I missed the State of the Union last night. [Pause.] Confession: I always miss the State of the Union address, and probably haven’t sat through one start to finish since the Reagan administration. The papers always run a transcript and exhaustive analysis. The late-night comics will mine it for jokes. If it actually produces news, that’ll be on the web within minutes. What do they need me for?

So instead, I opted to spend the evening at Border’s, watching Gerry Prokopowicz promote his new book (see right rail; it’s now officially On the Nightstand, although technically it’s in the kitchen at the moment). As our one-man advance team Brian Stouder reported last week, “Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln” a great, breezy read of a book that treads a careful line between egghead scholarship and popular appeal, suitable for long winter afternoons on the couch or short hits while making dinner. I first met Gerry when he was scholar-in-residence at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, an institution every local journalist got a chance to write about sooner or later.

My interest in Lincoln has always been casual, but the more I learn about him, the more interesting he becomes, particularly his oratory. For one of my Lincoln Museum stories I got to interview David Donald, whose Lincoln biography was new at the time, and we got off on one of those wonderful conversational tangents about the Second Inaugural speech, and how radical and brutally honest it was. Imagine a politician of today standing before the nation and saying:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

It doesn’t quite sound like, “As they stand up, we’ll stand down,” does it? An unfair comparison, perhaps, but again, imagine any contemporary politician telling the nation, “We may be at war forever, and if so, we deserve it, so deal.”

It’s hard to get enthused about a modern State of the Union after that.

The bulk of the presentation was Q-and-A, as that’s the framework of the book. Some of the questions were good, others less so, but fittingly, the show-stopper came at the very end, when Gerry took one last question and a child’s piping voice rose from the back and queried, “Was Lincoln gay?”

“You’ll have to buy the book,” he said, and with that, it was on to the signing.

Bonus: I got to meet Del Szura, who comments here from time to time and is, in fact, a Pointer. Little by little, our influence spreads!

So, bloggage:

Everybody has probably seen this, the Hitler-is-a-Cowboys-fan YouTube thing, but I hadn’t until yesterday, so maybe there are a few who might still be surprised by it. If only they’d hired me to fix all the errors in the subtitles, though.

Hell hath no fury like the well-heeled given the high hat: An Oakland County real estate company is suing ticket brokers, alleging it spent nearly $100,000 on VIP tickets and celebrity party invitations at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas but a company official and his clients were given the brush-off when they showed up at the pricey events. And here I thought the real-estate market was in the toilet. Not if they have that kind of cash to throw around, I guess.

The TV Club over at Slate found fault with a short exchange in Sunday’s episode of “The Wire,” in which an editor subtly upbraids another over his use of profanity in the newsroom. Which prompted Romenesko to ask for personal anecdotes of such encounters. The letters are starting to come in.

OK, folks. Have a good day, all of you, and I’ll try to do the same.

Back when Alan and I shared a computer, I used to track his enthusiasms through our bookmarks. He researches major purchases with a thoroughness that would shame Consumer Reports, and in those pre-Safari, OS 9 days, when all bookmarks went under a single menu (“bookmarks”), I knew when they started filling up with BuildABoatInYourGarage.com, he was soon to make an announcement involving that very thing.

Multiple users and folders give us all a bit of privacy, and I’m not the prying type, anyway. I guess the joke’s on me if I open his laptop one day and find QuickieMexicanDivorce.com active on the screen, but this latest thing is being announced with books. All over the house are books on sporting clays, wing-shooting techniques and the art of shotgun engraving. This one has been building for a while, since our year in Ann Arbor when we took a trip north and our host gave us each a chance to kill a clay pigeon. Alan was the only one who drew blood:

I don’t know what it is with my husband and the gentlemanly sports. You’d never know he was brought up working-class in a northwest Ohio factory town. By rights, we should have his-and-her Barcaloungers with a freezer full of venison in the garage, and instead we own a million dollars’ worth of Hardy fishing reels, half a dozen graphite rods suitable for catching everything from bluegill to 25-pound salmon, a handmade McKenzie drift boat and an English saddle (that last one’s mine). And now, soon, a shotgun. One of our new shooting books instructs us on the etiquette of firing so as not to hit your beaters, as well as techniques for switching quickly between multiple weapons, the last predicated on the assumption you have an assistant standing next to you with a second gun.

