My internet connection is spotty here, so just a couple of quickpix in advance of a bigger report later.

My friend Vahe Gregorian is a sportswriter in St. Louis. He saves stuff. Like, for instance, all his credentials:

It’s funny — I’ve always been a credential-saver, too. Of course I don’t have a fraction of Vahe’s. My guess is, he’s saving them to sell on eBay in his retirement, to supplement what’s left of his pension when the entire industry implodes.

Meanwhile, at the Cornerstone Festival, the alt-Christian culture is in full flower:

If they’d had a T-shirt of this, I’d have bought it. But they didn’t.

More next week. Enjoy your holiday.

“Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials” — and all is explained.

Also, someone at IU needs to catch up with Jack Shafer’s excellent urban-legend debunking on so-called “pharm parties” at Slate. Actually, that particular IU someone needs to catch up with a lot of things. In a new study on substance abuse, a task force recommends: “Raise prices for alcohol and other drugs.” Your alcohol, maybe! Leave mine alone!

It’s raining outside my window, not too hard, but a definite get-wet-if-you-stepped-outside sort of rain, going pitter-pat on everything, and it sounds wonderful.

It’s 8:54 p.m. The sun is trying to break through in the west, real golden-hour light, even though the rain isn’t abating at all. It’s almost, but not quite, Hollywood rain, the kind created by an industrial sprinkler on a bright Los Angeles day. I can hear a cardinal singing somewhere. If I weren’t sitting here, I’d go outside to look for a rainbow, but I’m enjoying the sound and the light filling the room too much to move.

The rain is harder now. Not a breath of a breeze; it’s falling straight down. Very very nice.

I know I’ve been bitching a lot lately, but today I am happy to be a work-at-home freelancer (even thought I have to go to work in, um, two minutes). But I’m working in a chaise in my own bedroom, on my laptop, enjoying the rain and the light and the cardinal. I just left Alan sitting over the remains of dinner — grilled salmon with cucumber-dill sauce, mixed green salad with herbs from the garden, Swiss potatoes — and he informed me he intended to listen to the rain for a while, too.

(Later.)

I don’t know why, but just sitting there enjoying the moment reminded me of something I heard on NPR — you know, that elitist radio network — a few days ago. Margot Adler’s story is headlined “Perfecting the Art of Frugal Living in NYC,” but it really should be called Perfecting the Art of Living, period. It was about a study of New York’s most endangered species — its starving artists, the people who in large part give the city its character and flavor, but who are also the ones least able to live in its staggeringly expensive apartments.

Wary of using too much in fair use, I urge you to click over and read the story of Hank Virgona, visual artist, who typically makes less than $30,000 per year, but still has the world’s riches outside his front door:

Virgona says when people come to see his art he never asks them if they’d like to buy anything.

“I talk about art. I talk about my love for art,” he says. “I talk about how a walk down a quiet street — especially toward dusk — is as good as going to Caracas or Venezuela or anywhere. It is nourishing. That is part of art’s purpose.”

Joan Jeffri, who directed the study for the Research Center for Arts and Culture, says for these creative people being an artist transcends every other identity — race, education, gender.

“They don’t ever think of giving up being artists,” Jeffri says. “If they have arthritis, they change their art form. They don’t retire.”

Jeffri believes these artists have wisdom to impart about living and aging. In a sense, she says, they are role models.

And what are the first programs to be cut when schools have budget troubles? Anyone? Yes, the arts. This has been your moment of Zen.

Jeez, it’s a hot one today. Of course, the hottest part of any day is late afternoon, which is when the (outdoor) kickoff party for the film festival starts. On a rooftop. Oh, well — if this day goes like the last 60 or so, it’ll be raining by then.

Some bloggage:

Of interest to media types only, a WSJ piece on the widening rift — there’s a piece of journalese, ain’a? when was the last time you used “widening rift” in casual conversation — between member papers and the Associated Press.

In the right blogosphere, Roy finds growing anxiety over “what the inaugural ball will be like” if Obama wins. I’m hoping for a five- hour set by Parliament Funkadelic, with lots of “get up offa that thang!” from the stage.

