Hillary Clinton just won the Nevada caucus, and to judge from the news reporting she’s now the clear front-runner and Barack Obama is an abject failure. Maybe. Maybe not. Here are the actual numbers:

Hillary Rodham Clinton 5,284 50.8%
Barack Obama 4,684 45.1
John Edwards 389 3.7
Uncommitted 31 0.3
Dennis J. Kucinich 4 0.0

So here’s the real story:

1. In a state with 2.5 million people, and almost 400,000 registered Democrats, only about 11,000 Democrats voted.

2. Of those 11,000 (out of the 400,000, out of the 2.5 million), only 600 — SIX HUNDRED — more voted for Clinton than Obama. So, advice to Mr. Obama: No need to bail just yet.

3. Finally, out of all those squiddillions of people, only 4 voted for Dennis Kucinich. Given what I’ve been witness to there, I would have thought that Las Vegas alone had a larger lunatic fringe than that, but I guess not. Clearly, Mr. Kucinich enjoys running for president; very few others are as enthused about it.

to bring Mark Chaet home with you and put him on your wall.

Remember my friend Mark Chaet? Of course you do. His mug was seemingly everywhere last year in a major print campaign. And a couple of years ago, every time I walked past a television, he was on-screen in some show or movie or other. (Which no doubt makes Mark wish I’d walk past more televisions.)

Living where I do, and leading the life I do, I have a high level of access to Mark. I could call him right now on his cellphone, if I so chose. You may not be so lucky. But nevertheless, you can own a precious piece of classic Chaet memorabilia, thanks to eBay.

That’s right, here’s your chance to own a piece of collectible Chaet memorabilia: a signed photograph of the actor from his “General Hospital” days. It’s priced to move, with an opening bid of just 49¢. A little background on this priceless collectible, courtesy of the subject, who was alerted electronically that this rare offering had been posted by an anonymous investor:

By the way, the 49¢ opening bid request is less than it cost me to have the photo printed, and probably less than it cost me to mail it to the General Hospital fan who requested it. I did 13 episodes in 1989 as Serge, a brainwasher disguised as an ice cream man, pushing a little freezer cart with bells – the bells were the Pavlovian device I used, having brainwashed Colton to kill Frisco. I was supposed to be Greek, and in one episode, I ad libbed a few words in Greek that I’d learned for that purpose. In Greek, I called another character a bastard. Take that Standards and Practices. Ever the rascal.

So there you have it: the provenance behind this piece, irrefutably certifying its authenticity. You won’t want to let this one get away.

You may recall that yesterday my daughter volunteered that the world’s largest rodent is the capybara. (And if you can’t recall that, please see your doctor.) She was correct.

But as this news report shows, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, there were once rodents even larger than the rats encircling one of the theatres in New York where I’ve been produced.

(On a side note, the above image looks like some sort of entrance test that most of us wouldn’t pass. Like the GRE’s, which I barely skated through.)

Recently my wife and I engaged the services of portrait photographer Harvey Branman to take a series of family photographs. Here’s his website. The shoot was great fun, and Harvey had no problem controlling either our dog or our children (which made us want to bring him home with us). And we love the photos — so much so that the projected size of our order keeps growing. As a family, we are glad we did this while we had the opportunity, and judging from the photos, it pays to hire a gifted professional photographer.

On the other hand, if you choose to go with an amateur or someone who is just plain bad, you can get photos like these.

Just now while driving my two younger children to school, we came past the neighborhood playhouse, which on its marquee announces the current production as “The World’s Largest Rodent.”

” ‘World’s Largest Rodent,’ ” I read aloud. “Hm.”

From the back seat, my nine-year-old daughter said flatly, “Capybara.”

For some time, my wife and I were wondering why so many little bits of dog food were winding up scattered on the floor near our dog’s bowl. Our dog, who, just like many a desirable female, is beautiful, elegant, and somewhat crazy, has always been neat in all her habits, so why were there now little beige bone-shaped bits on the floor seemingly at all hours? For a brief period we thought it was the fault of our five-year-old boy, whose chore it is to give the dog food and water. But no, he too is neat. It was a puzzle.

Then one morning I came down and looked in the dog’s bowl and realized the solution. The dark-brown dog-food bits were all gone, as were the medium-brown dog-food bits, leaving only, again, the beige dog-food bits. They were neatly piled into one corner of the bowl. I concluded that the dog doesn’t like them and won’t eat them and after weeks of separating them out with her muzzle and plucking them up with her mouth and dropping them onto the floor all to no avail because we just weren’t understanding, she had now chosen to make an even greater display of it, something akin to the mashed-potato mountain in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Now we understood: She doesn’t like the beige bits and she won’t eat them. And, by the way, might we consider buying a different kind of dog food. Points taken.

