I have an iPod with more than 700 songs on it (using a mere 20 percent of its capacity), a record collection with thousands more and probably half a dozen radios lying around the house. And yet, the song I can’t get out of my head today is on none of them, only the hard drive in my head: Dean Martin’s “You Can’t Love ’em All.”

The song starts with a long intro, with Dino and three different girls:

Hello, doll.
Hello, doll.
Eight?
Date.
Hello, doll.
Hello, doll.
Ten?
Amen.
Hello, doll.
Hello, doll.
Twelve?
Twelve-fifteen?
See ya then!”

The gist: So many ladies, so little time.

I never actually owned this record. My friend Paul did, and it was one of those that made me wonder why people waste their time on Weird Al Yankovic and Dr. Demento. Found humor is always more amusing.

Summer departed for a few days, then returned with the proverbial vengeance — back to the high 80s. I celebrated with a 90-minute jaunt up the Rivergreenway to Memorial Stadium and back. It was Amateur Sunday, with the usual crowds of meanderers, helmet-less goofs and others who just…got in my way as I made my Lance-like way along the stinking sewers of the St. Marys and St. Joseph rivers. How dare they slow the progress of the shrieking white-hot flash that is the Nance When Her iPod is Pumping Just the Right Tune? What is it about exercise that makes people aggressive? Is it the adrenaline, or is maybe a little testosterone mixed in there, too? Never in my life have I gotten runner’s high, but often I’ve thought that if anyone ever tried to mess with me while I was flying along, I would rip his heart out, show it to him, and then eat it raw.

There’s a cheery thought with breakfast, eh?

Two things:

Dong Resin was gone so long I took him off my bookmarks. Now he’s back with the usual genius: I would vote for Sharpton, however. In a heartbeat. We’d be the cool country again in about a week. Non-white countries would take us serious again, the others would at long last shut the f*** up. What would France have to say to us under the Sharpton regime? Nothing, that’s what. That should have been Al’s campaign button : “Let’s Scare The Tits Off Of Everyone Else.”

In the more responsible part of the commentary corral, read Slate on M. Night Shamalamading-dong, and impress all your friends.

If you want to know why the telecommunications business is in so much trouble, consider this: When we left for Ann Arbor, of course we disconnected our telephone here. I asked about reserving the number for 10 months, so it could be reconnected without hassle later. Of course I could do that — if I was willing to pay 60 percent of my current bill for those 10 months.

In other words, we have a new phone number now. And because this is an exchange on the action-packed south side of Fort Wayne, about half our calls are wrong numbers. And about half our wrong numbers are collect calls from the Allen County Jail. These come with an automated voice announcing their source and the caller’s name, and I never know what to do, other than hang up. I want to tell poor Whoever-it-is that they have the wrong number, but they can’t hear me (I tried). What must they think, I always wonder, when they realize their call has been refused? “Aunt Lettie must be terribly disappointed in me,” perhaps.

The other day we got another wrong number. A heavily accented voice requesting another mystery name, in halting English, while someone spoke rapid Spanish in the background. “Sorry, you have the wrong number,” I said, and we hung up. Two minutes later, another call, this time a young child speaking perfect English, the same Spanish in the background, asking for the same person and then, was this the number he thought he dialed? It was; I told the kid it was ours now. “OK, thank you very much,” he chirped. Just another day in the immigrant’s narrative.

Yes, we have Caller ID; did you know the Allen County Jail turns up, like almost everyone else, as an “unavailable” number? It does.

I wish I had more to report, about everything and anything, but I think I’m going through one of those dry periods that comes along once in a while. Fortunately, Richard Cohen isn’t:

It just so happens that when it comes to Iraq and other matters of foreign policy, we are wrong — tragically so. George Bush has conducted a bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy through which he has alienated allies by repudiating treaties and by telling them, in the inimitable words of Teresa Heinz Kerry, to shove it. As for the war in Iraq, it has been everything our carping foreign critics said it would be — unnecessary and unending. If, as it is said, an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters can produce “Hamlet,” then the French can be right from time to time. They were about Iraq.

I’ll try harder tomorrow. For now, it’s, whoa! Nine-fifteen! Time for bed!

