They also labor who have the holiday off. In addition to the joke of the week, I offer these items.

Item: Mike Pope knows the words and the tune. Yesterday I posted this on Facebook and Twitter: “Maryland plates LNB 883, perhaps you could find someone to help you interpret what a YIELD sign means.”

Mr. Pope commented thus: “Yielding is not American, and represents an unwarranted intrusion of the government into my right to drive. There is no Constitutional basis for regulating traffic in this way, and the government has no right giving entitlements like ‘right of way’ to pedestrians, many of whom pay no income tax at all. Yield signs are obviously a conspiracy by the elites to cripple American drivers and bring about a one-world tyranny of pedestrian-only cities. Why do they hate our freedom to drive?”

Item: I hope you got your paper on time this morning. Mine was faithfully delivered. (And if you don’t subscribe to a print newspaper, shame on you.) But Andy Bechtel identified a salient point about newspapers at The Editor’s Desk last week after talking to a friend who canceled his subscription to the News & Observer because calls to the paper’s automated complaint line and to a person in the circulation department failed to get a problem resolved.

Crappy customer service may not have done as much as any other factor to motivate people to give up on print newspapers, but it has been so widespread for so long that it cannot be ignored as a contributor. Where else would you be expected to take in stride the periodic failure of delivery of a product you have paid for?

Item: I’ve been intrigued by the talk by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and other conservatives about the possibility of repealing the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, the one that provides for the popular election of United States senators. It was a reform measure ratified in 1913 because in the nineteenth century business interests—often railroads—controlled the state legislators, which elected senators under the original Constitution.

I assume that corporate interests continue to control much of what the state legislatures do, so it looks as if the main motive behind repeal is a solicitude for corporations, since purchasing legislatures would be cheaper for them than purchasing general elections.

Item: Your word of the week is tergiversation.