Via Prof. Althouse, I read this really interesting q-and-a with the New York Times Obituaries Editor, Bill McDonald, whom readers have dubbed "Kill Bill." There are a lot of questions about obits written in advance, and McDonald goes to some lengths to explain that process, openly acknowledging they have over a thousand obits in the file for people who aren't dead yet.

It's no surprise to me that this topic so dominated the q-and-a. At first blush, it does seem a little morbid, even for a news division that deals in death all the time. (Or, do they deal in life?!) But of course, it's not as if they're taking bets in a Times dead pool or something. I'm sure all the other news divisions would love to be able to write their stories in advance. (I'm sure conservatives think the Times already does that!) Anyway, I doubt they do it like "Tom Brokaw" did in a favorite "SNL" skit: "Gerald Ford was mauled senselessly by a circus lion in a convenience store."

Anyway, what got me thinking was McDonald's reference to the oldest advance obit in their file. It dates to 1982, and the author is now dead, but the subject isn't. Now I'm intensely curious who the subject is. It would have to be someone who had done enough by 1982 to merit a Times obit (and there's a lot in the q-and-a about how they make that judgment call), but not enough since then to merit a re-write. My speculative guess was going to be Olivia de Havilland until I caught that McDonald referred to the subject as a "he." Assuming that wasn't a red herring, I'm stumped. Any guesses? Maybe it was an obit for disco.

There's an enthralling article by Michael "Moneyball" Lewis in this week's New York Times Magazine. It's about a poor black kid in Memphis who is taken in by a white family and an evangelical Christian school, sheltered, tutored, and introduced to football. It's very much worth reading, so I hope you don't mind if I give away the ending: the kid, Michael Oher, is now a pro prospect playing at Ole Miss.

Peter Northup at Crescat has a very good post up about the article and some of the questions it raised for him, and the comments there are worth exploring, too. I was struck by one of the same lines that Peter noted. He has a few representative quotes which he says "give the rich-white-born-again flavor of the family and community." At one point, Oher needs to raise his grades to meet the NCAA's minimum eligibility requirements. They find correspondence courses from Brigham Young University that allow Oher to get easy A's in almost no time, and his scholarship is secure. In gratitude for how helpful the BYU folks have been, Oher's adoptive father says, "The Mormons may be going to hell, but they really are nice people."

I think this is exactly why Mitt Romney has no chance to be elected President, K-Lo's crush notwithstanding. (A search on nro.com for "romney" and "lopez" returns a lot of hits.) I think there are too many Christian voters who won't ever warm up to Romney. Now, it could very well be that (a) evangelical Christians will choose to vote for someone they think is "going to hell," or (b) they can stomach voting for Romney if his opponent ends up being the devil herself. Personally, I find (a) unlikely if the other choice is a member of another Christian faith, and especially a Protestant one. I think that's especially likely to happen in the primary season, when another candidate (Brownback?) will be available to present most or all of Romney's conservative bona fides with none of the Mormon baggage. As for (b), if Romney gets the nomination and is matched up against anyone other than Hillary Clinton, the evangelicals might not feel so fired up and won't vote in the numbers they did in the last two elections. (And of course, Hillary herself has been a Sunday School teacher in her Protestant church before, although I don't believe that will matter to anyone.)

This is just a hunch; I may be wrong about Romney's appeal. But if the casual quote in the Lewis article is any indication of the esteem in which most evangelicals hold Mormons, Romney doesn't have a prayer.

If everyone hates reading other people's dream stories as much as I think they do, feel free to skip this post. The hook is that I had a dream so bad the other day that it woke me up.

I very rarely remember my dreams. Actually, almost never. I'm assuming I have them, because I do wake up sometimes with fleeting feelings that I had been dreaming. But they're very vague, along the lines of, "I think I was back in high school, except all my law school friends were there." Actually, I'm not sure I could have distinguished the two. But anyway, the point is, I can't remember the last time I remembered a dream in any kind of detail, so that alone makes this unusual for me. I do tend to have those almost-rememberings more often when I get a lot of sleep, so there's probably some REM-related/sleep deprivation reason for this. But conditions were ripe the other day, because I was sleeping late and wasn't rushed when I got up, so I didn't have much to clutter my mind.

I don't remember the set-up (which is probably the most interesting part), but I was on the run from someone or something. I was running down a road in a very wooded area at night, with no lights or civilization anywhere in sight. It was just this long road and a bunch of trees for as far as the eye could see. I don't watch "Prison Break," but it had the feeling the previews for that show try to evoke: I definitely did not want to get caught by whatever was after me. Okay, two weird aspects of this. First, there was someone else running with me. Either he was somebody famous, or reminded me of somebody famous. I want to say it was Sean Penn, but maybe not. The second odd thing is that we were pushing dollies or handtruck or something similar. There wasn't anything on them, but it was really important that we hang on to them.

The problem with having these dollies was that whoever was after us was following us via the tracks these things left. (I blame "CSI" for putting that in my brain.) They were lighter than the average handtruck, but not so light that we could carry them and avoid leaving tracks. At some point, we decided to split up, and the Penn-guy ran off into the woods. I stayed on the road. Shortly after this, the road started to get steeper. I was climbing a pretty steep hill, and it took a great deal of effort to get up it with the dolly. It seemed to go on a long time, but I finally reached the top.

At the top of the hill, however, I discovered that the other side of the hill -- the way down -- was even steeper. It was practically a sheer cliff. (But, strangely, still paved, as if the highway system has random spiky mountains in it.) And, when I looked back the way I came, that side seemed even steeper, too. Logically, if I was able to climb up the hill carrying a handtruck, I should have been able to get back down it, even if I had to slide on my seat or something. But from the top, it looked impossibly high and steep. And, even if I could have made it down that way, I didn't want to go back the way I came, because of whatever was chasing me. In the dream, the high point of this paved hill was just wide enough for me to barely fit -- like laying on the world's highest speed bump. But I was stuck on top with nowhere to go and no way to get there. The last thing I remember is hoisting the dolly over the side, trying to figure out a way to get myself down, and starting to panic.

Then I woke up. I've mentioned here before that I'm scared of heights. And I really think that's what woke me up -- the panic I felt stuck on that precipice. I was worried about my pursuer, but that wasn't an imminent fear. But I woke up in a sweat, my muscles tense, and the back of my neck on fire, for some reason. I have no idea when I last scared myself awake. And often, it's the falling dreams that wake people up. For me, I guess it didn't even get that far.

I'm sure the armchair dreamologists have some ideas about what this all means. Have at it. I'm not terribly concerned about the meaning of all this. For me, it's mostly like an annoying song stuck in my head, and I need to pass it on to get rid of it.