I officially give up on all pretense of regularly posting "Sunday Nights" on actual Sunday nights. I trust nobody will be altogether brokenhearted.

Today, tonight, or whatever the hell time it is, we're going back to school. First, to high school, before anybody's Gmail started sprouting little blinking orange chat boxes in the corner - in fact, before anybody had Gmail. All the way back to AOL Instant Messenger. And you might feel like you're too sophisticated now to even admit that you had AIM and a screen name with the number '16' in it somewhere, but don't worry - DavidAxelrod and Howard Wolfson still do! Apparently they "exchanged pleasantries" online last Wednesday, on the day that may or may not go down as the final excruciating morning after of this interminable primary season. Though the "pleasantries" are presumably not on the public record, happily, a couple of bloggers have offered their own interpretations. First, a commenter on Ben Smith's blog at Politico takes this guess:

TheRodster42: lol ur toast
WolfieSweater69: stfu, we won IN
TheRodster42: lol NC pwned u
WolfieSweater69: rev wright said wut?
TheRodster42: lol typ white person...

But I personally prefer Ana Marie Cox's rendering:

KewlSweater (9:26:06 PM): yt?
AxStache (9:26:55 PM): y
KewlSweater (9:27:01 PM): we got the white ppl! suck on it!
AxStache (9:27:12 PM): sorry am 2 busy sucking on our 14 PT WIN! PWND!!!!!
KewlSweater (9:27:40 PM): :(
KewlSweater (9:27:45 PM): u don't have to be so mean about it.
KewlSweater (9:28:01 PM): dude rlly, this like, totally blows….
AxStache (9:28:04 PM): i know bro. srsly, i feel for you…
KewlSweater (9:28:07 PM): it’s really curious how much this blows…
AxStache (9:28:14 PM): i know man, but it doesn’t blow as much as Penn!
KewlSweater (9:28:16 PM): LOLOLOL
AxStache (9:28:17 PM): LOL!!!!!
KewlSweater (9:28:19 PM): SRSLY!!! LOLOLOL J ;-)
AxStache (9:28:21 PM): ROFL ROFL….i think i laughed so hard i made my mustache crooked!
KewlSweater (9:28:22 PM): LOLOLOL
AxStache (9:28:23 PM): heehee
KewlSweater (9:28:25 PM): i miss you
AxStache (9:28:29 PM): i miss you too
Phil4Hill (9:28:30 PM): hey guys what’s up?
KewlSweater (9:28:35 PM): um….hey

God help us all, we probably sounded like that once too.

And while we're in the earlyish stages of our adolescent swaggering, let's revisit what I assume to be a confrontation that everyone but me had with their parents: the inevitable fight at the first appearance of text messaging charges on the cell phone bill. (I didn't have a cell phone until I moved out for college. I had suspicions that my parents harbored secret Luddite tendencies when it took us until approximately 1999 to purchase an answering machine, but the cell phone thing more or less sealed the deal.) At any rate, apparently kids these days without a texting plan are subjecting their obliging parents to large bills, which the parents grouse about - understandably, since the idea of paying fifteen cents for every 'lol' a child transmits, in lieu of actual snickering, to his best friend sitting ten feet away would raise my hackles, too. A presumably disgruntled parent named Nigel Bannister (very British, which, in fact, he is), who also happens to be a space scientist, was presumably so disgruntled that he calculated the relative cost per byte of transmitting information via text message versus the cost of transmitting information from the Hubble Telescope. The result: at five pence per message (which, I will have you know, is far cheaper than my non-plan), texting is at least four times more expensive than sending data from the Hubble. To earth. Which, you know, is a long way away.

But enough of that heady stuff - let's back up a little further to your first pimple and, hopefully, your last NSync CD. (Remember: yours, not mine.) Back up to a time when this headline would have been unimaginably hilarious: "Great Tits Cope Well With Warming." Sadly, it's actually about - well, I'll let you figure that out, because I want you to click the link and share in my disappointment. I'll just say: screw you, BBC News.

Finally, to elementary school, that idyllic time of coloring hours and playground games, with this super-cheesy entry in MoveOn's contest to produce an ad for Barack Obama. (You can see the other winners here.)

Now, isn't that just cute enough to turn your stomach? I'll leave you here, just like those kids - happy, holding hands, and with absolutely nothing interesting to do, now that some brat has killed your game of Red Rover.

PSYCH! (There's another throwback.) A late update from the adult world, probably more adult than we'd like to be at this point in our lives: Today, the House Republicans circulated a memo claiming:

Through our “Change You Deserve” message and through our “American Families Agenda,” House Republicans will continue our efforts to speak directly to an American public looking for leaders who will offer real solutions for the challenges they confront every day.

Which is problematic in itself, since the idea of an "American Families Agenda" sounds a lot like the much more boring version of the homosexual agenda (think Mom Jeans). But there's an even more fitting link: apparently "Change You Deserve" is already the slogan of an antidepressant. How very, very telling.