I’ve been meaning to post this thing forever; it ran two weeks ago in the NYT’s sports magazine, Play.

It’s a story about a 12-year-old pitcher — “arguably as close to being a professional baseball player as a 12-year-old can be” — on an elite travel team in Florida. The story’s quite long, but equally readable, and is about lots of things — the blurring boundaries between child’s play and adult expectations, the care and feeding of a promising young athlete, etc. To say it pressed every button I had would be an understatement, starting with the opening paragraph:

Jarrod Petree has spent his whole life throwing. The first things he threw, according to his mother, were assorted toys and a fair amount of food from the highchair. Before long, he moved on to throwing balls. Some babies, of course, are throwers. But from the very start, Jarrod had an especially determined arm. At least this is the view taken by his father, Tim, who played Division II baseball at the Florida Institute of Technology in the late 80’s, graduating only a few years before his son was born: the kid basically arrived on earth wanting to throw.

The kid’s parents don’t come across as drooling villains, but it’s hard not to notice the rationalization, the Earl “Training a Tiger” Woods School of Self-Justification, isn’t it? “We had no choice in this! He threw toys and food from his highchair! Clearly he was born to be a pitcher! It’s our job to guide him to his goals!” Uh-huh. I had a baby who vigorously threw food from her highchair, too, and I never mistook the impulse for a burning desire to play major-league baseball, but then, she was a girl and I wasn’t a college baseball player, either. So there you go.

Again, these parents don’t strike me as bad people. It’s my devout wish that they read this story and saw themselves whole for the first time — well-meaning parents who have nevertheless set in motion a program designed to chew up their son and spit him out before he’s old enough to buy a beer:

Because of his arm, and because of his team, Jarrod has a list of things that he won’t do, or can’t do, by decree of his parents, who are usually thinking ahead to the next baseball game. He will not, for example, jump on a trampoline. When his friends from school hold their birthday parties at a rock-climbing facility, Jarrod does not go. He does not play pickup basketball at school, and if it is the week before a tournament, he sits out of gym class. If he goes swimming in the backyard pool, he’s careful not to get sunburned or tired out. He is not allowed to skateboard or ride a scooter.

“He rides his bike,” Lori interjected. “Just not a lot.” Then she sighed, adding, “I know we sound psycho, but we’re not.”

Keeping a 12-year-old off a bicycle? Who would find that psycho, mom?

I know there are children out there who are preternaturally talented in many things — music, art, sports. I’m sure it’s a struggle, as a parent, to find the balance between supportive encouragement and just plain pushiness. As adults, we know what these talents can mean in one person’s life — the riches, both monetary and otherwise, they can bestow. If you could choose a life of wealth, fame and world travel for your child, vs. one of being a crime-lab specialist or phys-ed teacher (Jarrod’s backup career choice), who wouldn’t go with Door No. 1? How do you find the right path there?

Of course there’s a dark side, alas:

Overuse injuries — particularly in the elbows and shoulders of young pitchers — are indeed becoming epidemic. Orthopedists often blame coaches and parents for failing to monitor how many pitches kids are throwing and for not giving them time to rest their arms. They also view breaking balls — particularly the curveball — as placing undue stress on the soft growth plates in the arm, which do not harden until a child reaches puberty. Glenn Fleisig, the research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala., has studied pitching mechanics for more than 10 years. He and his colleagues have come up with two basic recommendations, both of which are widely ignored across travel baseball: young players should take at least four months off per year, and nobody should throw a curveball before he’s old enough to shave.

Dr. Timothy Kremchek, the medical director for the Cincinnati Reds, specializes in an elbow-ligament reconstruction procedure commonly known as Tommy John surgery, named for the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who first underwent it, in 1974. There was a time when the surgery was reserved for aging professional pitchers, says Kremchek, but today, with young players pitching more games over extended seasons, the average age of his patients is quickly lowering. “I’m seeing 15 to 30 kids a year who are younger than 11 years old and in need of surgery,” he says. “It’s unheard of.” He maintains that there is currently a shortage of skilled pitchers in Major League Baseball because too many promising young players have self-destructed “trying to get to the Hall of Fame when they were 10 or 11.”

By the way, Jarrod throws curveballs. Is there parental rationalization at work? Why, of course: Tim insists that Jarrod, who has been honing his curve since he was 10, throws a less taxing form of the pitch in which the curve originates from his wrist and not his elbow.

Ohhhh-kay.

I wish the kid luck. Lots of it. He’s going to need it all.

