Some voice mail just begs to be returned. "This is Robin Yocum," the message said. "Call me. I’m writing a book, and you’re quoted in it, and I want to run the quotes by you."

OK, I’m calling you back.

Rob’s a voice from my past; he and I toiled together back at the Dispatch many years ago, when I wore Candie’s and he wore a silver disco belt. The book’s a memoir about his time as a police reporter, and evidently I’m a minor supporting character who contributes wry observations on two occasions. Actually, after hearing the quotes, I don’t know if "wry" is quite the word, but it’s clearly what I was reaching for at the time, all of 24 years old. The working title is "Cop Shop Confidential," and he even has a publisher. I’m impressed, but then, Robin’s already been published; he and his reporting partner wrote a true-crime book about the Just Sweats insurance-fraud case, which you probably don’t remember, but it was bizarre enough to warrant a longish piece in Vanity Fair once upon a time.

I wondered what the hell I’d said 20 years ago that had prompted Rob to make a note of it. It comes in a section about Ned Stout, who was an assistant city editor, now deceased, one of those great newspaper characters that have been pretty much rubbed entirely out of the business. Ned had this resonant, Shakespearean voice and a vocabulary to match, and loved to harangue young reporters with both. Unfortunately, he was also a gone-around-the-bend alcoholic, and while this added to his persona, it certainly played a part in killing him before his time.

Ned always worked Saturday night, the most hated shift of the week (except for Sunday); the paper’s done and there’s nothing to do but wait for a cop-shop apocalypse, which rarely happened before 10 p.m. anyway. He took his dinner break at the bar across the street, where he’d drink four "ice waters" and come back with a gleam in his eye. His favorite thing was to send you out on wild goose chases off the police scanner, except when he kept you in the office to torture you. He once made my friend Ted call a couple at the scene of a domestic-dispute call; he jotted down the address, criss-crossed it and found the phone number, then ordered Ted to find out what they were fighting about.

The thing was, the call came before the cops arrived. "Imagine you’re one of the parties in this thing, and the phone rings in the middle of your argument," Ted said later. "You pick up the phone and hear someone say, ‘This is the Dispatch. Why are you fighting?’" When I worked with him, he’d drum the desk and chant, "Come on, grass fire!" Once he went to the bathroom and I heard a report of shots fired at a wedding reception on the redneck south side of town. I looked at the clock, and it was 15 minutes to quitting time. I weighed the chance of a pretty good story with tremendous photo possibilities — I could just see the bride in her white dress, tattoos peeking out of her neckline, sobbing while the ambulance lights raked across the chaos of her special day, perhaps a white crepe-paper bell swaying sadly in counterpoint to the fluttering of the yellow police tape — with the certain knowledge that if I said a single word about it to Ned, he’d send me down there in a heartbeat and I wouldn’t get home until after midnight.

I decided to hold my tongue, but stayed a little longer to listen to the radio traffic and make sure no one was going to the ER in a tuxedo. All was calm. False alarm.

I asked Robin what I said. It was something like, "One of these days he’s going to die, and they’re going to have to say he died of Ned. They’ll open him up at the autopsy and it’s just going to look like a jar of pickled eggs in there."

Which is probably pretty much what happened.

Ned was famous for many other incidents — and please, Dispatchers, send them along — but one I remember was the note he posted on the bulletin board, announcing the birth of the court reporter’s baby. The last line was, "Temporary cloud cover obscured the Star." I stole the line in a similar note I posted on the board in Fort Wayne, and somebody scratched it out — it was deemed offensive to Christians. The end of an era. Somewhere, Ned Stout spun in his grave.

Speaking of the end of an era, Rob isn’t a reporter anymore. He runs his own media-relations firm. Explain the justice in that.

Easter’s late this year, but it still sort of snuck up on me. I made a run to Meijer to stock up on provisions — jelly beans, asparagus, a turkey breast. Yes, a freakin’ turkey breast. My in-laws believe that a special occasion calls for turkey, and after a few years of Honeybaked Ham I’m just throwing in the damn towel and we’ll have turkey in damn April. But I’m making it on the grill, and they’re going to like it. What goes with hickory-smoked turkey on the grill? Hell if I know, but I think I’m doing asparagus, carrot salad some sort of potatoes and maybe a spinach souffle, just to be perverse.

We’re making a bunny cake for dessert, Kate and I. I love bunny cake.

Michael in Cali wrote with a funny story about thievin’ dogs:

Thirty years ago. Living and working in Berkeley. I had an old ’61 Falcon wagon I’d paid $40 for. I’d just gone to the supermarket and to the butcher and now stopped in front of the laundry to pick up my stuff there. I had rolled down the window in the tail gate of the old Falcon and just set my groceries inside with the butcher’s packages on top. One package had a half dozen sausages in it. I came out of the laundry just in time to see a dog coming from the back of my car. He had my sausages! I threw my laundry into the back of the car and took off after the dog who was running down the street with a string of sausages hanging out of his mouth. Many bad words and a block or so later I conceded defeat. I had to laugh. The dog looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. A goofy spotted white thing. I think he was laughing too.

