I don’t know about you, but I find this story hilarious. Even the headline is funny: The billionaire, the Post and the $220G shakedown; Page Six writer wanted $$$ to stop inaccurate coverage.

Read on, and learn about Jared Paul Stern, a petty-tyrant gossip columnist who put the screws to one Ron Burkle, managing partner of Yucaipa Cos., leveraging $220K — pocket change for a billionaire, I’m sure the columnist figured — against a pledge to stop writing lies about him.

You start reading a story like this, and you expect to learn that Burkle was a closet case of some sort, that the writer had the goods on him — compromising photos, a recorded phone call involving falafels and a Shower Massage, whatever. But no:

The false items included a Jan. 1 report that Burkle flew Tobey Maguire, girlfriend Jen Meyer and blonde actress Sarah Foster in his private jet to Aspen, Colo., where they “vacationed at Burkle’s mansion.” Burkle does not own a mansion in Aspen, did not fly his private jet to Aspen, and didn’t vacation with Foster, Maguire or Meyer.

Gossip journalism must be a strange world, sort of a parallel universe where people look roughly the same as you, but cut them and their blood is green and the world has two suns. Get this: Burkle and his lawyers have repeatedly written and or told The Post’s attorneys, editors and management that the articles and items about him on Page Six are inaccurate but to no avail.

I love this. You can open the paper to learn you have been credited with an Aspen mansion you don’t own, have your lawyer call the paper’s lawyer to say so, and still — no dice.

You can probably guess what happened here. Burkle went to the feds, they wired up his apartment and a meeting was called with the ink-stained extortionist, who apparently never saw an episode of “The Sopranos” and doesn’t know how to phrase a shakedown delicately:

An exasperated Burkle finally said, “How much do you want?” after Stern said he could control coverage by Richard Johnson, the column’s chief writer, and his staff. “Um, $100,000 to get going and then you could get it to me on a month-to-month, maybe like $10,000,” replied Stern. “Okay, that’s a great deal,” said Burkle.”

It goes on, and every word is fabulous. There’s even a minor character appearing in the third-to last graf named “Sessa von Richthofen.” Too, too funny.

Bloggage:

I once had a brief acquaintance with a dog breeder; I think her specialty was Australian shepherds. We hadn’t known each other long before I learned something pretty important about her: She took breeding absolutely seriously. She would neuter, spay and, if necessary, euthanize any animal she believed was not a credit to the breed. She had elaborate tests she did on her young dogs, taking away their food when they were eating and other provocations. If any reacted in what she considered an aggressive or dangerous manner, it had a date with the vet. If it was lucky it would only lose its fertility.

As the owner of a 20-pound juvenile delinquent, I was a little taken aback, but she explained it quite reasonably: You do no one any favors by keeping bad dogs in the gene pool, and in fact much of the damage done by bad dogs is directly due to human unwillingness to make the tough call. The day one of her Aussies knocked her down and growled in her face, she calmly got up, leashed the offender and took him away for a lethal shot of night-night medicine. It was, in the long run, the humane solution.

So I was a little surprised to read that Oakland County is jumping on the no-kill bandwagon. I mean, it’s a sweet idea, but is it realistic? Many dogs come to shelters because they’re problem children — yes, due to idiot owners, but problems just the same. Maybe it’s better to turn out the lights in a painless way.

A Free Press columnist points out the obvious:

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, the tough-talking ex-prosecutor who spent decades trying to legalize capital punishment in Michigan, now says he wants to abolish the death penalty outright. For puppies, at least.
…I’ve no idea whether this is a realistic goal, and I doubt that Patterson does, either. But I’m certain he’s doing the right thing, because if you’re offered a policy choice between killing puppies and saving puppies and you have to think about it for more than, say, 0.5 seconds, you have no business in elective politics.

Yup.

And finally, the good people of Indiana continue to entertain the nation on the subject of DST. In case you wondered, yes, the whole idea of clock-tinkering started and ended with high-falutin’ east coast snobs:

It is now April. At 6 a.m. it is still dark. In June, it might still be light outside at 11 p.m. Children have always asked, “Can’t we please stay out until dark?�? This June, if your answer is yes, it might be near midnight before they come home.
…When one hobnobs with East Coast snobs and then becomes the governor of Indiana, he might have to do things to prove that he is still a blue-blood elitist. “Hey, look, we in (fly-over) Indiana change our clocks, too! Now we’re just like you. … Will you still invite me to Martha’s Vineyard this summer? Can I still go duck hunting with you in Connecticut? … Please?�?

