Did everyone have a good Easter? I caught a cold, which really frosts an Easter cake served with three inches of snow. So if you came here to be entertained, all I can offer is this: I’ll try not to sneeze on you.

This story is going to get a lot of buzz today, so prepare to weigh in. Dan Barry’s portrait of the virtual runt of a high-school litter is pretty wrenching. Billy Wolfe is the kid whose ass everyone loves to kick, and as bad as his story is, the portrait it paints of a typical American high school is worse. The new technology is galling — the beatdowns of Billy are recorded on cell-phone cameras and then passed around the school — but at the end of this depressing tale, what it really calls to mind is prison. The code of any large population overseen by a much smaller power class will eventually evolve like this, where the most thuggish thugs of the lower class are the real people to fear.

Note how it started:

It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up.

What do we tell kids when they’re in over their heads? “Tell an adult.” And look what happens when they do:

Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School.

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Clueless school administrators can’t stop it? Contemptuous student body reinforces it? Color me astonished. Billy, Billy’s parents, if you know what’s good for you you’ll get out of this hellhole before it turns your boy into a monster. I suggest private tutoring or, at the very least, a very pricey private school, paid for by the public-school administrators who allowed this situation to grow and flourish. Maybe that’ll get ’em fired, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

OK, let’s turn 180 degrees, as befits a head clouded with decongestants.

More proof of my husband’s gay gene: Some years back we upgraded our sleeping platform. Our bedroom furniture was inherited from my grandmother, and the bed was starting to be a problem. It was so noisy you couldn’t roll over from your left side to your right without awakening your partner, and never mind the other thing. Plus, we were ready to make the jump to queen-size. So Alan went in search of something that would please his eye but not require replacement of the two dressers, which are still doing their work just fine. (Plus, I hate matchy-matchy in all things.) He found us something from following an ad in the New Yorker, and it fit the bill just fine.

That was in…? Nineteen and something, so at least eight, nine years ago.

So the “Sex and the City” trailers are out now, and oh my, it looks like Charlotte York finally caught up with the trendsetters:

That’s our bed. (Satin pillows, actresses and child not included.)

“Sex and the City” comes in for a lot of well-deserved abuse, and someday when I’m on a long bike ride I’ll have to decide why it fails to irritate me as much other shows loaded with shameless product placement and unrealistic New York housing options. The writers could be so ham-fisted with it; I still cringe to recall the AOL-plug episode, and the one where Carrie mentions “my new favorite website, Google-dot-com.” Because “Google-dot-com” is what everyone calls Google, right? The many Hermes plugs were totally grating — they squeezed their orange boxes into “The Devil Wears Prada,” too — but I still wear my Hermes scarves. It’s a crime against beauty to leave a Hermes scarf in its box for too long.

I think the thing about “Sex and the City” is, it distracts you with the ridiculous outfits. Once you’ve seen Kim Cattrall in gym clothes with her thong riding six inches above the yoga pants (because there’s nothing that feels good during yoga like a thong), or Cynthia Nixon in her…well, she played a lawyer, so she usually looked OK. And Charlotte was the epitome of good taste, which is why she bought our bed. But Carrie made up for all of them, especially when she ran down the street in a corset, net skirt, seventeen thousand ropes of pearls, stilettos and an Hermes scarf wrapped around her head so that the logo rode over her eyes, and the rest of America gaped and said, “What the fucking fuck?” So you were distracted from the next scene, which was set in the Magnolia bakery. The only Carrie outfit that didn’t make my head spin was the Vivienne Westwood suit she wore for her first day at Vogue. (Says Vogue: “a suit that nobody at Vogue would wear to work (too theatrically chic.)” Well, whatever.

I’m going back to bed. Or to couch. Or somewhere. Be nice to one another.

I once wrote a story about a man who’d staggered, drunk, out of a bar one night and apparently vanished. No one had heard from him, no one had seen his car in any ditches between the bar and his house, he just, poof, disappeared.

