She spent the first week or so beating the crap out of all the stuffies, butting and nibbling and doing her bunny-punch (a surprisingly effective move, not to be confused with the rabbit punch). Now that she’s established herself as the dominant doe of the warren, she can rest in regal peace, which is what she does up there for hours on end. She will accept your tributes now. Make them leafy and green.

Overnight, my illness has taken a turn, and I’m off to find something called Buckley’s. It’s on the recommendation of one of our student journalists, who says, “You will curse me when you take it and bless me later.” Hmm. Well, I’m out of Nyquil and Dayquil now, anyway. I’ll try anything.

If I don’t find it in the first three U.S. pharmacies I try, I’ll head downtown and cross the border. (It’s Canadian, and you will not be surprised to learn that one of the first businesses you see when you emerge from the tunnel is a pharmacy. Gee, I wonder why?) If nothing else, adding eight bucks in tolls and an international excursion will guarantee that I feel better tomorrow, on the same theory that says the food comes right after you light a cigarette, the funny sound disappears when the mechanic is listening, etc.

A little bloggage to start the discussion:

The double-chinned doughboy behind this story — Marc Thiessen — was on the Daily Show last night. You know someone is a bastard when even my mild-mannered husband starts jeering at the TV.

While we’re on the subject, no doubt Jihad Jane will be today’s talking point at Fox News. She is said to have made her al-Q connections through that covert website, YouTube. I haven’t seen a mugshot that screams CRAZY this loud since, um, Amy Bishop.

(By the way, has “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” become a catch phrase in your household, too? It just seems to work for so many domestic situations.)

OK, then. Exit, coughing weakly.

Nineteen ninety-nine. What a year. Our girl was out of diapers, the economy was strong, a Democrat was president and hardly anyone had heard of al-Qaeda.

And look at that face. (Whichever face you like.)

Not much this morning, but maybe later. Talk amongst yourselves, eh?

The president of the Detroit school board, Otis Mathis, is waging a legal battle to steer the academic future of 90,000 children, in the nation’s lowest-achieving big city district.

He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence. Here’s a sample from an e-mail he sent to friends and supporters on Sunday night, uncorrected for errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage. It begins:

If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

The column goes on to describe Mathis’ epic battles with the written word, asking whether his ability to succeed in spite of it (he has a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State, but it took more than a decade to get, because he couldn’t pass the English proficiency exam) is good news or bad. There’s no clear answer, but it made me think about writing and what it takes to do it a) well and/or b) competently. You can imagine my feelings about it; looking back on my romantic history, I don’t think I ever had a serious relationship with a man who couldn’t turn a phrase. They varied widely in formal education, but they could all write a decent letter or inscribe a book with style. It’s not like I went looking for them; it just worked out that way. I doubt a math PhD would marry someone who couldn’t balance the family checkbook.

Over many years, I’ve managed to overcome my belief that bad spelling is a character flaw, and friends, that has taken some doing. I’ve known enough very smart people who could barely spell cat and dog that I’ve grown into the belief it’s a form of learning disorder. (First, I have to believe you actually tried to learn, however.) One of my college boyfriends handed me a grocery list once: chese, pasto (penny), letus. I still get an occasional e-mail from him — funny but atrociously spelled. I don’t think he even sees the mistakes, and has the sense to rely on proofreaders for his business correspondence.

Others would feel the same way about me, and my mathematic illiteracy. I can do the big four — add, subtract, multiply and divide — but Kate, in seventh grade, knows better than to ask me for help on her math homework; she outran me with numbers a year or two ago.

But at least I’m not in charge of anyone else’s money, or doing calculations of load-bearing pillars. Mathis is on a school board, its president. And he’s a living embodiment of that contemporary nightmare — the diploma-holding (degree-holding!) graduate who’s functionally illiterate.

Of course, Detroit is a special case:

“We picked him (to be president) because we thought he has the intelligence for it and the tolerance for disruptive behavior,” says Reverend David Murray. “He has that type of calm.”

