A Bush jackass over at the Justice Department wrote a snotty e-mail about Mary Frances Berry, who is black and a longtime pillar of the civil rights movement. The snotty e-mail came to light because of a government inquiry into the jackass’s suspiciously political hiring practices. So, as a side-effect of all the other trouble he’s in, the jackass had to write Ms. Berry a letter explaining what he meant when he said that he liked his coffee “Mary Frances Berry style — black and bitter.”

I just plugged the thing in, my first scanner. After you do a scan, where do you find the scan that you’ve done? When I look at the menu item for Open Project (I think that’s the term), it’s all grayed out. Yet I know I’ve done at least one scan. I lined up a picture on the flatbed, the picture showed up on my screen, and I clicked Accept. The Help files says that’s what you do when a scan is ready to go. I even did a Saveas and gave the scan a name. But now … gone and nowhere for me to look.

Barney Miller. He used to be a cop and found the show true to life.

Years ago, on my first job, I had to write an obit of the man who invented Twinkies. Since I worked for a reference publication, I included a definition of Twinkies for future generations: “a tan, cream-filled cake roughly the shape of a cylinder.” That caused people around the office to laugh at me.

Since Noah’s a poet, so am I. I wrote this years ago during a quiet moment on the Bond Buyer copy desk.

A Pulp Haiku

“Get your goddamned hands

where they can do me some good,”

she said gustily.

Walter Koenig, Star Trek’s Chekhov, has a mantelpiece loaded with action figures, ranks of them. Earth-2 Flash stands out. Koenig was already 20 in 1956, when the Flash got revived. His autobiography makes no mention of superheroes or comic books.