Ralph Williams’ lecture on the Book of Job was yesterday. The whole family attended, including the 7-year-old, who sat reading Carolyn Haywood’s “Eddie’s Menagerie” while we grappled with one of the 900-pound gorillas of world literature. (I’m pleased to say this arrangement suited everybody well.)

It was a good lecture. I judge it so because it rearranged my thinking about the text; the last time that happened was during a 1994 performance of “Hamlet,” so I guess I’m due for these shakeups every decade or so. Everybody says “Hamlet” is about indecision. Wrong. What’s Hamlet to do — a ghost tells him his uncle’s a murder, so he should run into the throne room and shank his ass? Not much of a play there. No, Hamlet’s a thinker, an intellectual. He needs to have all his ducks in a row before he acts. This is not indecision, it’s intelligence. His uncle is a murderer, and you can’t really say that if he’d acted rashly early on, there’d be fewer bodies littering the stage at the final curtain. It’s a tragedy.

Job’s a tragedy, too, and yet what lesson do we take from it? What’s the expression? “You have the patience of Job.” I don’t think this is a story about patience. It’s about an unjustly punished man standing up to God and saying, “This is wrong.” For his resolution and acceptance of his fate — not his patience — God rewards him in the end, although it’s a pretty thin reward, if you ask me. The God of the Old Testament is not a compelling figure. He’s like the world’s worst boss, always micromanaging, speaking inscrutably from the heavens, flooding the earth and calling a do-over on his own creation. Oh, and smiting people. Poor Job. The text says God didn’t do the smiting, but Williams pointed out that the temple that fell on Job’s family, killing all his children at once, was struck by a wind “at all four corners,” and what sort of wind is that, hmm? A whirlwind? And who likes to speak from whirlwinds?

Even more disturbing is the prologue, which features God and his advisers lounging around heaven, when Satan shows up from a stroll around the earth and the two get to talkin’. “Have you seen my servant Job?” asks God. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” And Satan says, essentially, “Sez you,” (this the little-cited NN.C translation of the original Hebrew) and suggests God mess up Job’s hair a little, and see what he has to say then. And God says, OK, do what you want, just don’t kill him. This, apparently, is what a pious lifetime of service to God got you in the land of Uz — to be used as a pawn in an intellectual exercise being argued in heaven.

So either Satan or God smites Job big-time, first robbing him of all his wealth, then all his children, then covering his body with sores, and then the fun really begins. His friends come over to say, “Look, you must have done something to deserve this. Repent and get it over with.” Job is, of course, blameless and maintains his innocence, or at least no idea why this is happening. And then there’s a lot of great poetry about how God is present in all things, and no one can really understand why things like this happen, and essentially Job says, “I give up,” and God says, “Good boy” and gives him everything back, although not the original children, but he gets 10 replacement children, including three daughters named Dove, Cinnamon and Eye-shadow.

As parables of suffering go, there’s little comfort in this one. Maintain your purity in the face of unspeakable agony, and maybe you’ll be OK in the end. Don’t waste time trying to figure things out. It is as it is. God knows best.

Like “King Lear,” I think Job is one of those stories you have to be a little older to really understand. I can’t imagine how the 20-year-olds in the class took it. Although they all took notes.

If there’s one set of figures that gets less skeptical scrutiny than law enforcement’s estimate of the “street value” of seized drugs, it’s “lost productivity” claims. How do you figure lost productivity? Well, it depends, I’d imagine. If I break my ankle and I’m out for five days, on reduced duty for five more and hobbling for another month, I suppose you’d add my salary for the days I was off, take a percentage of the next five and go mfffmmfmf over the month spent hobbling and whatever that added up to, that’s my lost productivity.

Where it gets dicier is when you try to extrapolate from the known to the estimated. Which brings us to today’s Page One story in the Detroit News, about that hardy perennial, the NCAA tournament pool. Paragraph five:

Here�s the math: Employers nationwide lose about $101 million in productivity for every 10 minutes their employees spend obsessing about the tournament, according to New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

OK? This is just me here? But this is crap. That’s not to say the tournament doesn’t take people’s minds off work, but “$101 million.” Verrrry interesting. Why not an even hundred mil? Why not 99? Or 102? Or 105? By this measure, the premiere of “The Sopranos” is a veritable millstone on the American economy, and Janet Jackson, when we’re done striping her boob with the lash of our outrage, should be charged with high financial crimes against all those who employ others — for their lost productivity, of course, when they spent all those minutes around the water cooler talking about it.

You ask me, the most important part of that sentence, to the poeple at the New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, is the phrase, “according to the New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.”