You know that story is true because of the roll-down tailgate window; only someone who’d actually owned a Falcon of that vintage would remember that. Detail makes the story. That and the string of sausages. It had to be a string.

So, see you anon, then.

Despite the global reach of NN.C — yes, that first W stands for worldwide web — it should come as no surprise to anyone who stops here that I’m a nobody. No one really does sustained high-profile journalism from Fort Wayne, which is known as a place people leave and then remember fondly in interviews and acceptance speeches, while returning as little as possible. But never mind that.

Anyway, I was surprised today to get a call from a radio talk-show producer at WLIE on Long Island, asking if I’d like to appear on the Mike Siegel show to discuss my Monday column, which was about the Tim Robbins/Baseball Hall of Fame flap. OK, I said, even though I thought the column was a C- effort at best, but what the hell. "Why me?" I asked. "Mike read your column online," he said. And Tim Robbins, regrettably, wasn’t doing interviews below the Katie Couric/major-NYC-metro station level.

So I did the show. It went OK, 30 minutes of forgettable radio that nevertheless reminded me why I don’t listen to talk radio — too much talking, not enough thinking. That’s to take nothing away from the host, who was very cordial, or the callers, who were cordial too (so much for that famous New York attitude), but rather, that the very act of discussing things in yak-and-take-calls format serves to make everything sound pretty simplistic. Every comment is just another shovelful of coal to keep the furnace running.

But it was funny, hearing myself introduced after the breaks, and thinking, could this person (me) sound any more small-time? I doubt it. I think the host knew it, too, because he made a big deal out of how Tim Robbins wouldn’t appear on his show, just like Bill O’Reilly does. "Maybe he’s working," I suggested. That’s the wrong thing to say.

Mike Siegel, for you talk-radio fans, briefly replaced Art Bell on "Coast-to-Coast." How did you happen to stumble across my column? I asked, figuring he’d been trolling for Tim Robbins boosters, but I’m certainly not the only one to chime in on this subject. "Someone I know who works for the EPA sent it to me," he said. The amazing internet.

I have to be very careful how I word this, because I’m not for a minute making fun of the subject matter, but give me some allowance here: Of course I read my own paper at work, usually when it comes out in late morning. I open the one that comes to my house only to check to see if the home edition is substantially different from the early one, and most days it isn’t. But today the court reporter was talking about a pretty good story, and when I opened the paper this afternoon and saw the headline, I thought: Headlines don’t get much better than this.

Easter bunny helper is accused molester.

Not exactly Headless body in topless bar, but you can’t not read that story. Sorry, no link; it’ll probably be uploaded with tomorrow’s early edition, and truth to tell, the story’s not a huge barn-burner, except in the sense that any time a guy facing a charge of fondling a 3-year-old in a daycare center goes out and gets a job as cashier for the Easter Bunny at a local mall, well, that’s news. That story’s what you call a "talker." Talkers keep people reading newspapers. "People don’t cancel their paper because they’re upset by what’s in it," someone said at the writing conference I attended last December. "They cancel because they’re bored." And that’s the truth.

This was yesterday’s talker, and you folks who think I’m jiving you about the Amish are encouraged to follow that link and read its account of a middle-of-the-night buggy drag race between two Amish men that ended in tragedy when one crashed head-on into another buggy. The driver of the third — not a participant in the race, recall — was arrested on a drunken driving charge. What "Witness" never told you about the Plain people, and it happened in the next county!

Here’s another one, out of Michigan City: Woman struck by remote-controlled car is hospitalized. Old lady goes to check her mailbox and is run down by a miniature Indy car.

And here’s yet another one, from the Charleston Post & Courier, covering demonstrations at the Masters last weekend. If you wade through the whole thing, the story has a crunchy nougat center in this paragraph:

Throughout the morning, law enforcement officers stood on the perimeter of the five-acre field. At no point did the protest turn violent, though officers escorted Heywood Jablome away after he held up a sign directly in front of Burk that read "Make me dinner" before shouting "Oprah rules."

Heywood Jablome, yes. Where have all the dirty-minded copy editors gone?

(There are days when it’s pretty fun to work in a newspaper office. It being April 15, I was reminded me of what Mindy wrote last week: Your tale of the Mensans calculating the length of a roll of newsprint reminded me of a similar experience I once suffered. I was working a temp job in an accounting office on April 15 when a gaggle of accuntants gathered in a nearby hallway. All of them had their income taxes ready to mail and refused to do so before midnight. They compared the thickness of each envelope and guesstimated the weight of each one while exploring why this once could be thinner and weight less than that one since its owner had fewer deductions, etc. Gadfry, an accounting office full of accountants on April 15. Thought I’d died and went to hell.)

I didn’t sleep much last night, so I didn’t get up until 5:45 for the dawn-patrol bike ride. After four days of 80-minute rides, I cut myself a break today and did but 50. Went up to the end of the path and back, watching out for Canada geese along the way; one came after me yesterday and startled me enough that I nearly wiped out. Man, those birds are big, and when they’re protecting their nests, they are some mean mofos. I was distracted by the fresh droppings all over the path, and trying to weave among the poop, I didn’t see the gander coming after me with his wings spread and neck extended. He came thisclose to either biting my leg or sticking his head into my spokes, which would have been fitting, wiping out that way. Maybe I’d be severely injured. Cyclist hospitalized following goose attack.

I’d be a talker!

See you tomorrow.

Note: For those who came looking for the Colts cheerleader item: It’s here; voting’s here. Vote for Leah!

I’ve gone on at tiresome length here in the past about how much I love watching domestic animals do the work they were bred to do, and I won’t bore you with it again, but I will say this: The only time I’ve ever wanted to own a Labrador or golden retriever was when I’ve seen one putting on a show. There’s a guy at the lake who has a Lab, and he takes it down to the dock and plays fetch with it for an hour — throws the stick way out in the water, the dog runs and makes a flying leap into the water, swims for the stick, brings it back, repeat.

Show-off.

People are so impressed by this. It’s the flying leap that does it, that big splash. My own dear little terrier tries to keep up, but he’s not much of a swimmer, and after the first splash he settles for onshore supervision, running as far as the takeoff into the water, then waiting for the big dog to bring it back, at which point he accompanies him back to the thrower for praise and another mission. A born lawyer, this dog.

To see a terrier doing what he was bred to do is a little different, since basically they were bred to be pushy and tough, and that’s not always an endearing package. Play tug-of-war with my dog, though, and you feel those genetic booster rockets kick in; you’d swear that was Vin Diesel on the other end, not an 18-pound Jack Russell. He lowers his head and really gets his back into it. You can see how this breed could pull a fox out of its den or die trying.

The Sprigman has been living with us since he was 11 weeks old, though, and his skills were never really fully developed. I’ve walked miles with him along river banks, and we’ve investigated animal holes, but an instinct is only that, and I lack the skills to train him to be a real go-to-ground terrier. Fortunately, he has a sweet personality and that’s good enough for patrolling the house and being our pet.

But every so often you see the flash of brilliance. Last night Alan was eating a fudge bar, and Spriggy was doing what he always does when we eat delicious food in his presence; sitting close by, praying for a miracle. I know God loves my dog, because his prayers are often answered in the affirmative. He was there the time the ice cream scoop, making slow progress through a brick-hard chunk of Breyer’s strawberry, suddenly slipped and launched a big chunk out into space. It landed right next to him. He was there the single time in my life I’ve failed to properly secure the top on the popcorn popper, and it came off during cooking, sending popcorn flying all over the kitchen. It must have looked like manna coming down from heaven. And last night, when Alan was looking at him, eating the fudge bar, what divine force suddenly knocked it from his grasp, so that it landed on the carpet? I don’t know, but even though Alan lunged for it, the dog was faster, and it was beautiful to see, that low, darting snap! followed by the getaway into the living room, snarfing the treat as he ran, Alan running after him, yelling goddamnit! Give me that fucking fudge bar!

I was howling, until I heard the stick crunching and knew we’d best get it from him soon. But by then the fudge bar was mostly consumed, and he allowed himself to be caught and the stick pried from his jaws. He was very self-possessed after that. Victory, his attitude said. As usual.

Last Friday there was a very small sub-discussion on Romenesko‘s site, sparked by a columnist who wrote a column saying, basically, I’m giving up being a columnist because I don’t like it anymore. OK, fine, I thought; if there’s anything the world can easily lose, it’s a columnist who isn’t enjoying it anymore, but then the letters started. And the analogies started.

From Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, ex-NYT: The best comment on the inexorability of the work came (I think) from Scotty Reston, who once said that writing a column was like standing under a windmill. You get hit in the head and think, "thank god that’s over," only to look up and see another blade on its way down.

From Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun: Do not forget the words of the fine columnist Jesse Todd, of the Newport News Daily Press. "Like being married to a nymphomaniac," was how he once described his duties.

I thought, how could the world have so long remembered these, but forgotten those of Mike Harden, not well-known outside of Columbus, Ohio, but — to my mind, at least — author of the best single description of column-writing:

Writing a column five days a week is like making love in a burning building. You get the idea it would have been so much more memorable if only there’d been more time and fewer firemen at the window.

A late shift at work, today. I glommed my full share of outdoor activity on this fine, sunny morning, but paid for it tonight, by missing a F.W. Jewish Federation’s People of the Book lecture, with Bruce Feiler. (Those of you who live around here should keep an eye out for these semi-regular author visits; they almost always get interesting people.) I heard Feiler interviewed recently about his new book, Abraham, and wanted to see him, but alas — tons of copy. If I’d skipped my blood donation appointment today I’d have made it, which raises a moral dilemma about good works, if you ask me. Anyway, the story of Abraham and Isaac is one of my favorite Bible stories — the inscrutable Old Testament God at his best — and I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say about it. Next time, maybe.

