When you finish a Neal Stephenson book, you feel like you've really accomplished something, except you also sometimes feel like you've taken a very long Greyhound bus ride and you're mostly very tired. So, about 30 days after its release, I have finally gotten through the 1056 pages of Reamde, which is his novel about how a computer virus messed up a credit card scam and a video game, which upset the Russian mob which then intruded upon a terror cell, drawing everyone into a giant international mess. The great stuff is so terrific! Particularly the asides, the thoughts on how minds work, on how the modern world [...]

Today's Post reports that "An officer conducting an inspection at a Bronx narcotics unit last week found a soft-core porn movie playing on one of the TVs in the facility, police sources said. The skin flick was playing on a satellite-TV premium channel. That violates an NYPD policy banning such channels at work." Okay, so! The newspaper has done its job, by playing straight man. (Although this is a terrible headline.) Still, they have set up, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, at least 450³ possible jokes. Heaven! And yet, the lone commenter on this story at the Post is doing it wrong. Let's explain!

"I was told that if I played this song, I'd get a lot of people on the dance floor," said Jeff the DJ. He had been absentmindedly scrolling through his iTunes. The next words came from Gloria Gaynor, proclaiming that she had been, at first, both afraid and petrified. A handful of women came to the center of the dance floor, ignoring the men. This song was for the women. They'd earned it. And you don't have to be a shrink to understand why I Will Survive had a resonance at the California Cougar Convention at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills.