Mentor and section mate have recently posted blogs of very heartfelt and painful experience about social issues that have to change and are glacially changing. Okay, glaciers are harder to find. Channeling Trotsky here (at this point mentor is casting me from her office).

Oh, yes, so about what is Mr. Nobody here to write? Talk show wars, or something.

On Mondays Jay Leno generally has the "Headlines" feature involving gaffes usually from newspapers, ads as well as stories, sent by viewers. The first involved a restaurant advertisement which contained a line about an item "Straight from the chef's crack . . ." I trust your diaphragms haven't suffered too much overload from this rich bite of humor. Out of the office a second time...

Then there was the one that set this off. It was a public service about strokes; mentor recently sent me an email about recognizing stroke symptoms, especially ones involving affected speech and thinking.

In Leno's item, words were scrambled within directions for when strokes occur with the reader there. It told the reader to decode this, post it and have it handy for when the unthinkable strikes.

Gales of laughter from Jay and minions: He wise cracked along the general warp of, "So when someone has a stroke you ask them [gibberish, gibberish]?"

Pun intended, unhappily.

Strangely and not uncommonly the reasons for the ad's strategy were there onscreen for a second.

We have been long told talk show hosts are, for the masses, more important disseminators of events than the mainstream news. Leno is far more middle of the throughway than Colbert or "The Daily Show", but he's in there.

His first guest was Matthew Perry, and the initial thing the ex-Chandler Bing brought up was, "Just what was this 'crack' supposed to be?" And he and the host actually couldn't figure it out.

Celebrity; what a crock.