Can I still go duck hunting with you? I stand agog.

Have a swell weekend.

Like many mischievous little boys, Spriggy doesn’t go to the barber any more than he has to. He normally doesn’t see the groomer until later in the spring, but they had an opening and the day was warm; who doesn’t believe they’d be better off with less clothing on a fair day?

The weather has since turned chillier. Bad idea.

Still, every haircut reveals a new dog. We see, once again, that he’s no show specimen — his head is too large for his body. His ears seem to get larger every year. (Once upon a time they folded over in cute little triangles; now he’s Yoda Boy.) Sometimes he sprouts new spots that go away during the next Furry Period. This time they cut his eyebrows down, so his eyes look bigger and his face more vulnerable. Needless to say, he is workin’ that for all the cheese nibbles and peanut-butter bread crusts he can.

At least he’ll be suitable to greet this weekend’s company. Any suggestions on what I should make for dinner? I’m stumped.

Bloggage:

Bob Caylor, mentioned in the Jim Barbieri piece below, weighed in today with his own appreciation, shorter than mine and more affectionate. Recommended: As the wide world judges a man, he may have been a relentlessly agitated fish in too small a pond. But Bluffton was better off for his devotion.

An editor once told me, in the sort of bass-ackwards management advice I’ve come to think of as Thoroughly Hoosier: “It’s always tricky to write something about someone who’s dead that isn’t 100 percent complimentary.”

Noted, chief. So, on with it.

Jim Barbieri died this week. Chances are you didn’t know him. I didn’t know him, but I knew a lot about him. A good friend of mine, Bob Caylor, worked for him. I write this with a fat file before me, mostly letters from Bob, but with lots of clippings and photocopies of the incontrovertible evidence that his boss, Jim Barbieri, editor of the Bluffton News-Banner of Bluffton, Ind., was, well, a real piece of work.

The obit linked above tells you so little: James C. Barbieri had served as the News-Banner’s publisher, editor-in-chief as well as reporter and editorial writer during his more than 50 years with the paper. He was 77. All true, but such a thin, pastel picture of what Barbieri was — an old-time editor of a small-town daily, with all that entails. When I first became acquainted with his work, it wasn’t unusual for him to have written every word on the front page, and this was one of those old-fashioned front pages, cluttered and crammed with stories in 9-point type (although he took all the pictures, too). You’d turn inside, and he might have one or two signed editorials. It’s hard to imagine he had need of a staff, he worked so hard, straddling the town like a colossus, up on every possible story, and then some.

Small-town newspapers run by a different set of rules than the New York Times. These rules include, but are not limited to:

1) Everyone who wants to be in the paper, can be, with their name spelled correctly.
2) Every big story can be localized somehow.
3) News will be placed in its proper perspective.

As to that last one, here’s Barbieri on a barn fire, under a six-column, two-deck, 48-point headline reading, no, screaming: 40-MPH Wind-Whipped Super-Blaze Destroys 2 Lockwood Barns, Machinery; $500,000 Losses This was under a six-column kicker: 3 Big Tractors Among Dozen Implements Plus 2 Trucks, Car in Toll; Daring Firemen Ward Flames From Propane, Gasoline; Save House, 4th Barn.

OK, that’s just the display type. Here’s the lead:

Driven like a molten arrow by 40-mile-per-hour gale winds, one of the largest and most spectacular fires of modern history here catapulted through three large barns at the Richard Lockwood place on the Ellingham Pike, devouring building structure and machinery in superheated flaming gulps Thursday afternoon in a little-precedented rampage of destruction.

New graf:

It was like something from the other planets.

The story goes on. And on. And on. I think in word counts these days, and I’d estimate it at 2,000 words, minimum, maybe closer to 3,000. The Chicago Tribune might write that much if the mayor were caught in bed with a 9-year-old boy, but probably not. And having started at a gallop with those superheated flaming gulps, it never really slows down — “erupting streams and 4th of July bursts of shooting flames and encircling smoke” … “blackened by the ultra-heat but not aflame” … “swallowing and blasting in the inferno.” And my favorite: “rural holocaust.”

Nine grafs later: “But the firemen appeared like pygmies confronting King Kong as they hustled about trying to defend against and peck blows at the superfire under the compulsion of the tremendous wind.”

