Here’s why, from the comments below:

are others of you living in the so-called battleground states being inundated with recorded phone messages about the candidates? so far i’ve had “calls” from tommy thompson, ann richards, fred thompson and a host of others. today was the capper, though, when i picked up the phone and heard: “hello, this is laura bush.” i retorted, “bite me, laura,” and hung up. it was deeply satisfying.

I know what you mean. Those calls generally arrive on Election Day here.

Oh, lord, I knew this would happen. I have a busy week in front of me, and Kate just threw up. Fortunately, she has a stay-at-home dad to nurse her, but he can’t make her Halloween costume or write the memo and essay I have due at week’s end. Here’s hoping this will blow over quickly, and spare me in the bargain.

Better get to work on this stuff now, then. No time like the present…

…for bllllloggging!

As the person who sent this to me wrote, “No partisan gag is too stupid, as long as it mocks the same folks you mock.” Presenting: The Lie Girls. Moderately unsafe for work, but amusing.

That’s the new rule for the week: If it’s partisan politics, it has to be funny.

UPDATE: The bug flew in and out the window quickly — I think we’re calling it the After-School Virus. After a second heave and two glasses of 7-Up, Kate seems to be good as new. Ah, the mysterious healing abilities of youth. I don’t get over hangovers that fast.

What a day it was to be off: The temperature reached 70, the fall color was blazing, and my neighbors all seemed to have the day off, too, so we could gather in the street and pickalittle talkalittle about the big bust down the street yesterday. Six cop cars and a sniffer dog descended upon a house in the next block, which we’ve suspected of housing un-neighborly activity, which may or may not include a) drugs; and b) trick-turning.

(“The girl down there looks like she’s had a …real hard life.” — one of my neighbors. “Whatever the price of admission is, it must include take-out food.” — Alan, noting that the visitors tend to be middle-aged men bearing clamshell styrofoam boxes.)

When Laura Lippman visited last summer, her first observation was about how lovely our neighborhood was. And yet…it harbors vice and sin! They should make a weekly TV show about us. “Fort Wayne Vice.”

They’re not that depressing, but what the hell, one is important and the other is grimly amusing.

This one’s important:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives — used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons — are missing from one of Iraq’s most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man’s land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

Oops!

This one’s grimly amusing:

Americans are in the grip of a monster case of Pre-Election Anxiety Disorder. No one is talking about voter apathy anymore, because the opposite is more likely the case. People care too much. They’re losing sleep. They’re having bad dreams about unfavorable tracking polls. … Laura Auerbach, a Democrat and the director of a Washington research foundation, finds herself struggling with her emotions as E-Day gets closer. She hates the president. He’s a “horrible” man, she says. She sent an e-mail to a friend: “I never feel like such a bad person as I do when I’m talking about Bush. He is so hateful he makes me hate.”

Parents making speeches to toddlers: A classic sign of pre-election stress.

Newspaper editors are waking up to something even the half-bright ones feared at the dawn of the Web — it worked. Too well. We got lots of new readers, but they’re readers who don’t think they should pay a dime for it.

(Here’s a fairly depressing story about this, if you’re interested.)

But you know what? Here’s an old fuddy-duddy talking, but there is something you miss when you read a paper online: Context. Juxtaposition. Today, for instance, I was reading this wrenching New York Times story on educational chaos in Kenya, in the dead-tree version, which we splurge on with home delivery every Sunday. I was having the expected reactions — What did these people do to deserve this? There is no God — when I came across this passage:

the moment of grace was shattered when the teacher in charge, Andrew Ngundi, ordered all children not wearing uniforms to come stand before the rest of the school. As part of its free education initiative, the government prohibited the expulsion of students who cannot afford uniforms – required for students in many African countries – but the new rule has not stopped administrators from pressuring poor children to get them.

But Selina Malungu, a fatherless 8-year-old, stood before all her classmates in a grimy, red party dress adorned with torn lace and gay little bears climbing trees. It was her only outfit. The other children mock her for looking like a street urchin, she said.

I actually had to look away for a moment. On the opposite page? A Nordstrom’s ad for fall’s must-have boots. Jesus freakin’ Mary and Joseph, but I turned to the sports section. Some things are just too raw for Sunday morning. I’ll finish it tomorrow.

What a weekend. And it’s only half over, which seems strange, because I worked the extra-extra-early shift Saturday. Starting time: 4 a.m. I kid you not. I was home at noon, which should feel as though the weekend is still young, but it doesn’t. You just feel jet-lagged and spacey and crazy. I ate an egg sandwich and took a nap — oh, tell me you wouldn’t — and woke up to watch Michigan outfox the Boilermakers, then finally got around to watching “Fahrenheit 9/11” on video. Verdict: Eh. I think I’ve finally reached my limit. If the election were held tomorrow, I’d shout huzzah and look forward to getting back to normal, whatever that is. I’m tired of scowling at my neighbors’ yard signs and being surly all the time. Let’s get it over with.

