It must be the season, and the year, to wax nostalgic about romantic maladies. Was this also what was called "the vapors"? The old-fashioned nervous breakdown was a subject for my blog, Brick, a couple of months ago:

http://benpollock.com/brick/index.php/2006/01/29/ready-for-my-breakdown/

Mr. Keillor handles it better than me, with grace and soft vowels. But I know just how he feels. And it seems to be spreading.

Ben S. Pollock

Please add me to those requesting Salon to continue posting daily the TV talk show line-up that includes the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Charlie Rose. Syndicated TV schedules generally stop at the main network programs. I could program my browser's default home page for this and wait forever while it loads. Or every afternoon I could click on comedycentral.com and pbs.org then wade through series of screens.

A chat show list is a kind service from a daily news generator that keeps paying subscribers coming back.

Be glad we're not begging for a Salon sudoku.

The letter writers to the column "Since You Asked" are incredible. Here, more than on most days, it's difficult to tell what they take more seriously: themselves, the world or Cary's answers. Great satirical response, Mr. Tennis.

Unless I skimmed past it, no one has suggested talking to your vet before emergencies arise. (One reader did advise getting a second opinion.) If you already have a vet you trust, ask at the next annual exam, or sooner, his or her philosophy on expensive care. If you're new to an area or to pet ownership -- or you've never much felt comfortable with the doc you use -- investigate prospective vets like you choose a new physician, starting with word-of-mouth of other pet owners, then interviewing the doc.

This just could be asking about cost of the more sophisticated procedures, but it should be more than that: Does your vet share your views about where "too-much" begins, what to do when the care may just be prolonging the animal's suffering etc. A competent vet should be for eager this conversation before it's dire. If the client and clinic agree generally, the client will bring the next pet to the same place for repeat business.

Phyllis McGinley and Ogden Nash evidently never would be allowed online, for all the flaming they'd get. Way too many comments on Keillor when he leaves essay and approaches tall tale, and now those who allergically react to Traister's lovely froth of verse, show their writers have no appreciation or even sense of hyperbole or indirection, in the service of wit.

What causes this paranoid literalness? Incompent English teachers? The increasing presumption that what one reads HAS to be true -- or else -- seems to come from fear. But of what?

Any way to add time stamps, especially to home page headings? Fresh postings were obvious before, a top-down design.