Speaking of the mysteries of the universe, and the hard lessons God teaches, the Dispatch had a real heart-breaker today — a quintuple-fatal fire near the OSU campus, possibly arson following yet another of those famous drunken college parties. Someone’s 21st birthday party, a confrontation at 4 a.m., a fire perhaps intentionally set, and five people dead, including the birthday boy. The rest were asleep, most likely passed out after a party like this. Shudder. We drank like this in college, but it’s hard to see the fun when it ends like this.

OK, then. It’s late and it’s time to upload what I have and hope for something better tomorrow. Hope to see you then.

And what’s the use of having a personal website at all if you can’t throw its awesome power around to benefit your friends? Mark the Shark called Saturday; his daughter, Leah, said she’s thinking of taking a second job.

"I figured she’d be working at Wal-Mart," he said. No, she told him, something else.

She’s trying out to be an Indianapolis Colts cheerleader.

What’s more, she made the semi-final cut.

This doesn’t surprise me, as Leah is a lovely young woman who would seem to be exactly what the Colts would be looking for, with solid cheerleading experience (South Side High School) to boot. She’s a physical therapist — wasn’t that what Trista the Bachelorette, the former Miami Heat cheerleader was? — and she needs both the money and the Gold’s Gym membership that’s part of the compensation package. What did surprise me are some of the details from the interview process, including the baffling question, "Would you be willing to change your appearance if you got this job?" Leah said, it depends.

You’re thinking…breast implants? A nose job? Mandatory tanning? No. Turns out they may want her to become a brunette. Their market research shows brunettes are an unexploited resource in NFL cheerleading, or something like that.

This was really funny, because Leah’s a great, natural blonde, and usually it goes the other way, doesn’t it? "In all my life I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brunette with blonde roots," I told Mark. "But I’ll look forward to seeing my first."

But first Leah has to get the job, and that’s where you guys come in. Go to the Colts website and vote for her — you’ll have to scroll down a bit; they’re in alphabetical order. I don’t think that’s the greatest picture of her, but trust me, she’s certainly qualified, looks-wise, even if she becomes a brunette. Y’all can pick your own second and third choices.

This is probably only interesting to web-heads, journalists and those interested in the intersection of the two, but maybe not. The Columbus Dispatch, my alma mater, is experimenting with something sort of cool, an electronic edition that displays the paper to you exactly the way it would look if you were reading it in dead-tree form. You move forward and backward page by page, or click on section front pages in a left-hand rail. Clicking on a story opens it in a separate window, so you can read it easily. And it’s all searchable, ads included. Very cool.

I hope that link takes you there, because another thing the Dispatch is experimenting with is charging for content. As far as I know, it’s one of only a bare handful of metro dailies doing so; it costs around $5 a month. They have a system where paid subscribers can get up to three online accounts — for kids away at college, for instance — and I get mine through my sister’s subscription. If they don’t have an extended free trial for this, they should, because this could turn out to be fairly revolutionary. With my four-year-old Mac and broadband connection, it all loaded quickly and easily, and solves the ad problem. As many people read newspapers for the ads as the news content, especially on Sundays, and this makes it really easy to see them. Local advertising is less important to out-of-towners, but as someone who travels there frequently, I for one will use this feature, to find out when the stores I like are having clearance sales, and what-have-you.

The Big D can be a maddening paper, both to work for and to read, but I will give it this: They’ve never stinted on technology, and they’ve always been willing to experiment with it. They were one of the first papers available online — back in the days of Compuserve and 1200-baud modems — and I don’t think they’ve ever been given much credit for being forward-thinking in this area, despite outpacing many other papers that breast-beat endlessly on the subject (and shall remain nameless). So I’ll give it to them now.

We had a beautiful weekend, but I’m not going to express any gratitude for it, because by this time of year it’s our due, goddammit, and it wasn’t even all that warm. Nevertheless, I took extra-long bike rides both days, enough to exhaust me so that when I came home and contemplated how filthy our windows are, I didn’t have enough energy to do anything about them. (That’s the purpose of exercise, if you ask me.) Today, I circumnavigated poor, dead Southtown Mall, and discovered it’s still good for something — a single gentleman was having a riot of a time running a remote-controlled car all over the place without fear of running into anything other than an early-growing weed.

I’ve stopped watching the war on TV. The looting of museums sickens me, and as for the rest of it, well, print’s doing a better job. In that linked story, American soldiers make fun of Saddam’s interior decorating, which apparently is right out of the ’70s fly-dude love shack school:

One of the airbrushed paintings depicted a topless blonde woman, with a green demon behind her, pointing a finger at a mythic hero. From the tip of her finger came a giant serpent, which had wrapped itself around the warrior.

"Shagadelic," another soldier shouted.

Don’t they know class warfare — and, presumably, ridicule — is wrong and un-American?

Finally, Alex writes with one of those Ah-Modern-Life situations that we all have to cope with now and again. Evidently an older female friend of his told him, in a drunken fit of confession, that she always wanted a vibrator. With her birthday coming up, Alex made a note and then made the purchase. She lives in Florida, so FedEx was involved. And guess what?