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m some sort of whiner in a post-Fellowship slump whose life went from a Ferrari to a 1962 Ford Falcon in about six short weeks, but here’s this anecdote: When I got home from work today, Alan said, “Laura Lippman was the guest on Diane Rehm today,” and said it in his wonderful Diane Rehm voice, and it was sort of the highlight of my day.

“How did she sound?” I asked. (I’m interested because Ms. Lippman is book-touring, and we’re probably going to meet in a few days.)

“Sunny,” he said. “Especially compared to Diane.”

Well, almost everyone sounds sunny compared to Diane, and yes we must acknowledge now that Diane is coping with the tragedy of spasmodic dysphonia, although I’ve always maintained that my problem with D.R. is her recessive sense-of-humor gene, not her voice. Alan feels the same way, but he still imitates her.

(Richard has S.D., but it just makes him sound sexy.)

Anyway, if you want to see if Laura sounds sunny, you can listen to the stream here.

I’ve been thinking today about how stories spread, especially wrong ones. If anyone knows what really happened in Las Vegas between Linda Ronstadt, the people at her show and the management of the hotel where she was performing, please say something. Because every time I read an account of it, it grows a few inches, like the fish your grandpa caught or the snow he had to walk through to get to school. The closest I can tell, from reading Las Vegas newspaper accounts of the show she put on earlier in the month, she gave a lackluster performance that already had the crowd dissatisfied. When she came out to do her encore, and dedicated “Desperado” to Michael Moore, people reacted.

There were cheers and boos, and some walked out. If you search this story in databases, the earlier accounts tend to go with this version: A crummy show, an irritating speech, a vocal audience, an early exit. But oh, how it grew from there.

But Google “ronstadt + ‘near-riot'” and you get dozens of hits, most of them versions of this story, which says concertgoers “tossed cocktails into the air” in their outrage. (A Las Vegas columnist said one concertgoer threw a drink at a poster.) Soon she’s being “escorted from the building” in a bum’s rush of patriotic outrage. And so on.

But ask yourself: Say I’m at a show, and it’s not going very well, and the performer makes a political statement I don’t like. What would be my reaction? Speaking just for myself, I think I’d be likely to a) boo; and maybe b) walk out. But riot? Tear posters from walls? Throw a perfectly good cocktail that was doing no one any harm into the air? Please. This was not a Toby Keith crowd, nor the Sex Pistols; there was unlikely to be a mosh pit at a show for a middle-aged singer and her middle-aged fans, so let’s just use our common sense and try to consider the most likely reaction. You ask me, drink-throwing just seems…unlikely.

Now comes Lance Armstrong and the case of the Spitting French. Did you hear? French spectators spat upon our hero. But again, with the help of Professor Google, we see this entire charge comes from one story, in which the Tour director was talking about the unwise decision to hold a time trial on a mountain stage — because the riders don’t travel in a peloton in a time trial, and because of the characteristics of the terrain, there was no barrier between the crowd and the riders, and the whole course was this screaming gauntlet of crazy cycling fans pressing dangerously close to some riders.

Afterward, Tour director Jean-Marie LeBlanc said, �There were lots of aggressive fans surrounding the riders and I even saw two idiots spit at Lance Armstrong.�

This in a crowd estimated at 500,000 to 1 million. Two. And yet the same people who like to claim liberals have neither spleens nor spines for the war on terror get the vapors over the idea of this expectoration. Good lord, you’d think none of them have ever been to an American hockey game.

Of course, the Freepers are one thing, the mainstream media quite another. Soon Lance will be stepping to the podium dripping the spittle of contemptuous Frenchmen, when everyone else who watched the Outdoor Life Network saw people standing five deep along the Champs-Elysees, waving flags and cheering.

I’ve been doing this for three years now, more than enough time to tell all my newspaper stories at least twice. I know I mentioned my old boss Bernie, who would pay $10 to any reporter who could get the word “panties” into the paper, in any context. I had another editor who had a competition with friends on who could first slip “creamy white thighs” past the copy desk and into the Charlotte Observer.

There are those who find these contests childish. I say: Work for a newspaper for a few years at wages that a cocktail waitress would sneer at, and then tell me it’s so awful. We have our fun where we can find it.

But until today, even I was unaware of the Order of the Occult Hand, a journalistic secret society that’s existed for 40 years, dedicated to sneaking the phrase “It was as if an occult hand had…” into newspapers around the English-speaking world.