Well, of course he only disappeared in the sense that no one could see him. A week or so after my story ran, the police fished his car, and his body, out of a farm pond on his route home. He’d driven off the road and into eternity, another of the less-celebrated residents of Davy Jones’ locker. (Maybe, in this case, it should be Farmer Jones’ locker.)

His was an easy case for the crack missing-persons team in that jurisdiction, and it’s what I thought of when I read (HT: FWOb) about how divers went into some retention ponds on Indianapolis’ north side after a report that a car had been dumped there, and found…five. Most had been there “for a long time,” the Indy Star reported.

I don’t get it. When our plane passed over Pearl Harbor en route to landing in Hawaii a few years back, the pilot told us to look down at the wreck of the USS Arizona, still leaking a streak of diesel fuel half a century after Dec. 7, 1941. Granted a car isn’t a battleship, but wouldn’t you expect there’d be some surface evidence of a dumped car in a retention pond? And if not, if they keep their secrets that well, I wonder why Hollywood always shows us the killer digging the shallow grave by lantern light, when it would be so much easier to wire a couple cement blocks to the corpse and roll it out past the drop-off? Note to self: Never wonder again what the bluegill might be feeding on in those things.

Friends, that should give you an idea of the sort of conversation-starters I have today. Maybe you guys can carry the weight. Here’s a picture by Brian Stouder, snapped in the wild night before last:

And here’s little Brianette Jr., which only serves to remind me that in Michigan, the Easter egg hunt is likely to be cancelled for snow:

And here’s some bloggage:

There simply has to be more to this story than we’re getting:

It was incorrectly reported in Tuesday’s Tribune Chronicle that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton answered questions from voters in a local congressman’s office.

Reporter John Goodall, who was assigned to the story, spoke by telephone with Hillary Wicai Viers, who is a communications director in U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson’s staff. According to the reporter, when Viers answered the phone with ‘‘This is Hillary,’’ he believed he was speaking with the Democratic presidential candidate, who had made several previous visits to the Mahoning Valley.

Goodall’s next assignment: Interview Santa Claus.

A new MacBook Air costs $1,800. It’s nice to know Charlie Rose can think fast. And has his priorities straight.

What if they gave haircuts at Hooters? Why, then it would be Lady Jane’s Haircuts for Men. They advertise heavily on local TV, and I gotta admit — the ads are pretty funny.

Finally, I try to keep the aw-isn’t-my-kid-cute stories to a bare minimum here, but indulge me this one: Last night at dinner, Kate plucked an onion ring out of the pile, a very small one. She slipped it over her index finger, held it up and said, “Look, a literal onion ring.” Then she ate it. Please remember this 11-year-old the next time you’re watching your local news and a highly paid, college-educated TV reporter says, “The work is literally back-breaking.” If my 11-year-old can grasp the meaning of the word, so can, and should, he.

Now I’m thinking about onion rings, with the start of spring already upon us. Ah, well, it won’t be bathing-suit season for a good long time here, will it?

Off for my 60,000-mile service. The car, not me. I have way more miles.

Letters….we get letters:

Why is it that whenever there is something in the local media focusing on the Democratic party, the local media always gets “reaction” from Steve Shine? queries our correspondent. Steve Shine is the chairman of the Allen County GOP in our former place of residence, and he managed to pop up in pretty much every story about Bill Clinton’s campaign stop in Fort Wayne yesterday. She continues:

It’s not even in cases where they need some kind of “balance.” Two I remember are the changing of the party chair, and just last night, when Bill Clinton visited. In fact, the JG article doesn’t talk to anyone from the local Democratic party, but DID have several quotes from Shine.

There are several answers, which run the gamut from “Steve Shine is a shameless publicity hound” to “Fort Wayne editors live in mortal fear of having anyone complain to them over the phone,” but I think it boils down to why those kids jump up and down behind reporters doing live standups — because he can. My favorite was the sign he helpfully posed next to, proclaiming Fort Wayne to be “McCain Country.” A lie, that. Fort Wayne is Huckabee Country if it’s anything, although Huckabee might be a little too liberal for those good people. But the lesson is clear: Put a plateful of food in front of Fort Wayne news media, and they almost always eat it up.