Just a thought.

The casual reader might think I’ve become a U of M snob, that I think people really are smarter here, that I’ve become the reason elsewhere in the state, they say AA stands for “arrogant assholes.”

Well, not exactly. Two recent incidents:

1) Alan overheard two girls talking outside the student union yesterday. Said one, “Ohmigod, I ordered chicken wings? And they came? And they had, like, bones in them?! Ohmigod I was so, like, freaked out! I’ve never had chicken with bones in it!”

2) We had lunch at the University Club today, one of the restaurants in the union. It’s called the UClub and serves a club sandwich called, duh, the UClub. It’s a good sandwich. It’s hard to wreck a club sandwich. Today, a small card next to a plate displaying this specialty read: “The UClub’s infamous UClub.” Ah yes, as Mr. Language Person Might say, “The addition of a syllable to any adjective acts as an intensifier.” As Alan said, “Has sickened thousands since 1985.” The English department is housed in the building across the street; maybe someone will point it out.

I’m not a huge William Powers fan, but this column — about the reaction to the reaction to that Pat Oliphant cartoon of the sadistic nun and little Mel Gibson — gets it exactly right:

Do you ever wonder why political cartoons have lost the magnetism and drawing power they once had, why they’re no longer part of the political conversation? There aren’t many Pat Oliphants left in America, you see, and the ones we have are so troublesome, so… costly.

And really, why offend people when you can make them happy? Why shock when you can calm and soothe? Why divide when you can unite? If the newspaper industry had a theme song, it would be that old Coke jingle: I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony. More and more, it’s doing just that.

I’m not in the mood to write all that much today. Fortunately, many others are having a great day, blog-wise:

The Poor Man brings much pain to Rush Limbaugh and John Podhoretz: It seems like a pretty common trait of bargain basement Bill O’Reillys like Podhoretz, doughy middle-aged heros of the editorial page, that they can bravely lecture everyone about the need for square-jaw’ed determination and fearless resolve when fighting to vanquish the many-faceted forces of Evil, but at the first criticism they start crying like whiney little bitches, and I’d really like to apologize to whiney little bitches for the unfair comparison.

TBogg, too, on Peggy Noonan’s strange sense of humor, among other things.

And while it’s not a blog, there’s also G. Beato’s profile of a 35-year-old ex-roadie in LA Weekly. He’s got his own promo line: 5000 words about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and porn. You know you’re going to read that. (Warning: Extra gross.)

Sorry for the day’s absence — no excuse, sir. Dr. Frank came up for some visitin’, and that’s always a distraction, plus he bogarts the computer. Not really, but I tease him about it, and it’s so gratifying to watch a PC user explore the mysteries of a wireless broadband Mac network. Of course I had to show him the iTunes Music Store, spending a buck to demonstrate how quickly we could get Prince’s “D.M.S.R.” into the house. If he makes the Switch, I want a commission.

Today, in history class, the professor made a passing reference to burlesque. “If you don’t know what that is,” he said, “think Deja Vu.” Deja Vu is a semi-famous string of strip joints around here, but man, talk about taking nothing for granted — not knowing what burlesque is? I really do feel old sometimes, sitting in these classes. Last week, when my pathetic fiction was being workshopped in English class, everyone tripped over a passage where I’d called a fox “Sly Reynard.” Precisely one student out of 20 understood the reference. The teacher didn’t even get it. Like Jon Carroll, I felt hair growing out of my ears and wondered if my breath smelled like denture cream.

Now I see why everyone makes such a big deal out of that list that comes out every summer. Last night, at dinner, one of our fFs, the youngest among us, revealed she’d never used a typewriter. She knew what they were, of course, but she’d always written on a PC. Amazing.

Just writing about this makes me feel about a thousand years old. So I’d better take my teeth out and go to bed.

…not to mention a great deal more entertaining. Slate does the dirty work for you:

Page 225: A romantic evening for Jayson and his girlfriend Zuza: “We would spend late nights reading Emerson and Dostoyevsky, and talking about race relations and the immigrant experience.”

Page 282: Blair picks up a copy of David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, then passes out for hours.

And so on.

We had a Fellowship seminar recently on depression. Seminars are off the record, but I think no one will care if I pass along the evolving medical thinking on the big D: This is a brain disorder, a physical illness. It runs in families. There are risk factors. And it can be — it is — devastating.