That’s a Chicago Tribune link, which requires registration, but it’s worth following; the story’s a hoot:

“It’s a phrase that has that sense of journalese about it, sort of a campy phrase,” said the unashamed Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a Pulitzer winner and at least a six-time “occult hand” user.

It arrived at The Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y., in 2000, and the Bangkok Post in 2004.

It makes my creamy white thighs quiver with glee.

OK, today was…a day. Up at 3:55, off to work 50 minutes later, work work work, off, nap, shop, this, that, dinner (bruschetta, mmmm), wine, now. We’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Well, whew. It’s done. My big self-imposed-writing-deadline project, that is. I rewrote it, then re-rewrote it, then spat upon it, cursed it, and re-rewrote it again, which by this point mainly consists of block/save/pasting with fingers crossed. It goes to FedEx tomorrow.

And no, you can’t know what it is. If it bears fruit — months away — I’ll be happy to shout it from the rooftops, but for now it’s just Unworthy Writing Project No. 3,984.

The Tour de Lance could not end too soon for me. I’ve been enjoying every minute of it, because it involves many stimulating photographs. But three weeks of Lance is just about enough, even for a girl who enjoys examining every striation in you-know-who’s quadriceps. Also, unlike the pituitary cases and mesomorphs who play everything else, we have this bond because we’re both cyclists. He rides up the slopes of the Pyrenees, I ride — or rode — up the slopes of Ann Arbor, Mich. — we’re practically twins! And yeah, he’s hot.

The question remains: Is Lance on dope? Lance says no, and I’m just goofy enough to believe him, especially when I read about his training regimen. Ultimately, though, I reserve the right to have the same reaction so many men have had when I pointed out that this or that woman they were ogling had plastic breasts: “And this is a problem…why?” sums it up pretty well. Maybe Lance is simply an athlete with enough brains not to get caught, or maybe — it’s just crazy enough to be true — he’s telling the truth. Maybe he owes his success to the fact he spends every damn waking hour riding his bike fast.

Anyway, I don’t care.

Best Tour stories of the weekend:

The New York Times on the lanterne rouge, the guy in last place. Jimmy Casper was so far behind the field he was fined by race officials for, get this, allowing spectators to push him up the hills. A man after my own heart.

Sally Jenkins in the WashPost maybe goes a lee-tle over the top in her Lance-mania, but she’s upfront about her prejudice: Armstrong has his detractors and doubters, but I’m not one of them. My view of him is colored by affection: He’s my friend and he gave me a bestseller. OK, fine. It’s still a good column, but this one, about Lance’s coach, was better.

The other thing I think you should take note of was in Friday’s Salon, an interview with the mother of Mark Bingham, one of the heroes of Flight 93, the one that crashed into the Pennsylvania field. (You’ll have to watch a short ad, but don’t complain — it’s worth it.) Maybe I’ve been snoozing, but it’s the first detailed account of what the families heard on the cockpit voice recorders, and even almost three years later, it’s knee-buckling, eye-tearing stuff:

At this point, Hoglan says, a struggle mounts in the rear of the plane. It’s the moment when Todd Beamer, an account manager for Oracle, utters the now famous line, “Let’s roll.” A few seconds later, Hoglan says, “you hear somebody being killed, probably strangled. And then you hear Todd Beamer saying something like, ‘God help us.’

Hoglan says that an Arabic voice inside the cockpit then asks, “Finish her now?” The answer comes back, “No, not yet.” Then, she adds, “maybe a minute later, with more scuffling and struggling in the background, the very last thing you hear is a low voice spoken in English: “Pull it up, pull it up.” It probably signals the last struggle, they are probably trying to get control of the airplane. Maybe their hands are on the controls when the plane goes into the ground.”

I don’t really believe in God, but it’s hard to be a mammal with higher-level thinking skills and wonder what a death like the one these passengers suffers does to your…soul, or karma, or whatever. Who wouldn’t want to go out like these folks, who, the 9/11 commission pointed out, were the only Americans that day to appreciate the gravity of their situation and act accordingly? Who doesn’t want to die a hero?

OK, so one last thing, again from the NYT. According to blog aggregators, everybody’s linking to Okrent’s column, but I won’t, because this was the most entertaining thing in today’s paper, for me: A feature on the world’s foremost tosser-of-bouquets-at-ballet-dancers. Hilarious.