Meanwhile, our own Brian Stouder attended the speech. Maybe he’d like to file a NN.C exclusive in the comments.

Friends, I’m sorry to say this, but I am one worn-out kitty today. Got a million things to do, and the morning has half slipped away already. Just a couple of things before I go:

I see the comments in the previous post have veered into a discussion of 19th-century men’s underwear, of all things. Before it goes any further, participants are commanded to read “A brief history of pants” from the Independent, which should answer all your questions.

I thought Obama’s speech yesterday — which I read later, and saw video excerpts of — was outstanding. Discuss.

Back later, if the caffeine ever kicks in. Until then, play nice.

UPDATE: Oh, for God’s sake. Just read the News-Sentinel’s Clinton coverage. The sidebar is about what the last-minute visit cost the city. There’s a reference to “a costly whirlwind of preparation” to get extra security, etc., arranged on the fly. The figure comes in paragraph five: “as much as $3,000.” I think it costs that much to gas up the SUVs in Kwame Kirkpatrick’s security detail.

As astute trackers of the Nightstand can see, I started on Ms. Lippman’s latest over the weekend. Mystery novels go too fast; I’m restricting myself to a chapter or two a day. “Another Thing to Fall” is part of her Tess Monaghan series, and features the broad-shouldered P.I. on the set of a television show shot in Baltimore.

Huh, you’re thinking.

“Mann of Steel,” the fictional show, isn’t “The Wire,” which we all know was exec-produced by Mr. Laura Lippman, but it started me thinking about how writers work, especially creative writers. Her last book, which we are contractually obligated to refer to as “the New York Times bestseller, ‘What the Dead Know,'” had its roots in a remembered event from Lippman’s adolescence, about the disappearance of two sisters from a local shopping mall in the ’70s. During that book tour, I heard an interview with her where the questioner wanted to know about that story and its relationship to the finished novel.

I can’t quote Laura directly, but she made a distinction between “based on” and “inspired by,” and whether the interviewer swallowed it or not, I can’t recall, but anyone who writes knows exactly what she was talking about. The roman a clef is a time-honored literary form, and is excellent as a tool of revenge. (“Heartburn,” besides having good recipes, is responsible for my twin labels on Carl Bernstein. That is, “partly responsible for ridding Washington of Richard Nixon” and “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.” And then there’s “The Wire,” season five.) But only a writer utterly lacking in imagination can get away with straight fact-to-fiction, for a lot of reasons. You can never get your endings to fit, for one, as in real life the bad guys tend to prosper and not fall in a hail of bullets in the last five pages. Dammit. My experience with fiction is very limited — one screenplay, some abortive stories here and there — but the wonderful thing about it is, it’s a conjurer’s trick. You create your characters out of clay, breathe over them and make them live, and then they turn around, kick you in the kneecap, and start doing what they want. You can try to stop them, but doing so will retard your story. Your responsibility, as a writer, is to tell their story, and they will tell you what it is. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it; it’s the closest your average modern person will ever get to voodoo possession.

I recognize a lot of the details of “Mann of Steel,” Lippman’s fictional TV show, from journalism I’ve read about “The Wire” — the sets in the unglamorous building in the unglamorous neighborhood, the producer who keeps the ship afloat by making sure no one spends like it’s Hollywood, a few other things. But it’s her own creation. It’s inspired by, not based on.

When I was at the University of Michigan on sabbatical, I briefly took a TV-writing class before dropping it out of boredom. Whereas, in screenwriting class the semester before, we’d been encouraged to dream big, to wrestle with big themes and tell big stories, the TV-writing teacher suggested we all get a newspaper subscription and scan the police news for stories we could rip off. Meh. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn the professor was a veteran of the “Law & Order” writers’ room.

I mention this just as a reminder, should any of my abortive stories ever find new life. Except for the dog. Every dog I will ever write will always be the Sprigman. His personality is too strong to change.

(What happened to “Law & Order” besides too much success? Sometimes I catch some of those early-season episodes like “The Troubles” and just shake my head. This was great TV, once. But not for a long time.)

