happen until mid-year 2014. Which means it was one of those days I spent figuring expenses we can cut, while simultaneously trying to gather data for a story, but guess what? Any data website run by the federal government is down.

Here’s something you shouldn’t do on a bad day: Read the comments on a story. Take this one, for example. It’s a column by a grad student at Johns Hopkins, explaining all the ways the shutdown is affecting her life. I read it with a sinking heart, knowing the comments on the story would be horrible, as the accepted narrative seems to be that nothing all that bad is happening, and anyone who goes to grad school to study “environmental change and demographic transition theory” must be a twee egghead and all the rest of it.

To be sure, they weren’t that bad, but they were depressing. Don’t read the comments. EVER.

Don’t read stories like this, either:

Many members of an audience of mostly Ole Miss students, including an estimated 20 Ole Miss football players, openly disrespected and disrupted the Ole Miss theater department’s production of “The Laramie Project” Tuesday night at the Meek Auditorium.

Cast members of the play, which is about an openly gay male who was murdered in Laramie County in Wyoming, said members of the audience became so disruptive at times that they struggled completing the play.

It’s just too much of a bummer.

Let’s move on to black comedy. It wasn’t a great day for Indiana congressmen in general. Besides the much-discussed story about Marlin Stutzman, there was this:

Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN), a member of the House Committee on the Budget, was invited to discuss the government shutdown on this morning’s CNN Newsroom, but the congressman seemed far more interested in hitting on the host instead.

After Carol Costello called Rokita out over the “divisive approach” taken by Republicans to arrive at a resolution that benefits them alone, the lawmaker retorted by “mansplaining” the situation to the anchor.

“I don’t know if you have children yet, I’m sure you don’t have grandchildren yet, you look much too young, but we’re fighting for them,” Rokita told Costello. “Carol, do you have any idea how much this law is going to cost?”

There were later comments about Carol’s loveliness. I wonder what Mrs. Rokita thinks of that.

Here’s Charles Pierce on Stutzman.

And now let’s change it up a bit.

Oprah Winfrey is cutting her ties to Chicago. Neil Steinberg bids her farewell:

As much as you liked to float your Chicago street cred when basking in the endless celebrity limelight that trailed you like your own personal sun, it wasn’t as if you were ever really here beyond the confines of your 15,000-square-foot Water Tower Place duplex. Not a lot of Oprah sightings in all those years you did that hall-of-mirrors show of yours. No river of Oprah bucks watering thirsty Chicago charities. More like a trickle.

…Or, in your defense, the public’s gullibility was already there, and you just reflected it. You had your moments. Sure, too many were spent in squealing worship of brand materialism as its basest. But sometimes you rose above: One show, you sent a family from St. Louis to live in Mongolia in yurts. It was interesting.

(I should probably say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I was a guest on Oprah’s show once, nearly 20 years ago, promoting my second book. A four-hour ordeal I remember as a blur of endless waiting punctuated by frantic assistant producers with clipboards lunging past, of fellow guests blinking in wonder at indoor plumbing, of cheap vending machine muffins sweating oil in their plastic wrap, piled in the Green Room by minions of the richest woman after Queen Elizabeth II. Of how flinty, disinterested and queenly in a bad way you were in person. It is not a happy memory).

OID: A shots-fired police raid across from an elementary school. Leads to a change in policy. OK.

And I think that’s it for now. Have a good weekend, all. I think I’ll be firing our cleaning lady. With regret.

A guided discussion for the room today, if you please. (And yes, you can jump in on another topic if you like; I just want to keep this one moving.)

It’s open-enrollment season for benefits at many workplaces, and I’m wondering what’s happening to the cost of your employee-provided health insurance. It’s rising, of course — the cost of insurance hasn’t failed to rise annually in my decades of my work experience — but by how much? And how is it being sold to employees?

Juuuust wondering.

Out late last night again, missed my blogging window, but this was a topic that came up, so that’s why I ask.

Or you can talk about slippers again. I’ll be back tomorrow.

I wish I could get to New York more often. Every six months, say, often enough to have a few favorite places to go to, ideas about hotels. Alas, I am not that person. Enough time passes between visits that the place remakes itself two or three times over.

The last time I visited with Alan and Kate, we stayed on what I called the far west side, i.e., Jersey City. Back then, there were a few hotels, populated mainly by south Asian men who shlepped off to work in the financial district in the morning, in polo shirts and lanyards, on the PATH train. Now those hotels are surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings and a few restaurants, and the area is now called Wall Street West.

We actually stayed in the same hotel — a suite thing, just a couple blocks from the PATH. Manhattan is even more a gated community for tourists and the super-wealthy than ever, with most of the tourists gathered around the World Trade Center site. Seriously. On Saturday, I think English speakers were in the minority, with guided tours going on in about a million other languages. But we were bound for Brooklyn, and ended up in DUMBO, which I’m told stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge, with the O added so it’s not a neighborhood called simply DUMB. Correction: Directly Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Thanks, commenters.

