My neighbors have a big TV. Really big TV. How big is it? Can’t say — I’ve never seen it up close, because I don’t have to. If the curtains are open even a little bit, I can tell what they’re watching with 75 percent accuracy. (Right now, hockey.) And they live across the street and one door down; it’s a good 200 feet or more from my couch to their TV. That’s a big TV.

Big TVs are all the rage, now that the bugs have been worked out, now that they no longer have the footprint of a Volkswagen Beetle. Everybody I know is buying one. (True story: My friends John and Mary bought one, and hired a guy to hang it on the wall. He said he’d just finished a similar job at then-Sixer/now-Piston Chris Webber’s house. [Yes, he’s a Pointer.] He’d hung 13 of them. Thirteen flat-screens in one house! It’s like an episode of “Cribs.”)

Anyway, I guess eventually we’ll have a giant TV, too, once the price drops to $1.98, which it seems on track to do by year’s end. But I won’t feel good about it. I love TV now that TV is so much better than it used to be — thanks, HBO. I love watching DVDs at home. But my TV guilt-meter was calibrated in the days of “Three’s Company,” and there’s something about a giant TV that suggests a world of La-Z-Boy recliners with built-in cupholders and crocheted Kleenex-box cozies. It rings every snob bell I have, and I have a tower full of them. I hate myself. Why? Because part of me wants one, and the other part is covered in shame for doing so.

Here’s the thing about a giant TV: It wants to be on, all the time. I like a TV to be off most of the time. My first and most hard-core TV rule is this: If it’s on, the people in the room must be paying attention to it. If you leave the room for any reason other than a bathroom break or to fetch another beer, it must go off. Once I interviewed some lottery winners, plain old hardscrabble people who woke up one morning $9 million richer, courtesy of the state of Ohio. I caught them after they’d had the money for several months, which is to say, their old house was full to the rafters with new toys, but the new house — 1,000-square-foot master suite, cement pond out back, the works — was still under construction. There was a rock on her finger and a Corvette in his garage, and a giant TV in the living room, which was too small to accommodate it. It was mid-morning, around the time a movie old enough to shave was on TBS. I took a seat to the right of the screen, they sat opposite me. The TV stayed on. When I was talking, they both watched the TV. When they were talking, the one who was talking looked at me, the other one watched TV.

That was a formative experience in giant-TV culture. I still haven’t shaken it.

Oy, we had ourselves a day in the D yesterday. A “workplace shooting,” as they’ve come to be known. Guy fired from an accounting firm on Friday came back on Monday and shot a retiree helping out for tax season and two partners. The retiree died. The other two are still alive. Of course we have a sidebar story on how this might be avoided in the future. Grim humor within: An HR expert says Friday is “traditionally” the day to fire people. Really? I didn’t know that. I tried to think of firings I’ve witnessed, and the only common denominator they all had was the Box. You know the Box, usually a banker’s box, filled by either the fired party (or security) with the detritus of one work life — a few personal files, a stained coffee cup, a framed picture. Is there a sadder sight than a banker’s box with a “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps” mug overturned in the bottom? I don’t think so.

“The Office” has gone a long way toward pointing out the thousand soul-abrading, death-by-a-thousand-cuts indignities of life in cubicle land, but I don’t think they’ll tackle this subject for a while.

I predict [raises finger aloft] that we will come through this blogging thing, turn 320 degrees or so, and out the other side — yes, this is metaphor is intentional — with newfound respect for our unsung friend, the editor. Yesterday’s post was up for hours before I noticed I wrote “…for years I’ve tried very hard to annoy my site statistics.” I meant I ignore them. They’re like the quicksand of narcissism. I’ve read about people who monitor their credit scores daily, who track their eBay feedback nearly as often. And some people track their site stats obsessively, which is one reason I’ve avoided doing so. I mean, I like affirmation as much as the next person, but please.