This is a district where board meetings often feature “disruptive behavior” — a citizen’s group organized a grape-throwing incident on one memorable occasion — so maybe this is a special case. But I doubt it. Grosse Pointe’s most recent board president has a blog that he not only writes himself, it contains his own complex but understandable analyses of financial documents. You could hardly pick a better example of how far apart two adjacent districts can be in this strange land of southeast Michigan.

OK, folks. Back to the grind. I’m a word-churning machine for the next fortnight, and the warmup has lasted long enough.

“Because of the water?” Ding ding ding ding ding. It’s not exactly an SAT essay-question answer, but she’s only in seventh grade. We’ll leave the appreciation of life’s cruel ironies and the question of the universe’s perverse sense of humor for senior year.

I needed that story yesterday, which was not a very good one. Nothing catastrophic happened, just one of those comedy-of-errors 24-hour periods you’re issued every so often. I’m working on a book project, a custom-publishing job, i.e., writer-for-hire work. It requires historical research downtown, at the Detroit Public Library. I found a parking place on Woodward Avenue, right in front of the place, which I chalked up to my prompt arrival in the first hour after opening. Win! Got out, paid in advance for two hours, went to the door — locked. Wouldn’t open for 90 more minutes. No catastrophe; I’d find a quiet place nearby to spread out my materials and get organized. That turned out to be an Einstein’s bagels on the Wayne State campus, which was not quiet, but did have a big overstuffed armchair free. Win! The armchair was free because it was right next to a malfunctioning door, which stayed wide open to the 35-degree elements if not pulled shut, something only every 10th customer realized.

After a few minutes of this, I moved to another overstuffed armchair, far enough from the draft that it wouldn’t bother me. Win! The one next to me was soon taken by a guy who was enjoying a hot sandwich and a conversation with his friend on the other side of me, which I normally don’t mind; I love to eavesdrop. Unfortunately, all they could talk about was how good their sandwiches were.

But I got a little done, and headed back to the library at 10 ’til noon. My paid-for parking place was full; at least someone was having a lucky day. I got another, paid for two hours. I had an OMG moment when I found a letter from 1938, the writer announcing he was coming to Detroit with “a moving-picture newsreel from the German Foreign Office…showing the ceremonies, indoors and outside, in connection with the National Socialist rally at Nuremberg last September. I do not believe anything of this kind has ever been shown in America.”

My heart soared, thinking I had found a contemporaneous description of what were perhaps “Triumph of the Will” outtakes when I thought to check the dates. Um, no. Leni Riefenstahl shot the 1934 Nazi party conference, not 1937.

Trudged out to the car and found a $20 parking ticket. It was that kind of day.

I wonder if I can deduct it.

Came home, and heard about the guy who died with his weenie out, which was a useful reminder that one’s own bad day is almost never the worst bad day anyone ever had.

I wish I could have seen that newsreel. I wish more I could have heard what people said about it.

This project has been a useful reminder that there are two kinds of history — the kind you live through day-by-day, and the kind you didn’t. Go through old newspapers on microfilm for a while, and before long I guarantee you’ll find someone is being accused of leading the youth of America down the path to ruin and socialism. Yesterday I saw a column from the last week of October 1963, by Max Freedman. Dateline Houston:

One of the most surprising discoveries of this visit to Texas is the depth of feeling against the so-called Kennedy dynasty.

In Washington this complaint has dwindled to a pleasant little joke. Out here men swear angrily and women edge their speech with hardness as they denounce “the Kennedys.”

Don’t worry, Mr. President. I hear Dallas loves you.

OK, back to work. Lord knows what will turn up today. And I’ll remember to feed the meter.

Oh! Another great Detroitblog.

Back later.

From Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, No. 1: Never open a book with weather. Well, this isn’t a book. It’s the first draft of personal history. And I’m allowed to talk about the weather.