Walked around. Ate meatballs. Went up to Prospect Park. Came back over to Manhattan and strolled the east Village. Talked and walked and talked and walked, until I had a giant blister on one toe, at which point it was back under the river via PATH and a bottle of wine in the suite.

Repeat on Sunday. I bought Kate a CBGB T-shirt, which her government teacher told her was worth extra-credit points. And then home, where after about 48 hours, my feet have finally stopped hurting. Mostly.

But I’m grateful for every chance I get to see the place, although I have to say: Shopping in New York isn’t the thrill it once was. What’s there is outrageously expensive, and what isn’t you can find on the internet. Maybe if I had a few more days to wander. But then I’d need new shoes. Or maybe a wheelchair.

One photo from Dumbo (I’m done with the capitalization):

Yes, what a crazy idea! Come into the tent and type a letter! Wacky.

There is so much good stuff about the shutdown today, I can’t possibly cover it all. But here’s Paul Krugman, and here’s Charles Pierce, and everything else is out there for the finding.

For a chance of pace, how about this? Two idiots scuffle with the police. In the process, a paddleboat — yes, a paddleboat — is used in an escape attempt and capsized. It is difficult to capsize a paddleboat. In fact, i”d think it was nearly impossible, in anything other than extraordinary circumstances. And yet they managed.

Why I will never live in Florida. EVER.

Due to the government shutdown and events beyond my control last night (i.e., television, wine), we’re having an open thread today.

Question to start things off: Is Ted Cruz wearing fake eyelashes?

Back tomorrow.

First things first: As most of you have figured out by now, our connectivity problems continue. It is out of our hands, in large part, but J.C. is sitting in the NN.C control room, which is encased in lead and concrete and located deep beneath the earth in an undisclosed location, working on it. To the extent that he can. Long story short, we hope it will improve soon. If not, we’ll find a new hosting company.

In the meantime, don’t try to resubmit comments! J.C., yesterday: We’re doing a cache thing to help our poor hobbled server and the downside of that is that you may not see your comment show up immediately.

Thanks for hanging in there with us. This site is nothing without you guys.

Because I don’t have much to offer, many days, do I? But here’s this: A movie recommendation, now that it’s out on streaming/DVD — “The Bling Ring,” which we watched over the weekend. (Alan’s a big Sofia Coppola fan.) A light fictionalization of a real story, about how a gang of Los Angeles teens robbed a series of Hollywood stars’ homes, aided and abetted by the internet and the stars’ own carelessness (for the most part, they entered through unlocked doors and windows). They took clothes, jewelry and cash, but mainly seemed interested in stealing as much stardust as possible.

“Is this Herve Leger? I LOVE it!” one says, pawing through Paris Hilton’s closet. “This. Is a Birkin,” says another, helping herself. In a world where luxury brands are shoved in the faces of these vapid teenagers — or all of us — it’s almost a case of can-you-blame-them? Paris Hilton kept the key to her front door under the mat, and had to be informed of the thefts; she had so much stuff, she didn’t notice anything missing. And so this aimless and empty little band drifted from one house to the next — getting tips on their owners’ absences from TMZ and other gossip sites — collecting luxury items and cash and crap. An emptier existence could hardly be imagined, but uncommon? No way. Didn’t we spend some time yesterday batting around those Emmy runway photos? “Who are you wearing?” is a common question. We all know who Herve Leger is.

It’s not a great movie. It’s sort of depressing, especially when you consider how many stories I’ve read about what a clotheshorse Sofia Coppola is, how much she swims in this world she holds in such contempt. But I liked it anyway.

We have some good bloggage today.

Newspapers have stripped away so much of their content in recent years I almost forget how much I enjoy reading a smart critic from time to time. Especially Hank Stuever, writing about a forgettable sitcom that wants to be a nostalgia trip:

You could set your atomic clock by the predictable rhythms of retromania: When I was a boy in the ’70s, we briefly wanted nothing more than to be Fonzie in the ’50s (inasmuch as “Happy Days” struggled to depict the ’50s; in reruns it just looks like the ’70s). Out came the Dippity-Do and switchblade combs.

If only our forebears had possessed the wisdom to outlaw public displays of nostalgia! When I got to college in the mid-’80s, every other dorm room had a Jim Morrison or John Lennon poster on the wall, yet our preoccupation with the ’60s while living in the ’80s is something you never see in today’s films and TV shows that are set in the ’80s. The anachronisms — then and now — require too much nuance and an understanding that the passage of time and accumulation of popular culture is a fluid experience: It’s less like a free-flowing river and more like a dammed-up lake.

Meanwhile, someone explain to me how this bizarre story about a horse biting a man’s penis works: It’s written in English, but the quotes are in (presumably) Tagalog.

Criticizing AIG bonuses is just like being a Nazi. The AIG executives say so. Talk about confirmation bias.

Hump day. Thank ya lord.