It’s that time of the year again, when parents boast proudly of their graduating senior’s success and matriculation to the next fabulous institute of higher learning. This used to be a game confined to the upper classes, old Ivy League alums bragging to each other about their legacy offspring, but now all kinds of parents get in on the act.

Last week I got a group email from a fellow I know, boasting about his son’s high school accomplishments and his college destination. Theirs is not a conventional household (whatever that is) and the school he’d headed for is a well-regarded small liberal arts school, but not one of these impossible-to-get-into places. Still, he took the occasion to trumpet his kid’s academic standing (dean’s list!), extracurricular activities (chorus and ultimate frisbee champ!), political activism (name a war and he opposed it) as well as his contributions to curing cancer in his spare time.

“I got it, Dad,” my daughter said when I made the mistake of reading the email to her off of my Blackberry. It had just come in, causing that thrum in my pocket at the breakfast table, and I don’t think I was trying to impart anything — at least I hope I wasn’t. She is just completing her junior year, has done quite well, and is already freaking herself out over colleges etc. I’m quite proud of her and never meant to imply otherwise. So why was I telling her about the accomplishments of a boy neither of us hardly knows?

The Times magazine ran a piece on the semiotics of bumper stickers yesterday; “’My Child Is an Honors Student’” turns out to be one message that ticks off a surprising number of people,” Rob Walker learned, and is it any wonder? What if your kid is scholastically average, or worse, learning-disabled (or whatever the PC term is today)? Should you bow to the honor student’s parents, or try and run them off the road?

Of course, if your kid gets into, say, NYU, you both get to hear a commencement speech from a noted academic like Alec Baldwin. Personally, I preferred the speech he gave in Glengarry Glen Ross. Remember, second  prize is a set of steak knives. And coffee is for closers.

Senator Jeff Sessions famously hoped that health care reform would be Obama’s Waterloo. That didn’t work out so well for the GOP blockade bunch, who had hoped pure obstructionism might yield political benefits. And Wall Street reform, such as it is, has not provided much more traction for the naysayers.

With the growing oil spill, Obama-haters clearly hoped the president had met his disaster — “This will be the president’s Katrina!” they thundered, which is kind of funny given that a lot of this came from the same people who maintained Bush was doing a heckuva job with Katrina at the time. Until the flood from the hurricane swamped their party and left them all sitting on top of their houses, waiting for rescue.

At his press conference yesterday Obama may have stopped the water from rising (if I may extend the metaphor), even if he can’t stop that oil from gushing a mile below the surface, just by uttering the words “I was wrong.” Few men, let alone standing presidents, have made this admission before (just as the number of women, heads of state or not, who have said “I am sorry” can be counted on Jerry Garcia’s skeletal right hand) and just by admitting to have been slow on the response he may have bought himself and his administration some time.

Besides, there will be plenty more disasters to handle or botch between now and 2012. To repeat Robert Altman’s favorite joke (which he heard from Harry Belafonte): Two jazz musicians are on an ocean cruise. Between sets they go out on deck, smoke a joint and contemplate the ocean.

“Man, look at all that water,” says one.

“Yeah,” says his friend. “And that’s just the top.”

It was depressing to read yesterday that the majority of Britons now believe that global warming is no big deal — or not as big a deal as they thought it was just a year or so ago. My wife was just in London, in the middle of a bizarre heat wave — but don’t call it climate change!

Meanwhile, over in Pakistan, the majority of Pakistanis believe that the bomb that did not go off in Times Square was not the handiwork, if you can call it that, of their friendly neighborhood Al Qaeda branch. It, along with most of the bad things that happen here and seemingly there, are the result of American “think tanks.” Who mans these think tanks, and what are they thinking?  “You must know, you are from America,” a Pakistani lawyer told a Times reporter.

Nothing new in the international assessment that everything is our fault (and some wars, for instance, certainly are); but the time spent blaming America for everything is time that FUBAR nation could be dwelling on its own predicament. “It’s deny, deny, deny,” a columnist for an English-language paper in Pakistan is quoted saying. “It’s become second nature, like an instinct.”

Here at home, of course, we have bigger things to worry about — like what the hell the Lost finale was all about? The fact that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now headed for Florida and the East Coast is a little less pressing than what’s happening with Lindsey Lohan (who remains a top news story despite having not made a movie anyone has seen in years).

If the world ends thanks to, I don’t know, climate change, or some other kind of self-inflicted wound we have visited on the planet, at least you can say we’ll go out entertained. If you call Justin Bieber entertainment. (“Anything that’s not Bieber dies.”)

See you at the beach.

So Mick Jagger sat down with Larry King last night to discuss the 30th-something-anniversary reissue (or is it a re-reissue?) of Exile On Main Street. Mick was the one on the left.

I’m not bitter. Like most Stones fans, I love Exile and I’m always happy when a track like “Loving Cup” or “Ventilator Blues” comes up on shuffle. And the extra tracks, alternate takes, overdubs and even the postcards are something I’d like to listen to (or look at) at least once. (The inevitable DVD about the making of comes out next month.)

But can we stop with the endless rehash, even if actual hash was involved in the making of the album? One of the things that made the music on Exile so great was that kind of murky, funky, tossed-off quality of the songs. (Lines like “Judge and jury walk out hand in hand,” or “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me” still bubble up out of the gumbo, some discernible for the first time.) In fact Mick, twit that he sometimes is, used to complain that the album could have been better if they’d polished it more.

By going back and enshrining all of rock’s sloppy first drafts (the Sun Sessions, London Calling et al) we run the risk of losing the flavor, and certainly the fun, of the originals. Part of the Exile myth is that the Stones were exiled from England, dodging the tax man in the south of France, making music for themselves. Like the story of the Basement Tapes, this idea of a band making music for art’s sake is endearing, and enduring. (Albert Grossman was actually eagerly awaiting new Dylan songs to sell to artists anxious to cover them.) Getting all nostalgic about that supposed spontaneity kind of kills the myth, no?

But maybe that’s what rock is spozed to do.

One day you’re listening to media pundits exchange pointed pleasantries, the next thing you know there’s Michael Woolf saying Jonathan Alter killed journalism and calling him “a condescending prick.” This after an email spat (leaked to Gawker) in which the Newsweek scribe said the Newser hound had a “barren and ugly mind” which was why no one read his site.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! this is the war room!

Whatever you think of Alter who is also one of the usual suspects on MSNBC (which was one of Wolff’s points) or Wolff  (who shoots from the hip but is sometimes on target) it’s depressing that two people who went to better schools than me are reduced to such mud-slinging. Rappers, at least, have the common decency to shoot at each other. The biggest insult Wolff could muster was comparing Alter (who has a new book on Obama) to Theodore “Teddy” White. If you prick them do they not bleed?

The real context here is this thing called journalism and who is responsible for its ailing health. MW is trying to make the rather over-simplified case that talking heads like Alter (who, to his credit, seems far less windy to me than some of Keith Olbermann’s other regular guests) brought down the beast. While I suspect behind Alter’s snide-as-a-sixteen-year-old sign off — “You, Michael Wolff, will be the savior of journalism, redefining the form for the new age. Good luck with that” — is a belief that people like Wolff who profit off of other’s content are the real cancer on the news.

The question is, though, would you pay to see them go at it? Cage Fighting journalists — synergy at last for the WEC and C-Span!