Okay, maybe he’s not a “rock star,” but he’s way, way cool in my book.

It never fails to amaze me how that song came out of me. [Ed.: See “Christmas Scrapping,” about, among other things, “Christmas Wrapping,” by The Waitresses, an `80s group led by Chris Butler.]

I’m the person who yells, “Jump, George Bailey, jump!”, at the TV every time “It’s a Wonderful Life” comes on.

Thanks for digging my tune.

Chris Butler

Thanks, Chris, for reading Rittenhouse!

And thanks to Allen Bukoff for facilitating the introduction.

On “Page Six” of today’s New York Post we find:

SIGHTINGS . . . Dominick Dunne, Lee Radziwill, Bobby Short[,] and Nan Kempner sharing a table at La Grenouille.

Good Lord, talking about what?

Now this, from the same column, is more like it:

Chelsea Clinton bumping and grinding with Mark Wahlberg on top of a table at the Shore Club in Miami while her hapless boyfriend, Ian Klaus, looked on.

I never liked her.

(He said, as jealousy reared its ugly head.)

Two questions for which I haven’t the answers are preoccupying me at the moment. I’m hoping readers might be able to help me.

First, why do so many employers ask the applicant to specify his salary requirement in his first contact with the company?

Based on my past experience as a manager, I assume every employer has a budget line for each new hire, one outside of which it would prove difficult to move. If so, why not share that information with applicants, thereby saving everyone much time and effort?

Second, how does an applicant convince potential employers that he has “traded down” with respect to his next position?

For me this intention wasn’t so difficult last time around, even though I took a 66 percent reduction in compensation, largely because there was a physical move from New York to Philadelphia -- by which I do not mean to imply that the cost of living here is that much less than in New York, because it’s not -- and the assignment required only several hours a day to complete.

But now, with yet another reduction in my sights, this one of 40 to 50 percent from my latest job, it’s getting a little difficult to convince hiring officials I won’t run at the next opportunity. I would be embarrassed to share with you the names of companies that already have turned me down.

Your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

What with the testosterone abuse and the vapors and all, it’s hard for me to describe Andrew Sullivan as a man who has balls, so instead I’ll just say the guy has one helluva nerve.

Amid yet another pledge drive, Sullivan is . . . Where? Who knows? He’s not writing the “Daily Dish.” Someone named Daniel Drezner is handling that right now, this despite the fact the first thing a visitor to the “Dirty Dish” sees is a plea for contributions -- to Sullivan. For what? Well, you know, interns, e-mail readers and writers, explosive bandwidth expenses, a possible salary for Andy, renovations in Provincetown, and the like.

Gee whiz, even your local PBS station knows enough to broadcast their best programming while the hand is outstretched. And you even get a mug or a tote bag or a CD or something.

What do you get from Sullivan?

Something akin to a substitute teacher, one all too eager to promote himself and his book and a tad bit too concerned about forcing his heretofore undistinguished heterosexuality in the faces of the site’s readers.

[Post-publication addendum: See also, TBogg, “Blowing the Pledge Money on Frappachinos and a Bikini Wax.” Gee whiz, this guy could make a fortune writing cover lines for Bonnie Fuller.]

One of The Rittenhouse Review’s most loyal readers, my mother, passed along some memories of knitting from her younger days growing up in New York.

Jim:

I enjoyed the New York Times article about kids knitting. I saved it for my knitting guild. [Ed.: See “Kids Today . . . Are Knitting,” The Rittenhouse Review, December 26.]

You probably have heard of the Waldorf School, a private school for elementary students, maybe even high school students. It has been in existence for a long time. They still have knitting as a requirement for each student.

I learned to knit in grammar school. They held classes in the afternoons to teach anyone who wanted to learn such handiwork as knitting, sewing, embroidery, and such. I was very young, maybe seven or eight. Everyone thought it was so cute that I wanted to learn to knit but I was dead serious.

I started a sweater but gave up after a while and never finished it. It started out well but somehow got wider and wider. I moved on to knitting sweaters, hats, and blankets for my dolls.

In high school the fad was to knit argyle socks for our boyfriends. These were quite complicated but we were quite good at it. Some of the more daring girls would knit during class holding the knitting behind a book. I am sure the nuns couldn’t have missed this, but they never said anything.

What actually spurred me on to knitting seriously was all the needle-clacking during World War II. It seemed every woman and girl was knitting socks, hats, and gloves for the servicemen.

(All the time, of course, I was growing up in an Italian neighborhood. I admired the talent of the women I knew, many of whom were born in Italy.) [Ed.: My mother is not Italian-American.]

During the war there were no men around, as they all had been drafted. Dad was in public school at that time and all the shop teachers were away, so the boys took home economics. Dad was taught to knit in the class and never forgot how to do it.

Mom

She should write more, don’t you think?

[See also, “The Joy of Stitch,” by Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light. And “Yarns,” by Avedon Carol of The Sideshow.]

Madeleine Begun Kane, everyone’s favorite oboist-attorney-singer-songwriter-comic-humorist-blogger, is up for two awards in About.com’s year-end political humor awards.

Mad received two nominations among some stiff competition: a nomination for Best Parody (Ongoing) for MadKane.com, and another for Best Bush Humor for Dubya's Dayly Diary.

Other nominees, some in direct competition, include such notables (Get it?) as Betty Bowers, Tom Tomorrow, Get Your War On, WhiteHouse.org, Too Stupid To Be President, BartCop, Aaron McGruder, Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Bill Maher, The Onion (The Onion is funny?), and Matt Drudge (Drudge is funny? Oh, I see, “entertaining.” But what’s up with the “news and commentary” bit?)

Take a quick jaunt over to About.com’s polling place and cast your vote. And don’t let the fact Mad is an FOJ affect your decision in any way. At least don’t use that as a reason to vote against her!

This comes as a surprise, even though it really shouldn’t (“Laura Bush Has Words of Advice for Americans and Her Husband,” New York Times):

The first lady also said that the “Roses are red, violets are blue” poem she read at a National Book Festival gala in October was not actually written by her husband even though it has been attributed to him. She did not say who wrote the poem.

“But a lot of people really believed that he did,” she said. “Some woman from across the table said, ‘You just don’t know how great it is to have a husband who would write a poem for you.’”

No, she’s doesn’t, it turns out.

(Link via World O’ Crap.)

Are you a neoconservative? If you’re reading The Rittenhouse Review for some purpose other than sending the editor/publisher hate mail, I’m guessing you’re not.

But are you sure? Is it possible you are a closet neoconservative, like “Tiffany Midgeson” or “Mary Rosh”?

After all, I once considered myself a neoconservative, or at least I was aligned with their views on U.S. foreign and defense policy. But that was when I was young and foolish. And besides, in case no one on 17th Street noticed, the Cold War is over.

In the event you have doubts, fears, or just the creeps, I suggest you take the quiz prepared by The Christian Science Monitor, “Are you a neonconservative?”

The 10-question quiz features a graphic with the faces of prominent neocons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol, with Wolfowitz and Kristol looking suitably grim and Perle looking appropriately guilty for his repeatedly exposed wanton grabs at power, influence, and money.

Taking the quiz is like slogging through one of Commentary’s overly longwinded symposia. And the differences between the available responses are sometimes nuanced to a degree that can only be called frustrating. It’s helpful nonetheless.

In the end, I failed miserably, if “failure” were to be defined as not being a neoconservative. The quiz pegged me as an “isolationist,” which is far from true. Regardless, I’m happy to have shaken off a bad habit from years gone by.

Bulldogs are the best of all breeds, aren’t they?

If you doubt that, take a jaunt over to the New York Times web site and catch the photograph accompanying “It’s a Long New Year’s Eve That Starts at Thanksgiving.”

A beautiful specimen.

And Mildred, who has been known to partake of a drop of white wine or beer now and then, agrees.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Yesterday while writing about a group of New Jersey schoolchildren who have taken to knitting in an elementary-school program that not only fills their recess hours but apparently instills in them a wide variety of academic and social skills, I quoted a young student participant, quoted by the New York Times: “[I]f I’m mad, instead of taking it out on someone, I take it out on the knitting.”

That quote took me back to a job I had years ago, one at which the editor, a man I truly respect but who offered the rest of us all too many unintentional moments of hilarity, once was overheard, by me, berating a subordinate in a manner that for me recalled a favorite trashy movie, “Mommie Dearest.”

At one point in the film Joan Crawford -- overplayed by Faye Dunaway, as that is the actress’s wont -- noticed her maid and her adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, cleaning the front entrance hall.

By all appearances the maid and Christina were doing a fine job, but Crawford was unconvinced. She hurled a large potted plant to the side, thereby revealing an accumulation of soil underneath, the appearance of which led her to scold both her servant and child for their neglect and malfeasance.

“I’m not mad at you,” Crawford (Dunaway) said, “I’m mad at the dirt!”

Well, upon hearing the editor knock a colleague down a peg or two in an exasperated tone that, despite my accomplished mimicking skills I still to this day I cannot quite replicate, and with a spate of words and commentary altogether beyond that required under the circumstances, all I could think of was Crawford (Dunaway).

Emphasizing the criticism wasn’t personal, the editor expressed frustration with sentence structure, transitions, diction, and the like. “You see, here . . .,” he said. “And now this, . . .” he added. On and on and on.

It was as if the editor were saying, “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the words!”

The line repeated itself over and over in my head until I shared it with my colleague, L.C. Unfortunately he had never seen the film, and so my quip relaying this simile, smart and appropriate as it was, went largely wasted.

So, for you, now, if you get it: Enjoy.

Have you ever encountered a sub-culture of sorts, the traditions of which are nothing less than baffling? If not, here’s one for you: the annual practice of something called “celebratory gunfire,” or shooting one’s handgun into the sky on New Year’s Eve.

Somewhere along the way I missed this despicable practice, reportedly popular in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Detroit -- today, not 50 or 100 years ago.

What I missed Joe Jaskolka of Philadelphia five years ago took in the head, literally: a bullet in the brain.

In a heart-wrenching story by Steve Volk (“Shooting Pains”) in the latest issue of Philadelphia Weekly, I learned of Jaskolka’s terrible fate.

Just 11 years old then, Jaskolka was hit by a wayward “celebratory” bullet shot off by some cretin on New Year’s Eve.

Volk writes:

Five years on, he’s grown into a good-looking kid with curly brown hair and a bookish pair of glasses that makes him look like the smartest kid in class. But he still can’t walk more than a block without assistance, and climbing stairs takes both time and massive effort. He still needs a wheelchair for trips outside the home. When he dresses himself, his parents get him started 30 minutes before he needs to leave. He suffers from double vision, which he can overcome by concentrating, but reading or rapid movement of his head can trigger migraines.

With the right side of his mouth still partially paralyzed, Joe’s speaking voice is weak and halting. Thoughts come quickly, but they take their time coming out. [. . .]

For a time he simply sat in his room and cried for hours on end, but his tears laid tracks that carried him to a better place. “I’m over it,” he says, more than once. “Let’s move on.”

We should all be so strong as the teenaged Jaskolka, whose shooter hasn’t been identified.

His parents are the stuff of dreams:

After a few weeks of being told his son would die, Greg was called into the doctor’s office for a meeting.

“It looks like your son is going to live,” she told him, “but there will be days when you wish he hadn’t.”

“[Expletive deleted], doctor,” Greg replied.

Remembering that conversation, Greg raises his voice to the level of a factory foreman trying to be heard over machines and through earplugs. “He could be in a coma and it would be better than having to bury him!” he says. “And let me tell you something else! There is not a day that goes by when that kid doesn’t do something or say something, sometimes subtle, sometimes not subtle, that tells me he is still the same kid.

“My God,” he says. “I love him.”

Enough with the 18th-century stupidity. If you nuts want to aim for the sky to welcome the new year, try spitting instead.

He doesn’t use the phrase I coined -- “The Age of Unseriousness” -- but he might as well have.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist by profession but a man whose work in the paper of record easily tops the best of our lame punditocracy, writes, in Friday’s Times, about the absurdities of the media’s coverage of the still ongoing (no matter what the “leading lights” of the networks and cable outlets would have you believe) presidential campaign.

It’s so simple it’s amazing it takes a Princeton professor to point out the obvious, including: “[d]on’t talk about clothes”; “look at the candidates’ policy proposals”; “[b]eware of personal anecdotes”; “[l]ook at the candidates’ records”; “[d]on’t fall for political histrionics”; and “[i]t’s not about you.”

More tomorrow from your national and local newspapers about the Democrats’ wardrobes, facial features, hairstyles, family histories, genealogy, and eating habits, along with their stubborn unwillingness to ask Margaret Carlson why she wears eyeglasses and not contact lenses.

This was for me a quiet and uneventful Christmas. Pretty much what I expected and wanted.

I attended a beautiful midnight mass, awed once again by the beauty and power of singing voices that are thousands of times better than my own, inspired by the faith that years ago led to the building in Philadelphia of such amazing church edifices, and touched by the splendor of the Catholic mass. (I will add I was dismayed , though only slightly, to see that yet another parish has allowed applause and inappropriate contact with the wine chalice -- i.e., unpriestly, before distribution -- to interfere with the mandated course of the mass.)

I was invited to a Christmas dinner, but chose not to attend, a decision I will probably regret eventually. My sleep schedule is so completely whacked right now that I felt barely awake, and I strongly doubted whether I could be as sociable as the occasion demanded. It’s hard for me to meet and be with strangers right now.

I received just a handful of Christmas cards -- you gotta’ send `em to get `em, I guess -- but several well-chosen gifts from my friend M.D., including a book, Fortune is a River, into which I am far enough now to recommend it to you without hesitation. (Who knew Niccolò Macchiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci were friends? And that they together planned to reconfigure the course of the Arno River in the early 16th century? Not me.)

And from B., who sent not only two batches of the much-coveted butter cookies (made through the press), I received other gifts, including a package for Mildred -- treats appreciated more by Mildred than me, since after she eats them her breath recalls something from a creature in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s most horrific fantasies.

The biggest surprise was a package sent from a reader, the incredible L.H., a few items from my Amazon.com wish list given out of what I can only assume is the utmost and most heartfelt generosity, which I greatly appreciate. I promise that if I ultimately win an Oscar® for the screenplay that continues to whirl through my mind and that completely has taken over my latest jottings notebook, L.H. will be the first person mentioned in my acceptance speech. Hell, given my social life, she might even be my date.

This is not a happy time for me. I’ve been unemployed for nearly three months now, and time is running out. For reasons that are both my own fault and the result of the whimsy of fate, most of it bad, I very soon may be forced to leave Philadelphia.

My options are few. Actually, my options are one.

Barring a miracle or some new lease on a few more weeks in this city, I will be moving to a town that, lovely as it may be, is, in my view of the world, in the middle of nowhere, there to . . . I don’t know what. Hardly a mecca for the publishing industry, I suspect my most likely plight in this town will be to secure a position at a bookstore, one that would have to be within walking distance of my next hovel since I don’t own a car.

Things could be worse. Believe me, I know. I read not one, but two, Philadelphia daily newspapers, each regularly portraying the lives of people clinging to less of a life than mine. I am grateful for what I have and for what I know I someday will have again.

But when the friend who drives you to midnight mass sends you off for the night with three bags of groceries from her already no-doubt depleted pantry, and when you stock those gifts -- pasta, rice, soup, vegetables, and fruit -- in your empty cupboards and wonder how you thought you would survive another four or five weeks without them, you know you’re in trouble. And you know you have reason to be grateful.

Thank you, my friend.

Violence, guns, juvenile delinquency, truancy, premature sexual activity, unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, abortion, drugs, alcohol, and the like have parents -- And their single friends and family members: we pay taxes too, remember? More than you do, most likely. -- wondering how to keep their kids (and, more often, their neighbors’ kids) out of trouble, particularly during the crucial preteen years when future patterns of behavior often are established.

Perhaps the answer to social deviancy is something as simple as knitting.

In “Half the Pupils in a New Jersey School Are Learning Knitting,” New York Times reporter Maria Newman tells the story of a unique middle-school program that should have educational administrators everywhere making notes -- or at least scratching their heads.

The kids are knitting. During recess, after school, and at home. And they’re loving it.

What do the kids -- both girls and boys -- have to say?

“Knitting is like sleeping.”

“It’s so quiet. I’m usually very jittery, but when I knit, I calm down.”

“You make a lot of friends when you knit, people you wouldn’t think you’d meet.”

“When I’m bored, I knit.”

“I like knitting better than reading. I like reading, too, but instead of reading, since it’s close to Christmas, I can knit someone a gift instead of wasting money.”

“With knitting, you don’t have a care in the world.”

“I can’t stop knitting.”

“I lay in my bed and start knitting. I think it’s very peaceful.”

And my personal favorite:

“It keeps me from getting in trouble. Like if I’m mad, instead of taking it out on someone, I take it out on the knitting.”

What instructional aide Judith Symonds launched as a mid-winter recess activity has grown into a sprawling year-round program in which half the students of Seth Boyden Elementary School, Maplewood, N.J., participate. Along with a few others: “The principal, Kristopher Harrison, has learned to knit along with the children,” Newman reports. “And sometimes, the school’s head custodian, Malik Muhammad, also sits and knits.”

Symonds, administrators, and parents tout the intellectual, academic, social, and life-skills benefits of knitting in a series of remarks to Newman that are entirely convincing.

The program has been so well received and is so highly regarded it has been expanded to incorporate parents and community members, and picked up by other schools and communities.

Whether the Maplewood program, launched in a town that isn’t exactly a community in crisis, can be replicated elsewhere, and in a manner that addresses the problems faced by and arising from today’s youth, remains to be seen.

