( I got a phone call this morning... )

( I've never been much of a drinker. )

( So, to recap. )

( So there we were... )

Next week: Was it all worth it?

( I'm not sure what I was expecting... )

It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile

( In the first grade... )

( I spent a year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. )

( I saw something on the Internet yesterday... )

OK, the end of the last column said "more of the same", and there was no more of the same. I should've known better than to try and carry an Olympics column into a two-parter after the Olympics were over. The momentum dies off very quickly once the competition's actually finished.

Following that I've had a couple more false starts. I wanted to do something on Edward R. Murrow's 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, and the parallels that might be drawn between his view of television in the late 1950s and the modern state of the Internet, but that's been more problematic to articulate than I expected, possibly because in both cases the battle's already been fought and lost. I thought about doing something with some other current event, but everything that's going on has either been talked to death already or isn't of significant interest to anyone.

So instead you get three paragraphs of me grumping about how I haven't got an idea. Aren't you lucky?

( Well, that's it. )