Some of you are still having problems viewing this page. My web guy says, “That’s impossible! Impossible, I tell you!” (in so many words), but has agreed to closely examine any screen captures to see if there might be a hole in his CSS code.

Send them to jcburns -at- yahoo -dot- com along with pertinent info — browser and version, obviously.

I was able to view it on a Palm device at the Apple store the other day, if that means anything.

In a perfect world, a story like this would have the same effect on j-school enrollment as the WashPost’s Watergate coverage, only in reverse. Slate answers the question no one is asking: Have Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver had any work done? Then they banner it on the home page, and when you actually read it, the answer is: Probably not. Four of six plastic surgeons think he’s untouched, and the same for his wife.

Well, that’s a relief.

Wait! No less an expert than Mark Steyn — he’s a conservative columnist, in case you’re checking credentials — says Maria looks the way she does because of “excessive dieting, a cosmetic surgery too far, and over-tanning.” Well, that’s a big relief, isn’t it?

Which reminds me: Unless you want to blow the rest of the afternoon in idleness, stay away from AwfulPlasticSurgery.com. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

One question: Has Woody Allen always been covered with a thin film of mold and dried body fluids, or is this a new development? For once, Maureen Dowd hits one out of the park:

Woody Allen has proposed writing a memoir, if he can get enough dough.

“For this,” said the man who once savored privacy, in his proposal to market and spin his own scandal, “I want a lot of money.”

I mean: Ick.

Sorry for the light work around here of late. I spent all my free time this weekend assembling my Fellows presentation. It started out a video and ended up a slide show/video hybrid, and while it’s nothing special, it will go down in history as my first DVD. It was so easy you can’t believe it, just clickety-click-click and boom, out comes…a DVD with moving pictures and music. Go figure this amazing Mac interface, eh?

Of course, it did take hours to put the damn thing together, but that’s me. I want the music to get quiet here and swell there, and I redo the damn transitions over and over, and then I watch it, and all I see are the flaws. But tonight, I allowed myself a little thrill — those old pictures looked fabulous on the TV, better than they did on the computer, that’s for sure.

One of my projects this year is to get all the old digital-tape movies onto DVD. If it’s as easy as this, no problem.

Go see “Lost in Translation.” You really won’t regret it. I promise.

People are always recommending James Lileks to me, to others, to the internet as a whole. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist is a darling of the internet, thanks to the tirelessness with which he runs his personal website, lileks.com, to which I am not linking, because, having read James Lileks off and on for a few years now, I simply cannot stand him.

It’s an interesting sort of dislike, because it breaks so many of my personal rules. I always say I will follow a good writer anywhere, whether I agree or not, because the journey is the point, and a good writer always makes the journey worthwhile. And while Lileks is unquestionably a good writer, a superb writer, even, I can rarely get through one of his pieces. It’s not his politics, which are predictably conservative and glib; it’s more his persona, his idea of himself, which is sort of Ward Cleaver crossed with Superman crossed with Elvis Costello. He’s trying so hard, all the time, to impress you with his virtues, his cleverness, his hipness, that he ends up painting a picture — a Thomas Kinkade, only if you look into the rose-covered cottage window, you can see a short man with a receding hairline playing wth a cute little girl in front of a brand-new Apple G5.

He’s very taken with himself as a stay-at-home dad; he reminds us constantly of how hard he works at it, while still not shirking a bit in his professional work. His daughter is perfect in every way, except when she’s imperfect in an adorable way, and maybe you like that stuff, but me? Honestly? I would rather read Erma Bombeck.

Anyway, what made me think of this was a spell with my favorite writer of small things, Jon Carroll. He’s on another one of his month-long vacations, and the paper is running his greatest hits. I thought I’d read every one in the catalog, but today’s was a surprise to me, and I couldn’t help but contrast it with Lileks, who would take the same subject — how much he loves his wife — and turn it into something dipped in treacle, albeit with many clever phrases.

Here’s the Carroll column. Maybe I’m being unfair. But you tell me.

I’ve been a fan of Dan Savage’s for some time now — he writes the only sex column worth reading, because he makes it dirty and fun, not earnest and sincere — but even if I wasn’t, the things he says about newspapers would make me one. In this Mediabistro Q-and-A, he discusses all things Savage, including his belief that “family newspaper” is an “albatross” that publishers have hung around their own necks.

I heartily agree, and not because I’m dying to get the f-word into the newspaper, either. As someone who had another f-word — “funk” — stricken from a fashion story back when I was a rookie (the editor thought it sounded too much like you-know-what), I’ve never understood the impulse to never offend, for any reason.

