STILL not there yet.

Contractual issues, the fight to save full-length albums and worries about piracy have kept both Seger and Kid Rock from distributing their works online, Andrews said. Seger, however, did allow online stores to sell his new single "Wait For Me," from his upcoming September release — his first studio album in 11 years.

Seger, the legendary rocker from Michigan who entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, is considering releasing his classic 1976 album "Night Moves," but wants to make it so it only can be downloaded as an album, Andrews said.

Nothing else to the story but if you want to read it.

"Less self-concious people, that's who."

It's taking its old homepage away. Some day in September, I don't remember and don't care to remember. I know I'm looking for a new computer when Vista comes, but even while turning eight this month, this machine would be fine without the Yahoo run-and-fetch box factory. Build dynamically all you want, just have it built by the time I get there.

If I were 11 again, and even if not maybe still.

At first it was a bit jarring for Renee Zlotnick Kraft, Washington fur heiress and stalwart of the charity circuit, to be approached by strangers at traffic stops as she idled in her maroon Rolls-Royce.

Some wiseguy would turn and ask, in upper-crust deadpan, "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?"

Washington obit.

And then stop and never look back. People insist on caps in the middle or caps at the end to raise their voice, or they run all the way through the cut all the tone away from the visuals words provide.

THEY WAKE EACH morning on waterbeds, sashay to a buffet for breakfast, then go for a back massage. Each afternoon, they snack on chocolates before taking naps.

Sound good? Well, don't go trying to make a reservation at this spa, the guests here are all big fat Jersey cows.

Full story. Milk-milking man needs more of this life, and we all need more thoughtful restraint with capital letters, whether we're bringing lowercase livestock or arguments to save the world. Thanks to Jess for the link.

There was a milk-milking man at the county fair yesterday, and since this county was in the city maybe that's why he was talking to himself. Stuck between the Verizon booth (near the flea show) and the racing pigs, he had no customers, no visitors, and all the conversation he could handle. Apparently. No matter how much you love milk, you're not pulling fake cow teats with the most unnecessarily amused man at the fair. Or maybe it necessary. I don't know what I do if that job were mine. At least the pig-racing guy got to put on a show and take care of animals. The milk-milking man had a wood cow (both sides of one) with bags of milk hanging down between them all day under just a little roof all day at the country fair.

You saw everybody's tattoos and the thick covered cables running from wherever out into the middle of the park, with some people stepping over them and people like me stepping wherever and wondering what happened if you stepped on them too hard. Do they fuzz lose a hose or would you need heavy-duty cutters and some wood watt-eaters on hand? And everybody in the houses. Do they go out at night, with for once a fair in a city, just over the line but virtually there, do they stick around the RV roundup on the other side of the fence or do they find the subway and ride downtown? Trading what's normal to them for what's normal for everyone who's been watching and waiting for deep-fried Oreos?

And I don't know why. It's a writer with someone to say, something to argue, something to prove, someone who thinks it's worth time to convince you of something? If you can't name a writer you love at a news you don't know, then either you're not reading enough or that news isn't grasping at life nearly hard enough. Neil was what/who got me reading the Los Angeles Times everyday, and I'm not hooked easily. Years and years it takes me to like something different, to get comfortable with it and accept it. Not everything, of course, but everything important. Someday I'll get over that. But until then I'll praise whatever can do the job of conversion.

I direct you to Road & Track's cover story this month, a six-way runoff among the Porsche, the Dodge Viper, Chevrolet Corvette Z06, Ferrari F430, Ford GT and Lamborghini Gallardo. The editors have spared no trouble metering and measuring the performance of these cars, with the result that they are all within tenths and milliseconds of one another. You might as well draw names out of a helmet. Each of these monster cars will wring your adrenal glands like a pair of wet socks; each would qualify as karmic reward for a life spent working for world peace or curing halitosis or something.

Now imagine yourself driving them — which is to say, see yourself as others would see you on a day-to-day basis. Ah, well, now these cars become a decidedly more mixed proposition. Face it, with the exception of the Porsche, these cars do not cover their owners with glory. They are too vulgar, too boorish, too, too much. The Corvette is the subtlest of the bunch, and the Vette is about as subtle as a smoking exit wound.

Neil reviews the "Porsche's 911 Turbo for 2007." Nothing about the reviews grabs me hard, but it's got a "body of work" thing going on. One newspaper, one day's work, a body, imagine that.

Or so. What's going on? I'm behind on e-mail too. For someone who does this for a living, I really should be better at it at home. But there's a lot of detachment going on. It's helpful to think there's attachment in the data, but it's deceitful too. No one ever made a good life out of writing letters to send to no one. Or letters to toss up into the air to see where they land. I know I wrote here about dragging the blackboard onto the sidewalk everyday, but maybe you'd be better if you just sat your ass on the sidewalk and struck up something with every jacksass walking down the street.