The thing went off inside the box while I was at the Fed Ex place. Thank God this was in Boys Town (Alex’s gay neighborhood in Chicago). I can’t imagine the embarrassment of having to rewrap the thing in front of the customers and Fed Ex employees in a place like Fort Wayne. Everyone here was having a delightful time with it and they made sure I taped down the on/off switch lest the thing end up closing down an airport somewhere.

Make the note: Tape down the on/off switch. (Or send batteries separately.) See you tomorrow.

The day’s treasure comes from the San Jose Mercury News, which ran this story a couple days ago, but I only saw it on the wire today, so forgive: Many citizens believe Saddam has mystical powers. An excerpt:

UMM QASR, Iraq – Ahmed Ali believes Saddam Hussein can never die. All his life, the 23-year-old laborer has heard about the dictator’s powerful stone.

“The stone makes him bulletproof,” Ali, a slim man with a Saddam-style mustache, said in a serious voice.

Our business editor, a farm girl, was particularly amused by the detail about the chicken. It’s right out of Looney Toons, isn’t it — the nude chicken, perhaps scorched black by gunpowder, saying, "What the-?!?" before looking right at us and crossing her wings over her crotch. Good thing she had that magic stone inside her!

Of course, then we have to wonder how Saddam got the stone out.

The chicken never wins these things.

I’m beginning to wonder if these folks are ready for democracy. The whole country sounds like south Florida to me.

Week, be over. Just…be…over. Not only did the spring weather renege on us, I had one of those days today. My 11-year-old job-shadowers, Molly and Katie, came today. We had an interview. "Where did you go to college? Why did you choose journalism?" they asked. Beats me. The interview was over in 7 minutes; with 53 to go before their mom showed to pick them up, I took them for a tour. It’s always an interesting litmus test, a building tour. When I did this with the local Mensa chapter, all that interested them was the reel room, where the giant rolls of newsprint are stored. "How long would one of these rolls be if you unrolled it?" someone asked. "Six miles," I replied instantly, a total fabrication; I mean, if she expects me to know this, I’m going to have some fun with her. One guy actually pulled out a tape measure and took dimensions, then started doing the calculations out loud, and they all joined in.

I seem to recall six miles was fairly close.

Typical Mensans. The library — to me, the true treasure trove of any publication — interested them not at all. But calculating the length of a roll of newsprint, well, that’s entertainment.

The 11-year-olds liked the photo department and the designers’ area best, which figures, I guess. Computers they understand. At one point I apologized that the newsroom wasn’t more interesting. "One girl in our class got to watch them operate on a cat at the vet hospital," Katie said, a little sadly. They’re coming back next week; I’ll try to arrange a nice multiple homicide for them. To really top off the fun, I took them to the morning news meeting, which always disappoints; it’s nothing like the ones on "Lou Grant." I always hope for some real bickering, but these days, the best you can hope for is some strained tension, which I tried to explain, good Kremlinologist that I am.

After that things eased up a bit, but it’s still only Thursday.

Some interesting mail this week, on, of all things, Leni Riefenstahl. Here’s Alex:

I remember when the Leni Riefenstahl documentary first hit the theaters. I took a lot of heat from some of my holier-than-thou politically correct friends for even patronizing it, let alone the conclusions I shared afterward.

When she says she was doing what she loved in the service of something she didn’t care for or know much about, she’s really not much different than me or a lot of people I know. At the risk of being politically incorrect, what I see in Leni Riefenstahl is a person who has what it takes to be more alive at 100 than most people are at 40. If this is what comes of a life unburdened by conscience, where can I shed mine?

It’s hard to judge what any period in history was like, even if you lived through it. We’re all the blind men describing the elephant, and while it seems obvious, now, that anyone that close to Hitler would have to know what was going on, more than one authority has given her a pass on it. I’ll happily give her credit for her genius as a filmmaker and photographer and call the books as balanced as they’ll be in this life.

Let the weekend begin. See you back here in 48 hours.

Some Iraqi immigrants — eight or nine of them, I’d estimate — came out to dance in front of the courthouse here in the Fort today and wave American flags. I noticed Raad, the guy I wrote about a couple weeks ago, wasn’t among them, at least not from the pictures I saw. Raad — when I talked to him, anyway — was one of those cynical Iraqi immigrants who thinks the war’s all about oil and American business interests. He participated in the Shia uprising in ’91, got his ass kicked and doesn’t trust President Boosh. I need to give Raad a call, find out what he thinks now. News moves so fast now; he’s so March 30.

I’ll not be one of those anti-war people getting all mopey over the fall of Baghdad. This is good news. Great news. But I’ve said it’s what comes after that concerns me, and we’ll see what comes after. The road to Damascus? Another inscrutable terrorist organization to worry about in 15 years? We’ll see. For now, we’ll celebrate. I wish I had a ministry to loot! A statue to topple and then beat with my shoes! Around here, the only opportunity we have for such antics is when Ohio State beats Michigan. Or doesn’t beat Michigan.