A job I wish I had: Smashing up the ice on the St. Clair River. Seriously. My favorite thing is when the spring rains come in cloudbursts, and the storm drain in front of my neighbor’s house clogs with spring tree-gunk, and I get to wade through the warm puddles with my rake and clear it. Actually piloting an icebreaker through a troublesome jam to send the backed-up water on its way? Bliss. It would be storm-drain clearance on steroids.

Nance’s Rules of Writing: Don’t use stupid, dated, not-very-creative-when-they-were-coined, let-alone-now catch phrases like “on steroids.”

OK, then. I don’t want to continue yesterday’s depressing discussion for too much longer — I mean, in a silver world, you want to be optimistic — but I caught part of “Fresh Air” yesterday, and it seemed to pertain, a little. Journalist David Weigel of the Washington Independent was speaking on the new right, the right on steroids, the super-righty right represented by the teabaggers and CPAC. You know CPAC — these are the folks who were making jokes about flying a plane into an IRS building and killing a 68-year-old veteran (two tours, Vietnam). And of course you know the Tea Party.

I was struck by the portion of the interview where Terry Gross asked Weigel about what the teabaggers believe about the financial meltdown that started the cascading economic catastrophes of the past two years. He said they blame the whole thing on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the Community Reinvestment Act, which is both not surprising and pretty depressing. I’ve said this before and it didn’t originate with me, but this is what we’re moving toward — a media landscape where not only spin varies from outlet to outlet, but the very facts themselves. Wall Street is not underregulated; Barney Frank is the problem. And vaccines cause autism, of course they do.

Here’s the other thing that struck me: How the sorts of wackos I used to hear on my radio show(s) back in the day — the freakazoids who stayed up all night at the card table under the bare light bulb, writing their single-spaced manifestos or letters to the editor or whatever, who would call and rant about the Bilderbergers and the Federal Reserve and the loss of the gold standard and (my personal favorite) Ezra Pound, that genius — these folks are now being welcomed into the mainstream conservative movement. And they have some new entertaining ideas, about the president’s birth certificate and death panels and so on. And a new spokesgal, who is much prettier than they are.

How comforting.

I ran into one of these guys one day, at Best Buy. I thought it was brave of him to introduce himself, although I probably should have recognized him from his public-access TV show. We chatted a bit. He was pricing camcorders, but dammit, none of them had the feature he needed. Which was?

“Night vision,” he said.

His public-access show was entertaining. This is how he gave web addresses: “H, T, T, P. Colon. Backslash, backslash. T-R-I-P-O-D. Dot — this is a period — C-O-M. Backslash. Tilde. This is the key to the left of the numeral 1, but you have to shift…”

Anyway, they were joking from the CPAC podium about Joseph Stack, the IRS bomber. Had to check to make sure it wasn’t Grover Norquist at the controls, ha ha. Imagine the reaction if– oh, why bother even bringing it up? The liberal media, etc. etc.

I’ll say this: I’m really glad I don’t live in Indiana anymore. I’m sure these folks are all over the place. I see two Don’t Tread on Me flags waving in the neighborhood here, but it’s not a friendly place for the most part, so I don’t feel like I have to smile at them or anything.

Ach. We need to go out with some levity. How about this essay on Rielle Hunter’s “quiet dignity.” Not talking to the media about your stupid life choices qualifies as quiet dignity now? Evidently:

In the early days, Americans came to think of her in the sleaziest terms: the former party girl who used sexual wiles and New Age mumbo jumbo to steal Elizabeth’s husband. Most self-respecting women would feel compelled to say something, anything, in their own defense. And most modern mistresses would do much more than that. A fame-chasing Rielle would have come forward in the first days of her sex scandal, even if it meant defying John’s wishes. She would have talked and talked as the interviews declined in influence, the sad journey from Barbara Walters to Billy Bush. By now she’d have finished her book tour. We’d see her hawking an Internet sex column or sharing Twitpics of Quinn to thousands of followers.