That said, I found this amusing.

Our latest guppy is named Sunny, but I’m thinking we should change it to Bill. As in: Clinton. He’s the world’s biggest horndog. He hassled the other male to death, chasing him around and nipping at his tail until one day we found him bottoms-up, out of the fight for good. Now Sunny’s obviously putting the blocks to both remaining females, and they’re both bulging in a suspicious fashion. Last month one of them had seven babies, all of which are surviving and growing, and right before our eyes our tank is becoming positively … Mormon. One male, two females, seven little’uns with more probably on the way and four teeny catfish prowling the bottom, cleaning everything up. (I don’t know who their human equivalent is in this metaphor.) I don’t know what we’re going to do when the next crop of babies comes along — call Henry Huggins for help, I guess.

Update: Three catfish. Alan just euthanized an ailing one. RIP.

Let’s make it brief: Best Poor Man ever.

I don’t pay attention to sports. Everybody who knows me, knows this. But lately I’ve been editing sports, and I can’t help it: I’m now interested in the Yankees-Red Sox series. Who wouldn’t be, after last night, although some of the sportswriters got a wee bit hysterical. Curt Schilling has incredible heart, but the NY Daily News described his foot as a “bloody stump.” Please.

Anyway, today I saw the Poor Man’s entry on this and sent it to Dave:

Dear Boston Red Sox

God, I hate this team.

Dave replied:

I think this is the first time you’ve ever tried to talk baseball with me. I’m touched.

Cards vs. Yanks, please, God.

I think that says it all.

In between this, that and the other thing, I’ve been whittling away on a long, whiny post about Ohio’s Issue 1. Then I reread it, thought time to let this go, and spiked it.

Because this, that and the other thing is occupying me at the moment, how’s about a nice fresh bouquet of linkage, along with a short anecdote:

Today was one of those days when working in a newsroom is really fun. At one point in late morning, we were tearing up the front page for three breaking stories. One was pretty well under control, but two weren’t — escaped wildebeests from the zoo (no kidding) and a hostage situation in which the hostage-taker said he was holding a 15-year-old girl with a shotgun wired to her neck.

Mercifully, the hostage-taker turned out to be delusional and his hostage, imaginary. But the wildebeests were the real deal.

OK, bloggage:

(President Bush) was asked by Bob Schieffer whether he thought “homosexuality is a choice.” This is what Bush said: “You know, Bob, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

In the best of all possible worlds, Schieffer would have asked, “Why not? How could you not know? Don’t you know any gay people, Mr. President? Have you ever asked them? Don’t you know any parents of gay children and have you asked them about their kids and when they knew, sometimes at a very young age, that their son or daughter was homosexual? In all those private lunches with Cheney, all the time you two have spent together, didn’t you once have the intellectual curiosity to ask your vice president about his daughter?” After all, Bush was making policy in this area — trying to bar gays from ever marrying in these United States.

Richard Cohen states the obvious in his column today: George Bush is a great big pander bear.

Elsewhere in the WashPost, Hank on Mary — not literally, of course.

Proving a sense of humor runs in the family, Rob Hiaasen on Bill O’Reilly. (Rob’s Carl’s brother.)

Snippet: He wrote: “Here’s another smart thing to consider. Whatever you do, don’t give the details to your friends. That is a betrayal of trust. I don’t care if it was the best sex in your life.”

She wrote: O’Reilly in 2003 regaled her and her friend over dinner “with stories concerning the loss of his virginity to a girl in a car at JFK, two ‘really wild’ Scandinavian airline stewardesses … and a ‘girl’ at a sex show in Thailand who had shown him things in the backroom that ‘blew his mind.'”

Snicker.

Later.

From a Salon story on Issue 1, the anti-gay marriage measure in my native state. If you think gay marriage is a bad idea, meet your people:

As the conflict between Ohio’s civic and business leaders and the cadres of the religious right suggests, the fight over Issue 1 is more than a just a contest between Republicans and Democrats. Rather, it’s a battle in a larger struggle between stolid Middle American moderation and the mega-churched, hot-blooded moralism that is sweeping through much of the country.

The audience stares at him in open-mouthed amazement. Looking like she’s been slapped, McClellan walks out of the room and starts crying. “My father was a D-Day lander and a World War II hero,” she says later. “He freed two concentration camps. All I could think of was here are all of these people who have fought and given their lives to keep our country free of maniacal people like that guy. This guy reminded me of a Hitler youth. At this stage of our evolution, why is there such a maniacal hatred of people?”

Oh, Miss Cheney, what a big … tent you have!