However, Google Analytics is just out there waiting to be installed and noodled over, and today, my first day with it, was nearly enough to run me off the rails. I have a reader — or else a robo-reader — in Reykjavik. (Holla back, Iceland.) Someone came here via Googling the phrase “what hoody does TI wear in chevy commercial.” (Who’s TI?) And then there are those of you whom I can call by name. One reader in Portland (hey, Vince). One in Cincinnati (Rob!). Forty in Fort Wayne, approximately the remaining readership of the News-Sentinel. I have to stop. I have enough things to procrastinate with.

Page One story in the NYT today, so you know it’s important: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. The story is pegged to some recent high-profile (in blogland, anyway) incidents of over-the-top bad behavior and all manner of associated shittiness, between bloggers and the people who read them. (This was a theme of the letter to the editor I wrote a few days back. Ten days to be exact, and it’s still unacknowledged. It’s like it dropped into a well. They get three weeks; they’re busy people.)

It’s hard not to read about some of these incidents — death threats; grotesque, sexually suggestive abuse; vile Photoshopping — without wincing. That, and counting blessings. I developed a thick skin in my time as a newspaper columnist; I heard it all, and I mean all, so I know that the guy who prints your home address and suggests the world’s felons come to your place and rape you is most likely a pathetic, Cheeto-stained soul who hasn’t left his own house in 15 years or so. (Also, that rapists surf another part of the web when they’re looking for victims.) On the other hand, one of the problems a thick skin brings is the sense that everyone needs to have one, and where would we be in a world full of the thick-skinned? Someone needs to stand up for decent behavior.

To reiterate: I am extremely grateful for all the people who comment here, for the high level of discussion that goes on, and for the singular fact that when we occasionally descend into the gutter, we keep things good-natured and amusing. I haven’t had to ban anyone. My policy, if I have one, is pretty simple: Don’t piss off the proprietress, keeping in mind the proprietress has seen it all and is hard to piss off that much (most days). First-time commenters need to be approved, but I approve 99.9 percent of them, and after you’ve been approved once you’re in for good. The only people who keep knocking on the door after being turned away, other than spammers and damn their robotic little souls, is one guy who occasionally submits vile, racist screeds from an IP address of a well-respected member of the Fort Wayne corporate community, but his secret is safe with me.

I installed Google Analytics only recently (as in, last night), and for years I’ve tried very hard to ignore my site statistics. A journalist asked me recently what sort of traffic I get, and I honestly don’t know. I get over 1,000 page impressions most days (thanks, AdSense), and I suspect fewer than half are unique visitors. (It’s this sort of attention to the bottom line that for years endeared me to my newspaper overlords.) All I care about is that I’m still having fun, and you all are a large part of what makes it fun.

So, thanks.

How was your Easter? Mine was fine, if a bit chilly, and I take solace that it was a bit chilly in huge chunks of this great land of ours. We traveled to Defiance (Alan’s family homestead). I drove. I was looking forward to catching up on my reading en route, but Alan had a headache knocking on the door, so I took the wheel. It made me think of all the couples I’ve known, and their who-drives policies. For some, it’s a question of whose car it is, but for others — a lot of others, and I’m stunned by how many — it’s not even a question. The man drives. The man always drives. Either the man is a control freak or the woman is one of those who feels unladylike with a man in the passenger seat. I once heard Dr. Laura Schlessinger say that not only does her husband always drive, she insists he open the door for her, and she’ll stand there until he does. (This is why Mr. Dr. Laura will likely welcome death with open arms.)

OK. A brief bit of bloggage and then on to watch Google Analytics run my numbers, so to speak:

When Gene Weingarten writes the cover story in the WashPost Sunday magazine, it’s always worth your time. This week he sets up violinist Joshua Bell — playing a Stradivarius — as a D.C. Metro busker, and asks:

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The story is a stitch. Only in the WashPost.