That’s a good thing, I know. When I was hosting talk radio, I took a call from a guy who said, quite seriously, that he wanted to live in the 19th century, but probably more like the 18th, "because the government wasn’t always butting into your life and stuff back then." I said, yeah, but you’d also have to cut wood and chop ice and make hay and nurse your livestock and have nine children and watch seven of them die before their second birthday, and there’d be no Miles Davis CDs or interstate freeways or Budweiser or Tampax or Tylenol or even many books, and you’d get pox and tuberculosis and measles and typhus and whatEVER, and yeah, you wouldn’t pay federal income taxes, but would it be worth it? Isn’t modern life in the U.S. of A. just the coolest? Isn’t it a great time to be alive?

No, he said.

I really hated that show. It wasn’t until I got a co-host that I started enjoying talk radio. I needed someone there in the studio to remind me that the whole world isn’t lonely and crazy, which is a real easy conclusion to come to when you’re doing it all by yourself. Although it wasn’t a wasted experience; I’d never even known about these crazy anti-government people until they started calling me and yammering on about Ezra Pound and the Federal Reserve and the Jewish banking conspiracy. When the Murrah building blew up in Oklahoma City, I called Mark the Shark, my co-host, and said, "Which one of these crazy-ass white boys did this?" and he thought it might be a follower of one of the shows that aired only on shortwave, but we both agreed the swarthy Middle Easterner profile was wrong, wrong, wrong. And we were right.

You know what’s scary? Only one FBI agent felt the same way.

</tangent>

I have little bloggage today. OK, no bloggage. Long, busy day — carpool, groceries, dog walk, lunch with job candidate, seven hours on the desk, and a column somewhere in there, too. I feel bad for job candidates at these meal/interviews; how can one enjoy food at such a time? We might as well put a bowl of Purina in front of them and say bon appetit. I had the steak and mushroom salad at Paula’s, and I’m here to tell you, that’s a salad. Virtue and decadence all on one plate.

Here’s something: As you know, we in Indiana do not observe Daylight Saving Time. The arguments for and against are so tiresome you want to smash your head against a cinderblock wall, but I ran across the Poor Man explaining a long absence on his blog, and I decided if only the anti-DST forces would put their argument this way, they might get a wider constituency than the cranky farmers and old people who suppor them now:

I‘m not dead or anything. I had a little cold for a while, and so I was out of it, and then daylight savings time came along, and it totally fucked me up. Daylight savings time is such fucking bullshit. It’s all like "hey, here’s a free hour of sleep in the autumn. You get to sleep, while at the same time preserving endangered daylight." And then you have a lovely late morning, and then life goes on through the winter to the spring, and all of a sudden the DST shows up again and is all like "BAM! Now it’s time to pay the motherfucking piper, motherfucker!" and kicks you out of bed at some unholy hour of the night masquerading as 7AM, and sends you off to work or school or the methadone clinic or wherever like a fucking zombie with the I Got Up Way Too Fucking Early thousand yard stare. I’ve got a delicate constitution anyway, being kind of a Percy Bysshe figure, typing away here in my laudenum swoon, and I think this daylight savings bullshit has permanently fucked me. I’m such a fucking zombie, I’m like five minutes away from just taking a bite out of someone’s arm and there’s no way to stop me unless you put a crowbar through my brain! Fuck fucking daylight savings time.

Also, thanks to John my web host for resetting the counter, but you gave me 60,000 undeserved hits. For purposes of accurate record-keeping, I’d like to return them.

See you tomorrow, at the regular time. I think.

When a day begins with a tantrum, it’s never a good sign. "I’M NOT SICK!" my loving daughter shrieked at me this morning. "I’M GOING TO SCHOOL! I DON’T WANT TO STAY HOME!" Repeat for 10 minutes, punctuate with slamming doors. I have no reference point for this; I always enjoyed staying home from school. I enjoyed watching game shows on TV, and holding an open jar of Vicks’ Vap-o-Rub under gnats and other random insects until they passed out and fell into the jar. Ghoulish fun.

The storm passed and she slumped in front of the TV for another morning, all the proof I needed that this mystery ailment isn’t done with her, even after a 13-hour sleep. She stayed pissed, though — the price of parenthood. Just once, I want a Cosby Moment from this kid, something other than "You’re not a bad mom. You don’t yell that much." Gee, thanks.

I had no idea what to do to make her feel better, so I changed her sheets. I always liked it when my mom changed my sheets when I was sick. I don’t care what’s ailing you, clean sheets and clean pajamas always help. I should have been a nurse.

Fortunately, the stars were in alignment for me to get a bit of work done myself, so it wasn’t a wasted day, just a gray, cold, depressing one, where your outsides match your insides. The forsythia is blooming, but looks like someone caught on the front porch in their underwear, and the door’s just blown shut. We’re all sick sick sick of being indoors.

Enough of my existential pain. "At least you have a job," said Alex last night. (He doesn’t.) I cried because I met a man who had no shoes, and then for want of a nail the battle was lost, or something like that.