And that was one story. He probably wrote five others that day, plus the editorials. I don’t know what his hours were, but it’s safe to say he was never home for long. One of my favorite stories about him was the one Bob told about the secretary who mistakenly bought decaf for the office coffeepot, while Jim spent two days walking into walls and wondering why his usual 70 cups a day were failing him so utterly.

Rule No. 2, about localization? No one could do it like Jim. A plane crash over the Indian Ocean with no Americans aboard? Look for it on Page One, because “Bluffton-made Franklin Electric submersible motors” are being used in the hunt for the black boxes. I hold in my hand a 10-paragraph Barbieri story about the jail in Covington, Ky., which was sadly outdated only 15 years after its construction. And this is news in Bluffton why? Because the Covington jail was “hemmed in” by the river, but the new county jail in Bluffton has a “5.84-acre tract in a project based on calculated inmate population growth plus adaptability for expansion beyond that if ever necessary.”

As for Rule No. 1, let it only be said that the News-Banner was a prime source for one of my summer dog-days perennials — a roundup of all the enormous-vegetable news from the surrounding area.

But Jim didn’t just follow these rules. He made up his own. He’d been around that town about as long as anyone; why shouldn’t he be in charge? When the sheriff had a heart attack in office, Jim decided he needed to go. And started running speculative stories about who might succeed him should he decide to retire after his “punishing” cardiac event, and how risky it is to be a county’s top law-enforcement officer with a bad ticker.

Well. It turned out the sheriff only wanted to stay in office long enough to see ground broken on the new jail, so history would record that it happened under his watch. A resignation for health reasons was timed to coincide with the gala groundbreaking. Jim stayed on message until the end:

…the sheriff is expected to raise a small symbolic amount of already loosened turf — not enough for overexertion — as he turns the first spade Friday in the groundbreaking ceremony…”

(This became known, in a small way, in our own small newsroom orbit, as the “pre-loosened shovelful of dirt” story.)

I’m going on and on, and I haven’t even gotten to my favorite, about what happened the night he got a call from a family who had an unwelcome visitor. (Why call the police when you can call Jim?) Again, a multi-deck headline:

N-B Writer’s Covering BHS 100 Years Interrupted by Man Hallucinating on LSD, Rural Wells Family Alarm (The kicker: Asked about ‘Downers,’ Guns, Help; Killing Talked)

The lead:

This reporter had been covering events all Saturday afternoon at the Bluffton High school 100-year celebration and was about to go into the cafeteria for the alumni banquet when the phone rang at the high school. Over the next four hours this writer was drawn away from the historic educational milestone and festivities — dealing with a young man who was hallucinating on LSD.

Jim drove him around for a while, and then to the hospital. Then he went back to the high school and finished that assignment, before banging out 2,000 words or so on the tripping guy. Just another day at the office.

Jim didn’t keep this pace up for his entire career; he slowed down a bit at the end. For the longest time, all I noticed about him was his convoluted prose, his goofy Page One tributes (Happy 50th Birthday, Bluffton Bridge!), his elevation of a barn fire to a rural holocaust. He didn’t really gain my respect until his paper was sold to a local chain; they owned a bunch of little dailies out in “the region.” The head of the company had political aspirations — he wanted to be governor — and I expect he thought his own newspapers would back him up on it, like a rural Citizen Kane. Wrong-o.

It was hard not to notice the News-Banner’s editor didn’t think much of his new publisher. Every poll that showed him doing badly ended up on Page One. I don’t remember all the details, but it was plain Jim thought of his new boss as anything but a newspaperman worthy of collegial respect. As the publisher’s star fell, Jim was right there with the pre-loosened-shovelful-of-dirt stories. What was the publisher going to do, fire him? Fire Jim Barbieri? You might as well try to fire God.

If there is an afterlife, and a God, I expect Jim is talking to him now. I don’t know what final disposition of his case will be — as I said, I only knew him by reputation — but I expect that whatever it is, Jim will file something by deadline. I can’t wait to see the headline.

Life getting you down? Feel as though winter will never end? Can’t shake a pain-in-the-ass cold? Go camping with some Brownies. The weather will still be lousy, your own cold will not improve, but hey, it was fun. Seventeen Brownies and 15 moms in one lodge made for much togetherness, but that’s what the spring camping weekend is all about. I was reminded, once again, of another good reason to have kids — to get you out of your little world, and into someone else’s. (Unless you’re one of the world’s most controlling parents, your kids move in a different world than you do, yes they do.) I made 36 hours of small talk with the other mothers. I was the extra adult for the horseback riding. I held a ball python in the critter house. And I watched the girls’ Gimme Shelter class, pictured above, although that was the point at which the cold penetrated all the way to the bone and I had to go back to the lodge and lie under my sleeping bag until my temperature rose again.