But wouldn’t it be interesting if something so seemingly simple as the organized participation of kids in a knitting group -- or in other craft activities -- were just the thing to make a difference at the margins? (Anything to get them away from the TV. Or fussing over miniature balsa sleds or celline-wrapped gift packages.)

Of course, the potential creation of a new generation peopled by countless Mme. Defarges is a concern we may leave to others in years hence.

[See also Ronnie Polaneczky’s column in Monday’s Philadelphia Daily News for a hope-inspiring story about a group of this city’s horticultural students.]

[Full disclosure: I don’t knit. And I kill plants and trees.]

My nephew John, not yet known by the royalist appellation “John the Lesser,” performed his good deed on the night before Christmas.

His father reports:

On Christmas Eve John filled up a box with toys he no longer plays with, and left a note to Santa indicating that if Santa knew any boys or girls who might like the toys he should take them and give them away.

Where does that come from?

It comes from exceptional parenting.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Christmas Light Show
John Wanamaker & Co.
Philadelphia

Fark.com has some fun at the expense of moronic Fox News “personality,” Long Islander, and all-around loser Sean Hannity.

(Link via Atrios.)

How sad to see that anti-Asian and anti-Asian-American racism are alive and well and living in Philadelphia.

Or, at the very least, being given a platform for the widespread distribution of invective from the pages of the Philadelphia Daily News.

In today’s edition, the PDN saw fit to publish so despicable a letter from a reader as this one, under the headline “Asian Storekeepers,” from one Diane Madison of Philadelphia:

If Asian store owners are so frightened of their customers that they need bulletproof glass, why don’t they go somewhere else?

I don’t patronize them, and I’m glad there are groups organizing to keep them out of our neighborhoods. It seems like some Asian store owners are hiding behind their language and culture. They say they don’t understand English or American culture, and that causes problems with customers. That’s just an excuse to be rude. Stay out of their stores, and they’ll understand when they have to shut down.

Fine, Diane. And when, given the paucity of grocery stores, let alone supermarkets, in many parts of Philadelphia, your neighbors no longer have a choice between even “Chinese” food and “seafood,” don’t come crying to the rest of us.

[Post-publication addendum (December 30): Apparently I’m not to only person in Philadelphia who saw racism in Madison’s letter. PDN readers respond. (Please ignore the equally racist letter from one Donna Sambrick.)]

An imaginary but all too real dialogue:

Oh my God! Did you read that? Jane Doe is leaving Channel 18’s 4 o’clock news broadcast. She’s heading to Cincinnati!

Who?

Who cares?

Nobody!

I like living in a two-newspaper town, even if those two newspapers share not only the same building, the same printing presses, and the same owner, Knight-Ridder Co.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News are clearly separate organisms. And that’s good for both papers. And for readers. (Even I, an intellectual snob, know plenty of people who read the Daily News religiously who would never pick up the Inquirer if Knight-Ridder were to shut the tabloid.)

Nonetheless, there are times when coverage of the same stories by two papers is too much. It’s partly my fault for not picking one paper over the other, but the over-coverage of inside media baseball in Philadelphia by the Inquirer and the PDN makes me want to scream.

Our second-rated weatherman is leaving Philly for Milwaukee! You’re kidding. The guy with the hair? No, no, not him. The 5 o’clock guy. . . . One of Philadelphia’s only 18 minority newscasters is off to Cleveland! But a half-Mexican woman is headed here from Houston. And she’s gorgeous! . . . D’jou hear that blond guy from that radio station way up on the AM dial? The one who dated that lifestyles reporter from Channel 2? He’s moving to New Orleans! No way! Way!

Look, people, the goings here and goings there of local media “news personalities” is of no interest whatsoever to me nor to anyone I know.

To make matters worse, such inane commentary isn’t limited to, say, Gail Shister’s regular Inquirer column. No, you force-feed us these insipid and tedious reports not only through Shister, but also through Michael Klein’s “INQlings” column in the Inquirer and Stu Bykovsky and Howard Gensler’s columns in the PDN.

Enough, already. Your readers know everything they want or need to know about Big Local Media Jane and Joe, if that were anything at all.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

The Department of Homeland Security on Sunday raised the national “terror alert” from ELEVATED to HIGH, based on, according to Heimatlandsminister Tom Ridge, the following:

Credible sources suggest the possibility of attacks against the homeland [sic] around the holiday season and beyond. The information we have indicates that extremists abroad are anticipating near-term attacks that they believe will either rival or exceed the attacks that occurred [in 2001].

For those of you playing with the color-coded home game, that was a shift from YELLOW to ORANGE.

For those of you playing with the special-edition Sesame Street® version of the home game, that was an upgrade from BERT to ERNIE.

For those of you playing with all of your marbles, just go about your business.

Welcome, once again, to the Age of Unseriousness.*

(* Your saw it here first.)

[Ed.: I’m not sure to whom the original credit for this graphic goes. If you know, please drop me a line.]

Congratulations, slightly belated, to Adam Felber on the second anniversary of his widely -- and justifiably so -- respected weblog, Fanatical Apathy.

While you’re over there poking around, take a look at the Fanatical Apathy Campaign `04 Slime-o-Meter. (How deep is the sludge, how deep is the sludge, how deep is the sludge?)

Good stuff. Available only in the blogosphere.*

(* You saw it here first.)

Ignorant as I am of popular culture and the people who populate and patronize it, I was a bit out of my element when I read “Norristown’s Bello Plays it ‘Cooler’ Than Usual” in Monday’s Philadelphia Daily News.

I don’t know who Maria Bello is, and frankly, I don’t care. What I do know from reading reporter Laura Randall’s article is that Bello, at least as expressed through the interview with the PDN, is nothing more than a walking pile of clichés.

Discussing her latest role, that of a “down-and-out casino cocktail waitress” -- Is there any other kind? -- in a movie called “The Cooler,” Bello tells Randall, “As soon as I read the script I knew I had to play Natalie. You rarely read a woman’s role that has that sort of full character to it,” repeating one of Hollywood’s favorite myths.

The heretofore unknown, at least around this operation, Bello is angry that all the world will not see “a glimpse” of her pubic hair, that 1.5-second element deleted from the final cut in order for the film to secure an “R” rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Bello dribbles:

It doesn't make me angry at the MPAA. They have certain guidelines they adhere to. The problem is with the American public and what they deem as irresponsible for kids to see. We’re so puritanical in this country the way that we view sexuality, while violence is just a matter of fact.

Gosh, Maria, thanks. Never heard that before.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

It seems Tina Brown’s pal Conrad Black is even more generous and indiscriminate in doling out gratuities to would-be journalists than is the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of America.

“Friendship and Business Blur in the World of a Media Baron,” by Jacques Steinberg and Geraldine Fabrikant, in Monday’s New York Times, makes clear that Black and his company, Hollinger International, which just might turn out to have been as much of a personal fiefdom as was Tyco International Co. under the helm of Dennis Kozlowski, thought nothing of placing former government leaders and policymakers, and current slothful conservative “opinion-makers” on its own private dole.

It’s a scathing piece; an example, at last, of real journalism that is all the more impressive because real journalists wrote it in a real outlet for real journalism.

Of course, that previous sentence means nothing to the likes of Andrew Sullivan. The PofP is having a minor meltdown over all this -- gee whiz, I don’t know, something about Enron, I think.

In his nonsensical take on the Times article Sullivan failed to include the “money quote,” this from former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski about former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, both of whom were feeding greedily at the Hollinger trough: “For quite a while, Mrs. Thatcher would participate. I was one of those people who suggested to Conrad that it wasn’t productive to hear her speak at such length.”

And speaking of money quotes, let’s take a look at a couple of American journalists pundits who were taking Hollinger’s “money calls”: George F. Will and William F. Buckley Jr.

About Will, Steinberg and Fabrikant write:

In a column syndicated by [t]he Washington Post Writers Group in March, Mr. Will recounted observations Mr. Black had made in a London speech defending the Bush administration’s stance on Iraq.

In a rebuttal to Mr. Bush’s critics, Mr. Will wrote, “Into this welter of foolishness has waded Conrad Black, a British citizen and member of the House of Lords who is a proprietor of many newspapers.”

Far be it for me to express surprise that Will would think his readership so ignorant as to be impressed that someone is a “member of the House of Lords.” Anglophilia: The last refuge of the truly pathetic.

Steinberg and Fabrikant continue:

Asked in the interview if he should have told his readers of the payments he had received from Hollinger, Mr. Will said he saw no reason to do so.

“My business is my business,” he said. “Got it?”

Oh, yes sir. Hey, no problem. Trust me, I don’t want to take this outside!

There’s still more:

Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of [t]he Washington Post Writers Group, said he was unaware of Mr. Will’s affiliation with Hollinger or the money he received. “I think I would have liked to have known,” Mr. Shearer said.

Michael Getler? Your phone is ringing again. Only this time it’s not Andrew Sullivan. It’s Alan Shearer.

About Buckley, Steinberg and Fabrikant wrote:

Similarly, in a column published in The [sic] National Review in 2002, Mr. Buckley, the magazine’s editor at large, wrote of attending a dinner at Lord Black’s home in London.

In an effort “to divulge all my personal conflicts in talking about the subject,” Mr. Buckley wrote in the column that Lord Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, were among his “five closest friends in the entire world.”

Excuse me, Bill, that’s Lady Amiel to you. (I wonder how many “Friends of Bill” were counting their fingers after reading that. “‘My friend’ this, ‘my friend’ that” is a nauseatingly recurrent construction in Buckley’s writing.)

Steinberg and Fabrikant, again:

Asked later why he had not mentioned his payments from Hollinger, Mr. Buckley said, “I didn’t think that had any bearing whatsoever.”

To underscore that he did not feel beholden to Lord Black -- “Giscard d’Estaing and I don’t bribe very easily,” he said -- Mr. Buckley mentioned a “withering review” of the Roosevelt book that The [sic] National Review published on Nov. 24.

And yet, Mr. Buckley dashed off a letter to the editor of [t]he New York Observer after the newspaper published a front-page profile of Lord Black last week that interspersed criticism of his business with criticism of his book.

“Your editorial on Conrad Black was febrile with hate which [sic] one has to assume is personal,” he wrote.

“You are entitled to ask how I presume to write with ostensible authority,” Mr. Buckley added. “I write because I have known Conrad Black for 15 years.”

He concluded: “Since your mind inclines in that direction, hear this: he has never donated a nickel to any of my enterprises.”

No, Bill, just your checkbook. And remind me to send you my memo explaining the difference in usage between “that” and “which.” Many a cub reporter has cut his teeth on that missive.

And then there’s Richard N. Perle, a man whose complete and utter sleaziness can no longer be denied among reasonable people:

Mr. Perle, the former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board who served on the Hollinger board, also served as chairman or co-chairman of Hollinger Digital, a unit of the parent company, since its inception in 1996. In that capacity, he was paid more than $300,000 a year and $2 million in bonuses over part of that period, said someone with knowledge of the company, figures that have not previously been disclosed.

Reached for comment, Mr. Perle referred all questions on these payments to the company.

Which company? Hollinger? Or one of the many other companies with which Perle’s outstretched hands and greedy fingers are associated?

Speaking of testosterone, and we were, I just saw a photograph of a man I haven’t seen for a couple of years, a 30-something New Yorker who lately has been commended for his “discipline,” “dedication,” and, most laughably of all, his “athleticism,” that as a result of his having “really bulked up” through a regular exercise regimen.

“It’s not steroids,” I was told. “It’s just a lot of hard work.”

The hell it is. I know steroids when I seem them.

The telltale giveaway: the suddenly rounded face.

This, the man in the photograph, is a man who, when I knew him, had dramatically sharp and angular facial features overlying impeccable bone structure from his Italian and German ancestors. That’s gone now, along with, from I understand from reading various warnings about steroid use, much else.

I see this every day.

I see it in my neighborhood. The guys in the bar: steroids. The guys leaving the gym: steroids.

I see it in my building. The guys above me: steroids. My next-door neighbor -- that laid-back gay guy, so laid-back he can’t summon a mere “hello” in the hallway, just a grunt similar to those issued by your typical 15-year-old skateboarder -- steroids.

Michelangelo Signorile tackled this issue years ago in Life Outside. Sadly, this trend -- this pathology -- among gay men, hasn’t improved one bit since then. Care to give it another go, Mike?

Below is an excerpt, just an excerpt, mind you, from a help-wanted advertisement in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

BAKER Doughnut . . . Mix & bake ingredients acc. to recipes to produce breads, pastries and other bakery products. Measure flour, sugar, shortening & other ing. to prepare batters, doughs, fillings & icings, using scale & graduated containers. Dumping. Into mixing-machine bowl or steam kettle to mix or cook ingredients acc. to specifications. Roll, cut & shape dough to form sweet rolls, piecrust, tarts, cookies & related products prepatory [sic] to baking. Place dough in pans, molds or on sheets & bake in oven or on grill. Operate automatic machinery, e.e. [sic] rounding, curling, icing, slicing & wrapping machines. Observe color of products being baked and turn thermostat or other controls to adjust oven temperature. Apply glaze, icing or other tipping [sic] to baked goods, using spatula or brush. Attend to sudden unexpected rush business.

Yeah, yeah, we get it. You want somebody to make doughnuts and stuff. Gee whiz.

That “dumping” is a nice touch, huh?

According to Weather.com it is currently 47 degrees in Philadelphia. It’s 47 degrees in Philadelphia today? That must be wrong. Oh . . . outside. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop in at my place and cool off.

I recently found I can raise the ambient temperature in my apartment by running the dryer with the closet door open. (I tried doing it with the dryer door open, but that was kind of a disaster.) Upon hearing of my discovery, a friend suggested baking something, noting it would have the same effect given the kitchen’s proximity to the living room.

Ha, bright idea. Thanks a lot. Like that would work. And I told her so. Well, apparently zapping a three-day-old slice of pizza in the microwave doesn’t constitute baking in her little universe. She wants me to use that other thing, the um . . . stove. I suppose I could, but then I would have take all my files out of there and find a new place for years of old tax returns, bills, receipts, and such. Too much trouble.

I don’t know why everyone thinks the Christmas season is such a hectic, crazy, busy time of year. You might be surprised by how relaxing December can be if you just ignore or sit out the worst of the holiday’s demands.

Parties? Didn’t give one, didn’t go to any.

Shopping? Passing this year.

Baking? See stove, supra.

Eating? Well, there was P.’s excellent gift package from Harry & David. And, hopefully soon, butter cookies from B.

Decorating? Yeah, right.

Endless Christmas music? Allowed within reason. In fact, the headline on this post is a reference, one I pulled from my unconscious subconscious, to “Christmas Wrapping,” performed years ago by The Waitresses, which is around here somewhere. Where doesn’t really matter, though, because it’s on vinyl, making the recording pretty much useless.

Wrapping gifts? No, not this year, and that’s really a shame because nobody wraps gifts like I do.

It may take me several hours to wrap a single gift, even a small, sturdy, nicely proportioned box, but when it’s done, it’s perfect. The patterns of the paper, purchased from the most obscure source imaginable, are perfectly aligned on all sides and affixed so there’s no tape showing. Then I add fabric ribbons and hand-tied bows. Finally, I top the whole obsessive project with an added festive element, something different each year, possibly fresh mistletoe cuttings, sprigs of boxwood, holly berries, or miniature sleds made of balsa.

This is the only area of my life where I will have a Martha Stewart Moment, including one year when I actually used an idea of hers. First wrap the gift box in a brightly colored tissue paper. Then wrap the gift again, over the tissue paper, using celline (available at most craft stores). And then take it from there with your choice of ribbons, bows, or other trimmings. But please, not miniature sleds made of balsa because I’m thinking of trademarking that idea.

By the way, when using celline, hiding the tape can be a neurotic’s nightmare. I suggest using double-sided adhesive tape and hoping for the best. I don’t suggest going to three different stores on or around December 23 trying to find a different, more or less opaque, brand of celline expecting to secure a perfectly concealing match. Not that I know anyone who did that.

Should you decide to take a stab at making miniature sleds from balsa, the runners will prove to be the most challenging part. Soak thin strips of balsa in water for as long as needed until they hold the shape into which you bend them. And trust me, nobody will notice if the surface of the sled is created from a single piece of balsa. Slatting is superfluous. With an exacto knife you can score the single slab of balsa to create the same impression. Even the truly obsessive have to draw the line somewhere.

Christmas cards? Aw, gee whiz, Christmas cards. Better get on that. I’m having a little trouble with my annual letter to friends and family: “Wrote a whole bunch of radio scripts for a big famous guy. Blogged. Lost my job. Started another screenplay. Learned the difference between microwave and conventional ovens.” It’s going to be a thin one this year. If I ever get back to it. And if past is prologue, I probably won’t.

I guess that’s all for now. I’m going outside. My feet are freezing.

It looks like another outbreak of the “maidenly vapors” hit Provinceton, Mass., this morning.

Pot-bellied testosterone abuser Andrew Sullivan is angry with -- who else? -- the New York Times, accusing the paper of misrepresenting the president’s position on a constitutional amendment to “protect” heterosexual marriage from, well, such as are vulnerable to the “maidenly vapors.”

Sullivan today writes:

But this degree of shoddy journalism is inexcusable. It’s a good test for the new ombudsman. Email Dan Okrent . . . and demand a correction[,] but more importantly [sic] an explanation for the doctored quote. [Ed.: Emphasis added.] Someone somewhere at the Times looked at the original statement and consciously truncated it to alter its meaning [-]- in the lead story on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. Then they spun and distorted the rest of the piece to fit. Who will be held accountable?