“Who are you going shooting with?” I asked. “Prince Charles?”

Ha ha. Although really, at this rate I think we could be weekend guests of the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall and hold up our ends with only a bit of shopping beforehand. All Alan needs are some plus-fours, or maybe a kilt.

Actually, I’m looking forward to trying out our new weaponry, although with our history of marital squabbles while co-recreating — we nearly divorced on our honeymoon, after discovering our paddling styles were incompatible for a double-cockpit kayak — maybe not.

A friend of mine once had a really bad boyfriend, from whom she had an acrimonious split. Some years later, he married a woman who gave him a shotgun for a wedding present. As a journalist and veteran of many murder stories, she knew that it was only a matter of time before the new husband went back to his cheatin’ ways, and his bride would be driven to take action with both barrels. “I can see it now,” she said, fairly rubbing her hands together. “‘Police say the murder weapon was, ironically, a wedding gift from bride to groom in happier days.'” Cackle, cackle. I’m waiting for this story, too. I remember that guy, and boy did he have it coming.

OK, enough blue-steel romance. Haven’t current events been marvelous of late? “Marvelous” in the “what a great story” sense, that is. The French Poindexter who may end up bringing down a 150-year-old bank single-handedly; the destruction of the Gaza wall after months of surreptitious weakening of the structure; and, of course, yet another lesson why it’s dangerous to mix chess and alcohol.

Which should be enough bloggage to get you chatty folks started, but I do want to point you to a couple of nice considerations of Heath Ledger, starting with Glenn Kenny’s, which has its own links within to explore, and Roy’s.

Please, God, keep me away from the Daily Mail. I have a life to live! But how can one resist it, when they include photos of Sarah Jessica Parker wearing a blue doughnut?

Finally, those of you who spend all day online have probably already seen the infamous Craigslist vagina couch, but maybe you haven’t heard the ne plus ultra oh-snap from my new fave site, Datalounge, where a million queers get together to trade the snark: Once a month you have to stuff a sheep in it for five days.

You’ve been a great audience! Have a wonderful weekend!

Sing along with me now: When will they ever learn? Oh when will theyyyyy ever learnnnn? Detroit’s mayor becomes approximately the millionth public official to learn that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. The Free Press FOIAs his text-message records and discovers a rather mundane game of hide the salami going on between the country’s first hip-hop mayor and his chief of staff. Which is tawdry, but only tawdry, until you consider that the denial of said affair under oath was the centerpiece of a lawsuit brought last summer against the city, one that led to a number of whistle-blowing cops swallowing a $9 million canary. I won’t bog you down with details, which you fans of public-official ugly-bumping can look up yourselves; it’s a complicated story and the Freep provides a million links. Just absorb the takeaway lesson: Sometimes you have to stop lying, even if it’s really, really embarrassing.

Also, this: If you really have the rank to pull, you shouldn’t have to pull it. The chief of staff, pulled over for speeding in 2004:

The cops say she pointedly asked them: “Do you know who the (expletive) I am?” before calling Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings. Beatty later acknowledged calling the chief from her cell phone, but denied pulling rank on the officers. She was never ticketed.

Someone needs to teach these folks: You sit silent and take the ticket. Then you hand it to your close personal friend, the chief of police, who makes it disappear. Is there any sentence that looks worse in the cold light of morning than “Do you know who the (expletive) I am?” Don’t think so.

Reading this story reminds me of the olden days, when reporters staked out love nests with long lenses. I guess another takeaway lesson is: Everybody leaves tracks. It’s just a question of what form they take.