Then two days ago, the five-year-old pushed some button in error on one of the three remotes that control various kinds of activation related to video viewing and suddenly nothing would come up on our flatscreen television downstairs. I tried pushing buttons related to the satellite on the one remote, and then buttons related to the television on the other remote, and then lots of buttons the purpose of which I’m unaware. I also had the idea that if I just shut off the power strip providing electricity to the television, the DVD player, and the satellite box, that it might all reset; I tested my theory but that didn’t work either. Then I decided I’d just leave it all alone because I don’t watch television anyway. On his Nintendo DS, Dietrich, the five-year-old, was happily engaged in squashing reptilians beneath Mario’s go-kart. His sister was generally cross about the television situation because this meant missing any number of shows involving young girls with horses, but gradually she slipped back to reading the collected hardback edition of “Planet Hulk.” Hours passed. I went outside and lit a cigar and worked on my play. The day drew to a close. When my wife got up and learned about the televisionless downstairs, she found a bill from the satellite company and taped it up with the command for someone to call them and get it sorted out and then she left for work. I dutifully handed that dictum over to my 16-year-old as an assignment for him. (It will be hard for me when he goes off to college, but even harder for his sister — who will find herself next in line for this buck-passing.) He glumly took the bill, then decided to take one last look at fixing the problem himself. He wondered aloud whether simply switching the power off then on might reset whatever wasn’t working.

“I tried that,” I said.

I left him to our devices and went digging through the refrigerator in fruitless search of a beer. Suddenly I heard him call out, “TV’s back on!”

I ran downstairs. “What’d you do?” I asked.

“I turned off the power strip, then turned it back on.”

“I tried that!” I said. And then I showed him.

He looked at me. “That’s the wrong power strip.”

The dog arched an eyebrow at me and then turned away.

Go to this site — it’s the U.S. Postal Service — and find out how much it costs to mail a postcard. Click any and every link you can find, in search of that answer. I’ll wait here.

Give up? Then do what I did — go to Google and type in “How much to mail a postcard?” and get the answer in about, oh, a nanosecond. It’s 26¢.

By the time you find that answer on the Postal Service site, the price will have gone up.

You would think that it’s relatively easy to keep count of things that exist in whole units, especially when those whole units add up to only double digits. But today I took a break from working on my new play, tentatively entitled “Second Ice Age,” because I suddenly had the burning desire to figure out how many plays I’ve written. This was partially occasioned by my having to send out an updated bio to a conference I’m teaching at early this summer.

The last time I updated it, the bio that gets put into play programs and speaking notices and such says that I have written “more than two dozen” produced plays. That’s true. It’s also true that I’ve written many other plays that I’ve never sent out because I don’t think they’re ready, which means I’ve written more than 40 plays. I suppose in my mind, I will one day “fix” these other plays. (Or maybe I think that, like some wines, they’ll improve with age. Or just go really bad.) But… how many more than 40?

“The Bar Plays” was intended as a cycle of short plays — a cycle I may finish some day. I’ve written two of them so far. So I guess I should count that as two. Or, is it one unfinished play? Do I count the play I wrote in high school? (Hey, it was even produced.) It isn’t on my hard drive but I’ve got it on file somewhere. If I count that one, I’m now writing my 42nd play. (I think.) But I started writing it before play 41, so which one is actually play 41?

Of the 42 plays, about two-thirds are one-acts, some of them brief. But, I should note, some one-acts are “full-length” plays. Is a 60ish-page play (I’ve got at least two) a one-act or a “full-length” play? When it was done in L.A., “Uncle Hem” was full-length. In New York, it seemed short (because they played it too fast, I think. Which is precisely what one friend called to tell me.). When students ask me, “How long is a full-length play” or, more often, “How long is a one-act play?” I give them a variation of Edward Albee’s response. When asked by an interviewer how many of his plays are full-length, Albee, whose first success was with a one-act, said, “All of them.”

When I was an undergrad studying literature, it puzzled me how writers and then critics and academics couldn’t land on an exact number of how many stories or novels or plays or songs or whatever had been created by a particular artist. In cases concerning the passage of time and the lack of good storage, it made sense: Maybe Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shakespeare couldn’t keep track either. But why not Raymond Carver? Since then I’ve come to know that Carver’s stories exist in different versions, often substantially rewritten, sometimes retitled and sometimes not. As does the Bible. As does, it now seems to me, most things.
For years I kept a record of what I had written and in what order. Now I couldn’t tell you even where that is. I have two file cabinets stuffed with various printed-out or published versions of various things — the product also of short stories, and essays, and reviews, and correspondence, and failed novels — and boxes more in storage in the attic. A few years ago I found a computer disk that at some point I had marked “Lee’s Writing” (I like to think that I’ve come up with cleverer labeling systems since then) and found several completed short stories and plays that I had utterly forgotten about.

I am lucky in one regard: I’m not obsessive enough to be paralyzed by this. I have at least one friend who wouldn’t be able to leave his room until figuring this out. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole, or I’ll never get to play 43. And I remember the beautiful last story I heard about the late Louis L’Amour. When he knew he was dying, L’Amour went into his writing study resolved to clear up all the debris. On every square inch of floorspace he had stacked manuscripts in progress, miscellaneous writing, correspondence, ephemera, drafts — the detritus of creativity, not all of it yet given shape. His wife came in and saw him standing there deciding how to make order of this before he died, and she said, “You leave that. I’ll take care of it.” And L’Amour left all that and went to his desk and back to his writing.

Our official sample ballots for the February 5th California Presidential Primary Election came today. In reviewing the slate of Democrats she could choose from, my wife, who is rather well-informed and who reads the newspaper and such, said in a quasi-outraged voice, “Who the Hell is Chris Dodd?”

You may recall that when he announced his withdrawal from the race, MSNBC.com called him “Chris Todd.”

He has served in the U.S. Senate for 27 years.