Kate had a good time, too. I think even the python didn’t feel too badly used by the weekend.

Kids are different today; when did little girls get so la-de-dah about handling serpents? They got to pick up all the reptiles and amphibians in the critter house, but the poor frogs were neglected, while the python had a proverbial line out the door. In my own troop, there might have been one snake-handler, and the rest of us would have had the vapors. In this one, the only one who waited outside with a trembling heart was one of the mothers.

Snakes get a bad rap. One of the mothers was a military wife, had given birth to her first child in a hospital in rural Alaska. She said a moose cow stood outside the window watching, licking the glass.

(“Why do they lick the glass?” I asked. “I have no idea,” she said. “I was just glad we had a second-floor apartment, because one of my girlfriends was on the first floor, and her windows were always smeared with moose slobber.”)

Anyway, she explained that the first 1,000 moose you see in Alaska are charming, and then they become a pain in the butt. It’s common to call in sick to work because it’s rutting season and a bull moose is standing in your driveway between you and your car. You swiftly learn that a cow with a calf at her side is as dangerous as a black bear. You also learn that unlike horses, moose hip joints are omnidirectional, and they can kick straight out to the side, no problem. And yet her daughter carried a cute stuffed moose. Most people say awww when they see moose along the road.

But the snake, described by its handler as “as friendly and harmless as a kitten, but not as cute”? This is the animal that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

Join the Snake Anti-Defamation League, I say.

OK, then.

I blinked last week and missed perhaps the briefest career in our topsy-turvy world of digital media — the very short story of Ben Domenech, WashPost right-wing blogger. Zip he was hired, zip he was exposed as a rather blatant plagiarist, zip he resigned. Now comes the extended period of keyboard-clattering in which everyone weighs in with an opinion. I’ll keep my own comments short: I hope next time the WashPost doesn’t feel the need to hire a punk. Go ahead and click over and read some of the assembled quotes by the WashPost’s late hire — Coretta King is a communist, Helen Thomas is an “ugly old bat,” blah to the blah to the blah. And here we thought homeschooled children were so much more polite and well-brought-up than the ones polluted and coarsened by “government” schools. His mom must have been using the collected works of Ann Coulter as supplementary reading.

And in the NYT yesterday, a great read on the difficult effort to eradicate the guinea worm. This effort is led by Jimmy Carter, doubtless a figure of pure evil to people like Ben Domenech, but never mind that. It so happens I’m familiar with the guinea worm, having read not one but two mystery novels in which it plays a part — Randy Wayne White’s “Dead of Night” and the much artier “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” (The latter was translated from its original Danish. In London, I found the English version, with the title “Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.” Two countries, separated by a common language.)

It was amazing to learn just how close we are to eradicating guinea worm, the details of which are not recommended to the weak of stomach or those with food fresh on the stomach. However, it’s those last few places where the larvae thrive that are proving most stubborn, and therein hangs a big meaty Sunday NYT tale. Worth the time.

Good news and bad news out of Fort Wayne today, and it’s the same news: Carol Tannehill is leaving The News-Sentinel. The paper’s ace restaurant critic and feature writer departs soon to become editor of Home Cooking magazine, down Berne way. Alan used to be her boss, and I know how much he relied upon her, and how popular she was with readers.

Some of her best work wasn’t even food-related; she could really write a personal essay. I think my favorite was about her father’s home movies, which were years ahead of their time — on Christmas morning, he made them get out of bed multiple times, so he could get several angles and good coverage shots. She also did an outstanding job describing her breast-reduction surgery, which wasn’t easy, I’m sure.

So that’s the bad news and the good news — bad for the paper, good for her.

In that spirit, of food and journalism, here’s a recipe for pumpkin muffins. I made them tonight and served them with split-pea soup. It’s really too late in the season for that soup, which is wintry, and the muffins are better in fall. But when it’s 30 degrees, I figure it doesn’t really matter. I clipped the recipe from The New-Sentinel oh…two, maybe three redesigns ago. It’s from Jane and Michael Stern’s “Taste of America” column, and the muffins are credited to the Publick House in Sturbridge, Mass. So:

Pumpkin muffins

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup light vegetable oil
2 eggs
3/4 cup canned pumpkin
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease 12-cup muffin tin, or line with paper muffin cups.