While we’re on a sports-bloggage theme, I liked this Michael Miner column in the Chicago Reader, about how lame-ass American newspapers cover soccer:

As the World Cup gets under way in Germany, American journalists are talking to their readers as if they were unbaptized children. We have Hundley going on about war-torn Angola “carrying the pride of an entire continent,�? the “joyful samba�? that’s the Brazilian style of play, and even the “sons of immigrants and the sons of suburban soccer moms�? who form the up-and-coming American squad. We have Steven Stark and Harry Stark explaining in the Inquirer that one can see in the Italian team “some of the attributes that gave birth to the Renaissance�? and in the English team “what helped give rise to the industrial revolution and the wasted cities it left behind.�? If soccer’s not the church you worship at, all this is ecstatic gibberish. Or hilarious overwriting.

Note well: Every person I know who follows soccer does so by reading an overseas newspaper or watching satellite television. And the country gets more soccer-fied every year. While American sportswriters yammer about the Renaissance.

So how was your weekend? Mine was lovely. I bought a Swiffer. It was thrilling to use on my new wood floor, and restored my faith in Swifferdom. (To recap: The dusters work beyond your wildest dreams, but the WetJet is a waste of money.) Is there a cleaning product I’m not a sucker for? Yes. The battery-operated toilet brush. Show me a person too squeamish to scrub out a toilet with the old-fashioned long-handled brush and I’ll show you someone who has some Germ Issues. I don’t have germ issues. I expect bacteria to bloom everywhere, and it doesn’t bother me. I make war on gunk, dust and dog hair. If it’s visible, it’s my enemy. I don’t have time to worry about the invisible stuff.

We also saw “Cars.” Loved it. Every year, Pixar shows the rest of the animated moviemaking world how it’s done. Every year, the rest of that world fails to learn the lesson. One of these days, maybe.

And so the week begins. Last one of the school year. Ah, me.

Why does lawn care have to be so noisy?

Yesterday: A crew was taking down a tree about half a block away, probably yet another standing-dead casualty of the emerald ash borer. Chain saws and chippers were my afternoon’s soundtrack. Today, moments ago, the lawn-service crew arrived next door. Two mowers and two weed whippers sing as one. Next will be the blower.

I’m choosing not to be bugged by this. (It took me years to figure out that you could do that.) Although they’d better be done in the next 20 minutes.

(One minute later) And just like that, they’re done. Is that a chickadee I hear outside? Ah, sweet summer.

Really. The ghost of Possible Full-Time Employment is starting to haunt this address again, and once again, timing is all. If the damn thing would show up in January, that would be one thing, but there’s sure something sweet about freelancing in June. I’m writing this in a tank top that shows my bra straps, gym shorts and bare feet. The chickadee was just joined by a cardinal. Soon my daughter will be home from school, and maybe I’ll take her to the pool, and maybe I’ll keep working. An office isn’t much of a lure on a day like this. But for some reason I rarely get job feelers when I’m feeling lonely and poor and stuck inside my little home-office cage.

I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve spent too much time today writing, rewriting and throwing away a few notes about the sale of my old paper. The throwing away always comes after I tell myself it’s time to move on and I don’t care about the place anymore (not entirely true). Thankfully, late in the day I was saved by a reader:

I feel really bad for your old colleagues in Fort Wayne. Grit is the least of Ogden Newspapers’ problems.

This is a sad day for Fort Wayne, I think. The only positive is that Ogden does know how to operate in two-newspaper towns (Wheeling, W.Va., for instance), so it probably has every intention of keeping the N-S alive. The downside is that it’s liable to be a shell of a newspaper.

P.S. It’s already a shell of a newspaper, compared to what it was. They’ll feel right at home.

My old newspaper, site of 20 years of professional memories, has been sold.

To the publisher of Grit.

A telling anecdote in a column in yesterday’s DetNews. A respected former news anchor is speaking about the pervasive bias against African-American history in today’s newsrooms and offers this as proof:

WDIV sent the reporter airborne [in a helicopter] as part of a story about renovations to a safe house on the Underground Railroad. Dutifully, she called back to the newsroom. “We found the house, and we found some railroad tracks,” she said, “but I can’t find the place where the tracks went underground.”

You know, I wouldn’t waste half a minute arguing against the idea of pervasive bias against African Americans, in newsrooms and elsewhere — racism is simply part of the fabric of the nation. But in this case? Um, no. A journalist who doesn’t know the Underground Railroad wasn’t a choo-choo train that traveled through subterranean tunnels probably doesn’t know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb, either.