Color me astounded: Madonna’s teeing up a divorce filing. She’s said to be getting the best legal talent to preserve her giant pile of money, wherein live the souls of the men whose essence she extracted, creative succubus that she is. I think her husband’s best strategy is to go limp: Walk into the first negotiation and say, “I don’t want a dime. I won’t take a nickel. I’m off to live in a garret while I try to regain the semblance of originality and creativity I once had before you entered my life. I’m getting some futons from Ikea for the kids to sleep on when they visit. You are a curse and I am fortunate to have escaped with my life. Have a nice one of your own, what’s left of it.” And then walk out. She’d be running after him stuffing a check for $100 million in his pocket.

Not that anyone asked me.

OK, you all — work to do. Play nice.

Maybe you haven’t heard: The Detroit Newspaper Partnership is looking to cut another 7 percent in costs. Another round of buyouts is coming, but now that most newsrooms have burned the deadwood, cut the fat, stripped the muscle and amputated its pinky fingers and other superfluous body parts, it’s now time to, what? Suck the marrow?

I dunno. I tell you this only to stress that for me, for pretty much everyone with a stake in the newspaper industry, worry is our constant companion. At this point in my life I’ve learned not to let it consume me, but honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve thought next year might, possibly, lord willin’, inshallah be better than this, I can’t even remember.

So I’m always looking around for interesting job opportunities. They frequently present themselves at this time of year, summer’s beginning, when I can’t take them. This was yesterday’s:

Here’s the deal. We sell adult stuff. Not porn, but toys, lubes and all that. In our business they are called “adult novelties” Why do we sell adult stuff? Because people really enjoy buying it, that’s why. It’s called making money. The local economy isn’t doing that well, but we are doing great!

We do the website / Internet thing. We have been at it for 10 years now. It’s not too shabby. The work environment is as casual as anyplace on earth and people here are nice.

You’ll write stuff and maybe take pictures of it. We then create a webpage. People see what we have to say and decide whether to buy or not. A great copy writer will balance salesmanship with truth. You’ll be honest and upstanding. People will respect you for it and you will earn their trust.

The job is Monday-Friday 9AM – 5PM. …This is not a freelance job, nor is it a work-from-home type of thing. This is a real copy writing position. You will sit at a desk in a crappy office.

It goes on from there. They extend an offer to apply and invite writing samples about a package of bachelorette party stickers. I blinked when I saw what they wanted: “100-200 words.” Say wha? That’s a big ol’ copy block for a catalog. It sounds like they’re producing the J. Peterman catalog of adult novelties.

This could be my dream job:

The night started the way they always start — sexy dresses straight from the dry-cleaning bag, new shoes, the thrilling sight of the stretch limo pulling up to the apartment door. It’s Clarissa’s bachelorette party, and we are going to plow a wide swath through the night, starting with pomegranate martinis at dinner and ending with shooters at 2 a.m. Comes the witching hour, and here we are – Jenna is puking in the ladies’, Jess is dancing with some guy who has his hand on her ass, Cassie is slumped at the other end of the table, drunk-dialing her exes and crying for no reason. And the bride-to-be? She left an hour ago, and if you squint, you can see her through the window of the tattoo parlor across the street, stretched out on her stomach, some illustrated-man ink artist putting the groom’s name at the top of her butt crack. And you? You’re looking down at the pink bubble sticker you slapped on when the evening was young, a sticker just above your left boob that reads “flirt.” Just so you remember which one you are.

That’s 187 words. They actually sound like fun people, if you don’t mind the soul-destroying work of crafting 150 words about personal lubricant.

Wait, what?

That Craigslist ad makes me despair, actually. After our weekend of filmmaking, which would have been impossible without Craigslist, I wonder what the newspaper industry has in the pipeline to compete. Many in the business have criticized Craig Newmark for failing to “monetize” his creation; in fact, I think they have a special word for him, from a high-level econ seminar, something like “bad actor” — used to describe a capitalist who doesn’t want to make money. That implies a similar site could be monetized, while remaining free, so what are they bringing to the table? There’s always a better idea, a way to innovate. My guess is: Not bloody much. They’re GM in 1972, looking at the first Hondas rolling off the boat from Japan, scoffing, who’d want to drive that stupid thing?

As I said: I worry.

OK, on to bloggage, because that’s what we love:

Headlines that shouldn’t be written, much less clicked on: Oprah Winfrey completes her 21-day vegan cleanse.

Oh, and this just in: Copy editing outsourced to India.

And why don’t we leave it at that? Have a swell day, all.