See you tomorrow, when No! Deadlines! Reign!

Ohmigosh, but my life is just so busy and fabulous, that I don’t have time to write even a little teeny thing for you tonight!

Truth: Got home from work, stared at laptop for an hour. read some of “Shutter Island,” cursed self, stared at laptop for another hour, wrote a little, caught up on e-mail, talked on phone, had dinner, which brings us up to…now.

More truth: I spent much of today staring out the window and thinking about the essential weirdness of life. Yesterday morning there was a shooting in the Fort, a man found head-shot in the wee hours; he dies; police are investigating; autopsy pending, the usual boilerplate of a first-day homicide story. Our paper ran a picture of a crime-scene investigator taking close-up shots of a handgun found on the house’s roof. Yes, on the roof.

At midmorning, a call went out on the scanner announcing a staff meeting for everyone investigating the “60” of earlier today; a 60 is a homicide. So far, so routine.

Then, today, the follow: He shot himself, accidentally. The gun on the roof was unrelated and just, you know, an unrelated gun on the roof. (Have you checked your roof lately? You never know what you’ll find up there.) And while I was surprised, I also wasn’t surprised; lots of news doesn’t make sense, or makes the most banal kind of sense. People are killed not by Hannibal Lecter, crazed madman cannibal, but by their pissed-off ex-squeeze. A guy is shot, a gun found on his roof, and it turns out to be accidental and self-inflicted, and the gun on the roof was apparently dropped by a passing pigeon or something.

This is why I can’t watch “CSI” — it just doesn’t jibe with what I know about life. Needless to say, the crime-scene investigators I’ve seen in action on the witness stand and on the job are never as foxy as Marg Helgenberger, or William Peterson.

And yet, what was nominated for a Best Drama Emmy? “The Wire”? Nooooooo. “CSI.” I give up.

I’m always the last person to learn the important things. In the course of killing my comment spam — once an occasional chore, now a daily chore — I noticed they all seem to end up in the same entries in the archives. So I took a look at them, and found the key phrases (which I’ll try to modify to foil the spam-bots): “Ru$# L1m8augh’s drooog problem,” “n0n-pr3sc1pshun sl33p a1ds.”

Anyway, the comment spam’s coming fast and furious the last few days, as are the e-mail viruses. Pity you poor PC types, I do. Today I killed an appalling 52 spam-comment entries for ch33p p!11s onlyne. Mofos.

OK, then. A few weeks ago, on Memorial Day, we drove back to Ann Arbor listening to NPR. They were doing one of those hey-maybe-we-went-to-Brown-but-we-are-hip-to-the-hoi-polloi stories, about a song they promised would be the radio hit of the summer of ’04, something called “Redneck Woman.” (Warning: Link contains embedded sound.) This piece, which I think covered a 10-minute segment, went on and on and on and on, to the point that I thought, OK, it’s a holiday weekend and the pickin’s are slim, but this is ridiculous.

Now it’s late July, and Alan’s been working around our house like a field hand, earning his keep and more. So when he wondered the other day if I’d mind if he took a 36-hour fishing vacation, of course I said no, and that’s what he did, hauling the pretty green boat off to the Muskegon River for some badly needed R&R.

Only it wasn’t entirely blissful. Even though it was a Monday, he was besieged all day by drifting tubers, all of whom were, in his words, “drunk and ugly and with ugly, drunken children. Also stupid.”

Now, the habits of Michigan river travelers have been well-documented — you’ll recall the famous cussin’ canoeist case of a few years back. Alan reports that the threat of prosecution has not cut down on anyone’s willingness to scream profanity at the top of their lungs while canoeing and tubing.

Also, to sing “Redneck Woman.”

“They kept singing that part about And I ain’t no high class broad / I’m just a product of my raisin’ / And I say “hey y’all” and “Yee Haw” / And I keep my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long,” he said. (Actually, he said “they sing that part about ain’t being no high-class broad,” but I added the lyrics for clarity; I think they sum up a certain southern Michigan demographic like none other.)

I hasten to add Alan is not a priss about drunks or profanity, but “Jesus Christ, Nance, this is a river 75 yards wide and every goddamn one of them ran into my boat! Ran into it!” And then said, the way drunken tubers everywhere do, “You catchin’ anything?” And Alan said, “I was.” But they never took the hint.