I also have digital cable, and stayed up last night to watch "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl," which was as good the second time around as it was when I saw it a few years ago. Hitler’s propaganda artist is a type of woman I’ve always called a cat, because no matter where you drop them, they always land on their feet. "Who orchestrated the party conferences?" she’s asked. "Hitler and Speer," she replies. She certainly had nothing to do with it. She was off in the corner licking her paws.

Here’s a nugget from a bio page: On February 29, 2000 the active 97-year-old Leni Riefenstahl was injured in a helicopter crash in the Sudan while filming her life story there. Riefenstahl came away from the mishap with several broken ribs, while her cameraman was more seriously injured. She was later transfered by air to a Munich hospital and has since recovered.

See what I mean? A cat. Now 100 years old.

You’ll notice the nightstand has also been updated. I finally finished "Gilligan’s Wake" after a mere five weeks of falling asleep over it, which is not to say the book’s boring, only that I’m a poor reader, of late. So I’m shifting gears with a little light mystery. I’m liking these Laura Lippman novels. Girl’s got issues with the newspaper business. I’m recommending them to anyone who ever worked in a newsroom.

Here’s the day’s other treasure, with a warning: If you don’t have a broadband connection, don’t bother — this one takes a while to get into the room. But it’s worth it, a Fun With Photoshop contest on how Fox News might have covered other events in history. From the good folks at Fark. Enjoy.

As for me, I’m off to plumb new depths in dull living. Let’s hope for something better tomorrow.

Yes, we had some serious server hosage yesterday. The Two Guys in the Living Room Web Hosts decided to upgrade the servers to OSX, and I got caught in the crossfire, but ah well. As always, I’m grateful for the excellent service they provide, occasional daylong outages and all. As far as I know, they’re the only web hosts I know where the tech support line rings into the actual Two Guys’ living room(s), and what’s not to like about that?

Nevertheless, if you sent me mail yesterday, thanks. I’m trying to reply, but I can’t send mail from the NN.C account yet. If you received a note from a stranger named Alan, that was me. Always have two e-mail accounts; you never know when you’ll need a spare.

It was probably right that the week started out kind of jangly, schedule- and service-wise. The time change threw off my Sunday-night routine — gotta watch "Six Feet Under" and "The Wire" before I do anything, and it all starts an hour earlier here in the land of eternal Standard Time. Then Kate got sick — fever, listlessness. Then I got to work for my Monday-night shift and discovered I’m pulling two more late ones this week, on Wednesday and Friday. Yes, I work nights M, W, F, and days T and Th. The KGB used to punish political prisoners like this, I hear. On Thursday, I’m supposed to host two or three grade-school job-shadowers. I don’t know why teachers advocate this; is there any job less exciting to watch than that of a writer, especially a sleep-deprived one with a sick kid? Watch me stare vacantly at the computer screen for three hours, kids! Job-shadowing for elementary-school children is a waste of time, anyway. They should be playing kickball and learning where Estonia is, not doing early career assessments.

Nevertheless, they asked for me. I will be their Virgil. Kids, think seriously about dentistry.

I won’t be writing much tonight. You can see yesterday’s entry, if you’re so inclined. But I was pleased to pick up on a few things on the web today. Julia Keller, my old buddy in Chicago with the enviable title of Tribune Cultural Critic, e-mailed last week and mentioned in passing that she was working on a column about sandstorms vis-a-vis the Iraqi invasion (working title: "When metaphors attack!"). I mentioned I had a blogger neighbor who’d mentioned that very topic on his web page, and the next thing I know it’s today, and look what’s in the Trib:

No matter what one’s political or religious perspective, however, a sandstorm must evoke awe at the wind’s magnificent sculpting power, its relentless sweep and scoop and spin and push, turning day into night and night into chaos.

"It obliterates everything, creating darkness," says Michael Dubruiel, a Christian writer based in Ft. Wayne, Ind. "Sandstorms certainly make one think of a simpler faith where nothing happens without God willing it or allowing it. The `whirlwind’ idea is standard not only in the Islamic faith, but in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well."

One of the most tiresome and easily corrected problems of institutional journalism is its reliance on usual-suspects sources. Always glad to hook people up with some different sorts of folks willing to be quoted. I just noticed how Michael’s latest book, "The How-To Book of the Mass," has a cover that suggests one of those Dummies books. Michael, Amy, an idea: "Praying for Catholic Dummies."

You’re welcome.

Also, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. Another friend, David Heath, was a part of projects that were finalists in two categories, but didn’t win, the second year in a row he was a bridesmaid (last year he got screwed, plain and simple). I don’t think this exactly qualifies him as the Susan Lucci of the Pulitzer Prizes, because just getting to be a nominated finalist is such a titanic achievement. It’ll happen for him one of these days.

And finally, Adrianne wrote with another one for the Bad Clown file:

Perri David Rlickman, 51, an itinerant street performer who delighted people with his whistling and balloon-making but also drew complaints about some of his other antics, was found dead in his Boston apartment on March 24.

Known as Perri the Clown, he was the talk of Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, during recent summers. At first, he was a big hit in the progressive resort town, especially with children.

