11:35 a.m. Well, apologies are certainly in order. I think Gilda Radnor said it best: "What's all this I hear about Russian jewelry?"

Ok, so maybe the poor dumb guys in the lame, but badly dubbed infomercial are not to blame. Blame it on a dubb-o. Sort of like a typo, only auditory. The correct joke is "What's the difference between a jeweler and a jailer? Get it? Jeweler: sells watches. Jailer: watches cells.

Jew plus jailer, that's very bad. Jeweler plus jailer: that's very different. Never mind. To the fine folks at Channel 13 KCOP (UPN) in Los Angeles: never mind. But it sure sounded bad to me. Maybe I've been too sensitive and jumpy since the most recent shooting at the Jewish childcare center, what with all the hate and all. Another guy who was exercising his right to bear arms.

I think an excellent idea for the press and the media, of which I am a functioning part, would be to start forgetting to name the idiot who is looking for his Warholian minute. How about we just punish the creeps by denying them their own identity? How about we not put them on the cover of Time and delve into their childhoods? I mean, whose childhood (besides the ones of my own children, of course) was perfect?

And this whole primitive hang-onto-your-guns thing is just plain strange to me. When my kids were little we sometimes made the trip into the Big City to go to the occasional museum, and I remember after one such afternoon that I got to thinking about all the costumes and ancient outfits I'd been looking at. If you were a man of any stature, the weapon of the moment was always a part of your get-up back then. A huge long sword, a small jeweled blade in a nifty rigid scabbard, a gun and its studded holster. Weapons always displayed, always at the ready. Boys will always be boys.

Here's an interesting factoid: When Handel's Messiah premiered in 1742 in Dublin, the only way all the listeners could squeeze into the hall was for "the ladies to come without skirt hoops and the men without swords" according to an old newspaper account of the occasion. I wonder who felt more nekked, more stripped of their very wo/man/hood that evening as they rose to their feet at the glorious end?

I thought back to that particular museum visit when I went looking for the pretty picture, opposite, of my first-born baby who, by that time, was growing up fast. It was a happy, Rosannadana kind of day. We worried about our hair. I did not worry that my kids were going to get shot by a lone, stray, or otherwise disgruntled person who just happened to be armed to the teeth. I really thought we were much more civilized than that. The world, even the strange world of the Big City, seemed like a safer place.

Everyone wonders what has changed things for us these days. Is it the semiautomatic weapon near at hand or the hair-trigger hatred that's to blame? Hitler yelled and screamed to an audience that was feeling real pain. People who were squeezed out of the inflationary economy managed to squeeze into huge halls in record numbers to hear him rant and rave and they were brought to their feet, not for transcendent musical beauty, but on the strength of their anger, raw and pure. Fists in the air. Feel the pain. Pain turned to blame and the rest is one of the bigger black holes in our human history.

I know the stupid guys in the infomercial were trying to express their own dumbfounded pain -- how did we get so low? Who has our jobs? Where is our pot of gold? Who do you shake your fist at when you feel angry? The jeweler, the jailer, the Indian chief? Gee, Officer Krupke, what are we to do? Remember the line from West Side Story? "I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived?" It was meant as a joke. It was a stupid joke. It was a pretty good joke in its day.

But today, nobody's laughing. Today things are very, very different.