When a man like Donald Trump says that he's not sure whether or not the president is really a natural-born citizen, you should pay close attention. He's telling you something very important.

What he's telling you is that he thinks you're stupid.

Yes, Trump has conceded that Obama's birth certificate "checks out." But the man is smart enough to know that there was never any serious dispute about the president's citizenship. Any credible politician—not to mention The Donald—who has repeated and amplified any "birther" claims has done it for one reason: to undermine the president's credibility in your mind and to weaken him politically. After all, if you're frothing at the mouth and calling for the president to be impeached over a citizenship issue, it's that much easier for those same politicians to pick your pocket. And if they think they can whip you into that state by repeating statements with no more than a tenuous connection to reality, what does that say about their opinion of you?

So listen closely to Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and, yes, Donald Trump when they try to spin today's revelation to their advantage. Even now they think they've gotten away with something by forcing the president's hand, and every word they utter tells you they think you're as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Are you?

Just received another instance of one of my favorite emails. It goes something like this:

Hi! You've been such a help and inspiration, I'd like to send you a copy of my new self-published book. I'd really like to read some of your books too. Which one do you suggest I start with?

Flattering, right? But you have to know how to read an email like this. Here's what it means:

I know I'm imposing on you so I'll salve my conscience by pretending to want to read your stuff. Only I'm too lazy to do my homework, so I'll let you tell me what books you've written instead.

If I were a real asshole instead of just pretending to be one, I would write back:

It doesn't matter which one you start with, so pick whichever one out of all one looks best to you.

Good thing I'm not that kind of asshole.

Today is the 114th running of the Boston Marathon. I am reminded of this because I've started receiving race alerts via text message for a runner named Jen Stronge. So has Laura.

I wish Jen Stronge all the luck in the world in finishing strong in the marathon this morning. But I never signed up to get her alerts, and I wish they would stop. My guess is that she has the same chip number that Laura had last year, and the fine IT staff of the Boston Marathon never cleared out the alert requests from last year's race. Which makes them, for today anyway, some of the dumbest fucks in the tech industry.

To repeat, Boston Marathon IT crew—you suck.

UPDATE: It's the bib number that's the same as Laura's from last year—18649. A dumb, dumb programming mistake, friends. And who's paying for all those bad text messages?

What I didn't say in the previous post is that today's visit is the last visit Ella will make to that vet. We've been with this vet for over two years, and while we haven't always been happy with the service, we've felt some loyalty. But today was absolutely the last straw.

I was waiting in the exam room while Ella, sedated a bit, was getting her X rays. When the orderly, a Neanderthal bruiser I'll call Frank, brought her back into the exam room, he set her down on the floor. She sort of slumped there in a boneless, trembling puddle, then started bashing her head against the floor.

I immediately got down on the floor and lifted her up to keep her from hurting herself. "I can put her in a crate, like usual," said Frank, "or you can hold her in your lap to keep her from hitting her head."

Now, Frank doesn't seem like he's cruel, just like he's not all there. "I'll hold her," I said.

"Are you sure?"

Yes, I was fucking sure. I sat on the floor of the exam room with her until she had settled down enough that she wasn't going to hurt herself. This was before the vet explained to me about the hallucinogenic properties of the sedative, though I had guessed it myself from the way Ella was acting.

Frank came back with the vet to take Ella to a crate to finish "waking up." When Frank picked her up from my lap, she peed all over me. The vet apologized to me for the mess, but she's my dog. I wasn't upset about the mess. I was upset about the treatment.

I don't even want to mention the incident from last year that has made Ella forever fearful of this vet's office. You'll just tell me that we never should have taken her back again after that, and you would be absolutely right, which seems obvious in hindsight.

For the past few days, I've thought I might smell just a dash, just a soupçon, just one wafer-thin mint's worth of natural gas in the kitchen. I would sniff, and Laura would tell me I was crazy. It happens.

Last night I thought I smelled it, and this time Laura allowed as how she might smell it too. I didn't call ConEd immediately, having a vague memory of a similar situation in my Brooklyn apartment and being made to understand by the man who came to check it out that I had been kind of silly not to know this wasn't the dangerous kind of gas smell.

