Who says life in the suburbs is dull? The house was just disturbed by horror-movie sound effects (similar to screams, but not quite) coming from the back yard. It woke up Kate and drowned out “L.A. Confidential,” requiring an extra tuck-in, soothing and an investigation.

I watched from an open second-floor window, as the sound of claws scrabbling on bark came closer and closer and CLOSER and…

…a really, really fat raccoon waddled out of the hedge and disappeared into the neighbor’s yard.

Must have been what got into the garbage last night while it sat at the curb. Laid into a bag of stale hamburger buns and spread the mess across the park strip. It reminded me of the night two raccoons crashed through the ceiling during the dinner rush at the Mexican restaurant where I worked one summer. The owner, when I called him to report this news, insisted I was mistaken: “A raccoon is a wild animal. They don’t live in cities.”

Why should they, when they can eat your stale tortillas out of the dumpster?

Where did I read this — a Gretel Erlich story, or somewhere else? It was about researchers who conclusively proved some Alaska ravens were flying 30 miles or so from their night roost to a Juneau McDonald’s, to plunder french fries from the parking lot. They flew back to the roost at night and were, essentially, going to and from work.

I want a pet raven. Or a crow. I always have. I want to walk around with it on my shoulder and feed it the occasional grub. And I’d sic it on raccoons.

Can you tell I’m feeling a bit loopy? Long day, not much to report. We’ll try again tomorrow.

No, wait, there’s this: I was mostly right about the “terrorism” at Georgia Tech yesterday. Huh.

So after writing last night’s entry, I spent too much time today thinking of dumb style rules that should have been changed for the sake of clarity. A few years ago the New Yorker — which probably has an ironclad style rule insisting that their The always takes a capital T — ran a really good story on a family whose household income was right at the national median, but were, for all intents and purposes, working poor. It was really about how people with no critical-thinking defenses fall for things like those “a diamond is forever” and “priceless” TV ads and spend themselves into a lifetime of debt when, on paper, they should be doing OK.

Anyway, this family gave the writer full access to their finances, and there were long sections accounting for every penny that came into the house and back out again. And all of it was rendered in what I assume was New Yorker style at the time, i.e., it was all spelled out.

So, “the family earned thirty-four thousand seven hundred sixty two dollars last year, of which five thousand eight hundred forty nine dollars went to federal taxes, one thousand three hundred ninety one to state taxes and seven hundred twelve to miscellaneous local taxes. …The mortgage payment on their three-bedroom home is six hundred forty three dollars and seventy-two cents monthly, plus an electric bill of…”

My eyes were glazing over after about a page of this. And it went on for pages and pages. It was a really good story but man, it took a commitment.

Just goes to show you, even in the bigs they make bad calls.

Like you didn’t know that.

Speaking of bad calls, speaking of a bad moon risin’, things are looking grim here in the Mitten State. I spent much of the weekend reading about the Delphi bankruptcy, and nothing I read made me feel better. When a business with 175,000 employees teeters on the brink, no one feels good. What makes this worse is the salt-in-wound news that, oh by the way, the bosses’ landing pad was just made softer and fluffier:

With reports circulating that Delphi Corp. could file for bankruptcy as early as today, the company promised about 21 of its top executives Friday that they’d get more money if they are fired or laid off. The Troy-based maker of almost every part you’ll find on a car, from brakes to satellite radio receivers, wants to encourage those leaders to stick with the company, even if it files for bankruptcy.

The workers, I remind you, are being asked to cut their pay from the $26-an-hour range to around $10. A Freep columnist put it this way:

People trying to understand what’s happening at Delphi Corp. need only remember that we live in a competitive world.

To compete with corporations at home, Michigan’s fourth-largest company needs to pay its top managers more.

He went on to suggest that at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before top executives at Michigan’s largest public companies are unable to walk through their factories or walk their dogs beyond the perimeters policed by their invisible security fences without protection.

A friend of mine is harsher: He thinks within two years we’ll see physical assaults by blue collars upon white collars, and won’t that be a jolly old time. I hope he’s wrong. I also hope I am recognized as a penniless writer, and blameless in all of this.

But it is going to be the proverbial long cold winter.

