I’m trying to get my head back into Campaign 2012, but am suffering from aversions. The campaign feels static, the story-of-the-day trivial. The things people talk about aren’t even “issues,” really. Like Obama’s birthplace. He was born in Hawaii. This has been settled. To discuss further is to descend into madness and lunacy. And so I’m with Cillizza on Romney and Trump: What’s Mitt thinking? Is there a secret strategy memo that says that the way to 270 electoral votes is to play the Trump card and flirt with fringe conspiracy theories?

This morning I finished the Bill Bryson book, “At Home,” a warehouse of delights and fun facts, much of it about life in 19th century England, when Bryson’s home was built by a country clergyman. Bryson concludes that, superficially, the world hasn’t changed that much in all these years, that his clergyman would see a fairly familiar landscape, but for the odd car or helicopter. But culture, the reader surmises, changes so dramatically. Our sense of what is normal, healthy, appropriate, is radically different. We have witnessed cultural, political, scientific, medical revolutions. They had all these codes back then, all these compulsions and assumptions. And it makes me wonder what it is that we do today that will, a century from now, seem strange, antiquated, ridiculous.

I need to tidy up a loose end on the Woodward-Bradlee-Himmelman story, putting on the record a written response by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to one element of Jeff Himmelman’s book as excerpted in New York magazine. Woodward provided me with the typed response last night. This isn’t about Ben Bradlee but rather deals with something Himmelman discusses at length in the first half of the New York mag excerpt. Himmelman found a memo that shows that one of the sources for Woodward and Bernstein back in 1972 was a member of the Watergate grand jury.