Give Sullivan some credit here. Amid his characteristic and unbearably tiresome display of `roid rage, the former Times columnist cleverly included what I think can only be interpreted as a not-too-subtle jab -- “doctored quote” -- at fellow right winger Charles Krauthammer. (What’s that about? Play nice, boys!)

Yes, the same Krauthammer who not even three weeks ago doctored a quote from former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate Dr. Howard Dean, a doctoring about which Sullivan as yet has written absolutely nothing, and a doctoring for which no one, least of all Dr. Krauthammer, has been held accountable.

Could someone get Michael Getler on the phone? Tell him Andrew Sullivan is calling.

You may be pleased to learn that Mom came through with the recipe for butter cookies that I mentioned here last Tuesday. In fact, she sent two different recipes, the use of each variation depending upon whether the baker will use a cookie press or cookie cutters to form the shapes. (Who knew?)

Now, I want you to understand this is kind of a big deal, because I asked Mom for the recipe less than a week ago.

So what? Well, the patron saint of the Capozzola family is an obscure early church figure, either Roman or possibly merely legendary, known as St. Expeditus, traditionally invoked by diplomats, attorneys, and others seeking a resolution to stalled and troublesome negotiations, but better known to us as the saint whose assistance is sought against procrastination.

So from my her house to yours, enjoy.

SPRITZ BUTTER COOKIES (Cookie Press)

Makes four dozen cookies.

Ingredients
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
Red and green sugar, or candied cherries, for decoration

Directions
Refrigerate several large ungreased cookie sheets until ready for use. [Ed.: Where in her refrigerator Mom fits these I do not know, and that’s the last comment I’m going to make.]
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Sift flour with salt and set aside.
In a large bowl, using an electric mixer at medium speed or a wooden spoon, beat soft butter, sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla (or almond) extract until smooth and fluffy.
Using a wooden spoon, add one-third of the flour mixture at a time, beating until smooth and well combined.
Fill cookie press with dough, then make shapes.
(N.B.: If the dough becomes warm, place it in the refrigerator for cooling, but keep it pliable. The dough becomes crumbly if over-cooled.)
Decorate cookies before baking.
Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until lightly golden.
Transfer to a wire rack for cooling.

BEST EVER BUTTER COOKIES (Cookie Cutters)

Makes three dozen cookies.

Ingredients
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder

Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Combine butter, sugar, and egg in large mixing bowl.
Beat at medium speed until creamy.
Reduce speed to low, and add flour, orange juice, vanilla extract, and baking powder.
Beat until well mixed.
Divide dough into thirds and seal in plastic food wrap.
Refrigerate until firm (about two to three hours).
On lightly floured surface (or wax paper), roll out dough, in one-third batches, keeping the remaining dough refrigerated, to 1/8- to 1/4-inch thickness.
Cut with 3-inch cookie cutters.
Decorate with sprinkles before baking.
Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
Bake for 6 to 10 minutes or until edges are lightly browned.
Transfer to a wire rack for cooling.

And have a merry Christmas.

It’s official: Blogging has taken over my life. Not just in terms of how I spend many days, and not only with respect to what I think about over the course of a given day, or how I react to news events, newspaper and magazine articles, and the everyday incidents in my life.

Now blogging and bloggers have taken over my social life, such as it is, or at least they did so last weekend.

I had lunch Sunday with the “Archbishop Katerina,” who used to write a weblog called Goblin Queen. Brilliant, insightful, charismatic. Everything I would have imagined, and more. (And yeah, enough with you Dan Savage.)

Later that same day I met Atrios and the far more charming and personable Mrs. Atrios, along with the gregarious and talkative Susan Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla, for drinks and then dinner.

For those who were following us on a hunt for Sidney Blumenthal, I think we pulled away from you halfway between the bar (Bump) and the restaurant (Little Fish). Sorry about that mishap. I told the cabbie to make a left without signaling. “My bad,” as they say. Hope you’re okay!

It’s that time of year. Christmas. The “holiday season.”

Hands are outstretched. Hands you haven’t seen all year -- and yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. or Ms. Newspaper Delivery Person, you who cannot be relied upon to arrive here every day -- are asking for a year-end “gratuity” or a “gesture of appreciation.”

In other words, a tip. In cash, which as Yogi Berra once said, is as good as real money.

This is not a bad thing. It’s not evil, nor is it nefarious or unjustified. But here and there at least, it’s just a little out of control.

In my first building in New York we were practically extorted for a Christmas tip by a motley collection of “doormen” and “porters,” men who only arose from their seats when their legs became cramped.

An almost-threatening note was distributed in early December detailing the required customary gratuity, based on numerous factors including the number of residents in each unit and certain imaginary “special services” that may have been provided during the year. And they took names. If one were to decline to contribute, they would know about it. No big deal considering these guys never once opened the door, but a matter of consequence when it came to a backed-up sink.

At my second building in New York, where the doormen would do anything for you -- including hauling boxes of books your ex practically dumped on the sidewalk, holding his hand out the whole time for still more cash -- a similar notice was posted near the elevators. At that building, famed for its out-front topiary, I gladly distributed monies at Christmas. When you own two bulldogs, which I did at the time, and said doormen, on request, will take your bulldogs for a walk (my maid did it too), you do things like that.

Now I see that at my present residence, in which there are, I’m guessing, roughly 100 apartments, a “tip box” has been placed at the front desk, where the door-people/security guards sit.

That’s new this year.

I’m not sure what I will or can do for them. But I appreciate the gesture.

It’s subtle. Suggestive, even, rather than demanding. So different from New York. So very Philadelphia.

And that’s a good thing.

[Note: The post previously was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

I’ve been to Savannah. Savannah, Georgia.

No, not recently, so, no, I haven’t seen Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck cruising town inconspicuously in their lime green SUV. (Nude, shirtless. That’s me trolling for hits, not they seeking even more attention.)

But I’ve been there.

And based on just that one visit I can say with confidence that the women in Savannah are, or at least there are women in Savannah who are, better looking than this one. And less dangerous, too.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Did you hear that?

I swear I heard laughing.

No, no. I know I heard laughter.

The sound of millions of women laughing.

Mostly lesbians at the beginning, since they got the joke first, but eventually a chorus of mirth joined by millions of straight women and men of all sorts. A veritable cacophony of ha-has, hee-haws, tee-hees, guffaws, chortles, chuckles, and twitters.

It all began earlier this week when a certain Amber Pawlik, a soi disant libertarian, anti-government, anti-feminist, Ann Coulter wannabe, though one who really likes guys, or least certain kinds of guys, a whole, whole lot, wrote on her state-subsidized personal web site, maintained under the auspices of the Pennsylvania State University -- Hey, wait a second! I live here. I’m paying for this crap! -- the following:

If you have ever noticed, many women who have been with mounds [sic!] of men tend to turn their backs on men. The only thing going from guy to guy does is damage them. If they were really promiscuous, they often become lesbians. On the other hand, it is modest girls with few sexual experiences who still remain unabashed romantics and are completely starry-eyed over men. [Emphasis added.]

Cue laugh track. Huh? We don’t need no friggin’ laugh track for that.

As a self-proclaimed “objectivist” -- Will she grow out of it? Most of them do, thank God. -- Amber has consigned herself forever to the ranks of the fringiest of the fringistas, the “libertarians,” limiting her appeal, in the end, to West Coast techhies and East Coast “band guys” who are tired of the bother entailed in scoring “really great weed.”

Amber’s future career, assuming she wants one -- and she just might, judging by such you-really-should-stay-at-home, homo-hating, careerist conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly (A gay son!), Laura Ingraham (A gay brother!), Laura Schlesinger (Pornographic photos!), and Beverly LaHaye (Um . . . give me a second . . . hold on . . . ), among so many others -- could very well depend upon the international trade in illicit drugs. Well, as long as she’s happy.

Now, of course Amber, who desperately needs, at the very least, a copy editor -- a service that, last I knew, she couldn’t obtain free of charge from her government-supported institution of, uh, higher education, at which she pays below-market tuition and fees -- could not, through her post alone, spark millions of women to fits of hysterical amusement.

No, it’s the blogosphere and its countless readers worldwide, their attention to Amber drawn by such leading lights as TBogg, Roger Ailes, and World O’Crap, that has ignited the unceasing wave of abuse that is being heaped upon this public-trough-feeding student, one who, mysteriously, has declined to reject all of the advantages the “welfare state” she so despises offers her, including her little outlet to the world beyond the coddled, taxpayer-sustained confines of State College, Pa.

I’m pleased to report, however, that much to Amber’s dismay, the millions of gay women who launched this wave of glee, and the millions of others who have since joined in, aren’t laughing through their tears -- Amber’s “commentary” is much too comical for that -- they’re laughing through their laughter.

[Post-publication addendum (December 24): Sadly, No also has been tracking Amber’s inanity.]

I’ll bet you thought this post was going to include a bunch of Martha Stewart bashing. Sorry, no. We don’t do that around here.

Sure, my apartment may look worse than your son’s dorm room and only slightly better than a crack house. I may know how to prepare only one mildly impressive main course. And I’ve admitted to killing no fewer than 12 bonsai. Despite that, or maybe because of all that, Stewart is revered in this household.

Each copy of Martha Stewart Living is eagerly anticipated and warmly welcomed, if not read immediately. Despite all the whining about Stewart inflicting unattainable standards of perfection upon the already beleaguered American woman, much of which criticism strikes me as entirely affected and uninformed, the magazine is a top-notch work. Always has been; still is.

If you doubt this, try approaching an issue of MSL with an open mind. There really is something for everyone in each issue. Not that I actually do any of it. Still, I can appreciate the ideas in each issue for their cleverness, beauty, and efficiency, and I sometimes pass things along to people I know.

Unable to sleep last night, I settled down with a large stack of magazines, including half a dozen as yet unread MSLs, when an idea came to me. A blogging idea, of course.

You see, unless a bolt of reality lightning strikes Karen Seymour, the misguided and possibly delusional lead prosecutor, Stewart’s trial on securities fraud and other ridiculous charges is scheduled to begin January 12. That’s a day Stewart might otherwise be updating her scrapbooks, pruning fruit trees, or moving “winter-hardy bulbs from cold frame to greenhouse for forcing,” activities listed on her January 2003 calendar. (Don’t you just hate it when allegations of fraud and conspiracy mess with your gardening?)

Why not, I thought, track Stewart’s upcoming trial working with the monthly calendar she provides in the front of each issue of the magazine?

An entry might read something like this (but funnier):

Thursday, January 15: Stewart’s attorneys today are expected to call former Merrill Lynch & Co. broker Peter Bacanovic to the stand. The stunningly handsome Bacanovic, rumored to be involved with an equally attractive but still unidentified Philadelphia writer, is expected to back Stewart’s account of the questioned trades in shares of ImClone Systems Inc. (He’d better or he’s not invited back here. Uh, whoops.)

Meanwhile, Stewart, having reviewed the previous session’s court transcript taken directly from the stenographer, and having sent 10 single-spaced pages of notes to her attorney, Robert Morvillo, along with wardrobe suggestions for each day next week, will spend the morning at her Bedford, N.Y., home. There Stewart will review her accountants’ work on her 2003 tax filings, take an inventory of seeds for her gardens, and make a terrific beet salad (beets are in season according to the January 2004 number).

In the afternoon, Stewart will travel to Skylands, her home in Maine, where she will make notes on the oyster harvest; clean, filet, poach, roast, broil, bake, barbeque, freeze, package, and deliver to friends her latest catch of salmon; and sweep clear at least six acres of pine forest.

After returning to New York, where she will meet with editors planning the March issue of MSL and catch a late supper with friends Barbara Walters and Maria Bartiromo, Stewart heads to Turkey Hill, her home in Westport, Conn., where the refrigerator really, really needs a good cleaning.

Unfortunately, it can’t be done.

It can’t because there’s no calendar in the January 2004 issue of MSL. The feature was replaced in the September issue with “Gentle Reminders,” a front-of-the-book feature that dispenses similar wisdom, albeit in a less rigid format.

Perhaps the change was just part of a magazine’s normal course of updating features from time to time. Maybe it’s an element of a larger plan intended to reveal a kinder, gentler Stewart. Or could it be that Stewart, anticipating that the trial, combined with so natural a counterpart as the calendar, offered too tempting a target for the nastier elements of the media (and even the kinder realms of blogosphere), enacted a wise and strategic preemptive change?

I don’t doubt it one bit, because Martha Stewart is smarter than you are. She’s smarter than I am. And I hope Stewart and Morvillo -- and the jury -- are smarter than a handful of federal prosecutors run amok.

I recently learned my next-door neighbor refers to me as “that uptight straight guy next door.”

Uptight?

If you’re using Blogger’s software to write your blog, or Blogspot.com as your host, I highly recommend you save the HTML coding for your blog’s template on a regular basis.

I’m not sure who’s to blame -- and I’m sure it’s not me -- but I lost the bottom quarter of my sidebar yesterday and I’m sure you wouldn’t want something like that to happen to you.

I’m starting something new today, something I plan to run every Friday: a survey of Rittenhouse readers.

I tried to find polling software that would suit my needs, but was unsuccessful.

As a result, I’m asking readers instead to send me an e-mail in response to this question:

Should The Rittenhouse Review add a forum for comments after each post to the site?

In order to facilitate tallying, please enter the following in the subject line of your e-mail: Friday Survey #1: Yes, No, or No Opinion, as you see fit.

Please do not add, ahem, comments to these messages, as I would prefer to gather the results from a scan of the subject lines only.

Thanks for your help!

A quick check of the referral log reveals a recent visitor to Rittenhouse arrived here after performing the following Google search:

peggy noonan nude

Oh, the humanity!

Last night, in need of cigarettes, I made my way out of my otherwise comfortable abode, sometime around 11:00 p.m. Approaching the intersection of 13th and Spruce Streets I noticed a black woman trying to hail a cab. While she was within my sight I saw two cabs, both with their in-service lights on, pass her by.

After entering the nearest convenience store, taking some cash out of my account and then buying a pack of Benson & Hedges, I returned to the same corner, finding the same woman still trying to find a taxi.

“How long have you been out here?” I asked.

“About half an hour,” she responded.

“Looking for a cab the whole time?” I asked.

“Yeah. They’re just not stopping. I think it’s `cause they think I’m a man. I was thinking of taking my hat off so they know I’m a woman,” she said.

“Maybe, but I doubt it’s because they think you’re a man. I suspect it’s because you’re black,” I answered. [Ed.: The woman was all of 4 feet, 11 inches.]

“You think so? I’ve heard about that in New York and stuff,” she said.

“Watch this. You want a cab? I’ll get you a cab,” I said. “Stand back. Don’t move until I open the cab door, and then you step forward and slide in, okay?”

Within 30 seconds, and that’s an exaggeration, if anything, on the generous side, I had a cab at my beck and call, and she got a ride home.

Sure, Neal Pollack, the satirist who formerly made his home in Philadelphia, can say he’s friends with “a working class black woman,” but I can say, at the very least, that I got a cab for a black woman.

So I’m a little irritated by the recent and blatant hypocrisy (See addendum.) displayed by syndicated columnist and second-rate blogger James Lileks, and I decide I might want to drop a line to Lileks’s base, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, home of the world’s proudest Target shopper’s column, “Backfence.”

Hmm . . . Where to send my thoughts?

I know! How about the newspaper’s ombudman? That sounds right.

Experienced web user that I am, I trekked over to the Star Tribune’s web site, which can be found here.

I scanned the sidebar on the left-hand side of the home page and found no listing for “ombudsman.” That’s no surprise, really. I suspected a little hunting would be in order. And so I clicked “contact us.”

Huh. No listing for the Star Tribune’s ombudsman.

Okay, how about trying “Newsroom Staff Directory”?

Nope. Gotta’ have a real last name to work with that. Or at least as much as you know.

Oh, wait, there’s an option for “a complete staff listing.” Let’s try that.

Cool. Everybody’s here. Let’s search the listings for “ombudsman.”

“The text entered was not found.”

Well then, how about “feedback form”?

Wow, lots of stuff. Lots and lots of options here.

Let’s try “other content comments and feedback,” maybe that will get us an actual name. The real name of a real living ombudsman.

Alas, no. Just a routine form to fill out.

I got it! Site map!

Uh, no.

Hmm . . . What to do?

Of course, the consistently reliable Google.

And a Google search of “Star Tribune Minneapolis ombudsman” leads me to none other than one Lou Gelfand.

Hey, Lou, nice to meet you!

Now, wait a second. Where have I heard that name before?

I remember. It was when I searched the Star Tribune’s site for the term “ombudsman,” a search that brought me first to a piece headlined “Too Bad Times Didn’t Have an Ombudsman,” a few random thoughts published back after the oh-way-big-huge-isn’t-this-the-worst controversy surrounding former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines.

In that piece, Gelfand wrote:

I used to call the New York Times switchboard to point out errors of fact, suggesting a correction was in order. There was no listed number to call for corrections.

The operator would send me to the “national desk,” where the response was courteous but unavailing.

Eventually, I gave up.

Now that’s saying something, because at 9:30 p.m., Eastern Time, this very evening, I tried to find a “listed number for corrections” at the Star Tribune and found there was none to be had.

Failing that, I tried to reach someone, anyone, at the Star Tribune, and after going through innumerable hoops to register at the paper’s web site -- entirely too taxing an experience for someone who wants access to what is little more than a second-tier regional -- I got nowhere.

I didn’t give up, though. I persisted. I called every number I could find for the paper and eventually went through the security desk, for crying out loud, twice, trying to reach a real human being, preferably one in the upper ranks of the Star Tribune’s editorial offices, only to be told, twice: “I’m sorry. There’s nobody up there. I know they’ve all gone home for the day.”

At 8:30 p.m. local time? Gee whiz, I know Midwesterners go to bed early and all, but really, a newspaper shuts down at 8:30?