He’s giving the wrong speech. This one is from “Got Makeup? Great moments in TV journalism.”

Polyurethane Day One commences with a disappointment — there will have to be a Polyurethane Day Two. The humidity is too high to allow two coats today, but as many have pointed out, it’ll be worth it. And because whining about home improvement is the world’s most boring topic, let’s limit it to three sentences, eh?

A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal had a story on Zillow.com, the real-estate spy site that has everybody snooping on everybody else. Went there and Zillow’d my own house first. It estimated it at $100,000 less than we paid for it, pegged the taxes at about half their current level, undershot the square footage by 20 percent and dropped a bathroom. So much for that. It got closer on our Ann Arbor rental, but had nothing at all for our Fort Wayne abode; the Fort’s not yet in the database.

Fort Wayne’s never in the database. Poor Fort Wayne. The latest candidate to be named as a possible buyer for my old newspaper is Black Press, a Canadian company. At first I thought, “Black? Canadian? Could this possibly have a connection to disgraced press mogul Conrad Black?” (I figured maybe there could be a $300,000 consulting contract to be had for reading the paper and discussing it with the publisher.) But no — different outfit. If, indeed, this Canadian company buys The News-Sentinel, it will settle in with such siblings as the Lake Cowichan Gazette and Kamloops This Week. What a stunning comedown. When Alan got promoted he was sent off for a few days of KR management training (aka “Prick School”) in Miami. He ate Cuban food in Little Havana and watched people feed romaine lettuce to the manatees in Biscayne Bay.

Then it looked as though Gannett would buy the paper. Then a chain based in Fargo (where there are no manatees). Now it seems whoever offers $299 for the office equipment can just walk in, slip a halter and lead rope over the heads of the few staffers worth leading to yet another auction ring and throw a match over their shoulders as they exit the building. I used to take a certain amount of pride in working in America’s smallest two-newspaper market. With the sale of the Philly dailies, the story of KR’s dejected dozen effectively ends. No one cares who ends up owning the paper in places like Duluth, Wilkes-Barre and the Fort, do they? I guess we’ll find out.

Finally, the internet has spawned many puzzling success stories, but none more so than Glenn Reynolds, who has built a career as a pundit on such Chance-the-gardenerisms as “heh” and “indeed,” and now seems to have even the Wall Street Journal buffaloed. Read this and tell me if it makes a damn lick of sense to you, because it didn’t make any to me.

Oh, and P.S. The Reynoldses have one (1) child themselves. I guess parenthood just wasn’t prestigious enough for them.

No comment.

What a weekend. Two soccer games, the first sail of the season, the St. Joan of Arc fair, a dinner out to more or less celebrate our anniversary, and flower day at the Eastern Market. One of those weekends when you need another weekend, just to recover.

You don’t need a blow-by-blow, but hear this: I’m terribly disappointed that I didn’t win the Basket of Cheer at the St. Joan of Arc fair — a wheelbarrow full of so many bottles of booze I could have opened a tavern and not restocked for a year. Five bucks seemed a small price for a chance to win this third-place prize (first was a new lawn mower, which I don’t need). Ah, well. I guess Jesus loves me anyway.

The first sail was glorious — stiff breeze straight out of the west, clear skies, a rare day above 70 degrees. I picked up a little split of champagne en route and we all had a drink, plus a bit for the boat and the lake. Kate made a face at her own taste, and we told her about Dom Perignon’s eureka moment when he accidentally made champagne (“I am drinking stars!”). She was unimpressed. I wonder if any of the Dom’s Own was in the Basket of Cheer.

So, bloggage:

HoffaFest 06 — No body yet. We’ll keep you posted.

But many bodies in the Wayne County morgue after some bad heroin comes to town. Gotcha WMD, gotcha WMD!

He climbed Mt. Everest, even though he’s… something. Gay, blind, whatever.

I should say, though, that errors are errors, and then, there are errors: The lead story on Indiana’s NewsCenter Sunday 6:00 P.M. newscast was that former Mayor Ivan Lebamoff “was laid to rest today.” According to Eric Olsen, funeral services had taken place earlier in the day at St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church. … Funeral Services will be held on Monday at 11:00 A.M.

Every so often people ask me what’s the big deal if newspapers and TV stations cut staff, so what if fewer people are there? So what if we save money by hiring greenhorns? So what, so what, so what? Well, because sometimes you bury a guy a day early, that’s what. Presumably they spelled his name correctly, though; I’ve tuned in local TV in Fort Wayne to find a former mayor, Win Moses Jr., ID’d in his super as “Wynn Moses.”

