A lot of these things are racial

- I'm sure a million blogs have already pointed this out, but whatever, "I'm a writer, not a reader": J. Y. Smith, one of the two guys bylined in the Gerald Ford obit from today's Washington Post, is a man who died almost a year ago. Everyone knows the factoid about how they write all the obits way in advance, but this is still pretty funny. According to the obit that ran in the Post after Smith's death, the Harvard grad was "sinewy."

- Ed Park, formerly of the Village Voice and currently of The Believer, is teaching a writing class at the NYU Gallatin School this semester on how to blog. The course description relates blogging to W. G. Sebald's "magpie instinct" for "teasing out associations between ancient snapshots, newspaper clippings, and the words of others." The assignments include "brief weekly 'connections' reports, the regular maintenance of a blog, and a final paper." Emphasis mine.

- In the car on my way home from Milwaukee, I heard "Changes" by Tupac. There's a spoken word interlude in the middle of the song where he says the following:

It's time for us as a people to start making some changes. Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live, and let's change the way we treat each other. You see, the old way wasn't working, so it's on us to do what we gotta do to survive.

Change the way we live, the way we treat each other, fine, but I wonder: change the way we eat how? Does he just mean less?

- In the new issue of Newsweek, there's sort of a questionable line in the cover story on 2008, in which Jonathan Alter compares Hillary Clinton and Barack (did we know his middle name was Hussein?!) Obama. Emphasis, again, mine.

Will fatigue with the less attractive side of the Clinton years — the soap opera, sinning and self-absorption - resurface? Hard-core Hillary haters of both genders aren't going away.

Obama hasn't yet brought out the haters. "He's scarier than she is because nobody says a bad word about him," says a former senior aide to President Bush who doesn't want to be quoted speculating about Democrats.

The last line, fine - the obvious follow-up is why ELSE is he scarier? - but it's the reporter's language in the italicized sentence that seems off to me. Granted, he refers to "Hillary haters" in the same breath, but when I read that one line by itself, I can't help but wonder if subconsciously or not, the author was choosing his words to uh, fit the vernacular. That said, when Obama won the Senate seat, his wife introduced him at his victory speech as her "baby daddy," so I dunno, maybe I'm being hysterical.