Note that this hardship did not stop him from spending 13 hours on the river. As they say, a bad day fishing is better than a good day doing pretty much anything else.

I’m pleased to say my writing project is going better than I expected, and I’m perking right along. So, bloggage:

My fellow Buckeyes may enjoy Slate’s look at our home, the swing state. We spawned Jerry Springer and Harvey Pekar — can Indiana make the same claim? I think not.

An offbeat Tour de France feature on the man who was thought to be Lance’s greatest rival, Jan Ullrich. Turns out he maybe has a motivation problem, also a fluctuating-weight problem, and a party problem, and a no-worries-mon problem: “Look at it through his eyes. He says, `I can screw off, gain a lot of kilos over the winter, get serious for a month, finish second in the Tour, and make $3 million a year. What’s so bad about that?’ ” former Telekom teammate Bobby Julich said. Well, when you put it that way… More here.

Finally, some people think college towns get boring when all the students leave in the summer. Well, they’re wrong. Especially about Ann Arbor, where the rash of seminude cyclists continues unchecked.

You’ve been a great audience. See you tomorrow.

My high-school yearbook is online.

My page here. Kill me now.

P.S. I’m on that page twice. (Yes, that’s me in the Jane Fonda shag, swingin’ ’70s styles and ’80s scowl walking out of the graduation party.) Thank God I never bought it — the yearbook, that is.

(Pause.) OK, I was going to just post this and forget it, but I couldn’t resist a walk down memory lane. This page is a good reflection of the unfortunate truth that boys’ clothes were as stupid as girls’ — the guy in the plaid sportcoat and polka-dot bow tie is a case in point. (He died of AIDS, I heard.) The guy in the plaid sportcoat in this picture did, too — die of AIDS, that is. One of my best friends ever, and I still think of him at least once a week.

Beverly “Vacation” D’Angelo’s brother, bottom right. I saw her in a Benetton a few blocks from my old high school about a dozen years ago. The windowpane-check sportcoat on the same page was a serious partying buddy. Justin Timberlake’s uncle, top left.

Oh, stop me now, but no! Bottom row, left had the most terrifying post-spring break suntans I’ve ever seen; if he isn’t dead of melanoma by now, it won’t be long. Middle row, center: a model. Or was, anyway. Second row, left: Pretty enough to be one, but wasn’t. Top left, drove his Mercedes into a sinkhole on West Broad Street in Columbus; photo published all over the country.

Finally, My buddy Dave Jones, the sportswriter, top left. Tons better-looking now; in fact, a fox.

OK, now I’ll stop.

I owe my sister a big thank-you for turning me on to Swiffer dusters, truly a miracle product. Swiff the surface, kiss the dust goodbye. I think I’ve mentioned before that housework is my secret vice, which I hasten to add is not always evident on any given drop-by here at Chez NN.C. But I love me some Swiffers; I have two — one with the telescoping handle that does ceiling fans and miniblinds like you wouldn’t believe.

What makes Swiffers swiff-tastic? I assume it’s technology — it’s some sort of microfiber deal that attracts the dust and then doesn’t let it go until you take it off the little plastic handle and throw it away. For someone who’s been using her 7-year-old’s old diapers and retired T-shirts for the same thing, well, it’s a revelation.

So it was with this in mind that I took a chance on the WetJet, which was both less and more than I expected. As a mop, it doesn’t clean as well as the old-fashioned bucket variety, but as a miracle of recombining existing Procter & Gamble products into a new one that sells for $17, it is really something.

The “cleaning pad” is just an ultra-thin maxi and/or disposable diaper. A little battery-operated pump squirts the “cleaning solution” (which should be unscented and called Floor-dex, in case anyone from P&G reads this) in front of the ultra-thin maxi, which is then used to wipe it down. The dirty solution gets sucked up in the superabsorbent core — think of the last diaper/maxipad ad you saw, where they dump the test tube of blue water into the thing — and you move on down the tile.

Hot water and Mr. Clean still cleans better. But if it’s a big pain in the butt to drag out the bucket and mess with the mop, you can Swiff the floor a lot faster. The name could be code for “lick and a promise.” Or “maxipad on a stick.”

But sometimes, that’s the best you can do.