It was shortly after 7 Friday night that I wondered whether we were doomed. We’d gone into the Detroit Windsor International Film Festival Challenge knowing we’d have to make a film in 48 hours — no more than eight minutes, incorporating several assigned elements, in one of six genres, this last to be chosen randomly. Those were: Action-adventure, horror-thriller, crime, sci-fi, mockumentary and chick flick. We had vague ideas of a story for five. Some we liked better than others, and only one seemed un-doable with our standing team (chick flick). The rules would allow us to throw back one genre, but we would be required to take the next one. Before our two representatives went to the assigning event, we told them that if they drew chick flick to draw again, and we’d take whatever we got.

Diane, one of our reps, called a few minutes after arrival with bad news. Two more genres had been added: Superhero and musical. Musical? Musical?! We counted ourselves very lucky to have a musician on our team, but making an original musical in 48 hours seemed more daunting than a chick flick. We had a new bete noire. Diane spun the wheel, and it came up…Superhero.

We took it. The worst-case scenario of spinning again and getting Musical was too much to risk.

I’m not going to tell the whole story here — it was an entertaining and interesting weekend, and I’d like to tell it somewhere I have a chance of getting paid, but here are the highlights:

Our required elements were these:

We had to use the Ambassador Bridge and one more location, which was determined by throwing a dart at a board. Ours hit the campus of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. We had to have a used-car salesman in there somewhere. We had to use a “for Dummies” book as a prop. And our line of dialogue was a real gem: “What’s that? It smells like cheese.”

It’s hard to make a superhero movie without tights, capes, special effects and the ability to drop women off tall buildings. Believe it or not, we had a green screen, but with only 48 hours to work with, it couldn’t be the foundation of our movie. So our superhero had to be antiheroic, reluctant. To compensate, we honored the other conventions of the genre — we gave him an origin story, an adversary (the guy with the limo) and a happy ending.

The bottom line of fast filmmaking is, you can’t be too picky. Good enough frequently has to be good enough. You have no, or barely any time to rewrite, reshoot or even think very much about what you’re doing. But we were fortunate to have a great crew, entirely assembled from Craigslist. Michael, our director, said several times how amazed he was by the power of Craigslist. I concur.

We finished, but just barely. Remember that scene in “Broadcast News” we talked about a while back? It was just like that. I was the Joan Cusack character. We left our headquarters in Royal Oak with the bare minimum to turn in (a mini DV tape; no time for the DVD burn) at 6:32 p.m., headed for the dropoff just north of downtown at 7 p.m. We made it with 9 minutes to spare. But three teams finished after we did. My favorite was the last one, which by my watch arrived at 6:59 and change: A Chrysler Pacifica rolls up, its door opening before it was fully stopped. Out jumps one guy and sprints for the building at top speed. Another guy jumps out behind him, ditto. Behind him was a third guy, running a little slower, holding an open Mac PowerBook with an attached remote hard drive — still burning the DVD. After all were away, the driver backed into a parking place, got out, shook his head and said, “This car will never be the same.”

More as the week develops. Screenings are next Sunday, when we find out if we placed. In the meantime, just remember: It’s not a movie until someone yells, “Let’s get a move on, people! We’re losing light!”

I learned of George Carlin’s demise from an e-mailer who used the seven dirty words as the subject line. (Good to know my spam filter’s every bit the ace I suspected it was.) I’m sorry to hear the news. Carlin was a genius. He may still have been at the end, but the last HBO special I saw wasn’t very funny — he came across as bitter and angry, which can work, but didn’t this time.

The thing is, I’d just heard him in an NPR interview, and he was hysterical, so I don’t know what happened. He was famous for his dirty-words routine and could work blue with the best of them, but he always did it askance, light-heartedly — the biggest laugh in the seven-words routine is just two of them: “Tater tits.”

It’s early, and I can’t quite think yet — maybe I’ll have more to add later. But this is an open thread for George, the first hippie stand-up comic. RIP.

Since I didn’t leave you with any earlier today, here you go:

Michael Musto has a picture of a vintage Raquel Welch on his site today. (With the notation, “This might be the first time there’s even been a woman in a bikini on this blog.” Probably the last, too.) There’s something weird going on with her belly button. I can’t figure out if it’s a crude scar from crude tummy surgery, or if — and I think this is more likely — it’s a surgically created b.b., Raquel Welch having been grown from seed in a wombtank. For the record, this is really the only female body to aspire to, IMO. I hope it doesn’t cause Coozledad any problems.

And Bossy has a funny story about hair products that involves spying on Jennifer Aniston’s shower. You’ll like it. (I just looked up the price for the hair product featured on Bossy’s blog. Five ounces? Fifty-three dollars. Thank God I don’t have frizz.)