So, bloggage:

Most days I think Christopher Hitchens is just an old sot, but he can still bang ’em out of the park when he needs to. On Harriet Miers and the alleged lack of a religious test:

Of the nomination of Harriet Miers, by contrast, it can be said that only her religion has been considered by her conservative fans to be worth mentioning. What else is there to say, in any case, about a middling bureaucrat and yes-woman than that she attends some mediocre place of worship? One could happily make a case that more random civilians, and fewer fucking lawyers, should be on the court. But the only other thing to say about Miers is that she is a fucking lawyer. Her own opinion of herself is somewhat higher: She does not attribute her presence among us to the laws of biology but chooses to regard herself as having a personal and unmediated relationship with the alleged Jesus of Nazareth, who is further alleged to be the son of God. Such modesty! On this basis, the president and his people have felt able to issue assurances of her OK-ness. So, as far as I can determine, she was set, and has passed, a religious test: that of being an “Evangelical” Christian.

Yes.

Ooh, look. Terrorism: Three explosive devices found in a courtyard between two Georgia Tech dormitories on the East Campus Monday morning were part of a “terrorist act,” an Atlanta police official said.

The custodian found the three devices about 9 a.m. in a plastic-type garbage bag, Moss said. When he picked up the bag, one exploded, as it was designed to do when handled. The explosives were made up of chemicals placed inside plastic bottles and could have seriously injured someone, officials said.

Somewhere on campus, the Delta Zoo boys are hiding under their beds. I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate these were toilet-cleaner-and-aluminum-foil bombs and the perpetrators were not exactly al-Qaeda. Could be wrong. We’ll see.

Regular readers know I spent the last six months of my newspaper career as a copy editor, after 26 years as a reporter and columnist. The particulars of my situation aren’t interesting, but what I learned in that time was, at least to me. I learned yet again that the desk really is the very last line of defense, and Holden Caulfield’s dream about being the catcher in the rye applies, i.e., you just can’t save everyone. A few stories are going over the cliff. When it’s all over, you realize that it might not have happened if everyone further up the line, from reporter on down, had done their best job, but the last person to sign off on any random disaster was you.

You’ve read those scenes in war novels, where some medic flips out and starts trying to put the gravely wounded back together with duct tape? Or those scenes in “ER” when the soulful patient no one wanted to lose dies, and there’s one doctor who just won’t give up and keeps pumping the chest and yelling for an amp of epi and paddles! Charge to 300! Clear! And finally someone touches the doc on the shoulder and says, “It’s over. Time of death…8:17.” Some copy editors, I think, get like that doctor, that medic, in the sense that they pay too much attention to what they can do and not enough to the big picture.

What a copy editor can do — the chest they can keep pumping against all odds — is to enforce rules of style. Style is each publication’s rule book, the one that says it’s Fort Wayne, not Ft. Wayne, or Hoosiers, not Indianans. God gets a capital-H on second reference in a religious newspaper, perhaps, but not a secular one. Paul Wolfowitz is Mr. Wolfowitz on second reference in the New York Times, but not the Washington Post.

Sometimes style rules are ridiculous. The pop star Meat Loaf was, supposedly, “Mr. Loaf” on second reference in the New York Times, although Dr. Ink over at Poynter suggests that might be an urban legend. (Wait…checking…it is an urban legend. Never mind.) My very own paper adopted the spelling “Xtreme” for so-called extreme sports. And so on. But copy editors’ job performance is judged, in large part, on how well they edit according to AP and local style, and so they can be meticulous to the point of insanity.

Here’s my feeling: All rules are rubber. There’s always a case to be made for breaking one, and if the case is good, then go ahead and break it, for God’s sake. I mean, just use your noggin.

That said, it’s nice (or not nice) to know that even legends have problems with the copy desk. Even the New York Times copy desk, or especially so.

That link goes to a Free Press story from this morning, about Elmore Leonard’s serialized novel in the NYT Sunday magazine. Apparently he’s having some problems getting stuff past the editors. Not just the stuff you’d expect — profanity, which is at least understandable — but other things, too. Like, oh…

“Arkansas.” Arkansas? In newspaper style, it’s abbreviated Ark.

“They don’t realize this guy’s got a sound. Every word. Ar-kan-saw. That’s a big word for Elmore,” Sutter says. “He sweats every word.”

The rest of the story tells us a little about Sutter, who spent some time making Oldsmobiles in Lansing. That goes to show you that you don’t need a huge amount of training to edit copy, just a damn ear for the job. His comment about Leonard’s sound — and how “Ark.” doesn’t sound, to the ear, like the spelled-out “Arkansas” — marks him as more naturally talented for the job than about 75 percent of the editors I’ve worked with. And more than at least a few at the NYT, who can’t relax the rules, it seems, even for a novelist, working in the Sunday magazine.

