THE INSTA-MOTHER-IN-LAW HAD SOME SURGERY: We took her home a little while ago, and now I have to go out and pick up some prescriptions for her. Back later. In the meantime, Cathy Seipp’s monthly “MoDo Watch” column is up. Excerpt:

One of the side effects of reading Maureen Dowd more closely than any human being should is that not only do you catch every one of her adorable bits of wordplay, you even begin to see — beneath the text, like pentimento in a painting — the jokes she probably considered but rejected as just too cute.

As in The Mummy, some things are probably better left buried. But you’ll read the column anyway, just to find out what inspired this: “Dowd isn’t quite Lord Haw-Haw. But history may remember her as Lady Tee-Hee.”