(Oh, and speaking of local media and the work it’s been doing lately, Fort Wayne Observed broke the actual news of the former mayor’s death more than four hours before the evening paper did.)

Curse you, John Scalzi, and your infernal link to the Make Your Own Motivational Poster generator.

Between you and those damn videos, I may not get anything done tonight.

Housekeeping note: I put up a few recent clips in pdf format on a new page, The Clip File. It’ll be a work in progress.

The next week or two is going to suck, audibly. The wood for the floor was delivered today, followed by a visit from the Floor Guy. Who says the schedule is not looking good for a wrap-up this week. The wood needs to acclimate to our microclimate before it can be installed, and then it has to do some other things, and sanding is involved, and the bottom line is, if we want it done right — at this point I always want to jump up and say, “No! Do it wrong!” — it’ll probably be next week before we can reclaim our family room and living room, which is currently serving as a storage room for all the family-room furniture.

Which means we’ve been driven upstairs for our living space. The good news: Alan hooked the cable box up to the primitive tiny upstairs TV, so we can all watch “American Idol” tomorrow night gathered on our bed like a heap of puppies. Yeah, I know it sounds fun, and it probably will be.

At least the kitchen is still operable. When we did our kitchen floor in Fort Wayne, I thought I’d explode if I had to eat another takeout meal.

Because Alan moved the cable box, I got to see “The Sopranos.” Discuss.

I love the way David Chase keeps slammin’ the truth in our faces. All those weeks building sympathy for poor Vito Spatafore, taking his first tentative steps out of what had to be a very large walk-in closet, making his new home in Gaytown, N.H., and then pow — he reminds us that, at heart, like all of these characters, Vito’s just a murderin’ piece of shit. Tony, self-described “strict Catholic,” cheats on his wife, kills his nephew’s fiance, spreads evil like a slug trail… but objects to a homosexual business associate. Carmela, ditto strict Catholic, goes over to bring her destitute friend a surprise birthday celebration, wearing a fur coat and driving yet another in a long line of fancy cars purchased with ill-gotten gains. And then leans on her husband for not leaning on the building inspector harder, so she can build her spec house with substandard materials.

Sooner or later, everyone will get what they deserve. (Bobby Bacala already has, obviously.) I used to think the series had to end with Tony dead. Now I’m thinking it has to be worse. One of the kids has to go. Obviously, it’s A.J., but maybe Meadow, too. We shall see.

So: Bloggage

Mitch Harper at Fort Wayne Observed reports — and I think he’s correct — that my ex-newspaper, The News-Sentinel, is the only one of Knight-Ridder’s Dejected Dozen to have no reported or rumored buyer. I will repeat what I learned in my final years there, which may be the most important thing I learned there: Never say it can’t get any worse, because it can always get worse. Al.Ways. And probably will. Not that not having a buyer is the worst thing in the world — I doubt McClatchy will leave them beside the road like a foundling — but man, it’s gotta be humiliating. Psychological wounds are the worst.

I told Alan not long ago, moments after we’d been nearly sideswiped, at freeway speeds, by a driver whose inattentiveness to the road was inversely proportional to her attentiveness to her phone call: “The miracle is that we don’t have six fatalities a day around here.” And the scariest thing about our near-miss? I don’t think the driver even knew it happened. She was too busy blah-blahing.

Yesterday I came as close as I ever have to becoming a smear on the road. Pedaling my bike down to the library, on the sort of semi-deserted suburban street that I love to ride on, I approached an intersection. I had the right-of-way. A minivan rolling down the side street seemed to be slowing. I went on across. The minivan kept rolling. I threw up my hand in the universal gesture known to Supremes fans everywhere: Stop stop for the love of God stop you idiot I’m so much smaller than you. The driver slammed on the brakes, and stopped a whole 24 inches from my right hip.

You know the punchline, don’t you? Cell phone.

I swear, I’m going to start packing a sawed-off shotgun, loaded with a peppery birdshot, maybe rock salt. Nothing lethal, just something to get their attention.

Well, I always suspected exercise would kill me someday.

OK, then.

Our old pal Adrianne called yesterday, who may be the last newspaper editor in America who’s having a good time at her job. Why? She works for a tabloid, in upstate New York. Tabs still know how to have fun. Big news up in her neck of the Hudson Valley these days — the death of Moses Teitelbaum, the rebbe of the Satmar Hassidim, a branch of which lives in Kiryas Joel, a little village in their circulation area.

