What a long, strange column it's been.

If there is a thread running through Paul Povse's column (reg. required) today, it is of a similar ilk as that used to stitch the Emperor's New Clothes. The column has the attention span of a music video, jumping from scene to scene in a flash with no regard to continuity or story-telling.

Povse has some interesting observations, as Povse usually does, but it's almost as if they came to him while participating in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and then recorded directly from his brain in real-time. He takes off on journey at breakneck speed, from Lawrence of Arabia to the Civil War to anonymous sources at the New York Times to Sammy Sosa (to name just a few), leaving the reader trapped in a cultural time warp.

Neil Steinberg of the Sun Times, one of my favorite columnists despite his occasional bashing of bloggers, has adopted a blog-style format to his column, breaking each one up into four or five sections and giving each a subhead. It's an effective way to go if you don't plan on expounding on a single topic for an entire column. It might work well for Povse on days like today, although it might cause layout problems to the single-column format in which his work appears.

Perhaps Povse has developed a postmodern musing style of column writing that I'm not hip to yet. Still, a little more attention to proper segue ways between his disparate thoughts would help the toast and jam go down a little easier.