Also, TBogg on Johnny Hart, pointing out that once upon a time, “B.C.” had a reason to exist other than Hart’s religious obsessions. (I loved it as a kid.) Please, please, please, can the strip die now? Please?

I just wrote a nice long post about, well, a bunch of things. It started out with a hymn to online package tracking, dallied at sports-bra design, moved on to narco-lollipops and ended with the American Enterprise Institute, just the sort of eclecticism that pleases my eclectic readership. The first comment that came in was a spam trackback. I was trying to do something else — pet the dog — while I deleted it, and guess what? Deleted the post.

Screw this blogging. Screw it, I say! Find someone else to for your sports-bra fix. I’m off to find some narco-lollipops.

Today’s lesson: When someone smarter than you gives you advice, take it.

For years now, John, my computer guru, has been telling me to mind my metadata — tags, labels, genres, playlists. Take the time, when you download music, e-mail, photos, to put it where it belongs, or at the very least, slap a digital sticky on it. And remember to delete the crap you don’t want anymore. On today’s giant hard drives, single files can knock around like lost children in Calcutta, and someday you’ll need to find them, and where will they be? In Calcutta, that’s where.

Did I listen? Only with half an ear. And then, today, I accidentally deleted my “purchased music” playlist, and now all my iTunes Music Store tracks are at large in the Calcutta of my music library, which is a vast and crowded place, let me tell you. For reasons that have to do with the personal radio station of my iPod, WNN-dot-C, playin’ the sets that only one insane person would assemble, the ones that bump Tyrone Davis up against It’s a Beautiful Day and then hop to some Funkadelic and maybe some tango jazz from our Buenos Aires trip to take us to the top of the hour — to do this, I need my Purchased Music playlist, now vaporized.

One thing John has taught me, however, is how to solve my own problems (“Always happy to help, Nance. Really.”), so right now I’m figuring out a way to fix it. I’m sorting them by the iTunes proprietary file suffix (.m4p) and reassembling it.

Jeez, what a pain in the ass. Why do I have to learn everything the hard way?

Don’t answer that.

In the future: Mind your metadata, people. You’ll thank me.

(By the way, does anyone else have a K-tel album in their iPod? I do, now: “K-tel Presents: The Vogues and the Equals: Back to Back.” And to think, all I wanted was “Five O’Clock World.”)

Hump Day in Winter Break Week. I may yet go insane.

The terms of my ad agreement stipulate I cannot tell people to click on their links, and I’m not, but I do call your attention to them briefly today, and never again. You know how they work, right? Google’s servers sniff your page and figure out who might be reading it, then toss up some ads to suit what it thinks are their tastes. Once I searched Blake’s line “the moon like a flower in heaven’s high bower / in silent delight sits and smiles on the night” and got an ad for 1-800-FLOWERS. Proving, I hope, that computers have a way to go to catch up with us.

So I just loaded the page and got four — two for ice-skating, apparently prompted by my mention of Kate’s ice capades; one for Detroit home inspectors, perhaps because of my driving tour of Mexicantown; and finally, one for roll-off Dumpsters. Huh? Ah, this must be the reason: Yesterday came the news that Ford Motor Co. could not have lost more money last year if they’d set fire to the building and used a dump truck to drop $100 bills into the flames for 12 months straight.

This is going to be fun. This may be a new form of written performance art — the Google Ad Scramble. Let the games begin.

First, a little light housekeeping: I’m adding some Google ads to the site. From time to time over the years, people have asked me whether I’d consider hosting advertising here, and my answer was always bafflement: Who in their right mind would advertise here? In the six years I’ve been wasting time on this lunacy playing around with this blog, I’ve never really strayed far from the original idea, which is: Daily life, with links. That’s all. If people want to stop by and read, or participate in the discussions, I’m flattered to pieces, but really, if there was ever a blog about nothing, this is it.