“You have your unusual locals in the Amish,” she often tells me. “We have the Hassidim.”

Anyway, the death of an orthodox Jewish leader with devoted followers in two places creates its own news — there were services in New York, then a sprint up to KJ for a second funeral, at 3:30 a.m., so that he could be buried before sunrise in keeping with Jewish tradition. And there was traffic and charter buses and lawsuits, and, of course, the politicians. Gov. Pataki showed up to pay his respects.

“You should see our front page,” she said. “A picture of these kids in sidelocks lined up, and a headline: GUESS WHO’S COMING TO SHIVA?”

Tabs have all the fun.

I once saw some research, very cutting-edge for the time, that wired up a bunch of volunteers with these devices that would track, with some precision, where and how their eyes moved as they read the paper. The idea was to discover, without relying on personal reporting, exactly what things people read as they looked at their hometown daily. When the research was presented, each element on the page — from the 2D page number at the top to the credit lines on photos — had a number next to it, indicating the percentage of people whose eyes stopped long enough to indicate they might have actually read it.

One page had a left-rail digest of short items, marching all the way down the page. Each item had a number somewhere between 17 and 19 percent, except for two, which were up in the 40 percent range. The headline on one was something like “Sex charges filed against parolee” and the other, “Nude body found in field.” I think this indicates, with some authority, that if you want someone to read your work, slap a headline on it featuring the words “sex” or “nude.”

Note that I haven’t done it for this item, as all good webmasters know that doing so is like sending an engraved invitation asking for spam-bots to stop by. Some readers you don’t want.

But my point — and I do have one — is that headlines matter, whether it’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO SHIVA or NUDE SEX AT COUNCIL MEETING. And yet, when I was writing them, the question we most often asked one another was, “Is this offensive? Should we tone this down?”

OK, I’ll stop. Off for another bike ride. If I’m killed by a distracted, cell phone-yakking, minivan driver, I’d like this headline, please: CYCLIST STRANGLES DRIVER BEFORE DYING OF INJURIES.

Just one “American Idol” pop-culture note before we get to the meaty stuff: Kellie Pickler has passed her sell-by date, and in fact did so several weeks ago. She is starting to stink up the room. Also, as though I needed even more evidence that I am 12,000 years old, Elliott Yamin referred to “A Song for You” as a Donny Hathaway song, and no one corrected him. That’s because only six graybeards in the audience watching at home could say, with authority, that it’s a Leon Russell song.

Reader, I have the album. Recorded in 1969, when I was just starting to pay attention to such things. (I bought it for “Roll Away the Stone,” which I distinctly recall hearing first on prog-rock radio, more proof that I’m older than Lazarus. Radio playing obscure Leon Russell? That’s crazy talk!)

I wonder if Leon watches “American Idol.” I wonder what he thought when he heard one of his best songs assigned to a performer, not a songwriter. And what’s Leon up to these days? Of course Professor Google knows. Speaking of graybeards…

Oh, but I have to stop talking about the music of my youth. It’s just a straight shot from here to the iTunes Music Store, to spend away Kate’s college fund. I’m way too suggestible about these things. Do you know that after a Sopranos episode wrapped up with a Pink Floyd song a few weeks ago, I immediately ran over there and downloaded it? I did — “One of These Days.” Which isn’t a terrible song, but I sort of have a wall up between myself and Pink Floyd, which has been there since I gave away my copy of “Dark Side of the Moon” and vowed that if I never heard it again for all eternity, I still would have heard it once too often. “One of These Days” is from “Meddle,” but still. I was never much of a Pink Floyd fan; the band always seemed to be solid evidence that marijuana really was a dangerous drug. A gateway drug, in fact — it led to Pink Floyd records.

Did I say meaty stuff was following? Well, I lied. Bloggage is following:

Who has the best corrections in the newspaper business? I’d nominate The Guardian: We said that the vertical drop of the Stealth ride at Thorpe Park was the fourth steepest in the world (Crowds force closure of theme park, page 11, April 17). Nothing can be steeper than vertical. What was meant was that the launch acceleration – 0-80mph in 2.3 seconds – was the fourth fastest.

What do firefighters do when they’re not fighting fires? Sometimes they pull naked guys out of chimneys. Jon Carroll explains.