Open Wire thread. Oh, my, but I’m going to have to sleep on this one. The pieces, they are falling into place. Who wrote this episode? I missed the credits. Best show on TV.

Finished “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” It’s great. And depressing. And funny. His takedown of that barking nitwit David Brooks is tremendous. He’s dead-on discussing the class differences between conservative and moderate Republicans. And, finally, he’s even deader-on as to how all this happened — how the dwindling working class was abandoned not only by the right but by the left, too. The right, however, at least knows well enough to throw them a little fresh meat every now and then. I finished it over the weekend and spent the next several hours brooding and snappish — always a good sign. Writing ought to give you heartburn once in a while.

Excerpt here, if you’re interested.

Of course, the weekend’s other big wad of verbiage was Ron Suskind’s examination of our faith-based presidency. Talk about a heartburn-inducing piece of work:

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ”road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

This wasn’t presented as evidence that Bush is stupid — although you can draw your own conclusions about that, or certainly about the worth of an Ivy League education — but about his dangerous bullheadedness, which he describes as decisiveness:

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world’s most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ”By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.”

Wait until you get to the part about the “reality-based community.” You’ll die.

I don’t want to bring you down, though! Fall is finally here — crisp days, crisper nights. I brought the potted rosemary in for its winter dance with death, which we avoided nicely two winters ago but nearly hit head-on last year. I can only pass along the lesson learned: SOUTHERN EXPOSURE, PEOPLE. Also, more water than you might think, but the sun is more important. If you don’t have a sunny southern window, you might as well kiss it goodbye today. I also retrieved the potted tarragon and put it in the same window, but I have no illusions about that. It’s toast, but maybe I can keep it alive long enough to do a little more cooking with it.

Now I smell like rosemary — they were big pots, required lots of wrestling — and they look lovely in the front window, with the lemon-yellow maple in the park strip as a backdrop. Why is the good part of fall so short? After Halloween it’ll be grim November, my birthday month, the Year’s Most Depressing (r). One reason I find it so is that not only is it my birthday month, it’s Alan’s and Kate’s, too (same day), which is followed swiftly by Thanksgiving (my actual birthday, this year), and then the holidays. I’m always a little relieved on Jan. 2, after which crushing depression sets in and I set about adding to my thigh’s fat stores.

But I don’t want to bring you down! After all, you didn’t have to endure “Shark Tale” this weekend, as I did. It’s always depressing to see a movie that appears to have been made by a marketing committee AND features one of your heroes (Martin Scorsese), making an ass of himself by being connected with such a stinker. Sharks as gangsters — huh. I also tired of the constant inside jokes. Maybe you thought it was funny that they cast Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore as the mobster’s right-hand man and named him “Luca” and made him an octopus (get it? GET IT?!?), but it just depressed me. Year after year for, what, eight years? Nine? Pixar has been teaching Hollywood how to make a kids’ movie that parents will enjoy in equal measure, and it’s so, so, exquisitely simple: The story is the most important thing, and it has to be honest. Is that so hard? It is not. You don’t need songs by Mary J. Blige and a million pop-culture references and stinky double-entendres. The “keep swimming” scene from “Finding Nemo” still moves me, but when the little shrimp in “Shark Tale” said, “Say hello to my li’l frien’,” my God, but I was…offended. I don’t want to think about “Scarface” when I’m sitting in the movies with my kid! What kind of person would?

Some Hollywood asshole, that’s who.

But I don’t want to bring you down! Take the title of this entry — Whassamatta U. I had to look it up; I wanted to get the spelling of Rocket J. Squirrel’s alma mater correct. Rocky and Bullwinkle — now there was a cartoon.

Late update: Forgot to add this, although everyone’s seen it by now, but what the hey, maybe you haven’t: Jon Stewart cuts out Tucker Carlson’s heart, shows it to him, then eats it slowly. Either transcript or video is worth the time.

We were preparing to move during ReaganFest ’04: The Funeral, so I was a bit distracted. What’s more, we were living in Blue America, which probably had a different take on the week than the places we were seeing on TV did. But never mind that. It seemed the week just got stranger as it went along — the weeping louder, the mourning more hysterical. Just like when Diana died, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

So when, a few weeks ago, some local Republicans proposed renaming our semi-outerbelt the Ronald Reagan Freeway, I wasn’t surprised. It’s preferable to blasting the crap out of Mount Rushmore.

But I have been surprised by the public reaction, at least as far as you can gauge it by letters-to-the-editor and other public bulletin boards. It’s getting slaughtered. Some hate it because it’s silly (these are my people). Some hate it because it’s a public-works tribute to a man who loathed them. Most just think it’s a bad idea to take a road everyone knows by one name and then give it another, for no real good reason — the guy’s dead, after all.

I’m amazed.