Opinions

This is a file photo! (Paul Sakuma - AP) What does this much-ballyhooed Facebook IPO amount to? I’ve said before that if Mark Zuckerberg isn’t literally spirited up to heaven on the wings of hippogriffs, it will be a disappointment. I stand by that. Still, before you know it, there are going to be almost half as many Facebook stock shares as Facebook users. It is inevitable, like death and the release of “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” although probably slightly more pleasant than either.

True, nobody can quite agree how to mon­etize Facebook. But never mind that. It is common knowledge that it contains hundreds of millions of users. Each user has, on average, 229 friends, 22 percent of whom he or she met in high school. And through friends of friends, we can each reach something like 150,000 people. It has to be worth something.

In the mean time, Facebook is less a country than an ecosystem. The jungle has its own laws. It is not a particularly mean jungle — 80 percent of friend requests are accepted — but like any good ecosystem, it has its recognizable types. And before you invest, consider what you’re getting.

The Eight People You Meet On Facebook:

The Liker: You haven't spoken with this person in the flesh in over three years, but somehow he or she always winds up liking your statuses. You aren’t even sure what country this person resides in, if you have to be completely honest.

The Infected: This person always seems to be offering you FREE IPADS. If zombies ever come for us, steer clear of him. He's going to be among the first to go.

The Tagger: If it weren’t for the Tagger, none of those vacation photos would ever wind up with your name on them. Your attitude towards this person varies, depending upon the lighting and your state of undress.

Buddy Roemer’s here, too, folks! (Gerald Herbert - Associated Press) Americans Elect threw a party, and nobody came. A third party, that is.

It was like the old story where an elderly hostess throws one last bash. She engraves the fanciest of invitations, hires a band, commissions a chef to prepare the hautest of cuisine. She decorates for weeks. Everything is in place for the perfect soiree. But the party flops.

No one shows up.

It turns out (after the hostess goes off to die quietly of shame) that she forgot to mail the invitations.

Americans Elect has no such handy excuse for the fact that no candidate managed to clear its threshold for support.

But the lack of attendance at this party is not difficult to understand.

So long, sir. (Jay Janner - Associated Press) He disappeared in the dead of May:

The screens were frozen, the forums almost deserted,

A hush fell over the YouTube comments;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the caucus crew.

E’en mainstream media agree

The day Ron Paul stopped was a dark cold day.

That’s probably a bit much, especially the “e’en,” but the departure of Dr. Ron Paul from the presidential race — he announced Monday that he wasn’t competing for any new delegates, and clarified the statement on Tuesday — left a distinctly autumnal feeling in the air. It was the sort of news that gave you the urge to march around attempting ineptly to adapt Auden’s poem about the death of Yeats to the occasion.

What are we going to do without Dr. Paul?

All the strange uncles of the 2012 race have been lopped off. Thanksgiving dinner is bound to be quieter, but it will not be nearly so amusing. There will be no 9-9-9, no End the Fed, no sweater vests. We are left, on the right side of the aisle — depending on how exciting the week of news is — with either the Worst Man Ever, a Wealth-Addled Menace to Both Dogs and Humans, Who Is a Vampire and Predator and Destroys Businesses and is a Terrible Cultist, although possibly not all at the same time, or A Man So Bland That It’s Impossible to Finish This Sentence Without Drifting Off to Sleep. This is the trouble with our two-party system. It has a tendency to weed out strange uncles.

I’m going to miss Ron Paul. He was — to say the least — a consistent presence.

Paul spokesman Jesse Benton noted that the campaign was “emphasizing decorum.” He admitted: “Our supporters are going to get an excessive amount of blame for problems that arise at heated conventions.” This is not entirely fair.

Then again, in my admittedly limited experience of caucus speakers, it is not entirely unfair, either. The Ron Paul speaker at the caucus at first would make a great deal of sense, and then you would keep listening, and then he would start to tell a parable about a shepherd and a giant — “These giants, they were real. They dig up their bones every day. They had two rows of teeth. They practiced modern-day sacrifice and cannibalism” — and you would lose the thread.

But at least they showed up at caucuses.

Lukewarm’s better than, er, lukecold, I guess. (Jae C. Hong - Associated Press) “I’m for Mitt Romney,” said George W. Bush, as the elevator doors closed on him.

So ABC News reported Tuesday.

That’s a strange sentence.

It’s amazing how much air you can take out of any announcement by inserting “as the elevator doors closed.”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” said Patrick Henry, as the elevator doors closed.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the elevator doors closed.

“I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality in this day,” said Martin Luther King Jr., as the elevator doors closed.

It creates a certain vacuum.

Poor Mitt Romney. He just cannot get a full-throated endorsement. Really enthusiastic Romney endorsers are rarer than the unicorn.

To say that most Romney endorsers have been tepid is to say that lukewarm bathwater is tepid.

“Tepid Romney endorsement,” as a phrase, is redundant. All Romney endorsements sound tepid. That is what makes them Romney endorsements.

Butter wouldn’t melt on most of these endorsements.

Expect an irate letter from the hula hoop union. (Newsweek)

Can we talk about that halo, please?

I understand that the fundamental undergirding principle of all newsweeklies these days, almost to the exclusion of all others, is to Be Talked About. “Nothing is worse than not being talked about,” they say, in editorial meetings. “Not even Photoshopping some sort of weird Candy Land hula hoop over the president’s head.”

I am not alone in wondering about what has been dubbed the president’s “gaylo.”

Halos used to have an iconography of their own. As you moved up the Heavenly Hierarchy you got to trick them out in various ways. There were your regular halos, then your Halos 3 for X-Box, and then, when you made it to the very top, there were your tri-radiant nimbuses — or your tri-radiant nimbuses 3000, if you were simultaneously Harry Potter and God (not improbable, given all the allegory floating around.) But the point was you had to earn it. And when you got it, it didn’t bear a non-negligible resemblance to a frisbee.