That’s an editor who needs a vacation. Although I don’t know if it would help.

Which sort of brings me to the second part of this post, which was the weekend, when I actually met Gregg Sutter, via his girlfriend, Amy Alkon, whom I know through e-mail and mutual blog admiration. When she e-mailed and said she’d be in Detroit this weekend, and would I like to meet for a drink in Birmingham, of course I said yes.

I didn’t realize, until we met, that she and Gregg were in town to celebrate Leonard’s 80th birthday. Says the mastah: “Eighty is the new 60.” Here’s hoping he gets 20 more.

Anyway, we had a great 90 minutes or so at the Rugby Grille, in the Townsend Hotel, in Birmingham, which looks like the kingdom in “The Princess Diaries,” or just a big mall. I wanted to bring Amy a little bread-and-butter gift, and knowing her fondness for sunblocks containing mexoryl, I swooped over to Windsor to get the black-market SPF 30.

Because yes, friends, sunblock with mexoryl is not approved by the FDA. So I went to Canada, or as we call it around here, the Great White South, to score the dangerous stuff. I confessed all to the border guard coming back, who was African American and, shall we say, puzzled:

“So this is stuff that makes you darker?”

“No, paler, actually.”

He waved me through. Crazy white girl and her contraband sunscreen.

The pharmacist and store clerk and I exchanges shrugs and chuckles over the thousand absurdities of international differences in what’s available over the counter. The clerk said American mothers of colicky babies come to Windsor to buy gripe water, of all things, and Canadians go to Detroit to buy some over-the-counter pain reliever you need a script for on the other side.

Anyway, if you need any of this stuff…you know me, I’m your friend, your main boy, thick and thin. Plus reimbursement for tunnel tolls.

We had an unusally hot summer and, so far, an unusually warm (for Michigan) autumn. There were a few chilly mornings when the temperature in the house dipped into the 66-, 67-degree range, but I resisted turning on the furnace. The last few days it’s been close to 80 every day, but it can’t last, and a chill wind is a-blowin’ as we speak. It looks as though the next few days will break in the heating season. Which I am dreading.

You’ve read the stories. This one, from Slate, is typical, right down to the terrifying headline: “Get ready for your first $1,000 heating bill.” Uh, no thanks. But even if they go up 50 percent, which seems to be the figure everyone agrees is reasonable, my heating bill will hurt. Badly.

And excuse me, but I’m in no mood to read things like this, in which the U.S. energy secretary tells me my only defense is to conserve. That’s comforting. Stories like that are generally accompanied by a helpful graphic, downloaded by your local newspaper, offering tips on how I can do this. Turn the thermostat down at night, it might say, or Make sure your windows are well-sealed.

Who, precisely, are these tips helping? Who lives in a cold climate and doesn’t already do these things? Granted, there are a few. I knew a guy who kept his house heated to 76 degrees all winter long, while he sat around in shorts and a T-shirt. “I’m really best suited for a place like Florida,” he’d say, while the rest of us, his guests, peeled off our sweaters and tugged our collars away from our necks, so as not to suffocate. “I’m most comfortable in clothes like this.”

But you live in Ohio, you stupid git, I thought, struggling out of my parka. And it’s about 20 degrees here at the moment. (I think that was the winter of the Bengals-Chargers fiasco at Riverfront Stadium, when it was 9 below with the wind howling down the river valley, but I could be mistaken.)

And yeah, I’ve been in houses where people had to learn, yes, learn, that in winter it’s wise to keep your windows closed tightly. But most people smart enough to put on their own socks, and responsible enough to pay their own heating bill, learn this through trial and error soon enough.

I want to ask the energy secretary, what about those of us who already live in a house kept at meat-locker temperatures, who bark at our children to put on a sweater, who already have a programmable thermostat, an insulated attic and thermopane windows? What about us, huh?

A 50-percent increase in your heating bill, that’s what.

Oh, well. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this last day of warmth and summery temperatures. I laid on the bed next to the open window and read for 30 minutes in shorts and a T-shirt, and let me tell you, I appreciated every minute of it. That’s what life is all about — the appreciation.

I only read for 30 minutes because the rest of the day was all about the work. After a slacker end of summer I’m discovering the awful truth: I’m so broke I can’t pay attention. And so I leapt into action, and suddenly I’ve got plenty of work, enough that I actually feel employed. Which means I’ll have money in November. I hope. It might not arrive until December. (Just in time for the $500 heating bill!)