Or maybe, just mayyybeee, she’s holding out for the big payday. Just a thought. Maybe the quiet-dignity meter was recalibrated while I was worrying about the Tea Party, but in my experience, a person who has it doesn’t say things like this:

That same spring, Rielle came to dinner at my home in New York. The Edwardses had just announced that Elizabeth’s cancer was back and was incurable, engendering a national outpouring of support. That didn’t stop Rielle from explaining to the group at dinner, which included journalists from other national publications, that Elizabeth had gotten cancer because she was filled with “bad energy.”

OK, then. Back to the sweatshop! Copy due in two hours!

This one, from Sunday’s NYT, sort of snuck up on me, hiding as it was in the Styles section; I thought Sunday Styles was the place you went to avoid reading about strife and misery, but maybe this doesn’t count, although it does to me:

In 18 months, Ms. Lentini went from editing one daily newsletter to still editing that one, as well as the 10 weeklies that generated new ad revenue at no extra cost to her company. Of course, there was a cost: her free time. “It’s, ‘How many plates can I keep going?’ ” she said. “You’re giddy with hysteria.”

She now starts at 7:30 a.m. instead of 9, and works Saturday and Sunday mornings. The night of the Super Bowl, she finished at 11. When she was first hired, she had money to pay someone to fill in during her two vacation weeks. That ended with the recession, so now she doubles her workload the week before vacation. Holidays? “I work most holidays,” she said.

Even while driving one of her daughters to an after-school job as a hair salon receptionist, Ms. Lentini works. “Bridget holds the laptop,” she said. “She’ll say, ‘Mom, you got an I.M. from the photo editor.’ She’ll read it to me, I’ll say, ‘Just put ‘O.K.,’ and write ‘tx’ for thanks. So I can work and drive.”

The story was about the new way we do more with less, and then some more, and some more on top of that, and wondered what might happen when the recession ends, if it ever really does — will we still work this way? My own experience says yes, of course we will; that’s certainly the way it was in newspapers during our long slide, which presaged the general economic collapse. I used to liken it to starving to fit into a two-sizes-smaller dress by prom night or your wedding day or whatever. Diet-diet-diet-celery-water-diet, keep pulling everything in and then comes weigh-in day (quarterly numbers) and whew, you just made it to your goal! Yahoo! [Pause.] Now lose 10 more pounds.

I wonder because I heard from an editor yesterday, pointing out several sloppy goofs in a story I’d handled, and not only was he right, I knew why I made the mistakes: Because I’d edited that story at 1:30 a.m., after a seven-hour shift on my other job. I was still working because I knew I’d have trouble sleeping that night (even though I was exhausted). Why? Because I’m stressed out at how much I have to do. It’s a loop.

I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering. I wonder why we tell our friends story after story about work, its miseries and occasional joys, and yet, so few of our entertainments are about work. (Except for the usual venues — police stations, hospitals and forensics units.) The answer is obvious, I guess: Why pay for a novel or movie about something I live every day? A few years I noticed something: How often the people I met in the pages of a book were independently wealthy, either through family fortunes or early-career windfalls that left them with the means to have novel-worthy midlife crises uncluttered by having to show up at work every day.

One of the many things to admire about “Office Space” is how well it captures the existential misery of life in a cubicle farm, from the chirpy receptionist to the passive-aggressive boss to the ritual of the office birthday cake. You can almost taste the cheap frosting. My favorite sequence in “Up in the Air” is when the three main characters sneak into another company’s Miami team-building party; there’s something about the way the m.c. greets all the members of the best! sales staff! in the southeast region! that sent chills down my spine. (Not that I’ve ever been to such an event. In journalism they just bark, “Back to your oar, 42.” The Miami sojourns for Knight-Ridder were known as Prick School.)

And yet, existential misery is preferable to unemployment, isn’t it? The new normal will be no Miami at all. And no health insurance. The new model for freelancing is Crowdspring, which puts a high gloss on the feeding frenzy. It works like this: You post a project, saying, “I will pay $300 for a logo for our start-up business. It should convey the idea of “bookishness,” but be really smart and sorta techno and have blue in it. Show me what you got.” And then dozens of starving designers (or writers, if that’s the project) do the work and submit it. You pick your favorite and pay your pittance, and everyone else goes home hungry. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

If you have a job, you’re grateful. If you have a job you like, you have rubies and diamonds. Pause a moment to appreciate it.

The Daily Telegraph asks a number of writers to list their Top 10 rules for writing. Part one here, link to part two in part one. Will Self made me laugh:

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Now, I must go to work. (Which I like very much. I only wish it paid better, especially when there’s eight inches of snow atop my aging roof.)

We crossed the Mitten on a winter weekend because our friends from Turkey are back in the States for a while. Fatih was a Knight-Wallace Fellow and his wife, Idil, was the smartest of the spouses. She learned Russian in eight months while we were there, yes, zero to fluency in eight months. She thought she should learn because of all the Russians in Istanbul these days, and also they were planning on having a baby soon, and Russians are the go-to nannies, the way West Indies natives are in New York City. She did indeed get pregnant in Ann Arbor, had some minor complications that made her doctor forbid her from long plane trips in the third trimester, so they stayed an extra couple months and had the baby in Michigan. When they returned, Idil interviewed nannies in Russian.

Fatih told me that for something like $300 a month, you can hire a college-educated Russian woman — if you’re lucky, even one with an M.D. — to be your nanny. “Wouldn’t a woman with a medical degree feel a bit overqualified for child care, and perhaps resentful?” I wondered.

“No, you want one with an advanced degree so you know she’s not a prostitute,” he said. Oh.

So now Idil is pregnant again, and they’ve elected to give birth in the States again. To take advantage of the Greatest Health-Care System in the World? No. So that their daughters will have matching passports. Good thinking. We always knew Idil was smart. Between learning Russian and otherwise exploring Ann Arbor, she took some grad-school entrance exams, too, just for the hell of it. She got a perfect score on the math sections, and close to perfect on the writing. That really bugged her. “What is a nine-letter English word that means ‘talkative’?” she asked.

I thought for a minute. “Garrulous,” I said. She smacked her forehead as though she’d forgotten who George Washington was. Their 5-year-old speaks four languages fluently. She’s going to need dual citizenship, once she grows up to take over the world.

You’ll want to watch out for her. She’s blonde like her mother, a Tatar.

There’s nothing like spending time with ambitious international cosmopolites to make you feel dumb. We went to breakfast with the Bordens and Carpenters, and mostly talked sports and music, but it was smart sports-and-music talk. I learned about Bill Wirtz from Borden, and more from Wikipedia:

Wirtz died at Evanston Hospital on September 26, 2007, following a brief battle with cancer. …During a tribute and moment of silence for him during the Blackhawks home opener on October 8, 2007, the Chicago crowd displayed their displeasure with Wirtz’s operation of the organization by booing the proceedings.

Man, hockey fans can be tough.

And of course this weekend we watched a bit of the Olympics. I have very few strong feelings about the winter games, except that all that trick skiing is silly, but then, luge is pretty silly, too. Speed skating is my life’s great missed opportunity; it’s the one sport I’m truly fascinated by. (I followed the clap-skate discussion closely, a few years back.) Very Hans Brinker.

And, of course, the speed skaters have Stephen Colbert on their side.

In some ways I hate February in Olympic years; there’s too much on TV. This week, I’m going to have to choose between Westminster and the games. I hope nothing good in Vancouver is opposite the terrier group.

So how was your weekend? Bloggage? Not much:

The Alabama shooting case gets ever-weirder. Hello, Professor Crazypants.

With that, I’m off.