It can get utterly baroque at times. My former editor in Fort Wayne once took a call from a querulous old lady fretting over the phrase “and that’s the straight poop,” which had appeared in his column the week before. He was so impressed by her sensitivity he waved his royal scepter and instituted the infamous hell/damn rule, which led to those PG no-no words being represented by h— and d—, and any stronger than that having to be approved on a case-by-case basis. You can guess the fearless leadership that exists at the middle management level, and so our paper sometimes read like something out of the 1950s, only less interesting. The day an editor questioned the word “snot” in a column of mine (the dictionary notes it as “vulgar”), I knew it was time to get out. (I’m glad he didn’t dash it out, for obvious reasons.)

And he was really, really proud of that rule. He thought it was a victory for readers. For some, it was. I have no problem with the argument that not every word belongs in every publication, and the one that lands on your doorstep every day should be closer to a G rating than an R. I just think dashing the words out is stupid; does anyone look at h— and not think “hell”? Is any child over the age of 5 fooled by this? Take it all the way out, if you must, but dashes are like putting tape over the nipples of a stripper. Please.

I’d much rather work for someone with the common sense of Savage, who observed:

What did you think about the Doonesbury masturbation blowup? Where’d you stand on that? I assume something similar has happened to you.

Daily newspapers wonder why adults don’t read them. The “family newspaper” albatross that daily newspapers have hung around their necks is going to kill them. The newspaper is for adults, and any 11-year-old who’s reading Doonesbury is mature enough to see the word masturbation in that context and then not masturbate on a bus in front of a nun. And daily newspapers just can’t let that go. And that there are 90-year-old readers who are going to cancel their subscriptions is good. They dropped that Doonesbury in Seattle. They didn’t run that comment, about masturbation and prostate cancer. It wasn’t appropriate, they said; it’s in a comics page that a lot of people read with their children. Well, you know, maybe they should skip Doonesbury that week.

He touches on another theme — the 90-year-old reader. It’s true that newspaper readers, as a group, are aging rapidly. It’s also true that 90-year-olds are frequently more sensitive to words like “masturbation” than someone half that age. But the day you start editing for the most easily offended in your audience is the day your publication starts to die. Plus, guess what? Ninety-year-old readers are not the ones you build your future plans on.

P.S. There are exceptions. Carolyn, in Palm Beach, once told me her paper edits for the easily offended, too, a function of their elderly readership. All sexual activity, from a hand on a bottom to forcible rape, is “sex,” which makes it difficult to parse President Clinton’s thoughts on adultery with total candor. However, in Palm Beach, the unvarnished source material of daily life — presidential election recounts, Rush Limbaugh’s pill problems, bishops with an eye for the altar boys — makes their paper a must-read, I’m sure.

These are the stories that, during my long depression and sentence to night-side editing earlier this year, used to make me want to weep and smash my head against the desk: Thirty-eight years ago, a baby boy was born. His mother cradled him lovingly, gazing into his tiny face and wondering what life would hold for him — a college degree? Fame? Power? Happiness?

One thing is true: No mother ever imagines her baby will die by drowning in a steaming river of shit, does she?

“Kundun” is on the True Stories network now, a movie I avoided when it was in theaters and only saw years later, at which point I fell in love with it. Never mind the portrait of the Dalai Lama it paints — Roger Ebert makes all the obvious, good points — it’s just a great example of how a masterful director can make even dry subject matter compelling. It moves, it’s gorgeous to look at, and the Phillip Glass soundtrack is mesmerizing.

A New Yorker writer pointed out some time ago that the genius of Martin Scorsese is in the breadth of his work; he’s undertaken everything from musicals to novel adaptations to comedy. (I always thought it was in how he could extract masterful performances from so-so actors like Sharon Stone and Ray Liotta.) Hard to believe this is the same guy who did “GoodFellas.”

I was having such a swell old time in Russian class today. The instructor opened with a short clip from a film, the title of which translates to “The Irony of Fate.” The clip featured a character singing a song about things you have and don’t have, and since we’re studying the genitive case, which governs possessives, it seemed to fit.

The song was fascinating. So…Russian. The lyrics went something like…”If you don’t have a house, it can never burn down. If you don’t have a dog, no one can feed it poison. If you don’t have friends, you won’t ever fight with them.” I suggested this was just the Russian version of “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” a reference that sailed 25 light years over the heads of the 19-year-olds in the class.

This is the part of the class I really like, where you see how language and culture are intertwined. Then he passed out a worksheet we did in class, covering material we did weeks ago — irregular plurals, etc. I thought maybe something was up, and when he passed the tests back, I saw why. I think a lot of people bombed it. I got a C, a grade I always considered a personal failure. Now I’m wondering if I want to do 102 next term, if I should just bag it, or if I should accept the task at hand. As one of my fellow Fellows says, “There’s just nothing easy about learning a foreign language. It’s a grind, and that’s all there is to it.”

In other words: Nose, meet grindstone.