The only newspaper columnist I bother to read on the web is Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle. Remarkably, he writes five columns a week. I know that after a few weeks of that pace, I would be sputtering, pacing around my house, and copying the labels of old pickle jars. But remarkably, he keeps going, with columns both serious and funny, taking in the world of circuses (his daughter's a trapeze artist), cats, and our own surreal behavior. Some columns are better than others, as one would expect, but there's enough good ones to make clicking worthwhile. This one is an interesting, semi-contrarian point of view on Jesse Helms.