Speaking of the cold light of morning, the sun is blazing on new snow outside, which fills the house with light and casts every dog hair into sharp relief. I should be cleaning, but I’m not. (Obviously.) Instead, I’m making preparations for the next emergency I might face, by adding Mary-Kate Olsen’s number to my speed-dial:

The masseuse who discovered the body of Heath Ledger in a Manhattan apartment on Tuesday twice called a friend of his, the actress Mary-Kate Olsen, before calling 911, New York City police officials said on Wednesday.

I suppose it’s a side effect of the preposterous spotlight even D-list celebrities find themselves in that when an ancillary member of the support staff finds another human being unconscious, unresponsive and not breathing, her first impulse is to call an actress rather than 911 — when in doubt, think: Damage control! Or maybe not. Maybe what we have here is a young woman of rather spectacular dimness. Or just confused. It doesn’t sound like it would have made much of a difference, but still.

A final note: I’m sucking Brian Stouder’s tailpipe on this, but so be it: Of all American presidents, probably none is more-studied than Abraham Lincoln, and yet there’s always something new to learn about him. “Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln” is the new book by Lincoln scholar Gerald J. Prokopowicz (pictured), and he’ll be reading and signing January 28 at Border’s in Grosse Pointe.

Gerry teaches at East Carolina University, but spent many years in the private sector, as resident scholar at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, which is where I came to know him. But he has a local connection, too — he moved to the Shores in ninth grade and his mother still lives here. So if you’re one of my few local readers, stop by Monday night at 7, and I’ll see you there.

Who was it who said, when John Lennon was shot, “It’s always the John Lennons, never the Paul McCartneys.” Can’t recall. But it was only yesterday I read a piece about the Associated Press explaining its practice of keeping prewritten obituaries on file, particularly for “troubled” young celebrities like Britney Spears.

And yet, it’s always the Heath Ledgers, never the Britney Spearses, isn’t it? [Rages; shakes fist at the sky.]

Truth to tell, the fact Ledger left the stage so early isn’t as interesting as the headline on the AP piece: Debate rages over prewritten obituaries for young, living stars. I know from the work I do at night that wire stories on newspaper websites are usually imported from the wire datastream whole, with little editing and, needless to say, no rewriting of the headline. (A little Googling demonstrates the trick for you civilians.) And yet, reading the story, I can find no debate and certainly no raging — who gives a shit whether the AP prewrites obits? Raging debates are one of those things you only find in blog comment sections and in the fantasies of AP copy editors.

Canned obits, as the lead of the story points out, are nothing new and nothing more than a smart use of resources. I took a tour of the New York Times in the way-early ’80s, and that was a big hit with the folks in my group — learning that Princess Grace’s life had already been summed up in 1,500 words and half a dozen pictures before she missed that switchback on the mountain road. How macabre, was the general feeling. How unremarkable was mine.

We had a big obit-updating project in Columbus while I was there, the pet project of some assistant city editor who took it very seriously. Every reporter on the desk was given half a dozen to work on in their spare time, and we were encouraged to pull out the stops, to interview the still-living subjects for fresh quotes. But — and this struck me as fairly stupid — we were told not to reveal what we were working on unless it was absolutely necessary. The memo offered a suggested code phrase: “I’d like to interview you for a general biographical piece to run on an undetermined date in the future.” This fan dance was necessary for fear that some subjects may not have accepted the idea that one day they’d go the way of all flesh, and might refuse out of fear or superstition. Oh, please. Most people figured it out immediately, and I don’t think one got cold chills over it. I don’t even remember who my subjects were, but my friend Ted drew Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force officer who never met a landscape he’d mind bombing back to the Stone Age (as he famously said of North Vietnam). Ted asked him about that quote; as I recall, he suggested it had been taken out of context.

I subsequently learned that the character of Buck Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove” was based on LeMay. I wonder if that made the obit.