So I called up ConEd very late this morning, from work. In the voicemail treet, I deliberately did not choose the emergency options. I waited for a customer service representative. I said I might have smelled a little gas in my kitchen.

"What's your address, sir?"

I gave it, expecting that next we would schedule a little confab for later in the week at which I would sit home for hours wondering what time the gas man would deign to arrive, and the gas man would fritter away his day and finally show up with five minutes to spare before the end of the agreed-upon appointment window.

"Thank you," said the customer service guy. "Someone will arrive within forty-five minutes."

"Um." My brain shut down. "It was just— I was expecting— I'm not home. I'm calling from work."

"Sir, we take gas leaks seriously. They're very dangerous. We treat them as emergencies."

"But, I thought— I'm not—"

"Is someone home?"

"No."

"Is there a neighbor? A landlord?"

"No, there's not— I'm— Can't you—?"

"Sir, we dispatch these calls immediately. If they arrive and no one is home, they will break down the door. We treat these as emergencies."

I finally got my head around it. "So they're on their way."

"Yes, sir. Where are you?"

"In the city. How long do I have?"

"Zero to forty-five minutes, depending. Sir, I suggest you get there if you don't want your door broken down."

I dashed off a terse email to Paul Witcover, with whom I was supposed to have lunch, and dashed out the door. The elevator refused to come, so I ran down the stairs. I grabbed a cab on Park Avenue and directed it homeward.

As we flew up Park Avenue, I tried calling Laura, but she was doing presentations at work and didn't answer. I tried calling a friend who lives nearby to see if she was home or working today, but got no reply. I would have tried calling our other friends who might both have been home because they are moving out of state soon, but I needed to talk to the first friend to get their number.

I was thinking less about the doors to the building and the apartment than about Ella, and whether she would end up wandering the streets after the ConEd men burst through the splintered portals like Big Brother's henchmen.

The cab seemed to crawl. It was like a race against time from a movie, except it never seemed to end. Everything that could possibly get in the way did. Trucks backed up into intersections. People abandoned cars in the street. Vehicles failed to move in time at traffic lights and we missed our chances. Once we even lost precious moments when the light turned green and my own driver failed to notice. Traffic snarled and gridlocked. Traffic actually got worse in Queens the closer we got to home, and I watched the time edge past 25 minutes.

At 30 minutes, after I'd been calculating for some blocks at what point it would be faster to just hop out of the cab and run the rest of the way, we finally turned onto my street. I had 22 bucks already in my hand, my shoulder bag strapped around me, and my door keys at the ready. Heart in throat, I spied a ConEd van pulled over at the curb opposite our apartment. I scanned the front of the building from half a block away, but didn't think I could see any door-busting damage.

Then as we slowed down and I tossed the money at the driver through the plexiglas window, I saw one lone ConEd man loitering by the van. He wore a visored cap and had a long gray mustache. I hopped out of the cab almost before it had stopped and ran to the door, greeting the ConEd man over my shoulder.

As I hurriedly shoved aside the stack of mail that had been shoved through the door slot, I asked the ConEd man, "Have you been waiting long?"

"Just got here," he said.

He looked to me as if he had been loitering for a bit, but I was grateful and relieved (though my hands were still shaking) and I didn't want to push it. I warned him about the dog, burst into the apartment, shoved a very confused Ella out into the back yard and shut the door on her.

I was doing everything in movie-hero time.

The taciturn ConEd man checked the stove and told me we had a pilot light out. He relit it, then used a length of rubber hose connected to what looked like a small car battery with an LCD readout to check for natural gas. "Negative," he said. "You're fine."

And he left. And I joined the dog in the back yard, where she flung herself at me repeatedly and covered my head with licks while I let the jammering of my nerves dissipate.

Then it came to me. That's what the other guy had told me in Brooklyn that one time. One of my pilot lights had gone out then too, and he had shown me how to light it again. I wonder if I'll still remember this by the next time it happens.

"Your call is important to us. All our associates are busy servicing other customers. Please hold."

In other news, today's top random spam from-field name is "Defeatism J. Beheading." Yeah, that's an email I'm going to hurry to read!