You tell ‘em, writers. Look: I’m less and less involved with entertainment as a profession lately. Part of it is the lack of time to accomplish every single thing I want to accomplish and juggling priorities. Another part of it is that writers and performers are almost universally under-appreciated for their work. (Here is a related essay by our own Reid Levin.)

So reading about the WGA strike starting today fills me with something. Something like pride, but not the same. And not quite solidarity. But something. Writer’s block, evidently.

Here’s USA Today’s Whitney Matheson on the whole deal.

I get an absurd number of hits from people searching Google for “Mike Vick jokes.” Seriously. This is all because once, long ago, I wrote like two of ‘em. If I recall correctly, they were both lame. Anyway, may it please my Googlebound Mike Vick joke-seeking constituency, I saw somewhere that Atlanta Magazine has done something funny: they’ve revisited and annotated a 2003 article in which they presented a glowing portrait of NFL savior-to-be Mike Vick. The idea is funnier than the execution, but it’s still worth a look.

(Come on in, new Google friends.)

Maybe you’re wondering why I’ve been so mysteriously silent.

Well, one, to stoke the mystery. There hasn’t been enough mystery around here lately. I mean just this weekend there was a whole New York Times thing on how we’re such exhibitionists and voyeurs and architects and so on and so forth. Where’s the mystery? WHERE?

Wonder no more. The mystery is here.

Secondly, I’ve been busy reporting about sustainable beer. And other things. But right now, I want you to go and learn how to drink a beer.

But there have been some things that I should have blogged about here, so we’re going to do the quick-hit version of a lot of them:

Stephen Colbert tried to run for president in the South Carolinian primaries. The GOP wanted $35,000 and the Democrats wanted him to be serious. I feel his pain — and I think we now see that no comedian will ever be president of South Carolina — but frankly I’m glad it’s over because this way I won’t be asked to form an opinion on his running.

And also I’m thrilled that we don’t have to hear from other presidential candidates and politics blogs on the matter. I’m even beginning to hate it when they show up on Comedy Central shows. It just feels so desperate (Kucinich, oddly, excepted).

To be fair, when comedy shows do things on presidential candidates, it looks desperate, too. Honestly, I’m the perfect market for a comedy sketch on democratic primary presidential candidates and, uh, come on. Come on.

I did laugh at Horatio Sanz playing Bill Richardson playing Al Gore, due in no small part to increasing numbers of recent descriptions of the New Mexico governor as a Horatio Sanz character. But I just felt so bad for Amy Poehler in this sketch. In a relay race where every checkpoint was a heavy-handed set-up for a light joke about people the American public doesn’t know, she was forced to play baton. Meanwhile, Darrell Hammond was doing an unrelated one-man Bill Clinton sketch. (Bonus points to this sketch for giving me another excuse to write the word “mystery” in this blog post; points taken off because it’s a reference to the Pick-Up Artist television program for toolbags.)