Anyway, Gelfand’s little piece, fascinating and au courant as it might have been at the time, made no mention of his position at the paper, which, I should add, I can’t confirm independently right now since, as I just mentioned, “they’ve all gone home for the day.”

Thus I’m only presuming, based on my Google search, that the Star Tribune actually has an ombudsman on staff and that the ombudsman takes the form of a person known as Lou Gelfand. “So much for personal accountability,” as the altogether unjustifiably sneering Gelfand himself once said.

Gelfand’s job is one I would like. It’s obviously not too demanding. The Star Tribune’s web site indicates its ombudsman’s last article was published in September. No newspaper in the world is that good.

The New York Review of Books may have the most erudite readers, the New York Times may have the most pretentious readers, the New York Daily News may have the dumbest readers, the Philadelphia Daily News may have the meanest readers, and Tikkun may have the most made-up readers, but The Rittenhouse Review has the best readers, a group that includes L.H., a wonderful woman who not only hit the tip box but sent me -- and Mildred -- four (4!) items from my Amazon.com wish list.

Watch your mailbox, L.H. There’s something coming, something that includes a rare and cherished photo of the most beautiful bulldog in the world.

“I had this awesome dream last night. Let me tell me about it.”

No two sentences, combined, are more certain to lead me to roll my eyes in boredom than those quoted above.

Don’t tell me your dreams. I’m not listening if you do.

Snarky as that is, I’ll ask you to read this.

The other day, while napping in the afternoon, at which time I found myself in that really scarily deep, napping dream-space that borders on a coma, I had a truly amazing dream, a great story, presenting itself in clear terms as a veritable pre-outlined, pre-treatmented screenplay for a blockbuster thriller.

Okay, so a good friend of mine was killed in the dream, possibly by her future husband. Who cares? It’s a potential blockbuster thriller!

I woke up shaking, the dream was so disturbing.

And after I was done shaking, I scribbled down as much as I could remember about the dream. I mean, it’s a potential blockbuster, after all.

Then I called my mother, who’s read about every thriller ever written, and a friend who has seen about every thriller ever shown, the calls an effort to confirm the story hasn’t been told already.

Their appreciation for the plot and its intertwining conflicts duly noted, I set down to work.

What is Mildred, anyway?

Sure, she’s a bulldog, an English bulldog to be more specific, but what is she exactly? What is she like in, uh, person?

I’ve long described Mildred, based on her appearance, personality, and behavior, as being part dog, part cat, part rabbit, part monkey, part pig, part seal, part hippo, part bear (especially polar bear), part tick, and part human.

Today I received a card from a friend featuring a photograph of a penguin.

The resemblance is, in a word, eerie.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Oh, gee whiz, this I really don’t need right now.

I’m not yet sure whether it’s genuine, and, as a result, I don’t know whether or not I will publish it, but yesterday I received a mash note from none other than Ben Shapiro, the very, very angry conservative wannabe pundit, would-be Daniel Pipes, and ersatz Ann Coulter coming out of Los Angeles.

Hard to believe given his usual perspicacity, but Tom of TBogg is late to a certain party.

About Mickey Kaus -- little smidge, Napoleon complex, balding, friend of Andrew, that guy -- Tom writes, among much else, “Mickey Kaus has finally become unreadable. . . . [I]t’s not because his ‘iconoclast schtick [sic]’ has gotten old. . . . Kausfiles is a mess.”

“Finally”? Where you been, buddy?

[Post-publication addendum: Regardless, don’t miss Tom on the despicable, fraudulent, and absurdly hypocritical James Lileks. This guy still has a job? Lileks, I mean. Not Tom.]

I need a job.

Now.

As in, today.

As in, two months ago.

And thanks, PECO Energy (a/k/a Philadelphia Electric), for being so understanding. I only hope J.P. Morgan is half as compassionate.

No new insights here, just astonishment.

At Andrew Sullivan’s web site today you will find fawning, obsequious, and toadying commentary in praise of such contemptible poseurs and assorted fringistas* as Mike Kelly, Mark Steyn, Howard Kurtz, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), and the Jewish World Review, along with an all-too-courteous critique of David Frum.

Amazing.

By the way, when did Sullivan decide it was in his interest to link to other mere bloggers? Was it, perhaps, when his standing in the various measures of bloggers’ popularity started dipping?

Hate to get super-cynical, but is Sullivan no longer a Catholic because the media, with an assist from a Catholic blogger or two, or more, is now aware that he doesn’t know half as much about Catholicism as they thought he did?

Forgive me if I don’t know who “Galloway” is.

And is there any more awful a Sullivanism than “let’s unpack this”?

(* You saw it here first.)

Hmm . . . Nurses strike. Hospital obstinate in talks. Strike goes in to fifth week. The nurses’ union is scheduled to vote today on a new contract. Owner announces hospital will close March 1.

A thousand jobs down the toilet.

Conspiracy or par for the course?

Who says workers -- even professionals -- don’t need unions anymore?

Only those dimwits who will buy the company line, courtesy in this case of Tenet Healthcare Corp., that it’s the nurses’ fault.

ADDENDUM

Mary Jones of Sound & Fury, Signifying Nothing writes:

Nothing makes me angrier than the way companies like Tenet screw over nurses.

There is a tremendous shortage of both nurses and doctors in this country (and in this state), and for Tenet to simply close the hospital because it would supposedly be more cost-effective for them to do so -- Cost effective? Not in the long run, not for Philadelphia as a whole. But who are we to stand in the way of a CEO’s yearly bonus? -- is horrible enough, but the way they did it is absolutely appalling.

They baited the nurses into a strike, and now everyone will blame one of the most overworked, underappreciated groups of people in society.

Conspiracy? You bet it’s a conspiracy, in the sense that business, the current administration, and the media have toxic views towards unions, and they’re exploiting it for their own gains. In the end, it won’t matter to some CEO out in California, but for the rest of us? I shudder to think.

Sorry. I don’t mean to ramble, but I’m so outraged by this situation, and its relationship to the rest of the healthcare situation both in Philadelphia and the country. Also, my mom and cousin are both nurses, so it hits home a little.

Mary

Ed.: I don’t think she’s rambling, do you? I think she makes perfect sense.

[Post-publication addendum: Ah, the memories. If you’re interested in one of Rittenhouse’s angrier moments, take a look at “When the Going Gets Tough,” which, by coincidence, also deals with labor unions, and where I say, among other things, “Wake up, people. You’re being screwed big time from every which way including up. And not just working-class Americans, but the middle class as well.”]

Michelangelo Signorile, Rosie O’Donnell, a $100 million-dollar lawsuit, and gay marriage.

Here’s Rosie:

Any and every thing I wrote to [my partner] Kelli, you know, which they were using against me, some of my essays -- you know, when you get into a deep, dark place and you say, “You know what honey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Well, if the honey is the same sex as you, that is evidence in a trial, and that’s hard to believe in America. . . . And if they didn’t have access to some of those letters I wrote to Kelli, I don’t think they would have sued me. Because, innately [sic], what they were thinking was that I would rather give them money than show the truth of my darkest part to America.

(* You saw it here first. It’s a combination, of sorts, of “Jeopardy”’s longstanding category, “Potent Potables,” and the now colloquial “Notable Quotable.”)

Wondering how the Democrats are doing? Check in with someone who knows, someone with enough free time to give the party’s presidential prospects ample thought and a thorough analysis, someone with a deep understanding of the American political system, someone with a finger on the pulse of the American people.

Someone like Tina Brown.

Okay, Brown might not have been your first choice, but she’s what’s being offered up today by the Washington Post, what a wag once called the most self-important newspaper in the most self-important city in the world. So she must know something.

In “Tough Time for Democrats,” Brown shares her assessment of those considered to be the six leading contenders in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and her insights into their prospects, insights gained, or at least confirmed, by Brown’s recent attendance at -- what else? -- a dinner party, or more specifically and impressively, “a media-heavy Manhattan dinner party.” (You didn’t think she went out noshing in Queens or anything, did you?)

That’s our intrepid columnist, going right to the source!

Here’s what the readers of the paper of record in the nation’s capital are reading this morning. Sen. Joseph M. Lieberman: “censorious smile,” “jungle-book voice.” Sen. John F. Kerry: “the talking tree with the `70s hair.” Sen. John Edwards: “hopelessly puppyish.” Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark: “cyborg hero of places no one can spell.” Howard Dean: “a pisher with no past and no neck.” Rep. Richard Gephardt: “retain[s] a certain Great Plains steadfastness,” albeit a little light in the loafers.

Drawing upon an analogy with -- what else? -- a TV program, and a cable TV program at that, Brown all but calls them a bunch of queers.

In contrast, there’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), speaking to that most effete of institutions, the Council on Foreign Relations, and just oozing masculinity: “[S]ure of her leonine power, she morphed her pinstripe pantsuit before our eyes into battle fatigues and flak jacket. Planted solidly behind the lectern with only intermittent reference to her notes she exuded the sense of a well-filled mind and life. Maybe not yet a credible commander-in-chief but at least a Democratic Major Barbara.”

Unfortunately, Brown tells us, we’ll have to wait four years for the Democrats to get in touch with their inner straight man, their inner he-man; four more years until the Democrats can even think about tapping a much needed wellspring of misplaced testosterone.

Brown’s offensive commentary would be an awful joke if it weren’t such typical fare, not only in the media writ large, but in the Post itself. You would think having one Howie Kurtz on staff would be enough, wouldn’t you? No, take two.

[Post-publication addendum: On “Major Barbara,” see not only, of course, Major Barbara’s blog, linked above (Arms & The Man), but also Sisyphus Shrugged. Apparently Julia thinks Tina makes no sense. Perish the thought!]

Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

It was 1970. I was in the third grade. This was back in the day when kids made Christmas presents for their parents on the school’s dime, something I doubt is done any longer, though I could be wrong.

That year, for our mothers, we assembled a cookbook, or a collection of recipes, each student having solicited his mother for a favorite Christmas-season recipe. (Trust me when I say that no individual student, nor his family, was disturbed by this request. There were no Jews, Moslems, Unitarians, or atheists in our little village.)

In preparation for the project, my mother sent me to school with her recipe for butter cookies.

I loved those cookies. And yet, when the cookbook was completed it struck me, even then at eight years of age, that my mother’s recipe was far less interesting or exotic than those contributed by the other mothers.

I wasn’t ashamed, but I did feel funny somehow.

Time passes. Things change. Perceptions are altered.

And now, writing this today, there’s no recipe I want more than my mother’s formula -- along with her talent -- for baking the perfect butter cookie. And I wonder: Might this be the only recipe all of those mothers saved?

There’s one thing I would enjoy more of course, and that’s the butter cookies themselves. Preferably butter cookies simply adorned with green or red sugar sprinkles, nothing more complicated or elaborate than that.

But don’t worry. I think B. is taking care of it.

If she doesn’t, I’ll get back to you.

Or to Mom.

[Post-publication addendum (December 18): B. is taking care of it. Even before reading this B. had purchased red and green sugar sprinkles in preparation for the project. And -- finally! -- it’s confirmed: B. and A. are heading to Nepal next month to fetch my next, my incipient, my impending, my newest niece. Hope and pray for peace there: in the meantime, until then, and always.]

[Post-publication addendum (December 19): Whoa. New York blogger Diana found the recipe to end all recipes. As in, STOP writing recipes! (If links are whacked, search for “repulsive.”)]

[Post-publication addendum (December 19): I asked her. Mom, I mean. For the recipe. I’m waiting to hear.]

[Post-publication addendum (December 22): Mom came through with the recipe. See above.]

Although blogs and blogging are about more than making lists, even we in this avant-garde medium are known to succumb to the lures of that perennial fallback of magazine publishing known as “The Lists.”

As an admittedly disinterested fan of lists, I tend to pay close attention to those assembled by bloggers, particularly when the lists are derived from a field in which he or she has a certain expertise.

The Worst Movies of All Time, by Brian Linse of AintNoBadDude, which I found by way of Roger Ailes, is among such lists.

Like Ailes I’m pleased to say that I haven’t seen any of the films Linse selected as the 10 worst ever made. And while I’ve only seen five of the films on Linse’s best top-10 list, I can’t say I would agree with his assessment. Then again, I don’t go to the movies very often, so what do I know?

Linse thoughtfully included his eight “guilty pleasures,” though the persistent appeal of “Barbarella” remains mystifying, particularly from one as gifted as he is.

Excuse me, Brian? Have you never seen “What’s Up, Doc?”

That’s a guilty pleasure I’m only too happy to broadcast.

Hell, I know the screenplay by heart. (“Sylvia-Louise. You know, with a hyphen.” “I’m coming in there!” “That’s . . . unbelievable.” “You know, the nut with the rocks.”)

And you do too, C&C.

[Post-publication addendum (December 18): Reader A.D.M. writes in: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” (Ed.: A line from the film uttered by Howard Bannister [Ryan O’Neal], in response to “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” from Judy Maxwell [Barbra Streisand]. Hilarious. Don’t get it? It’s a period piece.)]

Wondering which candidate deserves your support? Or the candidate with whom you share the greatest affinity, at least according to a quick questionnaire?

Well, I wasn’t, but I still trekked over to SelectSmart.com’s American Presidential Candidate’s Selector and answered all of the questions. It’s uncanny how accurately the poll assessed my political proclivities.

The results of my experience with SelectSmart are posted below:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (75%)

Rev. Al Sharpton (68%)

Sen. John Kerry (62%)

Gov. Howard Dean (59%)

Ret. Gen. Wesley K. Clark (57%)

Sen. John Edwards (57%)

Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (52%)

Rep. Dick Gephardt (50%)

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (36%)

President George W. Bush (23%)

More than anything else I’m shocked President Bush, miserable failure he, scored as high as 23 percent. Must be the whole cloning thing.

Late this afternoon the newly established Mildred Pierce Fat/Beautiful Scorekeeper -- an unscientific montior of public perception (or projection) with respect to my English bulldog, Chadwin VII’s Mildred Pierce, better known as Mildred -- picked up two more entirely unsolicited votes in the “Fat” column.

Middle-Aged Man Speaking with Building Doorman (To Mildred): Girl, could you get any fatter?

Me (in a defensive tone): She’s not fat. She’s a bulldog. That’s what she’s supposed to look like*.

Second Middle-Aged Man Speaking with Building Doorman (patronizingly): She’s not fat. She’s big-boned.

Me: Heh. Yep. Big-boned. Her shoulders are broader than yours, pal.

Middle-Aged Man Speaking with Building Doorman (To Mildred): How `bout a walk around the block? You could use it!

Me: How `bout hittin’ the StairMaster, buddy? Come on, Mildred, let’s go upstairs and have a snack. It’s like loser-ville down here.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m getting really pissed off by this crap.

(* See especially, “Size, Proportion, Symmetry”: “Influence of Sex In comparison of specimens of different sex, due allowance should be made in favor of the bitches, which do not bear the characteristics of the breed to the same degree of perfection and grandeur as do the dogs.”)

It looks like Iraqi officials may have captured Saddam Hussein and placed him under arrest. That's what the Associated Press is reporting, by way of IRNA, Iran's official news agency.

As that idiot with the dopey hat would say: “Developing . . .”

I can't help but wonder: Is this a good thing for the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz administration? What will Saddam have to say about “weapons of mass destruction”? Watch for a gag order.

This directive request won’t apply to most readers, but I hope you will at least keep it in mind over the next several days, weeks, or months, as long as it takes: If you happen to drive by the Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia (owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp.) and you see striking nurses walking the picket line out front, honk in support, because, well, they would appreciate it, the whole thing is getting really ugly, which is not the nurses’ fault, and besides, it’s cold outside. And it’s almost Christmas.

We bloggers, who are viewed as either “blowhard[s], any old varmint[s], pipsqueak[s], [and] half-wits,”* or “freewheeling and full of attitude,” take our victories and accomplishments where we can.

With that in mind, I’m putting all authors on notice: I can make you or break you.

How so? Well, on Thursday I wrote favorably about three books -- The Speed of Light, The Meaning of Everything, and The Professor and the Madman -- and within two days at least one copy, and as many as five (!) copies, of each book was purchased from Amazon.com through links provided by Rittenhouse.

Pretty impressive, huh? Now just imagine how many copies were purchased through other means! It’s gotta’ be a whole lot, dontcha’ think?

So, yes, authors, I can make you or break you, if only at the rate of one copy of one book at a time.

Authors, editors, and publicists seeking my mailing address may click here.

(* Norah Vincent. Published after her failed foray into the blogosphere.)

[Note: Reports to me from Amazon.com reveal which items Rittenhouse readers have purchased through links from this site, but the identity of the buyers cannot in any way be determined.]

It may not have been intentional, but the second clause (sorry for the pun) in this sentence, from “A Christmas Crime in the City,” by Beth Gillin of the Philadelphia Inquirer, includes a pretty clever double entendre:

It saddens us to report that Santa’s been zapped from a cherished Philadelphia holiday ritual -- the annual light show at the landmark Center City department store occupied since 1997 by Lord & Taylor.

Now, I understand that the demise of Wanamaker’s was hard for some Philadelphians to take, but really, occupied territory?

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Overheard, earlier this afternoon, on South 12th Street, Philadelphia, after a beautiful silver sports car had pulled along the curb:

Female Pedestrian No. 1: Would you just step back? You are practically riding on that man’s car!

Female Pedestrian No. 2: I know I am! You think I’m gonna’ let a car like that go by without finding out who’s behind the wheel? Or at least what he looks like?

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Several readers have asked for additional details and/or required clarification about the mugging that I discussed here on Monday.