In 2001, the town’s police chief tried to revoke Rlickman’s street performer’s license after complaints that he made offensive remarks and was frequently drunk. The American Civil Liberties Union stepped in and negotiated another chance on the grounds that bad taste was no reason to deny him a livelihood.

Boston police said foul play was not suspected in his death.

Rlickman, a native of Bluefield, W.Va., apparently migrated around Massachusetts, Florida and other spots.

Drunken clowns — is there a more tiresomely predicable cliche? I didn’t think so.

See you tomorrow. Whenever.

A series of trucks rumbled up to our house in the last few days, delivering gallons of epoxy and marine-grade plywood. This weekend the boat-building project commenced, which means I won’t see Alan for a few months, but that’s OK, he’ll just be in the garage, building his driftboat.

Sunday he spent much of the day sanding two 8-foot sections of plywood so that they can be glued together to make the bottom of this craft, a process I’m told is called "scarfing." "How’s the scarfing going, hon?" I asked this afternoon when Alan emerged from the garage looking like the abominable sawdust man. Just fine.

While Alan is an excellent, painstaking amateur craftsman, he is fairly slow about it. (Motto: Measure 14 times, reread the plans, cut once.) I wondered what the target date for completion of this puppy is; he said late June, but that was probably optimistic. After years of marriage to a serious fly angler, I recognize late June as the window for the northern-Michigan hex hatch.

All things considered, this is much preferable to a guy who obsesses over college basketball, if you ask me.

It was as good a weekend for boat-building as anything else, as we had another cold snap. The wind has some teeth in it, and if I’m reading the weather map correctly, we’re in for some pink stuff in an hour or two, pink stuff being weather-map code for the meteorological hell known as "wintry mix." Two to four inches of wintry mix, in fact, which irritates me mightily. For more on this, enough to bring a teary mix to the eyes, see the archives.

On second thought, don’t bother.

Bloggage: I know Amy loves her, I know she’s flattered mightily by the attention paid by her, but if you ask me, Peggy Noonan’s a little goofy. To test my theory, ask yourself this question: Is Michael Kelly’s death a) a tragedy for several families and all who loved the man; b) a loss to American journalism; or c) a sin against the order of the world?

If you answered C, welcome to Peggy’s world. "A sin against the order of the world" — I guess you have to be a serious Catholic like Peggy to write stuff like that, because I’m about as Catholic as Billy Crystal these days, and even I was offended by that one. Of course, Peggy has extraordinary access to the Almighty — he’s offered her some incredible scoops lately — so I guess she feels confident making sweeping pronouncements like that.

If Kelly was a tenth as humble as his friends say he was, he must be squirming in the afterlife over Noonan’s overheated tribute, which quoted a friend of Kelly’s who was devastated at his death but didn’t want to be quoted by name saying so, as though mourning a friend is something you don’t want others to pin on you. (Maybe someone will take a memo from him on the subject, like Peggy did with Paul Wellstone.) But she really saves herself for the big finish:

His remains will come home now soon enough, and I hope what comes home is met with an honor guard, for he has earned it, and a flag, for he loved his country, and a snapped salute, for that is one way to show respect. And maybe it would be good if this son of Washington–born there, educated there, drawn to its great industry, politics and the reporting of it–were to find his final rest nearby, among those who fought with distinction for America. Michael Kelly went at great peril to be with U.S. troops, and he fell among US troops, while trying to tell the story of U.S. troops. So perhaps his final rest should be with U.S. troops, in Arlington, where we put so many heroes.

A civilian reporter in Arlington National Cemetery? Maybe he can be laid next to David Bloom. What does Peggy think about that?

For a far less wacky, but no less heartfelt, tribute to Kelly, try Jack Shafer’s, in Slate. Or Maureen Dowd’s (love that detail about the chaise lounge!). Andrew Sullivan offered this: Notice that he noticed things. And wrote about them clearly. His reportorial skill was that simple but that good. Some descriptions still stick in my head; he once called a small spring of water "gin-clear." I never forgot it. (Andrew: Come to my house. Read the stacks of fishing magazines on every toilet tank and beside every chair. Prepare to be disillusioned. Kelly was not the first to use the phrase "gin-clear.")

Deb was inspired by last week’s account of license-branch woolgathering. We’re going to let her go on and on about it, because Deb is a writer who notices detail, too, and that stuff about bologna fresh off the slicer trumps "gin-clear," if you ask me:

here’s a story i’m sure i never told you. i used to work in a license-plate branch in ohio.

cheryl and i worked at a battered wooden old desk, made change from a metal cash box, and plucked the plates from cardboard boxes. framed photos of big jim rhodes (former Ohio governor — ed.) hung behind us, looming as large as elementary schoolroom classroom portraits of george washington.

i loved that job. i got to sit on my butt, chat up my neighbors, feel the summer breeze on my bare legs, smell the field corn from denver hughes’ farm across the road, and perform a public service all at the same time. i have no idea what cheryl’s mother’s cut of this was, nor do i recall what i was paid. it was fun; i probably would’ve done it for free.

As for me, I’ll see you here tomorrow.