Ledger is a loss, no doubt; I thought his performance in “Brokeback Mountain” was a thing of beauty, particularly how he inhabited the character physically. With his long legs and lean frame, he looked born to spend his life in a saddle. He carried the tension of his forbidden feelings in his shoulders, and you could see every striation on the knotted muscles there.

However, as someone said to me yesterday, someone who was having their 30th birthday yesterday, in fact: “I knew I was 30 when I was more concerned about the Federal Reserve than Heath Ledger.” Amen.

So, bloggage:

Farewell, Fred Thompson. Don’t feel bad: “Law & Order” residuals pay better, and you get a nice trailer to relax in between takes. Slate’s John Dickerson points out the obvious:

…(F)rom the start, Thompson seemed to be stuck in a state of repose. His announcement in Iowa, held before an imposing set of columns and faux stone that looked like the facade of a small bank, stirred little more excitement than if he’d been offering free checking. More lounge-worthy moments followed. At Florida’s state GOP convention, where candidates had to pay for time before the crowd of 4,000, Thompson’s rivals gave passionate speeches. Thompson spoke for a lean and uninspiring five minutes. The press copies of his daily schedule always looked like they’d been handed out with a couple of the pages missing.

On trial for killing your 7-year-old daughter? Go ahead, introduce that “World’s Greatest Dad” coffee mug into evidence. I’m sure the jury will be swayed.

Off to the shower. Someone stop by and scrub my back.

The rest of the world’s eyes are locked on the future, i.e. the throwdown last night on CNN between Obama and Clinton. But the real chuckle for me, this morning, came from yesterday’s news, i.e. Rudy Giuliani, via the NYT. Is he still running for president? Is he still employing that super-crafty tortoise/hare strategy? Because I wonder how this might play in Florida, the land of losers looking for a second chance, old people with the accumulated wisdom of a million lifetimes, hustling sharpies, clamorous immigrants and, of course, O.J. Simpson:

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.

Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.

“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”

Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city.

The rest of the story suggests that a person would have a better chance of surviving after calling Tony Soprano a faggot pussy in front of his children. Is this a great country, or what?

(Hang on. I have to take out the trash. A new trash hauler arrived in the neighborhood Jan. 1, and their schedule is still a mystery.)

Nothing like a little chore to get your mind off whatever you were writing about before. Oh, right — political payback. For another point of view — on Clinton, not Giuliani, for you forward-thinkers — I can’t say it better than Roy, so read him.

Well, I met my deadline, sorta. A combined 3,000 words of opuses (opii?) are out the door. Someday we’ll have to get some of you other old-skool contract workers in here to talk about the pre-internet days, when making a deadline meant learning the schedule of your local FedEx office. I once white-knuckled it with J.C. while we traveled through the back streets of his Atlanta neighborhood, cornering on two wheels in his Honda to deliver a bunch of slides, or disks, or something, to the people who could absolutely, positively have it there overnight. I work only with words, but remember meeting freelance deadlines with 5-inch floppies, faxes and other 20th-century technology, and it seemed impossibly sophisticated.

Just last year I had a noon deadline for another big chunk of prose, finished it at 11:58 a.m., IM’d my editor and delivered the MS by dragging it onto his chat icon in my buddy list. The file transfer was complete at 12 noon exactly. I hope to live long enough to file via Vulcan mind meld someday.

Deadline is a drug, though. When it’s done right, it’s better than sex:

Seriously, where else does a woman say to a man “BobbyBobbyBobbyBobbyBobby?” Note, also, that the clip is 84 seconds long, and Joan Cusack says, “In 84 seconds?!?”

And now it’s the last day of a four-day weekend. Grosse Pointe tacked an in-service day onto the King holiday. The motto of this district should be, “Accommodating the ski-vacation plans of the affluent family since Henry Ford was a pup.”