First, and this will mean little to those who do not live in Philadelphia, it occurred near the intersection of Broad and Spruce Streets. (I may have told an e-mailer Broad and Locust, but that was not correct.) This is not an unsafe area, but it can be rather desolate late at night.

The robbery occurred on Sunday night, not Monday night, at about 11:15 p.m.

I was not stabbed. The “painful gash on my left palm” that I mentioned resulted from my using my hands to break the fall after the mugger pushed me to the ground. My palms hit a patch of ice, leaving a deep and nasty abrasion on my left palm and a small scratch on my right.

I felt okay about it all on Sunday night, but beginning Monday afternoon I started getting skittish about the whole thing. I didn’t see the perpetrator’s face but I know he has a beard because I could feel it on the back of my neck while he was going through my pockets. (Yuck. Scrubbed that off real good!) I could feel his beard again, and that, obviously, was creepy.

Fortunately, I guess, he got me when I was heading to an ATM machine and not after I had withdrawn cash, so I didn’t lose too much. And in a welcome display of karma (I think it’s karma) a reader who saw my Monday write-up subsequently hit the tip box with the exact same amount of money I had in my wallet at the time.

And Ginger Mayerson of The Hackenblog, in an incredibly thoughtful gesture, arranged for Così to send me a gift package to help replace the buy-ten-get-one-free card I lost in the incident. Bloggers really are among your better classes of people.

(Oh, I forgot to mention earlier that the wallet itself was a big loss. It was a snappy Prada number that I got as a gift several years ago. Idiot probably sold it for two bucks.)

In a way, I was almost overdue for this. I’ve been living in large cities since 1986 and I’ve never been robbed or even bothered on the street.

So, rest assured, I’m fine. My left hand is still bandaged, but I’m fine. And I still love Philadelphia.

The executive director of the Barnes Foundation earlier this week revealed that several items from its collection and offices, including “a work by Henri Matisse” and a grand piano, were “missing.”

Today the Philadelphia Inquirer reports the instrument wasn’t really missing at all. (“Missing Piano Turns Up in Ardmore,” by Peter Dobrin.)

It turns out an Ardmore, Pa., couple purchased the piano from the Barnes Foundation seven years ago through a classified ad placed in the Main Line Times, and at a bargain price too.

So, which is worse? That the Barnes considered the piano to be “missing” or that the foundation didn’t know it had sold the instrument in the first place? Tough call.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

This is a real headline from a real newspaper: “Boxing-gloved Gangs Attack Pedestrians.”

The article, by Regina Medina, who gets points just for having that name, appeared in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Daily News.

The gangs, working in groups of five to 15, attack pedestrians and bikers without warning.

Clad in black-hooded sweatshirts and black skullcaps, they hunt down victims in the dark, then beat them mercilessly, shouting “Get him!” and “you ain’t goin’ nowhere!”

In at least one case, they stabbed a young man with a knife. In another, they shot an advertising salesman who stopped to ask for directions. They’re [sic] motive is uncertain.

But it’s the boxing gloves that give these attacks an added bizarre twist.

“I’ve never seen that before -- using boxing gloves to beat up people,” said Lt. Walter Bell, head of Special Investigations in South Detectives.

Detective Larry McKnight, one of the lead investigators, says he’s seen a lot in his 30 years as a cop. “This is a first for me.”

Police say they believe seven incidents, all in South Philadelphia, are linked to one or more gangs that have been randomly attacking people near the Courtyard at the Riverview, also known as the “Tower,” a residential area just south of Queen Village.

I’m really not trying to make light of this. But it’s strange, isn’t it?

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

POLITICAL NOTES: You would think asking James A. Baker to sever certain business connections -- “Baker is senior counselor to the Carlyle Group, a global investment company that has done business with the Saudi royal family. He is also a partner in Baker Botts, a Houston law firm whose client list includes Halliburton” (New York Times, December 12) -- would be a no-brainer, wouldn’t you? More evidence of the Age of Unseriousness. . . . Paul Krugman on the unbearably obnoxious and gratuitously offensive Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: “Mr. Wolfowitz’s official rationale for the contract policy is astonishingly cynical: ‘Limiting competition for prime contracts will encourage the expansion of international cooperation in Iraq and in future efforts’ -- future efforts? -- and ‘should encourage the continued cooperation of coalition members.’ Translation: we can bribe other nations to send troops.” . . . Gen. Wesley Clark: A “quick study.” . . . Deepak Choprah, Ricky Martin, Betty Williams, et al., “peace cells,” “gift accounts”: It could work. . . . Quote of the Day: World O’ Crap on Ollie North: “I guess an article using one ‘F-word’ can be considered ‘profanity-laced,’ but only by someone whose background is felony-laced.”

MISCELLANY: So, Rush, what was that you were saying about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb? . . . Can the Metropolitan Opera find a replacement sponsor for its Sunday afternoon live radio broadcasts, now that ChevronTexaco Corp. has pulled out, the $7 million tab apparently being too much for the company to bear? (The Annenberg Foundation already has pledged $3.5 million.) ChevronTexaco’s profits year-to-date: $5.5 billion. . . . Enough already with Jack Nicholson. Pull quote: “‘I don’t know the name of a club in Los Angeles, never mind have I been to one,’ said Nicholson, 66, who claims to be a homebody these days, spending nights alone or with friends.” [Emphasis added.] Now, is that such a remarkable statement or is it pretty much to be expected of someone who is approaching 70 years of age? . . . If these are “retro” toys, I’d hate to hear what they would call the playthings of my childhood. . . . Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas. Say the Rosary in Spanish. (It’s Friday, so use the Sorrowful Mysteries.) . . . No link for this one, just a slice of my life: Let me tell you something, when a 60-pound bulldog doesn’t want to go somewhere, she doesn’t go there.

THE 2003 KOUFAX AWARDS: Mary Beth Williams and Dwight Meredith of Wampum are collecting nominations for the 2003 Koufax Awards. This is the second year for the awards, which represent the highest honor on the liberal/left side of the blogosphere. Stop by Wampum and submit your own nominations in the comments section or by sending an e-mail to either Williams or Meredith.

A READER WRITES: “You’re just as good as Sully [Andrew Sullivan] and he seems to be living the high life with his ‘pledge drives,’ so why don’t you become a full time blogger and get paid for it? You have the writing skills and passion for the issues. Go for it man!” What do you mean, “just as good”?

NUTTY RIGHT-WING BLOGGERS (Again): Go read this.

[Note: Items may be added to “Political Notes” after initial publication.]

Yes, I know, I missed “Tina Brown Thursday” again.

But, come on, just look at the headline on Tina Brown’s weekly Washington Post column: “Paris Hilton, in an Age Beyond Embarrassment.”

Too easy.

POLITICAL NOTES: Gee whiz, even Richard Nixon thought Ronald Reagan was “strange.” And more: Nixon found Reagan not “pleasant to be around,” “an uncomfortable man to be around,” and “not one that wears well,” adding “on a personal basis [Reagan] is terrible.” The quotes come from newly released White House tapes. No surprise: Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman is there agreeing with every word Nixon says. . . . The Washington Post reports today that the CIA is going to create an Iraqi intelligence agency. Down how many roads already traveled, and with disastrous results, does the Bush administration intend to take this country? . . . Message to “Old” Europe: Forgive them their debts but step aside while we take all the good stuff. . . . One of these days maybe a reporter, an editorialist, a columnist, or even a politician will make the fairly obvious observation that “the problem” with the Democratic presidential debates isn’t that there are too many candidates, it’s that the questions are so stupid. . . . Meanwhile, George F. Will may not have copies of the president’s pre-debate briefing books -- yet -- so for now he’ll just play third-base coach, at least until Karl Rove calls. . . . David S. Broder, known respectfully, I think, as “Dean Broder,” is just so confused. “Al Gore’s decision to intervene early -- and especially his call on Howard Dean’s rivals to ‘close ranks’ behind the governor -- is one of the more eccentric developments in modern political history.” Really? “Eccentric”? Ranking right up there, one supposes, with the presidential aspirations of H. Ross Perot and Lyndon LaRouche, George H.W. Bush’s selection of former Sen. Dan Quayle as his running mate, the Republican Senate whip’s cries of “Bring Out Our Nearly Dead” preceding roll call votes so former Sen. Strom Thurmond could be wheeled in to the chamber, Nancy Reagan’s repeated consultations with astrologers, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

MISCELLANY: It looks like Campbell Soup Co. heiress Mrs. Samuel M.V. (Mary Louise Dorrance Hill) Hamilton, known affectionately, I think, as “DoDo,” might be in some trouble arising from her investment in The Moshulu, a restaurant on a ship docked in Philadelphia at Pier 34 when that same pier collapsed into the Delaware River in May 2000, killing three people . . . Enough already with Hugh Heffner. Who cares what he does, says, or thinks? . . . QVC’s favorite designer, Diane von Furstenberg, can’t imagine a woman heading Gucci. What does she know? She’s married to Barry Diller. . . Hey, Pledge Week, what a great idea!

BOOK NOTES: I just finished reading two books that I highly recommend. First, The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (mentioned here November 26, though that was after I had completed the first four chapters), an extraordinary novel that takes you into the mind of an exceptional autistic man, his search for identity, self-respect, dignity, love, and a possible cure. . . . Second, The Meaning of Everything, by Simon Winchester (a gift from a generous reader), a history of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is far more interesting than it sounds, and written in prose clear and precise enough to keep you firmly within its grasp, but interspersed with enough unfamiliar words to make you long for your own copy of the OED, or at least teach you a thing or two. Winchester, author of the also excellent (and related) book, The Professor and the Madman, redeemed himself with The Meaning of Everything, squashing painful memories of his just plain awful Krakatoa.

They used to say a neonconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.

Last night I was mugged. Mugged by reality in the form of a mugger.

There’s not much to say really, it all happened so fast. A man grabbed me from behind, extending his left arm across my chest. “I want your wallet,” he said, or something like that, I can’t remember exactly, and then he went for my back right-hand pocket, which is where my wallet normally is, but it wasn’t last night. Then he reached into the right-hand pocket of my coat, which isn’t where my wallet usually is, but it was last night. And then he knocked me to the ground and ran off.

And that was it.

An ugly and painful gash on my left palm and some cash and easily replaceable ATM and library cards gone, along with my buy-ten-sandwiches-or-salads-get-the-next-one-free card from Cosí, just recently stamped for the tenth time.

The biggest annoyance: losing my driver’s license. It was my New York driver’s license and it expired a few months ago. One can replace an expired out-of-state license with a Pennsylvania license with little hassle as long as the expiration date is within the past six months. Now, however, unless I can get a replacement from New York, which is unlikely since I no longer live there, I’ll probably have to start from scratch. I knew I should have taken care of this a long time ago.

Do you remember that incident, relayed in David Brock’s Blinded By The Right and reported elsewhere, about Laura Ingraham and a certain Georgetown townhouse and the mail slot and the garden hose and the water and, most important, the water sent spewing through the garden hose through the mail slot into the townhouse?

Well, I’m not one to brag about being in on it all or anything, because I rarely am, but I recently received independent confirmation of the identity of the offending party and her victim by not one, not two, but now three different individuals, none of whom knows the other.

Furthermore, I now feel confident in saying not only that, yes, the nasty episode really occurred, but that I know to whom the townhouse, the mail slot, the garden hose, and even the water belonged.

I don’t know what reminded me of this particular remark today, but several months ago I was having lunch with a friend during which I made an offhand, but apparently interesting (to her), comment I no longer can recall.

And while I don’t remember what I said, I remember, and probably always will, her response: “You notice everything,” she said. “You see everything.”

No one had ever said that to me before, or anything like it, and I was taken aback.

Her remarks have stayed with me.

Mulling her aspirations in hindsight I see now, in the midst of organizing my things in preparation for what I dread will be an inevitable move out of Philadelphia and into the middle of nowhere, that I have notes, notebooks, jottings, and unfinished projects -- and a year plus of two different weblogs -- that indicate my friend wasn’t merely “close” in her observation, she was dead on.

I do notice, I realized, if not everything, at least a lot, and probably much more than the “average” person, I think.

Is this the inevitable fate of the introvert? The unavoidable destiny of the usually quiet guy who stands back . . . observing? Or is it something more?

Should I pursue this strange thing, one I’m hesitant to call a gift, assuming it even exists? Shall I follow the safe, secure path, or the take-a-chance route? Should I just get a job as a waiter or a car salesman or apply for one of those jobs at Home Depot, about the only positions for which I feel even remotely qualified lately?

Now and then I look back on my life so far and after doing so I think that every time I’ve had to make a big decision I’ve made the wrong one. So I suppose I should sit down and write out and then weigh all of the positives and negatives of each option before me and, when I’ve reached my decision, write that decision down.

And then do the exact opposite.

Have you ever wondered what might be the easiest job in the world?

For a long time I thought being a psychotherapist was the easiest job in the world. Lord knows I’ve bored -- and fooled -- enough of them in my day. You sit, you listen to some loser (or some neurotic, insecure overachiever) drone on for 45 or 50 minutes, maybe take a few notes, though that’s completely optional, and then when time’s up, well, just say so. And you’re done, at least with that loser (or neurotic overachiever).

These people don’t even have to check their watches. They smugly pretend the client doesn’t know there’s a clock over his right shoulder, a delusion we just really have to explore in depth at some point, but, like I said, with much empathy, “Our time is up for this week.”

Then I decided the easiest job in the world is drugstore pharmacist.

Notwithstanding the white coat -- you know, a stethoscope around the neck would be a nice and equally unnecessary, touch -- it seemed they did little besides punching something into a terminal, counting pills, typing labels, and taping said labels onto little amber-colored plastic bottles.

Later I noticed the stores began employing “pharmacy assistants,” a group of well meaning people who appeared to have, as their paying assignment, fetching bottles of pills for the pharmacist, typing and affixing the labels, and sometimes even counting out the dosage, which would then be confirmed by the white-coat-wearing pharmacist, leaving the pharmacist to . . . give me a second . . . oh, punch something into the terminal.

Hmm, I thought, this easy job is getting even easier.

Then the drugstores began installing pill-counting machines, a development I would have thought, with the addition of a little bar-coding here and there, would have wiped both professions off the map. And yet . . . no.

(An aside: Can no one in the pharmaceutical and drugstore businesses, to say nothing of the ancillary industries of information technology and machine-automation, devise a more efficient method for sorting filled prescriptions than the current system, which I would summarize as: “just throw all the little white matching bags with minute type printed on small stickers into a bunch of bins and hope for the best”?)

By the way, what the hell do they study for, what is it, five or six years, in pharmacy school? Seems kind of excessive to me. Wouldn’t some kind of, I don’t know, certificate program serve us all just as well? And, yeah, I know all about the laws of supply and demand, but $90,000 a year for pill counters? (Or, more accurately, terminal punchers.) My doctor, at least when he’s in a good or generous mood, does virtually the same thing for me . . . for free.

Anyway, then, all of a sudden, I found myself with a lot more free time on my hands, time that allowed me to read sections of the newspapers that I normally skipped. The comics, for example, which, when you consider the garbage that fills those pages each day, takes very little time. And also “Dear Abby” and “Ann Landers,” neither of which, I’m sure you know, is produced by either Abby or Ann, what with the twins being dead and all, not that the features ever were edited by “Abby” or “Ann,” since those were fake names from the get go.

Now this is an easy job, I thought. Sort through a bunch of mail -- or sort through a bunch of mail that has been reviewed previously by a group of paid assistants, or just make the letters up, because I remember either Abby or Ann did that, or maybe both -- decide which letters to print, come up with a wise or wise-ass response, and pass the pile along to an editor.

That’s somebody’s job?

Okay, I’ll admit, sometimes either Abby or Ann or whoever it is that’s running those shows these days touches a nerve. A letter to “Dear Abby,” published on Friday, certainly hit home with me:

Dear Abby: I have a son who is 33. He has four children and lives in another state. About a year ago, he asked me to co-sign on a house loan. I refused. Now he won’t speak to me. He didn’t even attend his grandmother’s funeral. I don’t know how to bridge this gap between us except by signing the note. I really can’t afford it, but I miss my son and grandchildren. -- Hurting in Ohio

Dear Hurting: Under no circumstances should you give in to your son’s emotional blackmail, particularly since you cannot afford it. Continue to send your grandchildren birthday and holiday greetings, and let’s hope your son grows up before they do.

Co-signing mortgages? No, I don’t know anything about that. Emotional blackmail? Oh yeah, that I know.

Ah, but then there’s “Heloise.”

The latest from Heloise that I saw was published in the Philadelphia Daily News on Thursday, under the headline “Children’s Tapes Become Keepsakes”:

Alicia of Omaha, Neb., writes to tell Heloise how pleased she was to receive letters and tapes her mother (Alicia’s mother, not Heloise’s mother) had stowed away for years after the fact.

Jan, apparently “of no fixed address,” as they say, advised readers paying credit-card bills not to write the full account number on their checks but only the last four digits. (Listen up, Heloise, and you too, Jan: I don’t write anything like that on my checks. I figure it’s just another example of companies asking their customers to do their employees’ jobs. And so I refuse. You want my account number on my check? Pick up a pen and write it down yourself after you’ve received my payment.)

Patty Reitz of Houston, who really, really doesn’t like to get her hands dirty or sticky or anything, offers a valuable manicure-saving tip on packing lunches for the kids.

And Carolyn Seibert of Orange, Texas, tells us that when making microwave pecan brittle (Yes, there is such a thing, and Carolyn discovered it all by herself! The pecan part anyway.), it’s okay to use dark corn syrup instead of light corn syrup.

Heloise published all four letters without comment.

And that, my friends, is the easiest job in the world.

People who obsess about the food they eat are irritating. People who obsess about the food others eat are contemptible.

