GRUMPY OLD MEN. At OpinionJournal Daniel Henninger devotes an entire, lengthy column to how there's so many swears on the TV these days and in his day they had Rod Serling and nobody used swears. Really, that's all it's about. A web outlet of the mighty Wall Street Journal is now running copy that sounds as if it originated with your cranky grandmother while she was off her meds, then was run through some kind of language software with the "pomposity" setting turned on High.

Meanwhile in Jasperwood Lileks complains of ennui, which is interesting considering what he wrote the day before. That session started promisingly enough, with a happy reverie about old-fashioned newspapering, "when movies regularly showed newspapers as things that spun like propellers before stopping at a jaunty angle," and the papers had great headlines like KILLER GETS DEATH, which Lileks repeated, again in all caps, adding the gloss, "Off to Old Sparky within the month." He seemed as happy as a teenage boy with a jar of Vaseline.

But then a housewife in a commercial behaved in a manner Lileks found insubordinate. This got him screaming BITCH, again in all caps, and reeling into a Kim Du Toit-style monologue:

it’s something I notice in ads: Guys Dumb, Girls Competent and Patiently Enduring Guys’ Thickheadedness. In the bad old days, in the era of spinning newspapers, it was the other way around -- the frails were dizzy flighty creatures who required an iron infusion of masculine common sense. Now the guys in ads all act like boys in a state of eternally attenuated adolescence, and they require partners who channel their inner Mom to whip them into shape.

He then announced he would amplify on this theme in his next installment. This morning I leapt out of bed and ran to my computer, only to learn that Lileks is too tired to write anything for us except one of those half-hearted Family Circus re-enactments. Little bitch.

Refresh my memory: aren't conservatives supposed to be the hip, fun kids?