However, even nothing has its readers. I added Google ads to my poor, neglected Grosse Pointe Today site when I launched it last fall. Even with haphazard updating and constant excuse-making from its proprietress, I checked my account status the other day and discovered I’d made, lord almighty, $19. Why, that means NN.C could conceivably make, oh, $60 in the same time period. As my friend the Other Alan used to say, “If you saw $60 lying on the ground, would you pick it up?” Of course I would. Google ads are text-based and unobtrusive and do not feature dancing silhouettes or punch-the-monkey games or, my new bete noire, those rollover-and-it-speads-like-a-stain things.

So we’ll see how it works out. Trial basis. Etcetera.

Content will remain status quo. As tempting as it might be to become Perez Hilton.

Another housekeeping note: I’m going to start limiting the time I spend writing here, and dammit, there’s nothing you can do to make me feel guilty about it. All that means is, I’m limiting myself to 45 minutes a day to put together a main entry, and if nothing good emerges in 45 minutes, then I’m going to go bake brownies or something. “But Nance,” you might be asking. “Frequently I read what you post here, and it’s nothing good. Are you saying you spend more than 45 minutes on it? If so, what a waste of time.”

I’m saying it’s none of your damn business. Just that I have to devote more time to paying work, exercise and keeping the dust bunnies from taking over the living room, not to mention my oft-laid-aside fiction writing, which is this year’s do-it-or-drop-it long-term project.

Perspective. It’s all about perspective. I actually considered taking a hiatus, and then realized that’s probably not doable, either. For whatever reason, I seem to need to write this thing more than anyone wants to read it.

OK, then. Bloggage: Fans of this week’s On the Nightstand pick will want to read the NYT’s interview with Jim Harrison today. The picture alone is worth the click-through; if I can live like he does and look no worse at age 69, I’d say that was a fair deal.

TV time. Who’s watching “Rome” this season? (Silence.) Thought so. So let’s start the one-sided discussion!

There’re a lot of nits you can pick with any depiction of ancient Rome. Some aren’t worth picking anymore — I’m fully willing to believe that everyone in the eternal city spoke with a British accent — and some still have some life in them. I’m puzzled, watching this show, as to how they could spend a nine-figure sum and still not have one scene with more than 20 actors in the frame. (I guess they blew their production budget on that silly gladitorial contest between Titus Pullo and six or seven unfortunate would-be executioners last season. Although HBO probably could have financed that entirely by selling T-shirts with “XIII” on them in its immediate aftermath.)

The central storytelling trick of the show — two fictional soldiers who wander, Zelig-like, through the well-known historical events of Rome — is still amusing, never more so than in the episode dealing with the birth of Cleopatra’s son by Caesar. Cleo’s back this season, pressing her case for the boy to be legitimized, laying the groundwork for the seduction of Mark Antony, which should be about as difficult as falling off a log; Antony’s the King of Goats and Cleo’s about as hot as hotties come. I’m noticing the profanity has been upped in this season, which is sort of disappointing, but it’s given me a whole new oath to swear by, thanks to the King of Goats: “on Juno’s c*nt.” And Atia’s whispered parting shot to Cleo is a keeper: “Die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop.” It’s a little strange to see Lucius Vorenus turning into Al Swearengen crossed with Tony Soprano, but I guess even high-quality HBO series have to have a little synergy with one another.

Is my 45 minutes up? It is. Time to walk the dog and hit the shower, in that order. Hope I don’t meet anyone important on the first errand, although it is about 18 degrees at the moment — it’s pretty unlikely.

Last night one of the local news anchors described Gerald Ford’s death as “tragic.” I know, in TV, where it isn’t possible to report a mass murder of kindergarteners without a smarmy furrowed brow and lots of unnecessary modifiers, all deaths are tragic. It’s just a default adjective, like “controversial.” Still. The man got four score and 13 and died in comfort, surrounded by his family. Kind of devalues the word, wouldn’t you say?

