The kids tumbled off the bus with grins and shrieks today: school’s done. They sloughed off their backpacks and headed up the hill for the swings, as they always do, but this time it meant something more; since each backpack was crammed with the compacted detritus of their desks and lockers, they’d literally shed the school year when they dumped their burdens. The neighbor has a rope hanging from a tall tree and two, yes two zip lines. I watched my daughter fly through the air, beaming, and marveled again at how big she’s got. How happy she looks.

But five minutes later: tears.

How does it feel to be done with school?

“Sad. I’ll never see Miss (student teacher) again.”

Half an hour later, utter glumness. She said she already missed the things they did in class, the fun they had in third grade, the projects, the games. First time she’s ever had that realization that life moves on. People move on.

Took a while to work through it, and when she was ready, she went out to the backyard swingset, and kicked off her crocs while I tried to hit them with a whiffle bat. Life’s big problems; life’s small solutions.

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Why does everything I love turn to krep? I don’t banish content-producers (you know, musicians, painters, comedians, directors, etc) for one or two silly comments, or even for a long string of gaseous emissions. Kraftwerk can make a cool song about radioactivity, then turn around 20 years later and remix it as anti-nuclear energy song, and I still don’t care. We all have roll-the-eye moments when someone we like pops off, or an actor annoys you with a statement that suggests he’s conflated his larger-than-life screen size with the wisdom of Moses. But  smug, politically-oriented crudity from someone not overtly political, delivered with the assumption we all share his “values” – boring.

Addressed at kids of famous people: pathetic.

People have used other words – disgusting, repellent, abominable, danker than the fetid breath of the nine-bladder’d Arazon, Privy-Cleaner of Hell, et cetera – but pathetic is all I can muster.

But no, it must be funny, because David is funny and hip. Right? Or maybe not; maybe he’s actually a brackish, hermetically-souled guy who’s spend the last twenty years going from table to table with a giant wooden grinder, asking anyone if they want some fresh-ground scorn with that. Say when. Or maybe he’s about as edgy as a soccer ball, and exists only to remind people they were Edgy once, and hence must be ever-blessed with the gift of Wryness and Irony. With those shields we can never grow old, you know. We’ll always be as sharp and perceptive as we were when we were sitting on a cast-off sofa in college, working through a midweek buzz, happily fellated by the preconceptions the TV so charitably provided.

Or so I remember; haven’t watched the show in years. I thought it was brilliant at first, but at some point early on Bill Wendell’s introduction stopped being Bill Wendell as Don Pardo and became Bill Wendell Intentionally and Ironically Being Don Pardo for Your Ironic Enjoyment. The introductory graphics got slick. Paul Shaffer morphed into this eyeless homunculus yes-man, like Ed McMahon on painkillers converted into handy portable Idol form (really, sometimes I see a picture of this tiny fellow wearing shades, grinning at nothing, and he reminds me of something Indiana Jones would replace with a weighted bag of sand before he stole it.)

What’s amusing is how unamusing he is in the clip. How sour he seems. Compare him to his predecessors: Carson was all midwestern charm, with unreadable yet mannerly reserve; Steve Allen was almost as smart as he was certain you thought he must be, but he was cheerful; Parr was a nattering nutball covered with a rich creamy nougat of ego, but he was engaging. Letterman is empty; he’s inert; he stands for nothing except disdain for people foolish enough to stand for anything – aside from rote obesciance to all the things Decent People stand for, of course, all those shopworn assumptions passed around in the bubble.

This posture was fresh in ’80; it even had energy. But it paralyzes the heart after a while. You end up an SOB who shows up at the end of the night to reassure that nothing matters.  I think  he may have invented the posture of Nerd Cool, an aspect so familiar to anyone who reads message boards – the skill at deflating enthusiasm, puncturing passion with a hatpin lobbed from a safe distance. The instinctive unease  with the wet messy energy of actual people.

Yes, reading too much into it. Really, it’s just a rote slam: If your mother is a loathed politician, and your older sister gets pregnant, famous old men can make jokes about you being knocked up by rich baseball players, and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the culture: a flat, dead-eyed, square-headed old man who’ll go back to the writers and ask for more Palin-daughter knocked-up jokes, because that one went over well. Other children he won’t touch, but not because he’s decent. It’s because he’s a coward.

Oh, one more thing: it’s okay for David to say that because someone said something else about someone, and since I didn’t write about that, I’m a hypocrite. Just so we’re clear.

Well, one more thing. Some say Dave – I’m sorry, the staff members who wrote the joke and had it printed on cards for him to read – thought the daughter in attendance was the older one who had the pregnancy controversy last year. This is possible; it also means that we accept as an excuse the fact that the writers confused the daughters they wished to humiliate.

That confusion must be the reason the NYT left the joke out of its transcript of the monologue.

One more thing: the monologue contained an Angela Lansbury joke. Dude is OUT THERE.

Then again, there’s always Conan O’Brien, who thinks African-Americans are persona incognita in Wisconsin.

These guys don’t get out much, do they?

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Today: lots. Out of Context Ad Challenge around 10:30 or so, Mpls update around 2 PM.  See you soon!