So, bloggage on a dreary, rainy day that will nevertheless rise above 40 degrees, qualifying it as “beautiful” for this time of year:

I don’t always follow the Fug Girls’ thinking on some of their targets, but they are so, so right about Heather Mills no-longer-McCartney’s divorce-court ensemble. If I had that body, and that bank account, and needed to wear pants most days, you’d never catch me in anything but Armani. In fact, I even know which Armani — a duplicate of the pantsuit Darryl Hannah wore in her final scene in “Kill Bill, Vol. 2,” right down to the blouse. I’d have about a dozen in three or four basic neutrals, and I’d wear one every day and I’d always look awesome.

If John McCain can keep a lunatic like Rod Parsley in his pocket, I’d call Barack Obama’s crazy minister even-Steven.

Calling fellow Bobcats: All remains mellow at our alma mater. Thanks to Basset for sending the story of two kids whose heat lamp started a dorm fire:

Though the two students responsible for fire and widespread flooding in Bromley Hall last week had marijuana and drug paraphernalia in their room, they will not be charged said Lt. Steve Noftz of the Ohio University Police Department. “It was a pretty overwhelming day, five floors of people concerned with property loss, and they’re concerned with liability,” Noftz said. “I think someone would say ‘good lord, is all you can think of to throw a criminal charge on top of that?’”

Totally.

OK. Morning phone conference, followed by the gym, followed by another afternoon off for our fifth-grader-in-residence. Which means short shrift for you guys today.

Our Saturday-night plans changed due to illness, so we were able to finally see “There Will Be Blood” in the last days of its theatrical run here. With all due respect to the lemon cheesecake our would-be hostess was stuck with after being felled by the flu, I don’t think it could have possibly been as good as the movie.

[Aside to the hostess, if she’s reading: “You…eat…our…CHEESECAKE! YOU EAT IT UP!”]

If you’ve been waiting for the DVD and have a chance to still see it in a proper theater, don’t wait. Like “No Country For Old Men,” this is a lovely movie, and unless you have an excellent home-theater setup, it’s going to lose something in translation. About half of it seems to take place in firelight, and dark shadows don’t translate well to TV screens — they get all pixelated. But how it looks isn’t even half of it.

It’s a little familiar; Daniel Day-Lewis gave a version of this performance in “Gangs of New York,” right down to the mustache — loud, physical, over-the-top, bloodthirsty. His voice alone is terrifying, and his face is the perfect vessel for it; his crooked nose suggests a past you’d rather not know about, and his gaze is the one they’re talking about when people say “he stared daggers.” There are many long, long shots of Day-Lewis in extreme close-up, and you don’t have to know much about film acting to be impressed. When the shot is that tight, the subject can barely move without leaving the frame, so the actor has to sell the scene with about 10 square inches of face. (Needless to say, Day-Lewis does not mug.) The film’s leisurely revelation of its subject (Daniel Plainview, turn-of-the-century California oilman) still never makes its 158-minute running time feel too long — I was actually surprised when the credits rolled, and not because the ending is unorthodox; I just wanted it to go on a little longer.

I probably shouldn’t say more. The smartest thing I did with regard to this movie was not read anything about it beforehand, and if it were possible to do that with movies in general, I would. (If you, like me, enjoy gaping at photos of Viggo Mortensen and George Clooney, it’s hard to avoid skimming the copy, too.) But if you’ll indulge me a little more, a couple observations:

* Since I so recently visited the Ford House, I have early-20th-century plutocrats on the brain, and I was struck by the simple truth we find so easy to ignore — how often vast fortunes are made in filth and fraud and chicanery, and how quickly they go through the moral laundry of endowed chairs, hospital wings and impressionist oils donated to museums. Plainview scratches in the earth for wealth for years (his nails are filthy every time we see them) and when he finally finds it, it literally explodes in a tower of fire; it’s as though he conjured Satan himself. And we know the sort of deal that guy makes for his favors.

