Back when we were 13, we went to the Bi-Mart with a couple of buddies to get some model-rocket supplies. We quickly found a giant battery, and carried it around the store while we looked for other things. But we didn’t find them, so we returned the battery to its display and walked out the store.

We’re fifteen or twenty yards out the door, when we hear a stern voice behind us: “Are you going to pay for that battery?”

Store Dick. Or maybe just a manager. Whoever he was, he had been watching three kids wander around the store and leave without purchasing anything. Case closed.

We were, shall we say, Righteously Incensed: “I put it back,” we said, in the most affronted 13-year-old voice we could muster.

Store Dick didn’t believe us. But since Store Dick couldn’t strip-search us out in the parking lot, he let us go, knowing we had slipped one past him.

It’s forty years later. We’re still pissed.

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A teenager was returning home from the 7-Eleven.

A man was stalking him.

The teenager was packing Skittles and a can of Arizona Iced Tea.

The man was packing a Kel-Tek 9mm semiautomatic handgun.

The teenager was talking to his girlfriend:

“He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man,” Martin’s friend said. “I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run, but he said he was not going to run.”

The man was talking to 911:

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Something you may not know about Trayvon Martin:

After taking an airplane ride two years ago, Trayvon decided he wanted to learn to fly, his uncle Ronald Fulton said. The teen attended a Miami aviation school part time and was studying to be an engineer, a path to realizing his ambition, Fulton said.

Math was Trayvon’s favorite subject.

Something else you may not know about Trayvon Martin:

“He was extremely creative,” said Michelle Kypriss, Trayvon’s English teacher at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Miami. “He just loved building things. He really was intrigued by how things worked.”

She described Trayvon, a junior, as an A and B student who majored in cheerfulness.

Something you may have heard about Trayvon Martin:

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This Exceptional American Life is proud to present Mitt Romney’s acclaimed one-man show, which he performed Tuesday night in Chicago. In keeping with our journalistic mission, we have redacted those portions that cannot be independently verified.

Thank you, Illinois! What a great night!

I’d like to congratulate my fellow candidates on a hard-fought contest. I’d like to thank our volunteers and our friends for their hard work and unwavering support. And, tonight, we thank the people of Illinois for their vote — and for this incredible victory.

Elections are about choices. And today hundreds of thousands of Illinois voters have joined millions across the country in our cause.

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Our guest columnist has submitted the following affidavit to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse” investigating Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Allen Hulton, being duly sworn, on oath deposes and says:

I am a resident of Belvidere, Illinois. I have personal knowledge of the facts contained herein.

I was employed by the United States Postal Service in DuPage County, Illinois, as a letter carrier from March 28, 1962 to March 30, 2001, on which date I retired. Attached hereto as Exhibit A are documents that support that I was employed with the United States Postal Service.

From late 1986 to 1997, I served at the Glen Ellyn, Illinois post office, postal zip code 60137. My primary duty at the time was to deliver mail on Route 6.

During my time at the Glen Ellyn, Illinois post office, I delivered mail to [redacted] Glen Ellyn, Illinois, the residence of Thomas and Mary Ayers, who were the parents of Weather Underground activist, Bill Ayers. The area in which they lived was upper middle to upper class. Thomas Ayers was the president of Commonwealth Edison at the time.

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We once knew a guy who was involved with the local recycling scene in Eugene. One night he took us to a warehouse — a giant, cavernous space — where materials were collected. At one end was a mountain of plastic milk jugs.

They were going to be shipped to Asia, our friend explained, because that’s where the facilities existed to deal with them. And the energy expended to process them — “carbon footprint” wasn’t yet in the language — negated any benefit from recycling them. It would be another fifteen years before Dick Cheney sneered that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue”, but we were already looking at the waste product of Good Intentions.

To be an American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is to be an agent of destruction. No matter how lightly you tread, you’re stepping on something. No matter how virtuous your life, to be a Caucasian in Our Exceptional Nation is to be the beneficiary of some pretty nasty business conducted in your name a century or three back. We’re historical trustafarians, decrying our ancestors but reaping the benefits. You learn to live with it.

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In our line of work — well, one of them — we build websites. The website we’re building right now uses HTML, CSS, jQuery, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, and—

Oh, we’re sorry. Did we lose you?

Back in the old days, you could hack your Commodore 64 without too much trouble. But just try to get a sense of the millions of lines of code controlling a Windows computer, or the Google search engine, or your Android or iPhone. For starters, the user interface and legally enforced sanctity of the code will prevent you from even seeing it. And even if you managed to take a look, the code would be so complex you would struggle to understand it, let alone manipulate it.

For that reason, [a legendary programmer named] _why explained in the “Little Coder’s Predicament” — and over and over again at conferences and panels — too few people were learning to code. The learning curve was too steep. There needed to be a simple, fun, awesome way to draw people in.

That’s Slate’s Annie Lowrey, who decided to pull a George Plimpton and get her head bashed in by a linebacker learn programming as a journalism project. She chose the Ruby language, because that’s what some of the Big Kids use (those who aren’t using Python), at least for websites — although if she really wanted to do Android or iPhone, she could have chosen Java or Objective-C instead, never mind that Objective-C gives us headaches so we’ve been cheating with Lua, and—

Oh, we’re sorry. Did we lose you again?

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