Some weeks back, after Rosa Parks was laid to rest, there was some disapproving talk about how the niches nearby in her Detroit mausoleum were suddenly carrying much larger price tags; apparently the rule of “location, location, location” applies after death, too. Well, time has wielded its scythe and Mrs. Parks has a new neighbor. And as they say, there goes the neighborhood.

More later. Discuss.

Off to Ann Arbor yesterday to do some work. On a book, no less. Not my book, someone else’s book. But still — a book. On the way home, I got a phone call, which offered more work. When I got home, another phone call. Which offered still more work. Hoo-boy, I actually felt like a person with a job yesterday, even if it is one that allows me to watch “The Sopranos” on Monday morning in sweatpants.

Nay, requires me to watch it on Monday morning. Because on Sunday nights? I’m working.

Being a freelancer is all about multiple income streams, don’t you know.

As I did my taxes this year, I estimated that, good-lord-willin’-and-the-creek-don’t-rise, I’m on track to match or exceed my last year’s salary as a columnist. The work I’m doing now is harder but more interesting, riskier but less predictable. There’s more juggling, more cold-sweat financial anxiety, but 97 percent less b.s. That’s gotta be worth something.

I expect I’ll be back to work in an office before too much longer — opportunities are starting to present themselves, and honestly, in this economy, in this business, having one member of a co-prosperity sphere working without a net, from home, doesn’t seem wise. I fully expect spousal health care benefits to either go away or become ruinously expensive within the next few years. But if and when I do go back to an office coffeepot and the rest of it, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I made it work the other way, at least for a while.

Yes, yes — I feel a song coming on — I did it myyyyy waaaaayyyyy.

OK, then.

What are you paying for gas these days? Filled up yesterday in Ann Arbor, at the chest-clutching price of 2.96 a gallon. And it’s only April — I suppose $3.50 in inevitable by midsummer, maybe even as much as $4. I love Detroit’s reaction to these events, which seems to consist mainly of adding to the greenhouse effect by vigorous complaining. Not that there isn’t comic relief:

“It’s not easy, but as soon as gas hit $2.80, I stopped driving my Lincoln Continental,” said Antoine Coleman of New Haven, a hi-lo operator in Detroit.

Now there’s an idea. (And I have no idea what a hi-lo operator is. Do you?)

As for me, warm weather calls for instituting the No-Drive Zone, roughly from Alter to Vernier and Mack to the lake, where I do most of my shopping and errand-running. From now until further notice, if the shopping and errand can be accomplished on a bike, it will. My cargo bags, last year’s Mother’s Day gift, were the best I’ve gotten in a good long time. I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.

The 100 Unsexiest Men in the World. Relax, you’re not on the list. But it’s a stupid list (Osama bin Laden? Richard Simmons?). Of course, it was written by TWO MEN. And it’s not a gay list (it includes Brad Pitt!). The irony is staggering.

Every time I consider getting a BlackBerry, I sit down, take a deep breath and consider: a) I don’t need one; and b) the idea of typing with one’s thumbs is stupid. Jon Carroll asks whether humanity is evolving smaller hands.

This guy says every newspaper editor-in-chief in the country should be writing a weekly column. I guess because newspapers need more columns written by uptight, frightened people who use “impact” as a verb (and “impactful” as an adjective). It’s a rule — the editor’s column is the best-read, and worst-written, column in the paper. No one fixes it because everyone’s afraid to tell the boss he or she can’t write. Once I told our editor he’d used the word “brackish” incorrectly. (He wasn’t writing about the paper, but his backyard fish pond. That’s another thing about editor’s columns: They should be about how we get the paper out, but sooner or later they all fall victim to Columnist’s Complaint and start writing about their backyard fish ponds. Or, worse, they try to make their backyard fish ponds a metaphor for something that happened at the paper that week.) He didn’t say, “Is there time to fix it? Let’s get it correct, then.” He said, “Really? Huh.”

Just so you know: “Brackish” means “slightly salty,” as in the water at the mouth of a river that drain into the ocean. It doesn’t mean “yucky.” And a disclaimer: The editor mentioned above wasn’t a terrible editor. He just wrote a pretty lame column; it’s, like, a rule.

And finally, NN.C’s comments are being spam-bombed. The filter’s catching it all, but so much is coming in that I’m going to the moderation panel and hitting “mark all as spam” and deleting them with a click. If you left a comment and it isn’t showing up, it may well have gotten mass-deleted. E-mail me privately or try again. UPDATE: J.C. installed a plug-in; if you have any problems commenting, let me know.