With those observations in mind, I’m trying to decide who’s more annoying: the “Fat! Fat! Oh my God, do you know how much fat is in that? There must be at least 12 grams of fat in there!” people of the `90s or the “Carbs! Carbs! Oh my God, do you know how many carbs are in that? There must be at least 30 grams of carbs in there!” people of the `00s.

It’s a close call, but I think the anti-carbohydrate freaks are winning. (I like saying the full word -- carbohydrates -- around these types. They get visibly antsy and disdainful, realizing they’re in the company of one who is not “a true believer.”)

About six or seven years ago, when this craze was a mere fad, I worked with a woman who, I swear, counted the number of grapes and peanuts she included in her lunch. Little did I know what we were in for.

On a related note, let me add the sidewalks in many parts of Philadelphia are narrow, this being an old city and all, and are made even more narrow, or more narrowly passable, when large portions are covered with ice, as they are on this 25-degree morning.

If you and your friends want to jog -- excuse me, go running -- on these narrow sidewalks under such conditions, and insist upon doing so three abreast, I feel pretty confident I’m not the one who is obligated to yield the right of way. (And to the joggers from this morning, don’t worry, my arm doesn’t hurt too much, thanks for asking. Oh, wait, you didn’t ask. Never mind.)

That’s all. Tipping the scales at a healthy 132 pounds (BMI=19.5) today, I’m signing off with the message, “Moderation in everything.”

[Note: This post was published earlier today at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

I know I’ve been mentioning the site quite a bit lately, but I can’t help it, I’m just a big fan of World O’ Crap.

Besides, as best I can tell she hasn’t posted any contact information at her blog, so I can’t send the proprietor the kind of mash notes I’d like to.

I have to do all of this out in the open, which, considering I’ve already been exposed as an “oversexed whore[] who enjoy[s] the bedtime company of pigs,” -- as if that were an insult and not the story of my life, one I’ll tell you after my blessed mother passes on -- isn’t really such a big deal.

Anyway, to be filed under “great minds think alike,” let’s add another.

Today WOC posts a piece about Paul Harvey with the heading, “We Thought He Was Dead,” which is really cool because last year I made passing mention of Harvey as follows: “Paul Harvey is still living. He really is. I just heard him on the radio at the corner bodega. I had no idea.”

I swear we’re not the same person, nor were we separated at birth, nor were we separated at surgery, but if the woman behind WOC ever finds herself in Philadelphia, and that like never happens, dinner’s on me.

While reading the papers’ weekend supplements yesterday I encountered two movies I’ll miss. Miss as in, “I won’t see them,” not miss as in, “It’s a shame they’re gone,” namely “The Last Samurai” and “Angels in America.”

I’ll miss “The Last Samurai” in large part because, as I’ve said before, I don’t enjoy seeing films in theaters. In fact, I’ve seen only one movie in a movie theater in the past four years. But that’s my neurosis.

Regardless, I even doubt I’ll catch “The Last Samurai” when it hits the video stores. First, I’m not a fan of Tom Cruise. Second, the whole project kind of gives me the creeps. And third, I happened to read Stephen Hunter’s review in the Washington Post yesterday.

If my own neuroses and instincts weren’t enough, Hunter’s piece, “Dances With Swords,” easily the most intelligent review of the film I’ve seen yet and one that makes me pine for the words of the late Pauline Kael, will steer me clear in perpetuity.

I’ll also miss “Angels in America,” set to appear on HBO. That’s in large part because, as I’ve said here in the past, I don’t get cable TV. (“Echo,” anyone?)

I missed the show on Broadway, missed as in, “I didn’t see it and didn’t try to see it,” though I should add that I’ve missed pretty much everything that’s been on Broadway during my adult life and, to be honest, I feel I’m no less a person because of it. (After all, this is a business that as of late is pinning its hopes yet again on the likes of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. Need I say more?)

I recall only too well the brouhaha surrounding the initial Broadway run of “Angels in America.” I cringe when I think about it. No, I’m not having an Andrew Sullivan moment, getting all set to spew the usual McCarthyisms, including McCarthyisms, or reverse McCarthyisms, about McCarthy.

Rather, it’s because I remember someone, and I forget who it was -- and I’m afraid to Google it because I’m worried it might turn out to have been a completely odious figure like Hilton Kramer -- warned at the time to steer clear of films and plays that the most enthusiastic of reviewers and fans insist upon abbreviating into a single-word appellation.

“Angels in America,” which was then, is still, and apparently forever will be referred to as, simply, “Angels,” as in, “Have you seen ‘Angels’ yet?”, is a prime and enduring example of this strange quirk.

Even if Kramer said it I think it’s a good rule of thumb, ranking right up there with my rule about “chick flicks,” issued last June upon the release of “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”:

No matter how tempting the film may appear, never pay to see a movie that is promoted with trailers that include a scene of three or more women sharing a bonding moment in their underwear. (See also “Practical Magic.”)

Then there’s Meryl Streep, a fine actress and all, but one who, from a p.r. perspective, really shouldn’t be allowed to speak when off set or off stage. Besides, as you may have heard, the thing runs for six hours. Six hours? There aren’t many things that can keep my attention for six hours, and I’m not ashamed to say that a Broadway show adapted to cable TV is unlikely to be one of them.

Anyway, here’s a nonsensical quote from Streep I picked up in yesterday’s Philadelphia Daily News that confirms my apprehension about the whole pretentious-actress/six-hours thing:

I think you should watch three hours, and then watch three hours. Now that they write things on the bottom of your television screen, for all the people that are just surfing through and they see one episode, maybe you should have, like on a fax, “Page 3 of 6,” so that you know you’re on 3 of 6. So you know you’ve got to go back and watch 1 and 2, and you know you’ve got 4, 5 and 6 ahead of you.

You just know when Streep threw out that unscripted line that the flack in the room got all fidgety and started coughing and tapping her foot and crossing her arms and leaning forward and tilting her head to one side, trying to catch the reporter’s eye, and then finally interrupted with a really smooth and casual line like, “Meryl, did you want something from the buffet?”

Oh, and if all that weren’t enough, I have just two more words: Emma Thompson.

The first snow of the season began falling on Philadelphia late Friday, an occasion that normally would please me, or at the very least, not bother me a bit.

I like snow. And I live in Center City and I don’t have a car -- hell, I don’t even have a job -- so I don’t need to navigate the streets when snow comes, whether as predicted or by surprise.

I can stay home, try to stay warm, and watch the flakes descending upon the city, each making its own path toward the cold ground.

And yet I’m unhappy, sad because this is the wrong kind of snow, especially for the first of the season.

It’s not that wonderful dry and almost mysterious offering that drops leisurely and in large flakes from the sky onto a city made nearly silent by the snow’s own ethereally muffling qualities.

Instead it’s the wet snow that plummets haphazardly and discordantly, buffeted by unnecessary winds and creating a mess, slop and slosh that lead not to a tranquil hush but to the noisy grinding and churning of angry wheels against the pavement and unwanted splashes that drench unwary pedestrians.

It’s a bad omen, I think.

The first snowfall should be beautiful, a welcome reminder of the new turn, winter, a much-maligned season we all too often forget we are just as happy to see end as the miserable stretch of the calendar known as late summer.

I’m a little worried, just a bit concerned, this morning. I probably shouldn’t be. But it somehow feels wrong, ominous even, and I wish winter had arrived in Philadelphia on a softer note.

Wait, I just realized . . . Ann Coulter launched her blog, such as it is, on December 2.

Ben Shapiro hasn’t updated his blog since November 19, though he threw a laudatory bone at Coulter -- instantly gnawed out of existence by its subject, ferociously but secretly -- by way of his syndicated (somewhere, I guess) column on December 3.

And Coulter once lobbed massively undeserved and thoroughly gratuitous props at Shapiro.

Could it be that . . . they . . . I mean . . . Coulter and Shapiro . . . are . . . Oh my God! . . . The same person?

The mind reels.

More than a year ago I warned readers, at least those not already long since in on the gag -- and at the very heart of it all, it is a gag -- not to take Charles Krauthammer seriously when he’s wearing his tin-foil hat.

Krauthammer, a nationally syndicated columnist with a home base at the Washington Post -- an observation I offer not to imply in any manner whatsoever that he is or ever was or ever will be a journalist, because he isn’t, he wasn’t, and he never will be -- again put on that precious little tin-foil cap just the other day.

The result: “The Delusional Dean,” the clearest example of punditorial projection I’ve seen since Camille Paglia, referring to someone other than herself, if you can believe it, used such phrases as “what a phony,” “the hair,” “a monster,” and “delusional narcissist.”

After reading what I hope for his sake are not his own words but rather Krauthammer’s latest verbatim transcript of what he heard from the voices speaking into that tin-foil dunce cap, I could only conclude that the Washington Post, which, as noted here yesterday with respect to Tina Brown, apparently leaves its vast stable of columnists unsupervised on Wednesdays (ahead of Thursday’s issue), does the very same thing on Thursdays (ahead of Friday’s issue).

Just as I would advise Krauthammer not to listen to the voices, don’t listen to me. I’m happy to let Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler, a vastly superior expert on matters of dishonesty in the media, expose Krauthammer as the despicable and disreputable fraud he truly is.

I agree with Somerby: Krauthammer should be dropped -- disemployed, fired, canned -- and immediately, by the Post and every other self-respecting newspaper in the country (if there’s any such thing anymore) that carries his column, including my local broadsheet, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As if. When it comes to right-wing columnists, the babbling know-nothings of cable TV, radio talk-show wannabe jocks, and conservative “think tank” “scholars,” the old rules don’t apply, as they say.

You know what would be interesting, though? If someone, anyone, would take the time to explain to newspapers, broadcasters, cable network operators, and the like what is meant by the phrase “the covenant of good faith and fair dealing,” and how the intellectual and practical underpinnings of that concept, if adopted and adapted to the media’s relationships with their readers and viewers, even implicitly, might, just might, enhance the industry’s collective reputation and credibility.

I’d assign to the task to Ann Coulter (J.D., Michigan, `Vague), but from her latest efforts (see below) it’s obvious she would have been a dismal failure in the study of intellectual property there, let alone any unsupervised foray into contracts, leading me to conclude she was admitted to Michigan to fill some kind of affirmative action slot of which we assuredly will never be made aware.

I mean, anyone can fake his way through constitutional law, during law school and afterward (c.f.: William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Warren Burger, Robert Bork, etc.), but IP and contracts, well, that’s another matter.

[FYI, the ombudsman for the Washington Post is Michael Getler and he can be contacted via e-mail by clicking here.]

By way of World O’ Crap I learned that Ann Coulter, the factually challenged pundit, that walking taunt to the underlying premises of all things Newtonian, started blogging earlier this week.

The reason for Coulter’s long delay into the blogosphere, well documented at TBogg, remains a mystery. From what I can gather, Coulter is almost never the last to arrive at a party. Even less frequently is she the last to leave. Overheard:

Butler (politely but not without trepidation): “Ahem. The gentleman has asked that I inform Miss Coulter they have no more wine.”

Coulter (angrily): “Dirty liberal traitor. I knew I should have gone to that lame Conrad Black party.”

The Virgin Mary (to the servants, urgently): “Do whatever she tells you!”

All in all, it’s a disappointment. As World O’Crap observes, Coulter takes an approach to blogging that is even lazier than what Michelle Malkin brings to her syndicated column: Coulter, a lawyer, posted to her blog the entire text of an article that previously was published by the New York Times, revealing her complete inability to grasp the concept of intellectual property. Now, whether that’s because Coulter didn’t take the relevant courses while at the University of Michigan or because she simply has never been in possession of such a thing, I cannot say.

Regardless, to welcome Coulter to the blogosphere, I’d like to direct readers to her latest column. Sure, you could make the trek over to anncoulter.org and read it there -- look for the stream of consciousness posted under the heading, “Supreme Court Opinions Not Private Enough” -- but why bother? Stay right here, put your feet up, and enjoy:

THE FIRST killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going.

The nation embarked on its abortion holocaust in 1973, when the Supreme Court astonished the nation by suddenly discovering that the Constitution mandated a right to abortion, despite there being nothing anyplace in the Constitution vaguely hinting at abortion.

Everyone knew the decision in Roe v. Wade was a joke. The decision hinged on the convenient notion of "privacy," which, oddly enough, still fails to protect my right to manufacture methamphetamine, saw off shotgun barrels or euthanize the elderly, privately or otherwise. Even Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz has said the decision was wrong.

During oral argument in Roe, the entire courtroom laughed when the lawyer arguing for abortion law ticked off a string of constitutional provisions allegedly violated by Texas' abortion law – the due process clause, the equal protection clause, the Ninth Amendment "and a variety of others." According to the "The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court" by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, the law clerks felt as if they were witnessing "something embarrassing and dishonest" about the decision-making process in Roe, with the justices brokering trimesters and medical judgments like a group of legislators. Never has the phrase "judge, jury and executioner" been more apt than with regard to this landmark ruling.

The nation was so shocked and enraged by the ruling in Roe that ... state legislatures meekly rewrote their laws in accordance with the decision. The Supreme Court building wasn't burned down. No abortion doctors were killed for the next two decades. No state dared ignore the ruling in Roe. Even when dealing with lawless tyrants, conservatives have a fetish about following the law.

Instead, Americans who opposed abortion spent the next 20 years working within the system, electing two presidents, patiently waiting for Supreme Court justices to retire, fighting bruising nomination battles to get three Reagan nominees and two Bush nominees on the court. Then they passed an abortion law in Pennsylvania that was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. At that point, Republican presidents had made 10 consecutive appointments to the Supreme Court. Surely, now, at long last, Americans would finally be allowed to have a say on the nation's abortion policy.

But the Supreme Court upheld the "constitutional right" to abortion announced in Roe. The decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey was written by Reagan's biggest mistake, Sandra Day O'Connor, his third-choice candidate Anthony Kennedy, and "stealth nominee" David Hackett Souter. The court's opinion declared that it was calling "the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution." Eight months later, the first abortion doctor was killed.

Meanwhile, conservatives responded the way conservatives always do. They went back to the drawing board and came up with a plan. It was the same plan that hasn't worked for 30 years: Elect a Republican president, wait for openings on the court and keep your fingers crossed. It's been going swimmingly so far. We can't even get the stunningly brilliant Harvard law graduate and Honduran immigrant Miguel Estrada a spot on a court of appeals.

Having literally gotten away with murder for a quarter century, the court is getting wilder and wilder, deferring to "international law" and issuing nutty pronouncements more appropriate to a NAMBLA newsletter.

In the past few years, federal courts have proclaimed a right to sodomy (not in the Constitution), a right to partial-birth abortion (not in the Constitution), a right not to have a Democratic governor recalled (not in the Constitution), a right not to gaze upon the Ten Commandments in an Alabama courthouse (not in the Constitution), a ban on the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance (not in the Constitution), and a ban on voluntary student prayers at high-school football games (not in the Constitution).

These bizarre rulings illustrate the notion of the Constitution as a "living document," one which rejects timeless moral principles so as to better reflect the storylines in this week's episode of "Ally McBeal." You may like or dislike the end result of these rulings, but – as subtly alluded to above – none of these rulings come from anything written in the Constitution.

In response to the court's sodomy ruling last term, conservatives are talking about passing a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. It's really touching how conservatives keep trying to figure out what constitutional mechanisms are available to force the courts to acknowledge the existence of the Constitution. But what is the point of a constitutional amendment when judges won't read the Constitution we already have? What will the amendment say? "OK, no fooling around – we really mean it this time!"

While conservatives keep pretending we live in a democracy, liberals are operating on the rule of the jungle. The idea of the rule of law is that if your daughter is raped and murdered, you won't go out and kill the guy who did it. In return for your forbearance, you get to vote for the rulers who will see that justice is done. But liberals cheat. They won't let us vote on an increasingly large number of issues by defining the entire universe – abortion, gay marriage, high-school convocations – as a "constitutional" issue.

In what weird parallel universe would Americans vote for abortion on demand, affirmative action, forced busing, licensing of gun owners and a ban on the death penalty? Whatever dangers lurk in a self-governing democracy, the American people have never, ever passed a law that led to the murder of 30 million unborn children.

Judges are not our dictators. The only reason the nation defers to rulings of the Supreme Court is because of the very Constitution the justices choose to ignore. At what point has the court made itself so ridiculous that we ignore it? What if the Supreme Court finds a constitutional right to cannibalism? How about fascism? Does the nation respond by passing a constitutional amendment clearly articulating that there is no right to cannibalism or fascism in the Constitution?

Is there nothing five justices on the Supreme Court could proclaim that would finally lead a president to say: I refuse to pretend this is a legitimate ruling. Either the answer is no, and we are already living under a judicial dictatorship, or the answer is yes, and – as Churchill said – we're just bickering over the price.

It would be nice to return to our federalist system of government with three equal branches of government and 50 states, but one branch refuses to live within that system. How about taking our chances with a president and the Congress? Two branches are better than one.

There may be practical difficulties with the president and the states ignoring the court's abortion rulings – though there's nothing unlawful about following the Constitution and I for one would love to see it. But there is absolutely no excuse for the Massachusetts legislature jumping when Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall says "jump."

Marshall, immigrant and wife of New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, has recently proclaimed a right to gay marriage for all of Massachusetts. She has further demanded that the legislature rewrite the law in accordance with her wishes. One imagines Marshall leaping off the boat at Ellis Island and announcing: "I know just what this country needs! Anthony! Stop defending Pol Pot for five minutes and get me on a court!"

Granted, one can imagine how a woman married to the likes of Anthony Lewis might long for the sanctuary of a same-sex union. But that's no reason to foist it on Massachusetts.