I’m devoting this weekend to housecleaning, literal and figurative. Before I change “On the Nightstand,” though, I want to recommend the book that’s been over there for a couple weeks — “King Leopold’s Ghost,” by Adam Hochschild. Most of my reading-for-pleasure is fiction, but as they say, this book reads like a novel. It’s about the formation and shameless exploitation of the Congo, mainly by the late king of Belgium, Leopold II. Hochschild notes in his introduction that although this effort resulted in the death of as many as 8 million people, it’s still strangely unknown in our time. (I had to agree, as I knew precisely nothing about it.) The story of European exploitation of its colonies is familiar, of course, but what makes this one different is the scope, the utter shamelessness with which Leopold sucked the life out of this region of Africa. There’s also the interesting detail that Congo wasn’t a Belgian colony until close to Leopold’s death; before that it was his personal colony, owned outright by one man, who never even set foot in the place. (He didn’t even like Belgium much, preferring the more refined comforts of Paris.)

I’ve mentioned before that Detroit actually has a Belgian community. A friend of mine featherbowls at their main outpost, the Cadieux Cafe, where the walls are hung with pictures of Eddie Merckx and regulars can tell you all about the difference between Flemish Belgians and French ones (called walloons, if you’re interested). But I’d bet few know much about this sordid story.

At some point blogging becomes a form of procrastination, like, um, now. If I don’t clean my kitchen right this minute, it’ll never get done.

Have a great weekend. Happy new year. See you there.

We have a guest blogger today. I found this essay while doing some tidying up on the computer. Alan wrote it a couple years ago, as part of the application for a job editing a motorcycle magazine. They were still making up their minds when the Detroit News called, so it never saw print. Most people don’t know that before Alan became a bald guy who loves fly-fishing and sailing, he was a long-haired guy who loved motorcycles (and bore a strong resemblance to the young Bob Seger). He doesn’t know why I like this essay, and I’m not sure either; it could use a new lead and is a little gearhead-y for a general audience. But it has a few nice moments. It’s a window into a part of his life I wasn’t there for, and objectively, I think it will strike a chord in anyone who ever loved a beautiful machine that didn’t love them back.

By Alan Derringer

I once owned a Sportster XLCH that I bump-started all the way from Indianapolis to Glacier National Park after the kick-starter took a bite at my leg and tore a chunk out of the engine case instead.

It was a complicated relationship from the beginning. I knew better than to buy the Harley-Davidson. I read all the bike magazines and I knew: Even in 1974, the year my Sportster was built, the motorcycle was an anachronism.

For starters, the brake pedal was on the left and the shift lever was on the right. That orientation was the opposite of the Japanese motocrossers and street bikes imprinted in my muscle memory. In panic situations on the Sportster, I learned to curl down the toes of both feet, hoping one would find a brake pedal. Federal safety regulators forced AMF Harley-Davidson to reposition the brake for the 1975 model year, but that didn’t prevent me from trying to upshift my 1974 brake pedal. Even the shift pattern – one-up, three-down – was out of step with the world.

The 1000 cc iron-head V-twin vibrated like a paint shaker. The vibration numbed hands, feet and any other body part that touched the machine. The blur in the rearview mirror was useful only for getting a sense that something big was closing in. The lone rubber isolation mounts were beneath the handlebar risers, and they didn’t do much but add to the vagueness of the motorcycle’s cornering. It would be 30 years – model year 2004 – before Harley-Davidson isolated the Sportster’s engine from the frame with rubber mounts.

The real anachronism, however, was the kick-starter. The XLCH had no electric starter motor, only a vicious and schizophrenic manual kick-starter: Sometimes the engine would kick back the steel lever and try to pitch me over the handlebars. Other times, the pitiful teeth of the starter-clutch gear would slip against the kick-starter’s ratchet plate and allow my full weight to come crashing down.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. I bought the Sportster used in 1979 for $1,250, a bargain price for a Harley-Davidson even then. “Most people don’t want a kicker,” the seller shrugged. In hindsight, I believe he had a limp.

