"... the space above the floor permits the broom to perform its work quickly and thoroughly."

10:46 a.m. Each and every day there's something new to chew on. Last night my son asked me what I was going to write about today. I can't say ahead of time because if I talk about something, I tend not to write about it. It seems secondhand. Plus, it hasn't happened yet. I like to scavenge and pounce on whatever floats by. Fresh is always better than refrigerated, or so we've been taught.

I live in a small city in the middle of a big city. All sorts of sounds, therefore. Some sounds you get used to and so you hardly hear the honks and beeps and shouts and horns and some sounds do what they are intended to do: wrest your attention, drag it down the street and off into the doppling distance. The car with the boom box radio going by like a giant muscular heartbeat. The red shiny ribbons of the fire sirens -- ah, civilization.

The answering howl of the hidden coyotes.

Huh? Yup. Here in the middle of the city within the city, once the fire company begins to wail, the invisible coyotes call out to it in return. For a few brief minutes you know you're not the only communicating species occupying this space. Vigorous, hearty howls, by the way. You can't mistake the sound. Music-of-the-children-of-the-night-type howls in the middle of the afternoon, followed by the smaller me-too yelps from a few bored but ambitious house dogs chained in their yards.

The fabulous, perfectly adaptable coyote, an animal who will eat the meat right out of the trap, your favorite cat, or whatever the landfill abundantly supplies. An animal who will mate with whatever: dogs or wolves -- it doesn't matter. Thus, we now have dogoytes and wily wyotes. You can't stop progress, or arrest or delay or even slow the survival of the fittest.

Back in the old days of lead-based daily newspapers, there was always a batch of filler material kept in the back in a bin. If you needed an inch or two, you grabbed the appropriate-sized news bit and screwed it into the chase along with the more important article and the much more important advertisement. Then, along with breakfast or dinner, the head of the household would try to digest these little odd tidbits and, depending on his or her power base, would often try to foist that same unsavory info onto the less alpha members of the flock.

To whit: here are some fillers from the town where I was born and the newspaper where, eventually, I got my first job: The Chester, Pa. Times, March 4, 1932.

London -- A recent purchase by the British Air Ministry is a plane carrying a broadcasting device with which it hopes to fly over its possessions, especially Iraq, and spread good will. The device magnifies the voice 3,000,000 times and can be heard over a range of more than ten miles.

Science has discovered a new coal-tar color, known as brilliant blue FCF, which has been added to the authorized list of food dyes by the Federal Food and Drug Administration. It is expected this coloring will be used to color breakfast cereals.

See how handy a piece of filler is? Takes up space, supplies perceived value to the reader, lets the writer off the hook for a brief second. Even gets you through a Monday morning with relative ease.

A species does what it has to do to survive. Communicates any way it can, across any boundary, like calling out to like, voices magnified over millions of miles, modems crackling, strange mixed breeds howling in the night, trying to broadcast good will. Eating whatever is to hand, ignoring expiration dates, swallowing CNN's weird factoids with this morning's crunchy off-color Capn' Booberry.

Survival of the fittest, indeed.