Freelancing is a life of many, many pleasures and advantages that make life feel sane and human-scaled. But swift payment for services rendered isn’t one of them.

It could be worse — I could work for Delphi.

Our old pal Atlanta Nancy wrote today. She was one of the first people I met online; we were both Warren Zevon fans. It was possible, especially in a place like Fort Wayne, to feel like the only Warren Zevon fan in the world. It was maybe my first experience in how you could use the internet to find people who shared your interests, who got you.

Anyway, she wrote today: There’s a burrito chain here called Moe’s that’s been expanding through the Southeast with scary speed. They drove my favorite independent burrito restaurant out of business, so I hate them, but I still eat there at least once a week because Willa loves it. Anyway, the only music they play is by dead singers. It’s a real mix–Jim Morrison, Allman Brothers, Frank Sinatra, John Denver, etc. I’ve been meaning forever to e-mail them and suggest that they add Warren to the mix, but, since I have a 2-year-old I never get around to anything. Well, yesterday, Willa and I walked into Moe’s, and “Werewolves of London” was playing. I got a bit teary and starting babbling about it to the guy who was making my burrito. He so didn’t care.

They only play dead singers? Yes.

Here’s what it says on the web site:

“The Music: Moe wanted to pay tribute to his heroes who have passed on and would never have a chance to taste his food � hence the music. A little strange? Maybe. But that’s just Moe.”

I wonder what corporate weenie came up with that little bit of carefully studied eccentricity. Probably got a bonus for it. Probably take care of his heating bill this winter.

Do trees have gender? I think they do, but I’m not sure. Hell, I’m no botanist. All I know is that the oak we lived under in Fort Wayne made beaucoup flowers in the spring — these pollen-y things that clogged the gutters and piled up on the porch — but no acorns. The oak we live under in Michigan made both. Especially acorns.

Every few days I must blow them off the driveway, because they imperil bike-riding and sound, when the cars roll over them, like the snapping of many small bones. But at night? Or when the wind blows, even a little? They rain down on the roof like missiles. I’ve stopped jumping a foot when they hit the skylights, although at night, when they rain down on the one in the bathroom, sleep is chancy.

If the squirrels ever figure out the weapons at their disposal, this whole neighborhood’s going to look like it was worked over with a ball-peen hammer.

Sorry for the late/lame-ass blogging this week. I’ve been wrapping up a few stories, and they’ve distracted me way out of proportion to their financial reward, but ah, such is the freelancer’s life. The last one was just sent away moments ago, and the little swoosh sound effect my departing mail makes as it leaves the outbox is the new sound of Miller Time, for me. I plan to wrap this up early, go watch Jon Stewart with all my fellow Americans and dedicate tomorrow to fiction-writing, an easy interview in the a.m. and maybe a few phone calls later.

And perhaps some blog-worthy blogging. For now I leave you with yet another clip from the inscrutable British papers: Catholic church no longer swears by truth of the Bible. Huh? When did they ever?

Alan has taken to listening to the radio at night. This is deeply suspect, if you ask me; radio is not a nighttime entertainment, unless you’re in the car. Sometimes I listen to talk radio at night, driving home from wherever; after sundown is when the lunatics come out and howl at the radio. Michael Savage, Laura Schlessinger — they used to be the hot thing in radio, and now they’re mostly on at night, and that ought to tell them both something. Not that they are listening.

Alan listens to public radio, so I don’t have to doubt his sanity. After dark, public radio is the Ed Love program on WDET (excellent jazz; sort of the antimatter Leah Tourkow), followed by various earnest chat shows (Can Hillary reposition herself as a moderate? My guests tonight are…), followed by the BBC world service, which must be when everyone but the overnight engineer finally goes home. I love the BBC world service, if only because they run on Greenwich Mean Time, which gives the whole program a certain otherwordly quality. Somewhere in the world, your Auntie Beeb is hard at work all the time.

Another reason to love the BBC: They let you know what’s happening in the world of cricket.

(Which reminds me of one of the thousand minor pleasures of my fellowship year — hearing Vahe, our resident sportswriter, try to explain American sports to the overseas fellows. No one appreciated the NFL.)

Late in his life my dad went through a period where he needed to have KMOX on the bedside radio all night long. If my mother tried to turn it off in the middle of the night, he’d wake up and turn it back on. It drove her insane, which is probably why she eventually moved to the guest room. Sometimes I think men spend the first half of their adult lives trying to lure women into bedrooms and the second half driving them out. Yes, I’m talking about you, Mr. Snorey Pants.