Sweet potato bisque: I happened to be at the Russell Street Deli, an Eastern Market institution known for its spectacular soups, the week before Christmas, when this was on the menu. It was…mouth-gasmic. It fogged my glasses and my mind. I tried to consider what the “Top Chef” judges call its “flavor profile,” but my tastebuds were happy-dancing so, it was hard to get them to settle down and give some sober feedback. It had many of the notes of a sweet potato pie — cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger — but was savory overall. I found a recipe online that seemed to come close, using buttermilk for the tang, and whipped up a batch. It was very good, but not as good as Russell’s. Three stars (out of four).

Curried butternut squash: An early improvisation, inspired by Mark Bittman. I make a version of this every fall, basically squash soup with curry and a tart apple thrown in the mix. For this, I left out the apple and added a can of coconut milk, and my friends? It was fabulous. I’m buying coconut milk every other week now. Four stars.

Cream of cauliflower: Another Bittman inspiration, brought on by the perennial January realization that I could eat a lot more vegetables if I tried. Sauté onion and garlic, throw in a whacked-up head of cauliflower, cover with broth, simmer to softness, puree and swirl in a half-cup or so of cream. Yum. Three-and-a-half stars.

Roasted garlic with white cheddar: I make this in the winter most years, but not for the last few. It’s an old Betty Rosbottom recipe, simplicity itself: Break up and peel two heads of garlic, cover with olive oil and roast in the oven for 40 minutes or so. Meanwhile, soften some leeks or onions or both, add a few potatoes, cover with broth, simmer simmer simmer, etc. When it’s soft, throw in the roasted garlic [EDIT: Remove the garlic from the oil first] and puree. Finish by stirring in a handful of grated white cheddar cheese. Serve with a green salad and crusty bread you can sop in the oil from the garlic roasting. Refrain from kissing for the rest of the night. Four stars.

Chili: Because if it’s winter in the Midwest, there will be chili. Everyone has their own favorite recipe. You don’t need to hear mine. Three stars.

No-cream of cauliflower and carrot: This was last night. I had a head of golden cauliflower teetering on the edge, so I made it the same way I did the other cauliflower soup, only I added a double handful of carrots and left out the cream and curry. Topped with some grated cheddar, cocked my shotgun, held it to the head of my daughter and forced her to choke down 10 spoonfuls or so, which she advised me were “gross.” Reader, it was not. It was delicious. Three and a half stars.

Note all the pureeing. You can do it in batches in the blender, but that’s a pain in the ass. Far better to spend $30 on what Emeril calls a “boat motor” and most cookbooks call an immersion blender. Mine broke last night, which seemed to be a fitting marker for the end of National Soup Month.

Although I will buy a new one this weekend. Because you really need an immersion blender. At least in our house.

Which takes us to the bloggage at the end of a cold but sunny week here in the Mitten:

You want to know why people hate lawyers? Try the NFL’s jerkishness in trying to stop New Orleans retailers from selling T-shirts and other merchandise featuring the fleur de lis and/or the phrase “Who dat?” One of my Facebook friends, Ray Shea, said it best:

The fleur de lis predates the existence of the NFL by more than two millenia. The fleur de lis has flown on flags over Lousiana for more than four centuries. Black and gold has been associated with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club for almos a century. The phrase “Who Dat” is more than a century old and exists in recorded New Orleans music since the 1930s.

The NFL is granted a temporary non-exclusive license to suck my balls.

Ray is an old friend of Ashley’s, and won my allegiance to the Saints the night the team beat Indianapolis, and he posted, “Who dat pushing Manning’s face in the turf? WHO DAT?” Indeed. Peyton Manning is a guy whose face can never be pushed into the turf too often.

I just surfed through Memorandum to see what’s going on in the world of politics, and found this headline: Palin to Obama: Stop the fingerpointing. And with that, irony died once again and I officially declared the weekend under way.

So enjoy yours.