Ms. Marshall has as much right to proclaim a right to gay marriage from the Massachusetts Supreme Court as I do to proclaim it from my column. The Massachusetts legislature ought to ignore the court's frivolous ruling – and cut the justices' salaries if they try it again.

And not a single footnote!

What can I say? Surly is as surly does. Still, I feel soiled.

It’s Thursday, and you know what that means, don’t you?

That means it’s “Tina Brown Thursday” at The Rittenhouse Review, a grand tradition, though one utterly lacking in pomp and circumstance, in large part because the institution only dates back about three weeks or so during which time it’s twice been postponed until Friday because, well, this is hard work.

In today’s installment we catch Brown in New York reporting from the dismally attended book party for Canadian-British newspaper publisher, alleged lawbreaker, and friend (of hers, not mine), Conrad Black. (“Company Hates Misery,” Washington Post, December 4.)

Having read the column twice now, we’re sending Tina home with a note that reads, once again: “Much improvement required.”

Right Night, Wrong Party

Imagine Brown’s disappointment upon arriving at the launch party for Black’s new book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, and discovering that it was a complete bust. Almost nobody there and, I’m willing to bet, kind of disappointing hors d’oevres too. [Ed.: Note to Tina: Call Rebecca Hagelin. Ask for her “refreshments” recipes. She says they’re “good.” I don’t know, try Heritage Foundation, main number.]

Adding insult to injury, Brown reveals that the night’s really fun party, one honoring former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin upon the publication of his new book, In an Uncertain World, was occurring simultaneously and directly across the hall from Black’s affair. And adding humiliation to insult, it was a party to which Brown apparently can’t claim to have been invited. Such a shame. But who knew? Who could have known? Not Tina. She writes:

No one could have predicted that the book party for Conrad Black . . . would coincide with his stepping down as CEO of the publishing company Hollinger International . . . under a cloud of allegations of financial self-dealing and an SEC investigation.

Well, nobody except Black himself, of course, unless his lawyers, who must have had at least some clue, left him completely in the dark, which I doubt is what he pays them for.

Poor Tina. All dressed up and at the wrong party! Such a bummer. What a “buzz” killer. Hmm . . . how to put the best face on all this?

I know! I know! Drop names, Tina. You’re good at that.

And so she did:

Even with hosts as luminous as philanthropist Jayne Wrightsman and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, acceptances shrank to a small band of loyalists like Henry Kissinger[,] Ronald Perelman[,] . . . and ex-con , Alfred A. Taubman.” [Ed.: Actually, Tina, his name is A. Alfred Taubman, but I realize this is unedited, first-draft material.]

Oh, please, that’s strictly B-list. Though I will say it makes me wonder what Augusto Pinochet, Michael Milken, and Diana Brooks used as excuses.

By the way, is DeDe allowed out of the house yet? I suppose so. And Taubman’s already out of prison? Gee whiz, I missed that entirely. I’m so glad he’s able to attend great-big-fun parties like this smash hit. As I recall, shortly before sentencing Taubman’s lawyers told the judge any incarceration at all would kill the old man, who, as it happened, was until the moment they carted him off working pretty hard overseeing his still vast range of investments. But that was then and this is now, and if anything, Tina Brown lives in the here and now, now, now, so she wasn’t asking any questions.

Getting Stupid About the Neocons

Ah well, enough of the social not-so-niceties. Brown is writing for the Post now, and although her column appears in the Style section, it’s time to get serious. Or at least to try. How’s this for blatant historical ignorance on Brown’s part?:

A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt’s pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the `30s bitterly reviled FDR as “that man.”

Where to start with this mess? Being “a belligerent neo-con” is “fashionable”? Really? I know being a neoconservative, or calling yourself one, or aligning yourself with them, can help you get a good job in Washington these days, but “fashionable”?

I have a couple of friends who are deeply entrenched in the neoconservative cult (Just kidding, guys!), but they’ve been at it for a long time. Perhaps they’re beyond saving. But even in their most arrogant moments, which in their particular cases are blessedly few, I highly doubt they would call themselves “fashionable.” (And before someone from the New York Times Magazine reading this starts hurriedly jotting down “ideas” for the next editorial meeting, an article about how “cool” the neocons are is really not a “new” or “fresh” or “exciting” topic. Trust me on that one.)

More important, though, who the hell are the “neo-cons of the `30s”? There were no “neoconservatives” in the 1930s. Sure, there were a bunch of guys in New York who went to college together and ate lunch together and argued a lot and later wrote a lot and drank a lot and some of them fooled around a lot.

Much later, some of them became neoconservatives, which helped them get better jobs, teaching appointments, and advisory positions, and to form the committee on this and the institute for that, and to snag a regular column here or there, all of which enabled some of them to make some pretty decent money, and exert a good deal of influence under various administrations. Some even moved from the dowdy West Side to the classier East Side. But now their kids are just all over the place, which is getting really annoying.

On the whole, though, other than the occasional Stalinist who really did an about face, the first generation of those who later became or called themselves neoconservatives were hardly Roosevelt haters. And since most of those from that first generation are dead or quite elderly and the neoconservatives currently serving in the Bush administration or otherwise taking up valuable space on the nation’s op-ed pages were born years after FDR died, Brown’s intended point, whatever it might have been, is completely lost here.

Yearning for the Old Country

I get a kick out of British writers who, despite having spent many years in the U.S., still get confused when it comes to separating the culture of the old country from that of the new. “What’s interesting about Black is that he’s a throwback to the era when media moguls were still called press lords,” Brown writes in the Washington Post, the leading daily newspaper of the capital of the United States of America, addressing an audience that is unlikely ever to have heard the term “press lords” and couldn’t care less about its meaning back home.

One almost wonders for whom Tina Brown thinks she’s writing, other than Tina Brown, of course. Gushing over Black’s wife, Brown observes:

His wife, Barbara Amiel, writes a sharply barbed, rousingly pro-Israel column in the [London] Telegraph. She famously caused interesting trouble when she wrote up the anti-Semitic remarks made by the French ambassador at a dinner he thought was private. She gets away with it because she’s not only Lady Black but a brainy, brunette femme fatale with spectacular cleavage.

“It,” as in “she gets away with it,” being a flagrant disregard for the ethics of journalism, at least in the U.S., a country in which Brown inexplicably continues to be published. I wonder if Brown is aware we play by different rules over here.

By the way, did you ever read something and say to yourself, “I wish I wrote that”? I’m just asking, I guess because my mind is kind of wandering at the moment. The question certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with what Brown wrote about Amiel’s bust, which coming from anyone who anyone takes seriously, would be considered degrading and foul, but as it spewed from Brown, well, never mind, it’s all in jolly good fun! And isn’t Barbara just a hoot! Get this zaniness:

Once, at a dinner party at the publisher Lord Weidenfeld’s [Ed.: Who?] Chelsea [Ed.: London, not New York.] apartment (the party was for Al Taubman, as it happens) [Ed.: The aforementioned convicted criminal.], I appreciated the deftness with which at cocktail hour she [Ed.: That would be Amiel.] reconnoitered the dining room to switch place cards and seat herself next to a less grand but more amusing man. It was a moment right out of Anthony Trollope.

Well, yes, but it was also an example of the typical behavior of a scheming parvenu, all the more reason for Brown, who is of the same class, order, genus, and species, to applaud Amiel’s rude chicanery, which, when you think about it, was a pretty nasty slap in the faces of the evening’s hosts. (“Rather American that, wouldn’t you say, chap?” “Oh, yes, very much so.” “Horrible people, they.” “Oh, yes, very much so.”)

But Brown does go on, once again revealing how ignorant some Brits are when it comes to what most Americans think about all that rank and peerage and your ladyness stuff, and how confused Brown herself is about the whole thing:

The paradoxical thing about Black, though, is that imperial trappings -- the butlers, chefs and chauffeurs he charged to the company tab -- don’t seem to be the point for him. He gave up his Canadian citizenship so he could accept a British peerage. A place in the House of Lords -- something a more power-hungry, pretend-populist mogul like Rupert Murdoch scoffs at -- is crucial to Black’s self-image. Conrad has never had Murdoch's single-minded focus on world domination.

Two weeks ago when writing about Brown’s column I asked, to no one in particular, whether anyone at the Post was editing her submissions. Based on the paragraph cited above, today I know for sure that the answer to that question is “no.” Perhaps the entire Post operation is left virtually unsupervised on Wednesdays?

Read that paragraph again. In the first sentence Brown asserts “imperial trappings . . . don’t seem to be the point for him.” She then immediately scribbles, “He gave up his Canadian citizenship so he could accept a British peerage” -- hence “Lord Black” and for Ms. Amiel, “Lady Black” -- and adds that “[a] place in the House of Lords . . . is crucial to Black’s self-image.”

How is it that a man who disdains “imperial trappings” could simultaneously be so hell bent on obtaining a peerage “crucial” to his “self-image” that he would go so far as to renounce his citizenship to do so? This is self-evidently contradictory. And while Brown maintains Conrad lacks rival Murdoch’s “single-minded focus on world domination,” she fails to see that Conrad’s need for a title and a powerless seat in Westminster does nothing to add to almost anyone’s perception of his character.

Comic Relief

Okay, so that’s all bizarre and stupid and everything, but then Brown turns absolutely comical. Catch this:

Black has a touching, almost romantic respect for editorial prerogatives. When he has a beef with something in one of his newspapers he dispatches a fruity letter to the editor.

Isn’t that cute? Of course, Black lately has asserted at least one other editorial prerogative that Brown left unmentioned: writing a piece for the National Post defending himself against various allegations associated with the scandal at Hollinger that has left him in almost complete disgrace (hence Kissinger’s attendance at the little gathering), all under the “nom de plume” of David Asper, who just happens to be a real person and also the chairman of the very same National Post.

Just a slight and innocent oversight on Brown’s part, I suppose.

That’s all for now. See you again next week, at which time I’ll try to be more brief. But really, that’s up to Tina.

Andrew Sullivan today writes, in a post headed “Reagan and AIDS,” a brief note that on the subject of AIDS and, well, everything else, is remarkably tendentious, misleading, and anti-historical, even for him:

Tuesday night, at Colgate University, the one point I made that truly shocked the audience was a defense of the drug companies.

Shocked as in, “They were surprised.”? Or shocked as in, “They were shocked. Shocked!”?

I hope it’s the latter, otherwise I’ll be forced to conclude that Colgate, which was considered a pretty good school back in my day, has experienced a precipitous decline in the intellectual capacity and general awareness of its student body.

I would have thought at least a handful of Colgate students would be vaguely familiar with Sullivan’s long history of parroting the pharmaceutical industry’s party line and his rich association with its financial largesse.

The same might be said as well for Colgate’s faculty, though being academicians and therefore inevitably inveterate left-wing America-haters they probably stayed away in droves. (Except maybe that weird guy from the physics department or somewhere -- you know, the guy with the thing about the holocaust or African-Americans’ genes or whatever, it’s almost always something outside his field of expertise -- because every campus has at least one of those guys, and they show up for everything. And then they hog the speaker’s time afterward and then sometimes the speaker invites them to submit an article or something. And, incredibly, sometimes the speaker actually publishes the stuff.)

Then again, Sullivan’s public profile isn’t what it was (and in more ways than one from what I understand).

Thus I’m inclined to think the Big Tuesday Night Shocker in Hamilton, such as it might have been, occurred because Colgate students are spending more time reading the New York Times than the “Daily Dish,” that long-since gone-over-the-edge collection of predictable Sullivanisms that so many bored web surfers turn to when they’re all ticked off that “Dilbert” just “isn’t as funny as it used to be.”

Oh, okay, now I get it. He’s been going for her whole “Mildred Pierce”-era look all along. How could I have missed that?

Michael Jackson

Joan Crawford

My dog, officially named Chadwin VII’s Mildred Pierce, is so ashamed.

[Thanks to L.T.]

[Post-publication addendum (December 5): Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged nails this one, referring to this eerie pairing as an example not of “separated at birth” but of the less common though far more disturbing phenomenon known as “separated at surgery.”]

[Post-publication addendum (December 5): No, not “Blue’s Clues,” Blues News. I don’t know exactly what Blues News is. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of the site before today. But, gee whiz, thanks for the link and all the traffic! Being “Blues News’ed” is, if you can believe it, even better than being “Atrios’ed.”]

In case you haven’t been paying close attention, I just wanted to mention that Roger Ailes, the blogger not the slobber, has been smacking all the right people upside the head but good. It’s been fun to watch, and yes, informative, too.

Among Ailes’s latest and very worthy targets:

National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez Lopez, a/k/a “K Lo,” which I was recently reminded is the purportedly fun and clever nickname of a right-wing doodler and not a personal lubricant available at drugstores everywhere;

George F. Will, the adulterous and divorced moral arbiter of a culture gone mad;

Robert Novak, he of the ongoing Robert Novak-White House Security Leak scandal (Why do people insist on using the far less accurate term “Valerie Plame Affair”? Let’s place the blame and notoriety where the blame and notoriety belong.);

Tim Russert, the Bush administration’s favorite and disturbingly excitable big-media slattern; and

Neil Bush, whose fetish seems to have been financially underwritten by just about everybody except Richard Mellon Scaife, though I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Nice work, Roger.

For those who “never understood the difference between blogs and those awful personal web pages from the `90s” (see, for example, the comments on “Co-opting the Future,” by John C. Dvorak, in PC Magazine, where Dvorak himself reveals he too doesn’t understand much about weblogs), this post will probably further confuse their already feeble and addled minds.

Why? Because it’s one of my wholly random and completely personal rants that I just want to get off my chest and make part of the public record, for that tiny slice of the public that might, just might, include my landlord.

I like where I live. Not just Philadelphia, but my apartment building. The location is perfect, for one thing, and it’s a pretty cool building, though the static, awkward, and uninteresting lay-out of my apartment would send any self-respecting feng shui practitioner into a dispiriting but still somehow satisfyingly harmonious meltdown.

The building used to be a factory where they once manufactured . . . No, I’d better not say, since doing so might make my location too easily identifiable, and some of the e-mail I get from cranky Rittenhouse readers kind of scares me.

Anyway, among the apartment’s advantages are 10-foot ceilings and 6-foot windows, which are nice when the weather is sunny and fair. But these same windows leak like proverbial sieves or, even worse, like White House stage manager Karl Rove.

Meanwhile, the building’s hallways are maintained during the winter at a temperature I would estimate at a brisk 45 degrees, yet another source of cold air that makes its way inside my apartment through a small gap under the front door.

As a result, on a day like today it’s freezing in here. Not only is the air cold, but the floor, even with its horrible wall-to-wall carpeting (a real selling point in the opinion of the building’s management but correctly termed “an abomination” by blogger Jane Finch), is cold. My hands are cold. My feet are cold. Shoes left on the floor are particularly cold. Everything I touch is cold.

And due to the otherwise-admired high ceilings, to get the place warm I have to turn the heat from “low” to “high,” an act that in and of itself sparks violent wind shears that really don’t help matters any.

I want to stay here -- in Philadelphia and in this building -- but I’ll tell you, I know already that the electric bills are going to kill me, again, this winter.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Andrew Sullivan for the second day in a row is all giggly and smug and stuff -- though he’s like that every day -- about Howard Dean having used the phrase “the Soviet Union” on Chris Matthews’s little-noticed cable program, “Hardball.”

“Yes, I know Dean means Russia,” Sullivan writes. “But anyone who cannot distinguish between Russia and the Soviet Union has no business running for president of the United States,” he adds in what the English are wont to call “a harrumph,” and a very self-satisfied one at that.

Actually, Sullivan, if we want to get all picky about it, and apparently you do, anyone familiar with the issue, one that has been simmering and occasionally raging for years, knows that world leaders and scientists are concerned about the transfer of arms and technology to rogue Middle Eastern states from several countries, countries that typically are referred to collectively as “the former Soviet Union.”

So actually, Andy, while saying “the Soviet Union” instead of “Russia” is, yes, a slip, but not, as you would have it, a world-peace-threatening gaffe, saying “the Soviet Union” instead of “the former Soviet Union” really isn’t such a big deal at all, is it?

I’d go so far as to say that anyone who cannot distinguish between Russia, the Soviet Union, and the former Soviet Union has no business writing a blog.

[Post-publication addendum: While we’re on the subject of Sullivan -- and it won’t be much longer now, I promise, though it’s hard to get off with of Andy -- stop by Eschaton and check out “Um . . . Andy?”]

I don’t know how they do it, but colleges and their alumni associations always find you, even after you’ve managed to escape their clutches for several years. It’s almost creepy, as if they asked around until they found someone who knows someone who knows you or something.

This certainly has been true of the two universities I attended and the affiliated alumni associations to which I am supposed to, or at least could, belong but don’t: the University at Albany and the University of Virginia. Friends and family have made similar observations with respect to their own schools.

Once they find you again, and they will -- both schools found me quite recently after a long hiatus, the simultaneous reconnection itself sparking suspicion -- prepare yourself for the inundation at the mailbox. Just yesterday, in fact, I received two different mailings from Albany and one from Virginia, the latter coming close on the heels of the association’s magazine, which arrived here late last week.

It’s like they want to catch up really fast. Not “catch up” in a “Hey, what’s up with the disappearing act? We were worried about you. What’s new in your life?” sort of way, but rather in a “Hey, reach for your checkbook and give until it hurts, buddy” kind of way.

They always want -- and ask for -- money, whether it’s the annual campaign, the centennial campaign, the bicentennial campaign, the 21st century campaign, the college campaign, the president’s campaign, the alumni campaign, the class campaign, the athletics campaign, or whatever. And for what? Practically anything, it seems: expanding the library, constructing a new field house, upgrading the performing arts center, installing wireless internet connections in every dorm room, building cooler digs for the alumni association staff, the list goes on.

