Traveling with Panchito must give new meaning to the concept of hardship duty. Why else would the carrot so outweigh the stick? It’s a sad situation, though, when the reader has to pay the price for the splitting of the spaghetti. Take a grocery list, please, and check it twice — Einstein figured out bigger stuff faster. And he never had to conform to journalism standards, of which the what and the why outrank the who and the when. All those questions, along with the fifth commandment, also went into the sausage grinder for the farmer drummed out of the Greenmarket five years after his integrity was challenged. I have to say, the duck the guy sold was so outstanding he had to have bagged it somewhere else; no one can produce that many farm products that well or there would not be a Union Square. But even the poor headline writer could not summarize what the thing was really about. And kudos for the Mandarin transcriptions, but I think hell would be serving as a line cook in a restaurant where all the non-Asians come in and order the one dish they have been assured is safe to eat. No wonder the mall shut down almost as soon as the papers landed.

The base camp is getting even harder to maintain now that I have been swept into the E-ZPass of the internets, a blog that needs links more than words. But it can be trouble, too. After skimming part of the Drivelist’s latest “and then I did this and then I did that” when the wheel was already invented, I set off to Youtube in search of a postable “toddler makes first doody.” Yikes. If I had any money to invest, I’d be sinking it into pharmaceuticals big time. A whole generation is going to regret that youthful exuberance in a cellphone/video world. But even so, a close-up of a floating first turd in a toilet bowl cannot be as embarrassing as, “Look, world: I made snail butter.”