Mix sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkins.

Sift together flour, baking powder, soda, salt and spices.

Quickly stir together both mixtures and fold in nuts and raisins. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full. Bake 18 to 20 minutes, until golden brown. Cool and eat.

I have been neglecting my daily Jon Carroll click some days lately. Is it me or him? I’d say him, but hey — everyone slumps sometimes. I’m willing to ride it out.

Well, today at least, he’s back. If nothing else, it’s good to see that in San Francisco at the very least, you can refer to anti-gay activists as “vile,” “cretins” and “overbusy, underbrained worms.”

Anyway, I know this is preaching to the choir, but hey:

My older daughter is a lesbian. She is also the single mother of an adopted child, working to make and sustain a family with jaw-dropping tenacity. I am a member of that family, but she is the head of it. The idea that any part of her social agenda involves the destruction of the family is insulting and stupid. She adopted a child, which means that a child who would not have had a home now has one. It means that a child who would not have rested safely in a mother’s arms now does so. These are real family values, not the poison spouted by these thoughtless, gossip-mongering abominations.

Bring it on, baby.

Talk about your irony. I finished the project that’s been occupying too much of my brain — and running my printer cartridges dry — and sent it off to my editor at the Indiana Policy Review Sunday night. It’s set to run in the spring issue.

So of course I open my browser today and find it on a website! Dang new media! Eating dead trees for lunch ONCE AGAIN!!!

Actually, it was all shared on the up-and-up. Since the IPR takes no advertising and exists not to sell magazines but to disseminate ideas, it’s all good. I think I’ll let you steal Fort Wayne Observed’s bandwidth; you can find it here. (Warning: It’s very long. You know you’re working for a non-profit when you ask how much they want and they say, “Oh, you know, 4,000 to 6,000 words.”)

I will tell you this: It’s a subject upon which my own ideas continue to evolve. So if you feel like talking about them, you know where to click.

More is becoming clear in the wake of the Knight Ridder sale. (Note to self: Does any normal human being use the phrase “in the wake of” in everyday discourse? I didn’t think so.) The staff of 20 papers have reason to sleep far, far better at night, knowing they’ve been adopted by a good family. Twelve other staffs can look forward to a few more weeks of stomach-lining damage and 3 a.m. staring-at-the-ceiling sessions. My ex-paper is among the Dejected Dozen.

McClatchy, the good family, has already said it plans on a clean break, that it won’t even accept delivery of the unwanted 12, that the marketing begins today. Some prospective buyers are emerging, or at least being talked about. Fort Wayne is a particularly odd duck. What are you buying? A 75-percent share in a two-newspaper agency (the smallest city in the country to still have two dailies), combined daily circulation around 100K, family-owned dominant morning daily and a gasping, dwindling p.m., which would be yours. What’s more, the publisher of the a.m. partner is now saying she’s not interested in selling.

I don’t know what the choices would be. Could you buy the agency and fold the p.m. and just be a landlord to the a.m.? Don’t know if the JOA would allow that. Make the p.m. a shopper, or some other dead-man-walking publication, while you wait out the a.m. publisher’s resolve not to sell? Or is that resolve another way of saying, “My price just went up”? I really don’t know.

Here’s what I do know: A few days ago, a market analyst, speculating on this sale, said that whatever the outcome, the affected papers will be in for some serious cost-cutting, that it’s time to “cut the fat, and maybe even the muscle,” to service the debt a buyer would incur. I laughed out loud. Fat? The fat at my paper went out the door sometime in 2002. Much of the muscle followed. Today The News-Sentinel is a double amputee. An entire department has vanished from the newsroom, and others operate with skeleton crews, although the desks remain, or did. That was one of the long-term goals about the time I left — to rearrange the furniture and get rid of all those empty chairs that were bumming everybody out.

I’m going to stop reading about all this, I think, and just file it all in the drawer marked Why It Was a Good Idea to Leave. Page? Turned. Future? Uncertain. Path? Murky. Also: Bet on Gannett.

The fate of my ex-employer is semi-known — McClatchy gets Knight Ridder, plans to immediately sell 12 papers, including Fort Wayne. Beyond that, I’m as clueless as anyone. Again, discuss.

Note: Fort Wayne Observed seems to have the energy to go after this one, and is speculating that whoever the buyer is, it’s already a done deal. We live in interesting times.

UPDATE: FWO now backtracking and saying the sale isn’t a done deal.