* I love the Coen brothers and always will, but Paul Thomas Anderson deserved the directing Oscar for this. He pulled off a much riskier, high-wire act of a movie, and did so beautifully. Maybe not a robbery, but a heartbreaker. (Another excellent take, with very mild spoilers: Roy’s.)

* Fun fact you probably know but just in case you don’t: Anderson is Ghoulardi’s son.

In other news at this hour, I talked to Mark the Shark about last week’s turnip bomb scare. Mark can tell a good story, but like a lot of people with specialized knowledge, he doesn’t know how to edit. I learned far more than I needed to know about the problems that can arise when a real-estate deal goes sour, but I also learned what I suspected from the beginning: No one seriously thought this thing was a bomb, but no one could definitively say it wasn’t, which made it a good training opportunity, and battle stations were never called off. Police lobby very hard to get all these toys — the little robot, the Klaatu suit — and if they don’t use them once in a while, they get rusty. It was a good day for a drill.

But today? Today, my friends, is a good day to go back to bed. Bear Stearns is leading us into a depression, and last night’s news-farming brought up this show-stopper, from a NYT report on the Food & Drug Administration:

The Institute of Medicine, the Government Accountability Office and the F.D.A.’s own Science Board have all issued reports saying poor management and scientific inadequacies make the agency incapable of protecting the country against unsafe drugs, medical devices and food.

How comforting! Either back to bed, or into battle. You choose.

You can live in a place a long time before you really get to know it. So it was that it took me three years to get to the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, as chaperone on a Girl Scout field trip. It’s a lovely house, a piece of local history; the Fords were generous people. We all bow in their general direction. Let us stipulate that up front, because there’s something about drooling over rich people — and that’s the response encouraged by the tour — that bugs me. Many of the home’s stellar details were plucked from the rubble of English country houses falling to neglect and reversed circumstances — the six-inch-wide oak floorboards from here, the stained-glass medallions on the windows from there. Maybe in another 200 years they’ll be in some rich man’s house in China or India. The great wheel turns.

One doesn’t feel encouraged to say these things out loud. In Edsel’s office there’s a photograph of him with his dad, Henry, and Edward, Prince of Wales. That was a real meeting of titans — two fortunate princes of lucky birth and one man who made his own fortune. What were they talking about? The Jewish Problem? Henry and Edward were on-the-record anti-Semites, and some accounts say Edsel was the one who got his old man to tone things down, at least for the sake of business. These things don’t come up on the tour; you are invited to exclaim over the woodwork. Ah, well. It’s worth an exclamation or three.

Here’s something interesting I learned: Edsel commuted to his job in Dearborn in true style — by water. Google won’t let me alter the route off the actual pavement, so you’ll have to use your imagination. Here’s how he would have gone via asphalt today:

View Larger Map

Now imagine a stylish man in a mahogany speedboat, pulling away from his backyard dock and going south on Lake St. Clair, into the Detroit River, taking a right at the Rouge River and tying up at dad’s place, or at least someplace where the motoring leg to the office would be only a short hop. It was 28 miles by water, the guide said; in that pre-freeway era, it was a 2.5-hour surface-street commute. Edsel liked the wind in his face, I guess. Can’t blame him.

Quick bloggage, because today is Organize the Tax Records Day:

Today’s NYT profile is the most I’ve yet read about Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, aka Barack Obama’s mother. Worth reading if only as an interesting counterpoint to the old argument that only children raised in stable, two-parent homes grow up to amount to anything. Soetoro’s life was a whirl of marriage, divorce, children by different fathers, relocation across continents and heart-following work, and it may yet turn out that she raised the next president of the United States. A fascinating portrait.

The story ends with an image of Soetoro’s children scattering her ashes in the Pacific Ocean off Oahu, which reminded me of Jon Carroll’s column about doing the same thing when his mother died. Through the miracle of the Google, we can enjoy it again. Bonus not-very-fun fact: Jon Carroll’s mother was adopted into “a wealthy Grosse Pointe family,” and later disinherited from it after her marriage to a poor Irish Catholic. Another useful lesson about the good old days, maybe.