Why KMOX? Who knows? It comes to us from St. Louis, my parents’ hometown (mine too). They had all-night talkers then, local ones I think, and maybe it was some sort of audio security blanket, hearing the hometown through a light layer of AM static. Or maybe my dad just grew another eccentricity in his old age.

He always liked radio, though; he went through a period where his preferred coffee companion was J.P. McCarthy’s show on WJR, the great voice of the Great Lakes, coming to you from the golden tower of the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit.

To give my dad credit: He never listened to Limbaugh, et al. Nor Art Bell (that I knew of).

Anyway, night radio is the voice of loneliness. It reminds me of driving to work last summer at 4:45 a.m., the last few minutes of “Coast to Coast” winding up, too early for even the morning drive-time guys. Just me, the earliest paper carriers, a few cops and the semi drivers idling outside Perfection Bakery. Tuned in.

Bloggage: I missed this when it ran a few days ago, so thanks to Eric Zorn for pointing it out — Leigh Anne Wilson’s account of coping with her intensely hyperactive son, proof, if you needed more, that some parents are simply better than the rest of us. (Even if they sell vibrators, as Leigh Anne does, although I think this fact is simply amusing.) A sample:

After he started walking I spent the next two years trying to get the boy to act right. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get him to stop breaking everything he got his hands on. I couldn’t stop him from coloring on the walls, I couldn’t stop him from unbuckling his carseat, I couldn’t get him to use the potty, I couldn’t get him to stop dumping shampoo onto the floor or plugging the bathroom sinks and flooding the upstairs, and worst of all, I couldn’t get him to acknowledge my cries of “No!,” even when he was darting toward the street or trying to stick his hand in a roaring fire. It ended up being easier to lock all the bathroom and bedroom doors, and remove all the furniture from his bedroom and the playroom. It was easier to buy board books he couldn’t rip up, and easier to let him have a sippy cup longer than he should so he wouldn’t pour whatever he was drinking onto the keyboard. If he was warned in advance not to exhibit a particular behavior, it was like handing him an engraved invitation to do exactly that.

Yes, there’s a happy ending. But you must read.

Few of the people I know around here pilot boats on the high seas, but if you’ve been out on anything bigger than a gravel pit you ought to know what makes a boat seaworthy.

For instance: Lake St. Clair, where we sail, is very shallow. Which makes it choppy, although you’d have to ask a hydrologist precisely why. I figure it has to do with how water moves when it has nowhere else to go. It’s also busy, which adds to the chop.

Hardly anyone skis on this lake, and even small boats tend to have deep V hulls — Boston Whalers, Sea Rays and the like. When you’re waked by a plutocrat, heedlessly plowing toward lunch at the yacht club in his 40-foot aquatic Bulgemobile, you come to appreciate a low center of gravity. A little junk in the trunk, so to speak.

I thought about this when I read about the deaths of 20 old people in New York, when their sightseeing boat capsized in Lake George. How does this happen? Those boats go out constantly, all summer long. Surely they’ve been waked before; how does a 40-foot boat just tip over, no matter how it’s rocked from side to side? It makes no sense.

I guess it will when the investigation is finished. Until then: Cruel, cruel fate. And a few heroes.

Bloggage: I didn’t follow the Broussard/Russert thing post-Katrina all that closely, other than to note that Russert was a jerk to the end. Read this. I think it sums up the set-to pretty well:

Russert had Broussard on the ropes, but Broussard didn’t get it. None of this ‘Russert’s game, Russert’s rules’ for him. He came out of his corner, jabbing, and he connected with every punch. ‘What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man’s mother’s death?’ Recognize yourself, you prick? ‘That wasn’t a box of Cheerios they buried last week.’ Chew on that, you heartless, coffee-drinking, toilet-equipped bastard.

On the psychological level, what Broussard did was even more astonishing: Just as he did on his first appearance, he jumped into the moment and relived it. Like a flashback. Or, to use a term of art, abreaction. And when he came out of it, he wasn’t dazed and blinking�he was breathing fire at the sick son-of-a-bitch who, with people dead and displaced, would cook up an exercise like this.

Sounds about right.

Also, sisterhood could be more powerful, at the DetNews.

Apparently I had the preferences on my iPod set in such a way that, um, the Shuffle function was turned off.

Boy, am I embarrassed.

Back to work now.

Editor’s note: I realize the following is disjointed, themeless and makes little sense. I’m tired. Also, you get what you pay for.

