By DALE McFEATTERS, Scripps Howard News Service

Reporters covering the Republican presidential campaign note that Mitt Romney's every move is scripted and that Newt Gingrich's top aides frequently don't know where he is.

Early in his campaign, Gingrich abruptly took off on a luxury cruise of the Greek Islands. When he returned, his then-top aides were gone.

In attics all over Media Land, reporters whose aging knees are not really up to the task are rummaging through dusty notebooks, yellowing files and tottering stacks of tape and videocassettes. The '90s are back.

Washington Calling, born in 1941 with great hopes and expectations, died rather more quietly this past Friday, a victim of the seismic changes in print journalism.

Over those more than 70 years, "Washcall," as it was known in office shorthand, became a regular weekend fixture in first the Scripps Howard papers and then dozens of client newspapers.

As Titanic foundered after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic, the ship's captain, Edward Smith, was last seen on the bridge. He went down with the ship.

When the authorities first heard from Francesco Schettino, the captain of the cruise ship Costa Concordia said he had encountered a "technical problem" but that the situation was positive.

God expressed his displeasure through the 10 plagues of Egypt, and it always pays to be alert to signs of God's wrath.

In my neighborhood, there is much to arouse suspicion. There are gnats, mosquitoes and flies, but then we live next to two streams, near the stagnant waters of the C&O Canal and not far from the Potomac River. Frogs, not so much anymore.

Old age has its compensations, and one of them is sneering at the young and their problems. But it's hard not to feel heartbroken for youngsters who go in debt to get a college education in a field they love, then graduate to find themselves really deep in debt and with no job to repay it.

The U.S. government is cashing in its chips, literally. It is giving up on its repeated efforts to convince the spending public to use a dollar coin.

Dollar coins save the government money in the long run because they last so much longer than the paper dollar, but Americans aren't having any of it.

Washington, D.C., is a city of holes in the ground. They're constantly being dug, and it's not easy as its residents found when they built the subway system.

There are 16 senators co-sponsoring a bill to effectively abolish the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Perusing the list, one finds that most of them come from bucolic locales in the rural West, Midwest and South.

WASHINGTON - Lance Gay was an immensely talented reporter and unlike so many of that breed no prima donna. Thus, when The Washington Star folded it was a mystery why no other publication had snapped him up.