Ergh, but it’s going to be a busy week. Another self-imposed writing deadline looms at the end of it, which means there’ll be lots of Guilt Blogging, also Procrastination Blogging and maybe, if I’m lucky, no blogging at all, because I’ll be writing.

If you’re betting, don’t bet on the last one.

If you’re into Lance Armstrong, you don’t need me to help you find one of the 12 million Lance-centric websites out there, not to mention the Outdoor Life Network, aka All Lance, All the Time, Even the Commercials TV. But I have to say, if you’re a registered WashPost user, I’m really impressed with their photo galleries. The Tour de France is a natural for pictures; it would be hard to do a lousy one. But this gallery is typical of the WashPost’s now — non-irritating use of Flash, nice snaps, the whole bit.

See you here tomorrow, with my clean-enough kitchen floor.

My sister was known in her day as a great hula-hoop talent. She probably could have gone pro, although I admit this all happened before I knew her, or before I was old enough to remember. Anyway, one of the great joys of parenthood is watching your child’s talents emerge, and I’ve been waiting for Kate’s to come along. We can already see a couple — she’s a good writer, for instance, imagine that — but I’m waiting for the prodigy-level gifts for music or athletics that will allow her to become rich, world-famous and, most important, able to support us in our old age.

I think we’ve found it; she has inherited her aunt’s ability to keep that thing going for minutes on end. As soon as hula-hooping becomes eligible for Title IX scholarships, we’ll at least have college covered.

The dog isn’t the only one who pudged up a bit in the past year. He didn’t have the long walks he was used to, and gained maybe a pound or two, which I didn’t notice until I buckled on his life jacket the other weekend, and …

(Yes, in case you’re wondering, I *can* hear myself. A dog with a life jacket. While children starve.)

Anyway, it occurred to me it wouldn’t hurt either of us to get back on our regular dog-walking routes, about a mile or so each in all directions from our house. So off we trotted south on Indiana, a few blocks we know well, but of course, it’s been a while. Some houses have been painted, some trees have been cut down, and what’s this? It’s an older woman who’s been there for years, only…she’s changed. She’s sitting on the front porch, hair wild and uncombed, drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon. At first I thought it was a man, but no.

I remember when Sprig was a pup, she was your basic neighborhood old lady. She’d call him over and pet him and talk about her own terrier. This time she called him over and sort of petted him drunkenly. “Where’s your dog?” I asked. “He…died,” she said in a small voice. Somehow, I got the idea the rest of it — the transformation to the sort of old lady who no longer combs her hair and drinks PBRs on the stoop — is related to the dog’s exit.

Anyway, we walked on. The dog pooped three times. Afterward he looked five pounds thinner.

Linkage: The other day, when Mike Ditka’s name was being floated as a possible Senate candidate, I remarked to a friend that the Republicans have reached their decadent phase, like the left was c. 1970 or so, when Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were considered intellectuals and had book deals. Well, I was wrong. It can still get far, far worse, like, when Ditka opts to keep his hat on his head and the next name we hear is …Ted Nugent.

(My question: Wouldn’t he have to relocate from Michigan?)

Alex wrote something nice this week about the Jeffries Cemetery in Whitley County, which he visited recently and which, depending on who you talk to, is or isn’t an African-American graveyard from the 19th century. A few years ago, Fort Wayne hosted a national genealogical conference, and a reporter from our paper talked to a woman who was researching black families, in part by visiting the Jeffries Cemetery, where, she said, many were buried.

The phone rang early the next morning, from a highly irritated woman saying, hello, those are my relatives and I’m not black. The photos of the people in question were, to my eye, unequivocal — Negroid features and hair, the whole bit. It turns out they were probably Melungeon, mixed-blood people born of black slaves, Native Americans and southern Europeans. It all seemed like a quibble, but this area is rural and people are still tetchy about such things.

If Seymour Hersh is right, we are so screwed.

If you and your spouse haven’t swapped domestic duties lately, give it a try. With Alan running the kitchen these days, I’m making all sorts of new discoveries. He brought home Hebrew National hot dogs the other day, which I never buy because they’re more expensive. Alan has a different rationale: “I figured there were fewer dicks ‘n’ lips in ’em.” Anyway, I’m kicking myself for not buying them myself — they’re the best franks I’ve had in years, and what a great slogan. “We answer to a higher power.” Mmmm.