Yesterday we had a parent-teacher conference in which the teacher encouraged us to help our kid increase her vocabulary. (Please, no jokes.) I’m going to require daily 10-minute sessions on Free Rice. (And yes, I know I’m only the latest person in a very long line to tell you about Free Rice. Humor me.)

You can’t legislate morality, but you sure can tax it. Unfortunately, morality has a way of evading taxes. A look at the the fallout from Michigan’s $2/pack cigarette tax, in today’s Freep. My friend Frank, the doctor, says high cigarette prices are the most effective discourager of young people taking up smoking, so I’m not unsympathetic. But you really can’t blame people for making a quick hop over to Indiana to pick up cheap smokes, either.

The baby polar bear picture of the day is giving me a new time-waster (because surely I need another one of those): internet translation. When the daily picture showed little Flocke gnawing on her keeper’s back, it read:

Milch, Hundefutter, Kalbsknochen – alles lecker, aber nichts geht über einen saftigen Pflegerrücken.

Which, translated, means:

Milk, dog fodder, calf bone – all lecker, but nothing goes over a juicy male nurse back.

Crude, but enough to get the gist. “Hundefutter” = dog food. German is funny.

That is all for me today, friends. Enjoy the start of Green Beer Weekend.

Anyone still have their dad’s old copies of the Travis McGee novels lying around? If so, you should take down “Nightmare in Pink” and give it another read. There’s a long passage about two-thirds in, where Travis tries to penetrate a rich man’s perimeter by booking a prostitute from the same high-end service the man uses. There’s an explanation of how the service works, how the customers are protected and the girls shielded from the police that I think a certain former U.S. governor would recognize. It masquerades as a showbiz talent agency, of course. Travis asks about the rates, and the madam/booker tells him:

“Most are at two hundred and two-fifty. We have several at three hundred, a few at four hundred, and two at five hundred. But it varies, according to the size and quality of our list at any given time. There have been some at a thousand, but not recently.”

“What makes it worth five hundred, Mrs. Smith?”

Her expression told me she thought it a vulgar question. “Those are girls who are very well-known due to television work usually. Some accounts prefer to be seen with girls who will be recognized in public. Generally they don’t stay on our list long.” Her smile was quite suddenly and surprisingly vicious. “They either go up, or they go down.”

Keep in mind this book was written in 1964. Factor in inflation, and I’d say we’re talking Spitzer’s girls. Later, Travis meets the one he chose, Rossa, in a cocktail lounge. She’s beautiful, smart, perfectly groomed:

She had no whore look or whore manner that I could detect. But there was a curious inadequacy about our easy conversation. We both knew there was an envelope of money in one of my pockets, and it would end up in her purse. This was a situation I had never been in before. It took me a long time to analyze it. Finally I realized that we could generate no particular tension between us because the result was preordained. She was a stately and beautiful girl, fashionable and bright, with shining eyes and a good mouth. But there was no spice of pursuit. A doe which runs up and stares down the gun barrel is not a sporting venture.

…At one point I glanced up quickly and surprised a different expression in her eyes — an absolute coldness, a bleak and total indifference which was gone the instant I saw it. And that, I thought, was the whore’s look and the whore’s secret, that monumental unconcern which insulated her.

I grow a little weary of the latter-day feminist upgrade from prostitute to “sex worker.” I guess, if you were the kind of girl raised in a house where your mom’s boyfriend ran his grubby hands all over you and you figure out a way to make it work for you, that’s a lemonade-from-lemons deal, but let’s not dress it up too much in women’s-studies b.s., OK? Ashley Alexandra “I am not a monster” Dupré may not be the most odious player in this whole affair, but she’s hardly an innocent, either.

I found this kind of pathetic:

Her MySpace biography says she started singing professionally after a musician she was living with heard her singing the Aretha Franklin hit “Respect” in the shower and burst into the bathroom with his lead guitarist.

And then what? They signed her with Interscope, or they had a three-way? She should have insisted on getting her propers when he got home, instead.