Enough already. Save it, people. Check back when I’ve had the opportunity to prove, yet again, that the degrees I earned were worth the time, effort, and, well, money.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]

Susan Madrak, Philadelphian, former journalist, blogger (Suburban Guerrilla), astrology nut, and friend, is approaching Christmas with about the same degree of enthusiasm I am. It’s hard to get excited about the holidays when you’re suddenly unemployed but don’t qualify for unemployment benefits (Susie for a different reason than me) yet the bills continue to pile up and the local economy remains mired in its persistent stagnation.

And so one looks for satisfaction elsewhere. In the energetic and joyous search for a new job, for example. Or in pondering the “true meaning of Christmas,” and spreading that message to others, those who need a hint that they’re not getting anything this year. Obsessively checking the Caller ID box when the phone rings just in case it’s, you know, a bank or something. Or by blogging, since you’ve been doing it anyway and these days you have time to read the newspaper from beginning to end (e.g., the Philadelphia Inquirer) or conversely, from end to beginning (e.g., the Philadelphia Daily News).

You know, blogging is fun and interesting, and lately it’s helped keep me from going completely insane, but it’s also hard work. Who knows why we do it? Many have tried to answer that question, and we all know it’s not the money, but no one has yet arrived at a definitive statement that covers all of the myriad motivations of bloggers, including Madrak, who have jumped into the fray and kept at it. (Meanwhile, some observers, well, they’re being just plain stupid about the whole thing.)

Do you know what else? A single copy of a continuously dumbed-down magazine like Time, Newsweek, or Fortune now costs four or five dollars. And the New Republic, its circulation still hemorrhaging at last check, is asking $40 dollars for a year’s subscription (44 issues -- Hey, eight weeks vacation, for them and you!), while home delivery of your local daily newspaper (circulation unlikely to be growing) probably takes about $500 out of your wallet each year. But blogs are free. For now, anyway, he said, ominously and with an evil grin. (Though also facetiously and with a plaintive smile.)

Blogs are free, that is, to everyone except those who write and produce them. (Insert something here about the cost of labor. Quote Paul Krugman. Watch right-wing bloggers go nuts. Note referral log’s record of visit from Poor and Stupid. Avoid use of word “stalker,” else phone attorney with forewarning.) If one is willing to shell out five bucks for a magazine that can be read in its entirety during one sitting, why not offer at least the same to a blogger who publishes what is arguably a specialized sort of magazine every day (or nearly every day)?

Moreover, at this time of year, you’re probably handing out tips right and left -- I mean that figuratively, not politically -- to such people in your life, if they exist in your life, as the newspaper carrier, your hair stylist, manicurist, masseur, trainer, babysitter, nanny, au pair, dry cleaner, tailor, cleaning lady, housekeeper, maid, doorman, garage attendant, dog walker/sitter, various maîtres d’hotel, and the like.

And those people have jobs!

What with this being the 21st century and the internet era and all, maybe it’s time to add someone like Susan Madrak to that list, assuming you enjoy reading Suburban Guerrilla on a regular basis -- and who doesn’t? It’s certainly not required. I doubt she’ll stomp her feet and threaten to shut the site down like the errant petulant blogger has in the past. And I know it would be appreciated over there.

(Now that I’m done with all that I’m thinking I could have just written, “Go hit Susie’s tip box,” but that seemed kind of, I don’t know, not very denbeste, you know? And besides, I was in the grip of some vicious insomnia and I don’t get cable, so what the heck.)

[Post-publication addendum: Predictably, since Madrak’s situation was mentioned at Eschaton, among other top-notch and popular blogs, there is hither and yon about the blogosphere today various carping and sniping about something referred to as “cyber begging,” accompanied by the usual claptrap about how everything on the web is supposed to be free (cf. the Napster controversy) and about blogging being a noble venture in the, again, free exchange of ideas, and oh, isn’t it all just so tacky. According to The Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary the verb “to beg” is defined thusly: “beg [ME beggen] vt 1 to ask in charity, as alms; 2 to ask earnestly; beseech; 3 to ask as a favor.” More important, however, the use of the word “beg” has evolved colloquially in recent years, I think, to convey specifically a request for something of value for which nothing has been or will be provided in return. Hence: “The streets of Calcutta (New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, your choice) are full of beggars.” (Akin, of course, to Scribner-Bantam’s first definition, but more clearly stated for a modern audience. When was the last time you used the word “alms”?) If you fail to see that this colloquialism does not truly apply to blogging, then I think you’ve missed the point entirely. If you resent bloggers being the recipients of entirely voluntary gratuities, contributions, donations, or gifts from their readers, start a blog yourself. If you already have a blog but do not offer readers the opportunity to send entirely voluntary gratuities, contributions, donations, or gifts, that is your choice (one that for a long time was mine as well). If you already have a blog but your readers haven’t availed themselves of the opportunity you have offered them to send entirely voluntary gratuities, contributions, donations, or gifts, build a better blog. Or you could always just ask.]

Rittenhouse hasn’t discussed cat fights, real or hypothetical, in more than a year, but it looks like there could be a one a brewin’ on the right side of town, this one a kicking, spitting, hair-pulling, meet-me-in-front-of-the-movie-theater brawl that would feature third-tier conservative columnists Michelle Malkin and Rebecca Hagelin.

The controversy: Kids today.

On the cranky right, but in an off good mood the other day -- or probably just in a rush to meet a deadline -- Malkin cheers today’s teenagers for their “compassion and humanity.” The column, published in the Philadelphia Daily News under the title “TV Distorts the Truth About Teens,” will warm your cockles, whatever they are.

(By the way, Malkin’s piece, at least as published in the PDN, ran to 566 words, of which 466 by my count, or a full 82 percent, were derived from the columnist summarizing news stories written by other journalists. Nice work if you can get it.)

Meanwhile, on the almost-as-cranky-but-gosh-darn-it-I-still-have-hope right, Hagelin, writing in “Bring Back Human Kindness -- Please!”, is having none of that.

Hagelin is upset that kids from “good, decent families” (despite those bona fides rumor has it Malkin already has inquired about their immigration status, thereby sort of picking a fight) and even adults just don’t thank her enough for her good deeds, including carting the neighborhood kids around in her van, a vehicle that I have no doubt sports, or at least once did, a sign reading “Baby on Board!”

Hagelin proceeds to recommend “a show-stopping, hand-clapping rousing sing-along CD” produced by one Judi Vankevich, also known, somewhere I guess, as “The Manners Lady.”

According to Hagelin, the CD will teach those snotty little brats, none named Hagelin apparently, “good manners” including “showing respect, living by the Golden Rule, and having an ‘attitude of gratitude.’” (No word from Hagelin as to whether The Manners Lady has filed a Lisa Beamer-like, transparently greedy trademark application for the phrase “attitude of gratitude.”)

Too bad for Hagelin that the other “Manners Lady,” the far more widely known Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”), just three days ago sharply criticized what she called “instant remedial etiquette classes.” Martin wrote, “[N]othing can relieve parents of the 20-year, around-the-clock task of teaching their own children how to behave toward others. That burden is called childrearing, and there are no quick fixes.”

Nice plug anyway, Rebecca.

See you after school!

I can’t wait until tomorrow!

Actually, it’s already tomorrow, or very early-morning Wednesday in Philadelphia, but still, I can’t wait until TBogg gets his hands on the latest from diminutive West Coast columnist Mickey Kaus Ben Shapiro, freshly posted at Townhall.com: “Ann Coulter is Welcome in My Orthodox Synagogue Anytime.”

I’ve heard many synagogues have trouble filling the seats outside the holidays, but can any single congregation be that desperate? Or should I ask, can any single columnist be that desperate?

But be careful, Ann. Ben’s got that whole mean, mad, “that’s-not-what-I-wanted-for-my-birthday” look going on with this column.

Oh, and sorry, readers, about the headline on this post. It creeps me out, too.

[Post-publication addendum (No. 1): It was worth the wait, and then some. Go read it.]

[Post-publication addendum (No. 2): By the way, Coulter badly needs an editor to join the team of fact-checkers so many have advised her to hire. “Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College,” she wrote. I can only interpret this statement to mean that Gen. Wesley Clark learned at some unspecified point in his life that his father, while attending college, briefly flirted with Judaism but then abandoned the faith. This is not accurate. But then again, it’s just Ann.]

The definition of “gay,” according to the first dictionary I pulled off my bookshelves (the Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary), is:

gay [OF gai] adj 1 light-hearted; joyous; 2 showy, bright-colored; 3 dissipated, dissolute; 4 colloq homosexual || SYN lively, merry, sportive (see cheerful, showy)

If it weren’t sad enough that certain people can’t cope with a word in their native tongue that can convey the meanings listed in both definitions one and four, above, now it seems we must add this as well:

5 colloq, regional a bad word (see vulgarity, swear word, curse)

Guess it’s time to get a new dictionary.

If anyone in Louisiana has an, ahem, up-to-date local edition he can spare, please let me know.

(Link via Atios.)

I don’t know what she’s doing, but she’s doing something right.

A week ago I mentioned that my dog Mildred, the world’s greatest English bulldog, received one helluva compliment, one coming out of nowhere and from a stranger, and one that pleased both of us, especially since the typical comment from the stray man or woman on the street draws attention -- out loud and in spoken, if obviously uneducated, English -- to the entirely disputable contention that Mildred is fat.

I’m pleased to report that since then Mildred has enjoyed two more unsolicited compliments, observations I record verbatim as fellows:

No. 1: “Oh my God, that dog is beautiful. Just gorgeous. Oh my God, honey, come and look at this dog!”

No. 2 (his pick-up truck coming to a screeching halt on S. 12th Street): “Damn! She’s beautiful! How old is she? [Six.] Beautiful! I love it!”

Take that, those of you so insecure of yourselves that you feel compelled to make fun of a dog.

Oh, and will someone remind me to read this to Mildred when she wakes up? She’s been sleeping since 10 o’clock this morning, nearly -- gee whiz -- 12 hours ago.

[Post-publication addendum (December 3): Darn it. Add one more point to the negative side. Tuesday morning a woman passing Mildred and me on the sidewalk remarked to her two companions: “Cute dog. But it’s so fat!” Now, one of this woman’s companions was rather large. I can’t help but wonder how well that observation went over with the nasty one’s friends. Do people like this woman think, even for a moment, before they open their stupid mouths?]

Amazing, or at least interesting, isn’t it, the things you learn from reading weblogs?

For example, reading No More Mr. Nice Blog, via TBogg, I was directed to an article in Fast Money, “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” from which I learned there’s something called the J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence.

Really, there is. I’m serious.

The center, based at Southern Methodist University, was established in 2001 by a $1 million donation from -- you guessed it -- J.C. Penney Co., and is headed by Edward Fox, assistant professor of marketing at SMU’s Edwin L. Cox School of Business, who is quoted in the Fast Company article.

Now, I have a great deal of respect for Alan Questrom, who took the top job at Penney in September 2000. If anyone can turn the ship around, Questrom can, and the performance of Penney’s common stock reflects his accomplishments to-date on the enormous task that was set before him.

But I mean, really, “excellence”?

Penney is a decent operation as far as it goes, particularly given the ruthless and oft-times less than wholly ethical challenge presented by the likes of the odious Wal-Mart Stores Inc., but given the disaster that resulted from what should have been Penney’s brainless acquisition of the Eckerd drugstore chain, among other missteps, “excellence” is a bit of a stretch, even -- or especially -- when a company is tooting its own horn.

Are you looking for a mortgage? A mortgage on a new home? A little home equity line of credit maybe? A loan for that dream house at the beach or in the country?

Or perhaps a mortgage on the nation and your children’s future?

If so, look no further than Mortgage War, which lately has been spewing advertisements all across the web for purchasing, refinancing, home equity, FHA/VA, and construction loans.

“Mortgage War,” the ads say.

That about sums it up, doesn’t it?

Writing about the tap-dancing Pentagon mouthpiece Pete Williams -- and I was, or did -- brought back a flood of memories from my 11 years in Washington. While I’m here, and while you’re here, can I just share a funny story from my days in the nation’s capital? No? The hell with you, I will anyway.

Okay, so it was fall 1992 I think and I was taking a night class in accounting, one of many such night classes in accounting, and I was waiting for the subway at about, oh, 11 o’clock at night.

A train approached the station. Everyone waiting for the subway at first moved toward the platform, anticipating embarkation, but as the train entered the station nearly everyone, everyone, in fact, but one person, moved back.

Why? Because it was the “money train.”

The money train, for those not familiar, is the term used in Washington for the train that runs through the Metro system late at night to pick up the cash collected during the course of business.

It is an armed train. A heavily armed train. In fact, when the money train arrives at a Metro station, all of its doors open and out of each car emerges at least one armed guard. Armed as in carrying what appeared to me, as one who is mostly ignorant when it comes to guns, a pretty damned good-sized rifle. So, even if you didn’t know immediately that it was the money train, the rifles normally would have served as a pretty good warning to, as they say, “Step back, fella.”

On this particular night there was at the station an especially impatient gentleman who was, it seems, entirely unfamiliar with the money train and its regular rounds, and, worse, willfully ignorant of the significance of the armed guards who emerged from each and every car when the train came to a complete stop.

This gentleman, regardless of the evidence before his very eyes, was determined to board the train. Very determined. Making his way toward the doors -- this door and then that door, aiming himself at those doors not otherwise blocked by, well, men with guns -- he was hell-bent on boarding that damned train.

“Sir, step back.”

“Sir, this is the money train.”

“Sir, please step back.”

“Step back now!”

Despite repeated warnings and some aggressive blocking, to the point of one guard having actually raised and pointed his rifle, justifiably in my opinion, this man, in an absurdly agitated state, persisted.

I’ll tell you, it was scary. The rest of us on the platform not only stood back, as was requested specifically of the seemingly mentally disturbed man, we almost cowered behind phone booths and escalators and such.

And then, in a moment that can only be described as Washingtonian, purely and in its very essence, the man screamed at the armed guards, “Let me on this train! I need to get on this train! Now! Do you know who I am?! Do you know how important I am in this town?!”

Damn, if that’s not a tension-relieving bit of unintentional hilarity, I don’t know what is. Maybe he was famous, powerful, and important, but I sure as hell didn’t recognize him. But only in Washington can the executive director of the National Chickenfeed Association or whatever think he is that important and so deserving of special treatment that he, and he alone among 50 weary and waiting travelers, should be privileged enough to get on board.

As the money train pulled out of the station, its armed guards back in position and Mr. Chickenfeed aghast and appalled, all I could think to say to this idiot was, “Look, pal, if you’re waiting for a subway train at 11 o’clock at night, let’s face it, you’re nobody.”

Atrios today alerts readers to the publication of the tenth anniversary issue of Michelangelo Signorile’s Queer in America, and in so doing makes reference to the long-ago “outing” of then and former Defense Department spokesman Pete Williams.

The whole Pete Williams “outing” thing really takes me back. Takes me back to days gone by. Days when I lived in Washington. A Washington where the Pentagon’s chief spokesman would annually perform, with a friend, a rousing tap dance at Christmas parties.

And everyone in the power crowd, or anyone with power in the crowd, which would exclude me, smiled and laughed and applauded and nodded knowingly and said not a word and silently promised each other they wouldn’t say a word and felt all pleased and privileged about being in on the little secret and talked about it in the car afterward and I just went home feeling sick.

The post below about thimerosal, childhood vaccines, autism, and Eli Lilly & Co. has generated an unusually high level of e-mail from readers.

With the exception of one, all of those who have written objected both to the post and to the article published by In These Times to which I linked, many coming to a blazing defense of the pharmaceutical industry, and/or asserting as nonsensical any possible connection between thimerosal and autism, and/or subtly alluding to the parental hysteria issue.

Judging by their addresses, most of the critical e-mail appears to be coming from your ordinary Joes and Janes, albeit regular Joes and Janes who possess considerable knowledge about the thimerosal/autism debate and the various studies of the subject, with a decided emphasis on drawing attention to research that disputes a connection between thimerosal and autism. (Studies and commentary about this controversy, from both sides and neither side, can be found all over the web. I encourage you to look into the matter.)

I suppose many a man on the street who has had no personal experience with autism (which goes for me as well, by the way) has been following the thimerosal/autism debate so closely as to be more expert on this matter than I am.

I admit to being fairly new to the controversy, so perhaps I should defer to their better judgment.

And yet my referral log reveals that numerous recent visitors to Rittenhouse are accessing the site from servers based at pharmaceutical companies.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Stranger things have happened.

When it comes to panhandlers’ requests, I finally can say I’ve heard it all.

Over the years I’ve been asked for spare change generally, of course, but also more specifically for a dime (that was a long time ago), a quarter (not quite so long ago), 50 cents, a dollar, 10 dollars, even 20 dollars.

Two dollars is a frequent request in Philadelphia, as in, “Could you spare two dollars? I just need to get a bus back to . . .” (Sure, pal, as long as I can watch you get on it.)

I’ve been asked for subway tokens, articles of clothing (specific things I was wearing at the moment), cigarettes, and the time and then my watch.

This afternoon in Center City Philadelphia, in the Photo District (actually, there’s no such thing but I like saying that because it sounds sort of cool and, besides, I can’t conceive of any other reason why there would or should be three photo shops -- Ritz Camera, Mid-City Camera, and Comet Camera -- along a two-block stretch of Walnut Street, east of Broad), a woman standing in front of a deli asked, “Would you please buy me a liverwurst sandwich?”

And do you know what? I almost did. I mean, she deserves points for originality at least.

[Note: This post originally was published at TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse.]