The L.A. Times Sunday magazine runs a surprising profile today. The usual pieces of a newspaper profile are here — the recapping, the story-telling, the interviewing — but from the beginning, you know the reporting gets much more complicated. The lede:

Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"

It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

Francis isn't laughing.

He has turned on me, and I don't know why. He's going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff's deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he's punishing me for being the only blond in sight who's not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.

Full story.

For whatever reason, the mainstream sports press recently went deeper into baseball card collecting than usual….

• The best baseball card story I've read in a while: Dave Jamieson's "Requirem for a Rookie Card" on Slate. It's an indictment of everyone involved, including collectors, young and old, but especially of the card companies.

"The baseball card industry lost its way because the manufacturers forgot that the communal aspect of collecting is what made it enjoyable," Jamieson writes. "How can kids talk about baseball cards if they don't have any of the same ones?

Most stories about how the industry changed in the early '90s don't go this far. One after another, they examine the history and then back off. They fall into the "Did the industry change or did we?" trap. The trend shows up in all the articles following here, as good as they are. The general age of the writers means they were out of casual card collecting before the industry changed. Long before, most of the time. And now they aren't sure how much their own growing up made them lose interest in cards.

I don't know how old Jamieson is, but the touchstones in his story put him around my age. Working from that experience, he's able to point a convincing finger at the industry. Our generation of card collectors has the experience to point. We know how those prices jumped way beyond what we had in our kid wallets. We know we got thrown out.

• Apparently always writing, Yahoo's Jeff Passan does a card column:

Before I got to the National, a card-collecting friend issued a warning.

"All those cards we grew up collecting," he said. "If you look in the Beckett, you won't see them. After four pages, it jumps to 1997."

He was right. Today's Beckett Baseball Card Monthly is a thorough compendium of the current market with barely a nod or wink to the past. Fifteen years ago, it was my bible. New issues arrived with all the promise of an oil well. If the price of a card I owned included an up arrow, I felt like I'd struck.

The story balances the writer looking back with his experience this summer at the National Sports Collectors Convention. He meets a dealer nicknamed Big Loot — he got nickname in prison after serving drug-related charges — and another dealer who in his ads fans out "at least $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills." He also talks to James Beckett, who sounds like he's fine with it all.

• ESPN's Eric Neel writes about his collecitng days and rounds up his colleagues' memories:

I used to put hexes on Michael's Will Clark. He once threatened to tear my Orel Hershiser in half. I mocked him for Kevin Mitchell's sleepy look. He was all over me because Alfredo Griffin's 1988 card actually was shot when Griffin was still with the A's. We thumbed the cards like rosaries. We shuffled pinch-hitters and relievers in and out. We were at war. We were compadres.

When Michael died suddenly in a car accident five years later, it wasn't the eulogies at his funeral, the old photographs or the stories and memories of friends that made it possible to wrap my mind around him being gone. It was a card. Back at Michael's house after the services, I stood in his den and looked at the CDs and books on his shelves, and then I saw it, the Will Clark, perched on the shelf in front of his Coltrane discs, sitting there like some sacred object on an altar. Like Michael, Clark looked like he was jawing at me, like he was having a last laugh, like he was giving me the business. And like me, Clark looked incredulous, too, like he couldn't believe he and I were the only ones left, like this was madness.

Others comment on the beauty of the multi-player future stars card, Billy Ripken's obscenity card, Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie 1989 Upper Deck #1, and the awesome look of 1986 Topps, sadly before my time.

• Jim Caple takes a tour of the Topps offices.

Luraschi is giving me a tour of the Topps baseball card headquarters in Manhattan, which is a bit like being allowed inside the gates of Willy Wonka's factory. Only instead of Oompa-Loompas waddling around, there are teams of 20- and 30-something baseball fans and art designers studying computer screens of statistics amidst desks scattered with old cards. One editor is poring through minor league stats, searching for the next rising star. Another is looking through photos of Ted Williams for use in a new set of cards. A designer shows me how they use Adobe Photoshop to place new caps and uniforms onto players who changed teams over the winter — and in Johnny Damon's case, they also give him a George Steinbrenner-approved shave and haircut with a single keystroke.

There's an interesting bit about the players who don't make it on cards, but a discussion about a marketing correction, about "getting back to making cards for kids," is frustratingly short.

There's also a collection of reader memories.

In the middle of reading it, I got to thinking that I wanted to buy a whole box or case of Topps from 1988 or some other worthless year and just give them away to people. I sent an e-mail to the House of Cards. Then I went on eBay and poked around there, first for boxes and then Mussina memorabilia. Didn't buy a thing over this half-hour but did great at improving the morning.