Repeating to myself, internally and very slowly: My co-host was never an editor. My co-host has always been a writer. If I take this “co”-“writing” thing as a metric, I’m going to be in jail within a week.

Having what we’d call a Bad Job Day (on all of them, including the contract / freelance stuff) — Suzy Kolber, phone your office. So screw it. I will instead meditate on what sounds to me like the perfect job. Had I known this existed when I was young — assuming it did — I could have spared myself a good decade of annoying interactions with editors, reporters, product managers, labs rats and UPS. Though probably not so much with the UPS; can’t have everything I suppose.

My august co-host is appalled, but I’m absolutely roaring over this article. Not that it’s news that some of these people are more mooch than media, but will this list now engender a backlash among Real Journalists, since even the founder says that Real Journalists don’t accept such gifties? (For the record, I am a real Journalist, or, as I tell flacks who tell me “not to worry” about returning test units, Sweetie, if I kept all the crap I’ve been easked to look at over the years, I wouldn’t have room in my house for me.) Anyone willing to bet that 50 percent of this swag ends up on eBay? Anyone? Anyone?

Ach. Thank heavens there’s just one more night of this (and just three more nights of DC as a whole) — traffic, slush, dim-witted Republican girlies dragging the hems of $3,000 dresses through same while public schools in this town go without books. All the pomp and fireworks makes me think of what wise women know (and giggle about) re men who wear big buckles and drive ostentatiously expensive sports cars. In other words, it’s clear that Dubya has a tiny, tiny… problem with legitimacy. Again.

I’ve had The Rose And The Briar for some time now, but managed not to catch the brilliant line in The Handsome Family’s “Blackwatertown” ’til now: “Fun has a way of becoming funereal.” Oh honey, don’t you know.

Gmail is crashed? CRASHED?! That’s, like the sixth or seventh horseman of the Apocalypse right there. Lovely. Somebody wake me when it’s over…

Okay, I’m probably only able to laugh so hard at these because none of them happened to me. Or maybe my blood sugar’s low. Or maybe I spent 15 minutes too many on the phone with my grandmother tonight trying to explain to her that the Upcoming Job Change is a good thing. Wait, no… I remember… I’M ON DEADLINE! That’s what happened to me!

A very fine essay on the inherent instability of Islam, brought to my attention via these new Hookie awards the NY Times is giving out. Worthwhile reading all (some of them I caught the first time around, but not this one). I’m eager to see what else they turn up.

I know this is an old story, but I’d never heard the whole thing before: How a graphing-calculator application became part of the Mac. It’s also a great illustration of how truly Apple folk love their platform, as well as Exhibit A of what it truly means to be a hacker, in both the computer and the social-engineering senses. Read it already. Your day will brighten and your faith in humanity will be restored.

An extraordinary sermon (yes, Tony, I said sermon; yes, Rob, I implied Christian, though actually it’s Unitarian) that lays out what seems to me a particularly astute analysis of where we are and what happens next — if we do act, or if we do not. Read it. Spend time with it. Forward it vastly.