But I was seduced by the grunt of the staggered dual-exhaust when the Sportster was short-shifted. I was drawn to the polished aluminum eyebrow over the headlight, to the simplicity of the exposed push-rod tubes, the ribbed 19-inch Avon Speedmaster and the muscular 2 1/4-gallon peanut tank. I saw my future in the reflection of the canned-ham air-cleaner cover.

I had taken a year off college to work as a carpenter in Ohio, save money to buy a Harley-Davidson and ride around the American West for a couple of months. My best friend at the time, a college roommate, was going to do the same. When he announced he had squandered his money on beer and was returning home to work in his father’s tool-and-die shop, I reentered college and finished my senior year.

I rode my Sportster to classes. And I learned, mostly, how to tame that beast of a kick-starter: I’d straddle the bike and push the start-lever slowly with my right boot until I felt the pressure build at the top of the compression stroke. I’d allow the lever to ratchet up until it was almost perpendicular to the pavement. I’d grab on hard to the handgrips and let the engine compression give my boot a bounce like a diver off a springboard. Then I’d come down on the start-pedal with all my weight, fully committed.

One kick out of three, the motor would catch and I’d coax the throttle as the Sportster coughed to life. One kick out of 25, the motor would kick the start-lever back up. I broke the shanks of three pairs of boots. I tried starting the Sportster while wearing Topsiders exactly once.

A few years passed. I graduated from college and went to work. One of my friends from back home traded his decrepit Bultaco on a 750 Yamaha. We both strung together 10 days of vacation time and made plans to ride from Ohio to Glacier National Park, and then down to Yellowstone.

We were 135 miles into the 4,400-mile journey when we stopped in Indianapolis to refill that 2 1/4-gallon peanut tank. When I tried restarting the bike, it kicked back savagely. I looked down to see a wide crack in the outer engine case that supported the kick-start shaft. Without the case’s outboard support, the internal gears of the start mechanism gnashed uselessly against each other.

It was Labor Day and no Harley shops were open. So we pressed ahead: To start the bike, I would run alongside and push as fast as I could. I would mount the Sportster as if it were a pommel horse, spreading my knees wide at the last moment to clear the overstuffed saddlebags and the tent and sleeping bag bungied to the rear fender. I would bounce myself hard onto the seat and dump the clutch.

It wasn’t that much of a hardship bump-starting the Sportster for the first 1,900 miles. At one campground with deep-sand roads, I only had to push the bike a hundred yards until I found a patch of concrete. Whenever we stopped to gas up or eat or have a smoke, I tried making sure we parked at the top of a rise, no matter how small.

One morning, up high in the Rockies in Glacier National Park, I unzipped the tent door to discover three inches of snow. We broke camp and loaded the bikes. I tried bump-starting the Sportster on the snow-covered road. The back tire locked and skidded; the Sportster refused to start. We cleared a patch of road with our boots and threw down some sharp stone. The motor turned over and caught.

We headed out of the park, aiming for lower altitudes and warmer temperatures. We hit Missoula for the night, staying at an aunt’s house and thawing out our gear. In the morning, my uncle drove me to the Harley-Davidson dealership to buy a new engine case. I installed the new case and kicked the bike to ignition. We said goodbye and headed for Yellowstone National Park.

We followed the Madison River to the town of West Yellowstone, where we stopped for gas before entering the park. I hunted for the compression stroke with my boot, then came down hard. The motor kicked back and broke my brand-new engine case.

I bump-started the Sportster all the way through the snow of Yellowstone National Park, and then home to Ohio. The relationship had become a lot more complicated.

The guy who bought the bike from me saw nothing but the hard muscularity of the machine, heard nothing but the easy lope of the idle. “Most people don’t want a kicker,” I told him when the deal was done.