Every so often I open a newspaper and read a long, searching, new journalism-wannabe profile of a sex worker, usually a stripper. (They’re easier to find than actual prostitutes.) It’s almost always complimentary and respectful, and always liberally illustrated, because if there’s one place you don’t have to ask a photographer to do a thorough job, it’s a strip club. When I was a very young reporter, a photog approached me with the pictures he’d been taking at a down-at-the-heels club on High Street called the Garden Burlesque. He wanted me to write the story, and talked about the gems he’d found there — this girl was in college, and this one was an entrepreneur, and they were all wonderful, wonderful people who were happy to tell their stories. So I agreed to go with him one day and meet everyone.

The college student was a slack-jawed moron who said she was thinking about maybe enrolling at a local secretarial school. Most of the rest were just garden-variety skanks lucky to have reached 25 with a full set of teeth. I forget what the entrepreneur was planning, but the standout of the group was a girl who was six months pregnant, and royally pissed that she’d recently been banned from the stage and assigned to ticket-taking instead. “I caint make no tips now,” she whined. (“What was she dancing to?” our witty columnist asked when I told him about it, “the ‘Baby Elephant Walk’?”) It was as grubby a bunch as you’d expect to find in that era, the last years before the new-style high-end clubs started to open, the ones where you’d find the Ashley Alexandra Duprés and their gym-toned sisters. Well, everybody was moving up in the world, then. It was the ’80s.

I feel worse for Ashley than I do for Spitzer. The whore always gets the worst of it, and I suspect this will be no different. She’s headed down the trail blazed by Jessica Hahn and Donna Rice, and if we still know her name in three weeks it’ll be because Howard Stern made her a co-host and Hugh Hefner wrote her a big check. But like Travis McGee’s date, she has “that monumental unconcern” at heart. It’s the whore’s look, and monster or not, it’s hers, just the same.

We’re going to keep this clean for a few days. God knows what some of the newer visitors must think of me. They came here to see us lift high the bloodstained banner, and what do they get? The C-word and that other C-word.

So let’s dial it down a little. Go smoke a bowl with Mary Ann.

There. Everyone mellowed out? Good. (And thanks, Ashley, for the tippage.)

Sounds like Spitzer may be out of a job before I can hit “publish” today. Ah, well. It was inevitable. Why am I reminded of the speech Beadie gives McNulty in “The Wire” this season, about who comes to your wake when you die? “A nice guy and good tipper” isn’t the worst epitaph in the world, but for a man with three daughters, I’d say he has some reparations to make.

Fortunately, because this is politics and the great circle of life, we didn’t even have to wait a few minutes before fresh entertainment arrived: Dr. Kevorkian says he’s running for Congress. Well, he can’t practice medicine anymore and he’s overqualified to pump gas, so I’d say this fits. He’s challenging Joe Knollenberg, known locally as “Toilet Joe” for his willingness to march into battle against the scourge of low-flow toilets. Jack Lessenberry provides the details:

Toilet Joe got his nickname from his as-yet-unpassed “Plumbing Standards Improvement Act.” That would permit our Johnnys to use more than twice as much water per flush, certainly a fine environmental idea in the parched Southwest, and one of the many reasons the League of Conservation Voters rates T.J. a perfect zero.

Dr. Death vs. Toilet Joe? Where else can you get entertainment like this at these prices?

Note: Journalistic objectivity requires me to make a couple of observations. Kevorkian’s run will likely not happen; he needs to gather signatures and has supposedly been dying of kidney disease for years now, and most people think this is, what do we say these days? “A cry for help,” yes. Also, everything I know about low-flow toilets comes from Dave Barry; apparently some people really consider them an affront. But my sister remodeled her bathroom last year and cannot say enough good things about hers, which is not only efficient but, being low-flow, refills in just a few seconds. Plumbing seems much louder in the middle of the night, and a fast-refilling potty is something you want. “But what about the multiple-flush phenomenon I’ve read about, in which a simple number two cannot be sent on its way without supplemental explosives?” She said she’s never needed it, and even if you did, 75 percent of all toilet-flushing is for number one, so you’re still saving water. Having used this very toilet myself, I have to say I was impressed. It does seem very efficient for only using a gallon and a half.

