Miss me?

Hey, good to be back.

I had one of those "This is the part of the movie where I came in" moments yesterday. I was off last week for a medical procedure and recuperation time (it went well, thanks), and I wasn't particularly interested in the news. I decided I should at least get current before returning to work, so I went through the Sunday Journal Gazette. Poor women will be harmed and there will be more abortions! shouted a Page 1 story about the state's cutoff of funding for Planned Parenthood. Opinion of the newly approved education voucher system is mixed, said a story with a calmer tone. An analysis on the Perspective front page more or less said Hoosiers are morons if they approve putting a gay-marriage ban in the state constitution, thereby chasing all the creative people away and dooming economic development efforts. John McCain had a piece in which he said that torture is not in keeping with American values.

In other words, a lot of rehashing of stories that were big when I took off and stopped noticing the news. Same stuff, different day. Or, sometimes, same play, different cast. There was even another story about the "Bob Dylan accepted Chinese censorship of his play list" story that had seemed to fizzle out last month:

"As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing," Dylan wrote. "There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous three months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play."

In a column published April 9, The New York Times' Maureen Dowd criticized Dylan for not singing such protest anthems as "The Times They Are a-Changin,'" and "Blowin' in the Wind." Dylan, she wrote, "sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left."

I'd probably choose to believe Bob Dylan over Maureen Dowd, though her devotion to songs like "The Times They Are a-Changing" and "Blowin' in the Wind" has a certain goofy charm. But Dylan has a long history of protecting his privacy by saying false, contradictory and preposterous things just to mess with reporters' heads, so I'm not going to go too far out on a limb. Maybe I'll wait to see if The Journal Gazette takes a position so I can take the opposite one.

I highly recommend, by the way, taking a week off now and then during which the news is only marginally paid attention to. And the more you follow it, the less attention you should pay. The world really will keep on turning, and you can jump back in anytime without losing a step.