I know you guys have come to expect something fresh and new every day here, but the day’s tasks are piling up like cordwood and something’s gotta give.

What’s more, NN.C is taking a brief road trip to a primitive land with no wi-fi, and will not be back until Monday. I’ll leave the doors unlocked here, and y’all can play. Something we might talk about:

More discussion of Obama’s bike helmet.

Habeus corpus — not dead yet.

You’ve all seen that human-ovulation-caught-on-film thing, right? Well, if not, here it is. Shy little ovum!

Mischa Barton: Why?

Finally, a dispatch from our Wisconsin correspondent, in the western suburbs of Milwaukee:

i spent a lovely 15 minutes or so in the basement today with the boys while we waited for the latest tornado siren to stop howling. i’m not complaining, mind you. in greendale’s R section, close to the root river, water levels were up to the bottom of the stop signs. a small town south of here is just waiting for its dam to break–it’s not a question of if it happens, just when. westbound I-94 to madison is closed because one of the rivers is flowing onto the freeway now. (earlier this week, they closed that stretch down and parked semis loaded with sand at regular intervals to provide downward force to offset the upward force from the floodwaters directly beneath.)

but: not complaining. our basement, for the moment, is dry. still, we feel a little shellshocked.

Stay dry, Deb. Good thoughts to all of you caught in the deluge. Me, I’ll be back late Monday/early Tuesday.

EDIT: Oh, this is nice — Ashley Morris, David Simon and tomorrow’s commencement speech at DePaul, from the ChiTrib.

Finally saw “Swingtown.” Snap judgment: It doesn’t have legs, but I give them credit for trying. There’s no reason to let premium cable have all the shows about adults; broadcast has to find something outside of the police/law procedural and the escalating CSI grossfest.

One of the things that bothers me is the ostentatious “hey, we’re in the ’70s now” shots. Sure, the people are going to wear ’70s clothes and the men are going to have ’70s sideburns and the women are going to drink Tab. But when I saw a quick closeup of these, I thought they were trying way too hard:

Closeups of shoes are for significant-to-the-plot shoes, and unless those Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandals are going to be very important in a future episode, this was just show-offy. I do have an idea of how Dr. Scholl’s might be the pivot upon which the plot turns; after all, like every other woman who was young in that era, I owned a succession of pairs. They were my default shoe all summer long, and I loved them beyond all reason.

You bought them in drugstores, along with other fine Dr. Scholl’s products. They cost $15, and had their own end-cap display, at the bottom of which was a series of molded plastic footprints you used to find your size. The “exercise” gimmick said that if you wore them, your feet had to clench the toe ridge with every step, thus exercising your legs. Huh. Whatever. I never noticed any specific toning action, but maybe I wasn’t clenching them correctly. For me, they were wooden flip-flops, and by midsummer the rubber had worn off the heel and everywhere you went, your shoes announced you before your arrival. In the era’s shag carpet, it was no biggie, but on wooden floors it was like beating a drum. I can still hear my friend’s grandmother’s crabby voice ringing in my ears, complaining about our “clompy shoes” as we came inside their summer cottage for our endless supplies of Dr. Pepper and turkey sandwiches.

Maybe the teenage-girl character who wears these will stumble upon her parents and their new neighbors in dishabille, struggling into their Qiana fashions after hearing her clomp-clomp approach. That would justify the closeup.

By the way, Dr. Scholl’s started making them again a few years ago. Back in the day they came in three colors — navy, red and bone. I was a bone girl. But in a spasm of credit card-enabled nostalgia, I just visited the Dr. Scholl’s website and I see they’ve expanded their color palette; now they’re available in such racy colors as Cheeky Pink and Wine. I thought about it for a long time and opted for tan. It was the only color on sale, and the shoes are no longer offered in bone. Once a bone girl, always a bone girl. (I suffer the Curse of Neutrals.)

So, some Monday bloggage?

Neely Tucker finds one of the oddest car clubs in America — for the misbegotten, better-off-dead Chevy Cavalier. I liked it because, down low in a lengthy story, he gets to the point of custom-car culture. It’s not about buying something fancy off the showroom floor. It’s about finding something cheap, something you can afford, and little by little, turning it into something all your own:

A quick history of customized cars in pop-culture America:

After World War II, GIs came home with a little money in their pocket and a new sense of working with mechanics. Out in Southern California, they bought old beaters, mostly from Ford. Like a ’29 Model A Roadster, or anything after ’32 with the flathead V-8. Something wasn’t right with the engine but, hell, they could fix that. Get out the tools, ratchet, ratchet. Honey, crank it when I tell you to. Right. Give it some gas. Good. Good. Slam hood, wipe hands on a rag. Take it out on the strip and turn the quarter faster than anything else alive.

The hot rod was born out of reworked junk. That was part of the glory of it, the great young male joke on respectable society.

We mentioned the Dymaxion House a few weeks back, so this seems apt: A New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller, which answers a lot of questions for me:

Fuller was fond of neologisms. He coined the word “livingry,” as the opposite of “weaponry”—which he called “killingry”—and popularized the term “spaceship earth.” (He claimed to have invented “debunk,” but probably did not.) Another one of his coinages was “ephemeralization,” which meant, roughly speaking, “dematerialization.” Fuller was a strong believer in the notion that “less is more,” and not just in the aestheticized, Miesian sense of the phrase. He imagined that buildings would eventually be “ephemeralized” to such an extent that construction materials would be dispensed with altogether, and builders would instead rely on “electrical field and other utterly invisible environment controls.”

Wow. I wonder what it would be like to take a shower in that house.

Cops storm a Detroit art gallery. It’s almost too rich with possibility for words, but it turns out, they were only looking for after-hours drinking. In commando gear. Because, you know, in a city like Detroit, after-hours drinking in an art gallery is a crime that requires a SWAT response.

You know why people think raising kids is so expensive? Because they read shit like this, about the nursery for the Pitt-Jolie royal twins:

They even installed two pink crystal chandeliers for the girls at a cost of $899 each.

I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t regret not getting a pink crystal chandelier for my nursery. She had to make do with one of those dumb infant-stimulation crib mobiles. But today she’s an A student. Let’s see where the Jolie-Pitt babies are in 11 years, eh?

Happy Monday.

My commitment to saving gas is so pathetic as to be comical — I mean, a fair-weather cyclist who works from home is hardly capable of a real sacrifice in fossil-fuel consumption — but I’m trying to approach it with some level of seriousness. And I’ve set a goal: The one-month tank of gas. Fourteen gallons in 30 days.

It’s not that far-fetched. I made it to three weeks between fill-ups recently without making myself a hermit in the bargain. If you can go three weeks, you should be able to go four, right? Here are my main rules and strategies:

1) Combining trips. If I’m going to Royal Oak for a meeting, I try to think of other stuff I can do while I’m out there. I mean, besides eat lunch. If the trip takes me past Costco (and most do), I make a stock-up stop.

2) Telling my dear only child, “Can’t you ride your bike? Lansing’s not that far. ”

3) It’s difficult to shop for a week of groceries on a bicycle, but easy to get a day’s worth. I pretend I’m French and live in a tiny Paris walkup with a refrigerator the size of a shoebox.

4) All shopping excursions requiring the car get a second, third or fourth look. All chances to interact with other human beings I don’t even question. The idea is to save gas, not become a crazy miserly energy tyrant.

5) You can fit more on the back of a bike than you think, if you have the right bungee cords. It does make the thing a little light up front, however. And carrying home certain loads — a few bottles of wine, a big bag of dog food — make you look like a crazy person who lost her driver’s license to multiple drunk-driving convictions. But it’s fun to be crazy. At least people get the hell out of your way.

6) Finally — and this is huge in Detroit — I started driving the speed limit. There’s an essay in that, because absolutely nobody in this town, in the state, does so. The default driving style is fast, cheap and out of control, and while it can be fun, it doesn’t exactly make the real-time mileage gauge on the dash track a nice steady number. Driving the speed limit in Detroit is like being an atheist in Colorado Springs. People not only look at you funny, they think you’re with al-Qaeda.

If none of these strategies seem particularly earth-shattering, well, you lived through the ’70s, too. It’s hard to make you younger folks understand how unsettling that era was, and prices aside, it was unsettling. Stations closed at 5 p.m. Some areas restricted sales to every other day depending on last name or plate number. Lines at the pumps stretched a block or more. And it happened so fast — one day gasoline was an expense for most households the way coffee was an expense, and suddenly it turned into a mortgage. I drove to Cleveland with some friends for a day trip during this period, and we delayed topping off the tank. As we turned for home, we entered a strip of gas stations near the freeway entrance, and justlikethat, they all turned off their lights and closed for business, and it was like that all over town. We had to spend the night, like pioneers stranded by a blizzard.