So I’m voting for Kevorkian!

Actually, I can’t vote for Kevorkian, because I don’t live in his district. My own congressman is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, mother of the current mayor of Detroit. He is what we reporters generally call “embattled.” (It’s one of our special-vocabulary things, like “war-torn.”) A few weeks ago, one of our commenters, JohnC, predicted Kwame would play the race card before his current troubles are through; not to take anything away from JohnC, who is a very sharp observer, but this is a little like predicting winter will be colder than summer. It came last night in his State of the City address, the race card with extreme prejudice:

“In the past 30 days, I’ve been called a nigger more than any time in my entire life,” Kilpatrick said, his voice rising and his finger wagging at the suddenly electrified audience, which stood and applauded.

“In the past three days, I’ve received more death threats than I have in my entire administration,” he continued. “I’ve heard these words, but I’ve never heard people say them about my wife and children. I have to say this, because it’s very personal to me.”

And then, in a swipe at the media, he said, “I don’t believe that a Nielsen rating is worth the life of my children or your children. This unethical, illegal lynch-mob mentality has to stop.”

Well-played, sir! The N-word and a lynch mob in one fell swoop! Let’s see how it goes. Every week it gets worse for him, but never, ever count out a crook in Detroit. In many ways, the city hasn’t found its bottom yet.

OK. Second cup of coffee and extra sleep is now fully operational, and it’s time to get to work. No bloggage today…no, wait. Ken Levine is back on the job, taking apart “American Idol” for the amusement of parents across this great land of ours, trapped on our couches watching this crap with the kids:

Amanda Overmyer wailed on “You Can’t Do That”, a song referring to her black and white striped slacks.

Of course she’s the one from Indiana. Figures.

Have a great afternoon. I’m off to write queries.

C*nt is a terrible word and I don’t use it lightly. (I only play the asterisk game because it’s the first word in this post, and some people are still pretty shocked by it, Larry David or no Larry David.) I only deploy it for women who actively work to hurt, shame, blame and otherwise denigrate other women, particularly those who don’t deserve it.

But I think it applies here.

(And yes, it also applies to the women, and men, who book guests like this on wastes of time like the Today show, and continue to give them publicity.)

Let’s forget Silda Spitzer for now. The question at hand is this: Did Carlita Kilpatrick, wife of Detroit’s mayor, walk in on the jaw-dropping sight of a stripper “touching her husband” as part of said stripper’s performance, leave the room, come back with “a wooden object” and commence beating on the bethonged skank?

(“Wooden object” — snerk. In my mind, it’s a rolling pin. In reality, probably nothing so fitting.)

Pity the wife of a political bounder, these days. I think we’re reaching a tipping point. I never agreed with Chris Matthews’ belief that the secret of Hillary Clinton’s success is her husband’s dowsing rod, but even allowing for it, it can’t last forever. Women can empathize with a wronged spouse, but no one likes to back a self-deluding fool. My gut says there’s more sympathy for Donna Hanover no-longer-Giuliani, pitching a public fit over her scoundrel trying to move his girlfriend into the spare bedroom, than over the spouse whose coping mechanism is to pour another martini and think of the children.

That’s why they do it, of course — for the children. They stand up with Daddy as a way of telling the kids to not be afraid, we’re all presenting a united front. Your home will not break up over this. At least for now, we’re joining hands and supporting one another, because that’s what families do.

I have no idea what the “might not be safe” activities might constitute. My money’s on coprophilia; someone else I know suggests erotic asphyxiation. It’s a truism that powerful men are among the most enthusiastic bottoms in their sex fantasies — every so often, you just have to give up control — so keep that in mind, too.

Anyone who wants to take up that in comments, go ahead, but maybe the rest of you might want to wear latex.

I’m ducking out of this entry early — the weightlifting class at the gym starts in 15 minutes. I’ll add some bloggage after I return. If you like, my last-episode Wire blog is over at The New Package (or NuPac, as we’re calling it now). For now, my flabby ass takes precedence.