Here’s our situation so far: My editing employer, for whom I drive a giant combine four hours a day, harvesting news for the edification of our corporate clients, has asked for some extra help today. So has one of my colleagues, who has an unexpected conflict. I have agreed to both, and this morning it dawned on me what my schedule will be: 1-3 p.m., 4-6 p.m. and 9 p.m.-1 a.m. From doing a variation of this one day last week, I know how I will feel by the end of it — as though my eyeballs were dipped in sulfuric acid, then pounded back into my skull with sledgehammers. This will not stop them from crossing, however. I tell fellow journalists that the closest equivalent to this job in their world is wire editor on the desk of a single-topic newspaper. Even though the topic is interesting (health care), by the end of eight hours I will have followed the news cycle from Australia to New York, and by then you don’t know if the story you found in the Sydney Morning Herald at 1 p.m. and in the Wall Street Journal 12 hours later is the same one, a significant update or maybe about the Yellow Wiggle, only written in code.

Did I mention that over the weekend, my computer, which had settled down, developed another fever? Fortunately I have Alan’s, but still.

Anyway, I did something over the weekend that I want to tell you about, but I need time to do it justice, and right now I need to sleep some more and try to dream about something other than trends in heart-disease treatment.

So let’s all wish our good friend Kirk a happy birthday and you talk about current events in the comments. Please, no college football. Last time I checked, the “Michigan was robbed” story in the Freep has 100 comments and rising rapidly. You go over there if you have something to say about that.

So yesterday we — OK, I — were/was discussing the miracle of the modern internets, and ho ho, here it comes again.

Britney Spears, put on some damn panties!

I confess: I’m an occasional — OK, daily — reader of Wesmirch, the only gossip blog aggregator you’ll ever need. I don’t do it because I give a fig about such things, but because it’s so easy for a person like me, aging and working alone in the house all day in an unhip neighborhood, to wake up one day and feel entirely out of it. I still do, even with daily gossip intake. Half the faces in People magazine are strangers to me. Who the hell is Tara Reid? Have you ever heard a song by Babyshambles? Justin Timberlake, how’s your uncle Mark, with whom I went to school for a while? Is he still the Bambi-eyed, pudgy boy I remember? And which one of you is Justin, anyway?

The celebrities whose paparazzi-chronicled activities I used to pay attention to — Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn — all look like escapees from a nursing home and/or wino flop. If they go out after dark at all, I’m sure it’s only because they’re rich enough that they don’t need the early-bird special to make ends meet. But I’m sure they’re all snoring by 11 p.m., too.

Anyway, back to Britney. In the last week, a mere seven days, she’s become best friends forever with Paris Hilton and a messy old sot who goes out at night in short skirts, sans undies. Once you can forgive — every girl needs to throw down after a divorce filing — but twice? And then three times? That’s when the wire services start noticing. That’s when all the goodwill that you got by dumping your parasitical husband starts to ebb away. People start to ask questions: Did she flee the house without so much as a suitcase? Is this some sort of newfangled therapy for herpes?

Because, as I say so often around these parts, I don’t get it. Never once have I “forgotten” my panties when I was wearing anything other than sweatpants around the house on a Saturday morning. I can certainly understand how no-panties would feel more comfortable than a thong, but am I the only girl in the world who knows the secret of Jockey for Her? They’re perfectly comfortable, they come in breathable cotton, many attractive colors and cuts. I think I’m going to buy a three-pack of the bikinis and send them to this girl. Clearly she needs an underwear intervention.

Actually, many young actresses do. For all the money spent on La Perla and various other high-end lingerie brands by Hollywood celebrities, too much of it stays at home in the drawer. I will say this: It’s certainly entertaining to see the new slang that has grown up around our most slang-worthy body parts. When Lindsay Lohan got caught in a similar fix, one blogger referred to her “shredded pastrami.” Snicker.

If you’re wondering why the blog looks the way it does, I have no idea. We seem to be having some problems down in Atlanta, but my main blog guy is in Lansing, nursing sick in-laws. I’m trying to keep everything in perspective. Sick old people are more important than my blog theme.