We are not churchgoing people, and as a Michigander of very little body fat, Kate is not one to have a closet full of dresses. And so, on the rare occasion that she is required to wear one, we tend to react like the Three Stooges: I usually run straight into a wall going whoop-whoop-whoop the hour before she’s supposed to get dressed, and I realize the last skirt still on the “possibles” closet bar now hits her at mid-buttock, and her tights might make it to her knees. Might.

The occasion: A piano recital. The shopping: Sears and Target. The take: One pair of tights. I found a still-decent plaid flannel skort from last year, crossed my fingers and hoped the beauty of her musicianship would sweep the audience away. It was all fine. I’d post pictures, but they weren’t that good. One of the other players did a vocal number, too — “Memory.” Kate didn’t know it; I barely did. What was I saying last week about showtunes? We need to beef up our CDs in that regard; it pains me to think my child may graduate from high school not knowing the words to “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Certainly, my digital music collection is lacking. My primitive third-generation iPod doesn’t have a shuffle function, but it does have Browse, and if you put it into the Songs menu, close your eyes, give the tracking wheel a few whirls and then hit “play,” you can find yourself in an approximation of shuffling, in that it throws up songs from the library you’d forgotten you had, albeit in alphabetical order.

(Was that one sentence? Man. Do not attempt this at home. Remember, I am a professional.)

Anyway, today I was in the A’s, and heard “Athens County,” one of the also-ran tracks from the eponymous album of Jonathan Edwards. (Poor J.E. He had to settle for a .net domain, the .com taken by fans of the 18th-century preacher who wrote “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”)

Anyway, as an alumnus of Ohio University, I guess I’m required to own this record. O.U. is located in None Other, and Jonathan Edwards came to Athens regularly during my time there, and for a brief shining moment we were all bluegrass fans. Bluegrass is the indigenous music of southeastern Ohio — a thousand tragic stories in search of a 24-verse tune. A little goes a long way, but one of the happiest musical memories of my life was driving through the Appalachian counties of Ohio early on a Sunday morning, listening to local radio play its weekly allotment of religious programming in the form of bluegrass gospel music.

It was…heavenly.

Athens County is — or was — full of hollers and back roads and other places offering excellent privacy and marijuana-growing possibilities. We used to go to parties out there, carrying on a long tradition of mischief in the foothills. Good times, good times.

That’s what oldies do for us, I guess — take us somewhere else for about two and a half minutes. When I woke up, I was back in Grosse Pointe, and George Clinton was singing “Atomic Dog,” followed by Billie Holiday and “Autumn in New York.” Alphabetical order, the great equalizer.

That was the better part of the weekend. The worse was the time I spent on Sunday, cleaning the drains on all the bathroom sinks and tubs. I dismantled the traps and removed great wads of hair from each of them. If women were required to do this job regularly, we’d all shave our heads. On the other hand, there’s something about cleaning out a drain, having it go from slow-running to fast under your very own hands, that’s deeply satisfying. No wonder plumbers don’t care that their cracks show; they’re happy!

Not much bloggage today — still working my way through my late-coming NYT — but for now, try Lance on teaching the Bible as literature.

Not quite a year ago, Alan, Kate and I traveled to Milwaukee for my best friend’s birthday party. We stayed at the Country Inn and Suites, one of those places with a breakfast buffet, always handy when traveling with children, who have non-coffee nutritional needs in the early morning.

I wrote something then about the appalling manners demonstrated by our fellow travelers, who arrived in the breakfast room in their jammies and, I suspect, their underwear.

I structured the post in the form of a letter to an etiquette columnist. Since then, about once a month I get either an e-mail or a comment on the original post from someone seeking etiquette advice.

Despite the obvious joke here — me, an expert on comportment, snork — I wonder what it says about how savvy people are about what they find online. I mean, other than the form of the post, there is nothing about this site that suggests I’m some latter-day Emily Post.

One of my ex-bosses hated when I wrote satirical columns, not because he hated the columns (although he wasn’t a fan), but because he believed there was a significant portion of readers who simply didn’t get satire, and would always take it the wrong way, and he’d spend a significant portion of the following day on the phone, telling them, “It’s a joke.”

I think the Milwaukee paper used to run a humor columnist, with a huge disclaimer: “This is a humorous column of satirical opinion.” Talk about a buzzkill.

Anyway, here’s the original post. Note the last half-dozen comments. Soon I’m going to forward them all to Amy Alkon.