The show is your basic prime-time soap, with comic elements. Whenever a comic scene commences, however, the sound editors insert this giggly little piano/string thing, the universal music code for “French farce scene about to commence! Get ready to laff!” I remember a couple years ago, reading an interview with some network executive who said it was necessary to telegraph every punch that way, because they’d given up the idea of any viewer giving any TV show their complete attention, and they didn’t want someone to look down at their laptop during a serious confession-of-infidelity scene and look up to find a zany oops-we’ve-been-caught-having-sex-in-the-cloakroom scene. Too jarring. And so tonal shifts are underlined, perhaps so viewers know they’re watching broadcast TV, not HBO.

So I was looking for that interview, and got distracted by reveries of the Allman Brothers, who — you younger folks might not know this — had a monster album in the ‘70s called “Brothers and Sisters,” which combined with “music” would of course turn up in any Google search. And by then I had forgotten that one of the things I wanted to say was, nobody has any attention span anymore, because they’re always multitasking.

There was a trainer at my gym who liked to combine the ab work in his classes with “Whippin’ Post,” which I always thought was appropriate.

Which sort of brings me to this story from the New York Times’ Department of News You Already Knew, about how kids today are addicted to the internet. As an abusive parent in this regard, defined as “one who declined to buy the data plan for her child’s cell phone, and who also activated the parental controls feature of the computer’s OS,” I read with keen interest:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

It’s the texting that makes me insane. A true moderate, I equipped Kate with the moderate plan — 1,500 per month, which feels like all the goddamn texts any normal person would need, don’t you agree, my fellow geezers? Well, you should pay closer attention to your kid, who thinks nothing of texting “yo” or “‘sup?” or “hey” nine million times a day, and I am not kidding. Objecting to this is like saying with all this long hair, you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

I told her if she went over 1,500, I was taking it out of her hide. And no data plan until she gets a job.

After all, I don’t want to happen to her attention span what’s happened to mi– Shiny object! New tab in Safari! Tangent! So let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh? (I pronounce that blo-GAHGE, by the way, from the original French.)

Detroitblog finds a sterling example of that unique American character — the graphomaniac. (Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Why do you think we have tabbed browsing and the internet at our fingertips, fool? If this were a TV show, I’d be playing stern music right now.) Don’t miss the guy’s website.

It so happened I was at John King Books, Detroit’s spectacular used-books treasure house, looking for a couple of volumes that will aid in my horse-eating project mentioned last week. You want to know where graphomaniacs’ work goes to die? Check the local-history shelves at your own town’s version. They are distinguished by their lengthy subtitles (“Officer Down: One Man’s Heroic Crusade Against a Corrupt Police Force and Its Enablers Among the Legal Community, Particularly the Prosecutor’s Office — You Wouldn’t Believe”) and their equally lengthy dedications to the many kind helpers they had along the way to publishing their opus, which no publisher would touch, because it’s simply too hot.

There’s one at my local car wash, or was the last time I visited. I love this car wash, which takes advantage of the few moments you will spend there to push every imaginable sort of impulse purchase at your face. Greeting cards, scented cardboard air fresheners, bulk lots of utility towels, one-size-fits-most floor mats, laminated study guides for everything from the SAT to the periodic table — I have barely scratched the surface. But there, on a table next to the window where you watch them finish your inside windows, is a little pile of books. Self-published, natch. Title: “My Wife Has Cancer.” I can’t bear to pick it up. I hope it was therapeutic for someone.

An odd and an end from yesterday: You Cincinnatians, does Zino’s still have the greatest pizza in the world? We used to drive down from Columbus for that stuff. It’s the big red onions that does it. And Bob (not Greene) wondered if the Kim who commented yesterday had a last name beginning in L, because if so, he thought they knew each other? She does; you do. Contact me privately if you want to catch up.

It’s a new medium, so the growth curve is spectacular: The Chinese folks who brought you the animated Tiger Woods story tackle the Leno-O’Brien-NBC story. And it is awesome. If I were a young journalism student, this is what I’d be studying.

And now, to commence what is, theoretically, my work. If I don’t get distracted.