Now that Spalding Gray’s body has been found, confirming what everybody pretty much knew about his disappearance some weeks ago, maybe we can talk a little more about depression. I think suicide is never the correct answer to that particular problem; I don’t think it’s a justifiable act in almost all cases where it’s attempted. (I make exceptions for the terminally ill on a case-by-case basis, but you know? Life is a terminal disease.) When a person has, as Gray did, young children (sons, 11 and 6, and a stepdaughter with his wife), it becomes something far worse. Although Gray styled himself as a typical NYC neurotic and treated the people around him accordingly, at least he was honest about it, and he gains whatever redemption honesty offers.

A New York magazine cover story shed a little more light on his particulars: The guy was in no small physical pain following a car accident a few years ago, and seemed to be the victim of some bad, or misguided, medical care. No justification, but it makes it a little more understandable.

Gray’s mother was a suicide. Gray’s children are now at risk. And the grim drumroll goes on. Depressingly.

Land sakes, but I had to keep checking the source of this overwrought, badly written story about the Columbus sniper. I thought the Washington Post had better editors than the ones who let this stinkeroonie into the paper:

ETNA, Ohio — The farmland in this part of central Ohio is as flat as an open palm. The economy has been depressed for years, but that hardly dents the persistent optimism of local farmers. Maybe the corn will grow higher this year. Maybe the tomatoes will be redder.

But this year there is a spookiness and chill cascading across the land. A brazen gunman has been roaming the rural roads and circling the interstate. For weeks the shooter was a ghostly figure, leaving behind only bullet holes. Then, Nov. 25, came the death of Gail Knisley, a 62-year-old woman who had been out for a doctor’s appointment, who planned to do some holiday shopping, a quintessential small-town soul, who appreciated when friends would drive her places.

That, right there, is parachute journalism at its worst: The phony-baloney scene-setting that lets readers know we’re in the capital-H Heartland, the boolsheet assertion of authority — I’ve never, I mean never in my life, heard a farmer hope for “redder tomatoes” next year — followed by the obligatory Ominous Chords of “spookiness” and “chill” which “cascades” across the land. And then the Victim, who can not be merely a small-town soul but a quintessential one.

Paragraph three: He was standing on an overpass, with a handgun, like a figure frozen in a movie poster for a western. Eyewitnesses found his calmness to be eerie.

Oh, really? “Officer, he was standing calmly. It was…an eerie sort of calm.” And while I’ve seen approximately a zillion movie posters featuring gun-brandishing figures, I’ve never seen one for a western that featured an overpass. But that’s just me.

And that’s only the first three paragraphs! It goes on for five pages!

I’d say “enjoy,” but, you know.

Issues my parents didn’t have to deal with, No. 283: What to say when your 7-year-old asks, “Can I have a dot-com?” No. 284: How best to consolidate all of our family’s dot-com needs?

For the last year, I’ve been, shall we say, transitioning out of my Nancy Nall identity, not so much shedding it the way a snake does its skin, but adding my married name to the end. I wrote a fairly muddled column about my fairly muddled feelings about all of this for Indianapolis Monthly last year (not online, sorry). I imagine, in my next career incarnations, I’ll be either Nancy Nall Derringer or just Nancy Derringer, and I’m not entirely happy about it, but it is what it is. When Kate came along, it just made sense for all of us to have one name. I didn’t change it legally for a couple more years, but for the last few, N.N.D. has been the name on my paychecks and tax returns if not my byline. I took the fellowship as N.N.D., and because it sounds stupid to introduce yourself with three names, particularly when you haven’t gone hyphenated, these days I’m mostly N.D.

But, of course, this joint is still NN.C. If you can grasp the potential, and entirely unnecessary, problems this poses, you are closer to understanding the modern age than I am.

Kate’s question reminded me of one of those easily put off parental chores I’ve had on my to-do list for a while: Grabbing her .com domain name before a) it somehow becomes a porn site; or b) a starlet with the same name wins a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, thus enabling us to sell it to her at a fat profit. But while I was out there in Verisign/GoDaddy land, I thought, why not shop for the whole family? Alas, derringer.com has been taken by a gun-sales clearinghouse. Dot-org and .net are also gone, one grabbed by a fellow Derringer and the other by someone who lives on Derringer Lane. Derringerfamily is available, but struck me as incredibly dorky. Twoshot.com — a derringer is a two-shot weapon — sounded much cooler, but alas, it was taken. Dot-org and .net are available.

I stopped at Kate’s name. She won’t be setting up a site there for years; but it’s in our pocket, for now. In the meantime, she’ll continue to play the Flash games at nick.com and her mother will content herself with playing on sites like Making Over Mona. I think I went a little overboard on the botox.