No bloggage for you today, alas. At some point in the next 24 hours I’ll get my Wireblogging up to date, but there’s certainly other stuff to enjoy over at The New Package. I’ll be back later, perhaps.

Remember that line in “Witness” before Harrison Ford witnesses the touching purity of Amish neighborliness, and makes lots of eyes at Kelly McGillis? The old Amish man, witnessing the tumult of the barn-raising threatening to fall into just another day of socializing, barks out:

“We’ve a barn to build and a day to do it!”

Well, I have 2,500 words to write before noon today. Not quite a barn, but not quite a whole day, either. So enjoy yourself an open thread, and I’ll see what I can dig up this afternoon.

Conversation starter: If you’re counting on a Democrat being elected president in November, and it doesn’t happen — never underestimate the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — could you live with President John McCain? Why or why not? (My take, in a nutshell: Sure. If I could live with George W. Bush, I could live with anyone. But, you know, I’m a crazy dreamer.)

Or: Discuss the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. Every time one of those guys came down hard on that cement decorated with dead grass masquerading as turf, one of my ribs cracked in sympathy.

Now, off to the mines for me.

It’s been a jolly morning. I got that rare treat from my family — sleeping in on a school day. Alan woke up chirping at 6:55 a.m., so I let him feed the livestock, etc. Then I open the laptop for my morning run and find this gem, from Roy:

If Obama gets the nomination, we’ll get Willie Horton II (and possibly III, IV, and infinity); if Clinton gets it, the position papers of the opposition will resemble the taunting letters-to-the-editor of serial killers of prostitutes, and if Edwards wins they will all be written by the Club for Growth and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”

It gave me the familiar feeling of laughing through tears, because I thought what I always think: Is there any way ink-on-paper opinion-mongering will ever catch up with the web? (Answer: No.) But at least I was laughing. And then Amy, careful reader of the morning fishwrap in my ex-home, sent this, from the (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette:

Input gathered at two public forums will help the Three Rivers Festival eventually become a nationally recognized event like Mardi Gras, Burning Man or Taste of Chicago, according to Shannon White, the festival’s executive director.

I can see it now: Two San Francisco hipsters, planning their summer. “If we do it right, we can make the Three Rivers Festival in July, and still have plenty of time to recover before Burning Man on Labor Day weekend.” The non-profits there haven’t lost their sense of humor, at least in public statements.

Whew. OK. Friday. Around 10 last night, the rain stopped, the wind picked up and the temperature started to fall. It’s now 19 degrees, and we’re promised single digits, maybe even below, over the weekend. Think I’ll shoot some video down at the lake. The ice probably won’t be safe, but it’ll be pretty. Hard to imagine the death grip of winter was once so predictable here that rumrunners made winter ice part of their business plan. It’d have to be a long, deep cold snap before I’d set foot on river ice, and we just don’t have those anymore.

Cold snaps, while miserable and sometimes terrifying, do give you good stories. I endured the back-to-back horrors of the ’76-’78 winters in college in southeast Ohio, normally a place touched by the balmy breezes of the south — forsythia in February is more or less par for the course there. But for one awful week, I walked to class in minus-20 temperatures, and that’s without the wind chill, a truly baffling weather glitch. One year, early in my Indiana residency, I went to Michigan City for Super Bowl weekend, in similar cold. The car-starting chore was story enough, but the thing I remember about that night, driving home, was the otherworldly city as I pulled into town. It was early on a Sunday night, but the streets were deserted (and not just because people were watching the game). The discharge from thousands of furnaces billowed up as plumes of vapor, and the salt-stained pavement looked like the road to hell. (I’m on the ice side of the fire/ice question, yes.)

I spotted a lone figure, the only human being I’d seen outside for miles, trudging up a driveway in the distance. As I caught up, I could see it wasn’t a residential house, but a massage parlor. I’m sure the girls were working that night, loneliness being perhaps the one thing that could drive a man outside in weather like that.

Tell me a cold-weather story, while I warm my hands over the keyboard. And have a good weekend.