There’s a scrap of video going around, which I’m not going to link to because it’s expired from the Memeorandum page and whine whine whine…oh, OK: It’s here. But you don’t need to watch it. It’s a compilation of talking-head interviews with people at an anti-abortion demonstration. The questioner asks them two questions: Should abortions be legal or illegal? Everyone replies, “Illegal,” of course — they’re demonstrating against it. Well then, the interviewer presses on, how should women who get abortions be punished?

Hem, haw. I dunno. Haven’t thought about it. “Prayer.” “Counseling.” And so on.

It’s a mild little piece of propaganda, and I don’t take it as gospel because it’s obviously coming from one side of the question and who knows? Maybe lots of people said, “Hang and flay the bitch!” and those interviews were left out. But it is safe to say that in the national conversation, not much time has been spent discussing this. Savvier pro-lifers have been wise about their talking points — the “two victims” of abortion, the “one dead, one wounded” argument. But if any have stated their bottom line, it hasn’t been clear. Which is:

OK, so we say abortion is murder. How do you punish a woman who has one? Hem, haw.

If any penalties come up in the discussion, it’s those prescribed for medical personnel who perform or assist in the procedure. But how about that big Tupperware container who showed up, placed the order and wrote the check? Oh, her. Well. Um. Perhaps her “wounding” will be punishment enough. But I doubt it.

This is one reason that while I don’t welcome recent events in South Dakota, I’m certain they’ll be interesting on many levels, and not in the Chinese-curse sense of the word. Let’s put our cards on the table. Lock up doctors? Lock up women? What are you willing to do?

A few years ago I read one of those articles that makes you happy you subscribe to The New Yorker. It was about nausea, maybe 4,000 words on this simple physical reaction and how and why it affects us the way it does. I was hooked from the second paragraph, in which it was explained that a man who breaks his ankle on a ski slope tomorrow will suffer great pain but, with proper care and rehab, will likely be back skiing this time next year. Whereas a man who overdoes it on tequila in the ski lodge tonight may never touch tequila again for the rest of his life, may well start to heave at the very smell of it for years and years to come. I love to read stuff like that. Such a simple observation, and yet.

Anyway, one of the through-line narratives in the piece was about a woman with a condition called hyperemesis of pregnancy, in which the normal morning sickness of early pregnancy becomes 24-7 puking for the entire nine-month term. It is a leading motivator for later-term abortions, contrary to the propaganda, which says women choose these procedures for fun and waistline-preservation.

The descriptions of the symptoms were nausea-inducing themselves — women are absolutely flattened by this. It’s not a question of being confined to dry toast and applesauce, it’s about long-term hospitalization and IV nutrition and life-threatening dehydration and still, even with medication, overwhelming nausea for months on end.

Of course, suffering is in the eye of the one who suffers. What one woman can endure another cannot. The woman in the story gutted it out and hung in there and had her baby and was happy she did (although I think it’s safe to say she never had another). Others can’t do it and throw in the towel. Anyone who’s had a bout of stomach flu can at least empathize.

So where do we draw the line here? What do we tell the weaker woman? Sorry, sister, but you have to go through this? Sorry if you can’t keep a glass of water down, but your condition isn’t life-threatening? What about the doctor who performs an abortion to relieve this woman’s suffering?

Let’s have the conversation. Let’s find out who the pro-lifers think are the criminals here. And how they’d punish them.

On the lighter side, Jon Carroll has some ideas about how we can all become South Dakota residents, for purposes of voter registration and influencing elections. It’s a crazy idea, but it just might work.

Big Busy Period of spring 2006 is winding up, at the end of which I hope to send invoices for several hefty paydays. That’s why I’ve been half-here and distracted. I’m also closely watching — and you Fort Wayne readers may want to click through — the next phase in the possible Knight Ridder sale, which will affect whether or not you have an afternoon newspaper this time next year. (Personally, I think things have entered the George Burns stage, i.e., don’t buy any green bananas. We shall see.) But here’s the money quote:

“The bottom line on Knight Ridder papers is that in order to make these deals work, someone has to get extremely aggressive with costs,” said Frederick W. Searby, an analyst with J. P. Morgan. “There’s no question that this means that any buyer has to go in with a very, very sharp knife and trim the fat and maybe into the muscles to get this to work.”

Hello, one-newspaper town.

UPDATE: In a nice convergence, here we have a wussified newspaper unwilling not only to ask the questions, but even to discuss the issue. How nice.