For teenagers accustomed to getting a couple days’ driving out of a dollar’s worth of gas, it was shocking.

A few years later came the big coal strike that led to voluntary restrictions on electricity use, deep into one of the coldest winters on record, and certainly in my lifetime. I think of that era as cold, dark and expensive, and it changed my energy-use behavior forever. I’ve never bought a car without at least considering its gas mileage. I never set the thermostat above 68. I watch my tach as closely as I watch my speed, and shift to minimize RPMs whenever possible.

This sort of era can turn you crabbed and mean; the dark side of thrift is miserliness, a refusal to share in any sort of bounty for fear of a coming shortage. But I’m sympathetic to those caught flat-footed. Many of my neighbors are in the automotive business, and many drive enormous, hulking, high-profit-margin vehicles that are surely running them to the poorhouse, one tank at a time. (Remember, this is the industry that, when confronted with the early Honda subcompacts, offered as competition the Chevy Vega and Ford Pinto.) Many are younger than I am, and don’t remember the fun old days. Ah, well. As my parents responded to my whining then with stern reminders of the deprivations of the war years, so too do I nod in sympathy, as I roll past on pedal power.

How do you save gas without being totally anal about it?

By the way, today I’m having lunch on the patio at the Detroit Golf Club — a planning session for our movie challenge entry, next month. See Rule #4, above. I’m so starved for a non-family human interaction I’d drive to Ypsilanti for donuts with Mitt Romney. (Downside: Again, it’s not even 50 degrees yet. Maybe they’ll have to serve us our coffee in thermal casks.)

A bit o’ bloggage:

In addition to the big essay on conservatism, I also read this in the New Yorker this weekend, about Katie Couric’s travails as anchor of the CBS Evening News. I read it with the same sense of awe I have whenever I think about the evening network news — that somewhere in this country there are still people with nothing better to do at 6:30 p.m. than watch 22 minutes of old-skool network news. So, I think, does Nancy Franklin, who wrote the piece:

The evening news continues to have value for millions of people, but millions more are now turning to the Internet. Increasingly, and in more ways than one, there is an end-of-the-day feeling to the nightly-news half hour—there’s ad after ad for products that treat all the things that go wrong with your body after you’re fifty, and in the broadcast itself there’s the endless use of the tired phrase “pain at the pump,” for stories on fuel prices, and always, in stories about pharmaceutical companies or warnings about drugs, the same shot of pills moving rapidly along a conveyor belt.

Our witty pal Alex once described the overarching theme of network news as “somewhere, someone younger than you is spending your tax dollars on things you wouldn’t approve of,” and that’s word, too. Later:

But I don’t think that people want less news; they want, I believe, the same kind of informed passion and doggedness that TV-news people displayed while covering Hurricane Katrina, and they want anchors to go deep into issues. Who knows, young people might turn on their TVs in droves if news organizations had a few choice strands of Michael Moore’s DNA in them, and pointed out when, say, a public official wasn’t telling the truth. Jon Stewart is a lightning rod both for people who decry the notion that young people get their news from watching “The Daily Show,” and for people who think that his (and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report”) is the only current-events show worth watching. I’m not a Stewartite, but when Dick Cheney denies making certain statements about the war in Iraq and Stewart shows three video clips that prove he’s lying, I think he’s providing a real service to the country, and I’d like to think that that’s what his fans are responding to.

That’s exactly right. I’m late to the Jon Stewart fan club, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see him on a network newscast — it would ruin his magic — but I’d drive an SUV to Ypsi to see him do an author interview before I would, say, Brian Williams. (His dissection of Jonah Goldberg is a minor classic.) Stewart brings a level of honesty to the table that so-called professional journalists either can’t or won’t, because they interpret “objectivity” so strictly that they can’t call a spade a spade. Haven’t they figured out that the people they cover are wise to this? How many books does Scott McClellan have to write before it gets through: Sometimes the people behind the podium? Are LYING. It’s not bias to point this out. It’s, um, journalism.

Well, don’t want to start ranting.

Why newspapers are dying: Because they think there’s no room for ALL the “Sex and the City” movie-premiere fashion pictures. But Jezebel does.

The morning, she is slipping away. Better go select my long underwear for visiting the golf club on the 28th DAY OF DAMN MAY, FOR GOD’S SAKE. Have a good one.