Scenes from a very modern 18-hour visit between friends:

The kitchen table is strewn with sections from two newspapers, three laptops (one of them the kind with widdle bunny ears), an iPhone, two venti Starbucks cups, my Flip video camera, two Gorillapods and, I dunno, maybe a salt and pepper shaker. “Sometimes I’m reading a paperback, and I try to flick the page with my finger,” says Sam. Not the way you flick a mosquito off the page. The iPhone flick. “Did you see these e-mails from Leslie?” she asks John, looking up from the iPhone. “Already answered,” he replies, not looking up from the laptop.

This is how we interact these days. John shoots a little video of Sam reading the e-mail and shows it to me, because I was sitting next to her when she did so, and I guess I might like to see it from another angle. Sam takes a picture of our stained-glass panel for her iPhone wallpaper. Then she takes a picture of the dog. Then we all realize what we’re doing, and go for a walk.

“Put on hats, it’s cold outside!” a passerby scolds us. Apparently the multiple weather widgets installed on every single electronic device on the kitchen table failed to warn us that it was 30 degrees. So we stop at Starbucks for more venti cups and a warmup. I tie Spriggy’s leash to a post outside. Sam takes a picture of him through the window. Good. He hasn’t had his picture taken in five or 10 minutes, and two or three soft-hearted ladies have petted him on their way in. No wonder his self-esteem is so toweringly high.

We need something, we decide. Maybe…a bottle of wine and a bunch of snacks. Also, a two-pound salmon filet and something from the deli called “Michigan black bean salad.” Cucumber, dill, Greek yogurt, a baguette, and we’re good to go.

Does the iPhone ring during dinner? Of course it does. I wait for John to say, “I’ll call you back after we finish eating,” but he doesn’t, because it’s a semi-emergency, the call is coming from Sam’s brother, stuck in an airplane on a runway at Hartsfield in Atlanta for going on three hours, and he wants to alert the media. Does John have a number at CNN? he wants to know. “How strange that you’re in Atlanta, where we live, but we’re in Detroit, but anyway you’re in the plane and can’t get out,” John says, before giving him the number. I kept waiting for him to check the weather, like the guy in the commercial, who used his iPhone to liberate a similarly imprisoned flight. It wouldn’t do any good, because the reason the flight is sitting on the ground is terrible weather in Atlanta. It’s snowing there, which we learned from an earlier phone call from John’s brother, who also lives there.

I wonder where this salmon came from, I thought. I hope not China.

Anyway, the dinner was delicious. We watched Jon Stewart dismember Jonah Goldberg, put all the devices to sleep and/or charge, and went to bed ourselves.*

This morning I read, not online, a NYT review of a book called “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” It begins:

In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.” How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?

Mr. Siegel’s field trip illustrates several things, not least that Starbucks is today’s most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of what it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition that has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond the collapse of community.

He should have come for dinner last night. The salmon could have fed another easily, and maybe he would have had some suggestions for Sam’s brother to call. Then she would have taken his picture.

Bloggage:

Does Lee Siegel read Bossy? I’d like to hear what the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic (can I get that job? Because I’ve got the skilz) has to say about her brand of humor writing, which combines the elements of photography, colored type, italics, strikethroughs and Photoshop-with-arrows to tell a story about her slippers which makes you glad you spent 45 seconds hearing about. Why can amateurs figure out the unique syntax of the web, and college-educated professional journalists can’t? Put that in your venti Starbucks cup and drink it, Lee Siegel.

Whenever I see a picture like the one with this story, I remember the federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, who ejected a female lawyer from his courtroom in the 1970s for the crime of wearing a pantsuit. The old geezer’s dead now, but I wonder what he’d think of a 75-year-old lawyer with his gray hair tucked into a neat braid at the back of his head. Note that he got charges dismissed against his client, who was a candidate for tar and feathers last year, when she was accused of hanging up on a boy who called 911. Well-played, sir. A little Googling reveals the same lawyer was instrumental in reviving the career of Andy Bey, which earns him a place in jazz heaven, no matter how long his ponytail is.

You know how you know you’re really, really old? When you see a gossip item that begins like this —

Bye-bye, Justin Bobby! Audrina Patridge has a new beau.

— and you not only have no idea who the people are, you don’t even have the slightest itty-bittiest ghost of a hint of a desire to know who they are, and what’s more, you know that even if you bothered to find out, in the name of keeping up with what the kids are into these days, you know that both people will be over by the time you can Google the names. You just have a sixth sense about these things.

* Some events reported out of order, but all events actually happened.

I was the 143rd voter in my precinct at noon Tuesday, but my ballot was 105, which I assume means I was the 105th to ask for the Republican version. From this, we can extrapolate that the GOP will outpoll the Democrats by a 105-38 margin, and that the next president will be a Republican. Probably Romney.

Hey, just testing my punditry skills, in case anyone wants me to go on CNN.

Primary Day in Michigan was a big fat anticlimax, unless you were at the auto show Monday, which hosted the big three GOP contenders, plus Joe Lieberman, carrying John McCain’s coat. Connecticut for Lieberman for McCain: it has a real ring to it. But in the end, of course it was Romney’s show, seeing as how he was the only one who spent more than $1.98 and actually bothered to rent a local hotel ballroom for the victory speech. There’s something about seeing the candidates concede Michigan from South Carolina that really says “your primary was a joke,” isn’t there? (Jack Lessenberry over at the Metro Times put it more starkly: “Kazakhstan has better elections.” At least for Democrats.)

There were some chuckles, but they were so far inside as to be practically non-existent. The NYT’s county-by-county map is interesting, in that “uncommitted” carried the Democrats’ day in only two outposts — the thinly populated mystery spot of Emmet County, at the very tip of the mitten, where only 1,222 Democratic ballots were cast, but 49 percent of them went for U.N. Committed, and the Communistic pinko liberal People’s Republic of Washtenaw, which should not be counting on a warm hug from President Hillary, by God.

(As for what it says that the New York Times offers the best graphic representation of what’s happening in a state 500 miles away — that’s a question I’ll leave for you folks.)

Sorry I took the day off yesterday. I was walking into walls and not getting my calls returned. Also, I needed my roots touched up. Let me make it up to you with bloggage:

Ever wonder what a commune for crunchy-con buttheads would look like? Alas, county commissioners shot down this half-baked Hoosier version of Seaside, Florida. I think it would be a great setting for a murder mystery, however. Be my guest, Lippman. Maybe the next time Tess Monaghan takes a road trip, she can check out the corpse found in the dumpster behind Little Blessings Midwifery. Via The Good City. (Just an aside: What is it with these folks and chickens? They all want a backyard henhouse, or will until they learn just how early roosters get up in the morning. You should hear my vet talk about Grosse Pointe’s wild pheasant population, and the cocks that start crowing at 3:30 a.m. in midsummer. Only they don’t say cock-a-doodle-do, which is annoying enough at that hour; “it sounds like fingernails on a blackboard.” Ah, country life.)

Where did you first read about Truck Nutz? Here, that’s where. And four years ago, no less. (Sorry, the photo’s been lost to the ages. Here’s a replacement. I highly, highly recommend Nut Galleries one and two.) Now the Virginia legislature wants to ban them. For the children, of course.

Speaking of lame-ass punditry. I think Matthew Yglesias nails Tim Russert pretty well, in Washington Monthly.

Why the English are better than us: Because even their trashy tabloids, reporting bizarro police/court news, can use the word “remonstrate” in copy without fear that their idiot readers won’t know what it means.

Now I have to clean my house. John ‘n’ Sam arriving in about five hours. Friends! Adults to talk to! I may faint.

HT: Talking Points Memo