In an interview posted Wednesday on the AARP Bulletin's website, the 68-year-old Keillor said he plans to retire in the spring of 2013. But Keillor said he first has to find his replacement.

"I'm pushing forward, and also I'm in denial. It's an interesting time of life," Keillor told the publication.

Keillor told The Associated Press in a follow-up e-mail Wednesday that he'll be 70 in the spring of 2013, "and that seems like a nice round number."

"The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don't want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage," Keillor told the AP.

For the first time this season, "A Prairie Home Companion" had a guest host on Jan. 15, when singer and fiddler Sara Watkins of the band Nickel Creek hosted the show from St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theater, with Keillor appearing as a featured guest. Keillor said at the time that he had never gotten to see the show himself and wanted "to stand in the back of the hall and watch for a few minutes."

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Since I started being serious about fiction writing, say about four or five years ago, I realized there was only one thing that I wanted. I wanted a shot at being a writer, and the way I defined that (knowing there were many ways I could have defined it) was to be accepted to a certain rather prestigious MFA program.

Some time after I finished college, I applied to that program and a whole bunch of others and I didn't get into a damn one. So I ran away from home and went abroad for a while and did some other seemingly frivolous but actually kind of important things. When I returned to the States, I realized I still wanted this thing. So I gave it another shot. And you know what? I got in. I got into this place that I'd always wanted to go; I got this reward I always longed for and never dreamed of.

Then something really kind of poetic happened, the kind of thing that if somebody wrote it into a story of theirs for workshop, the class would totally not believe. Several months before I left my home to go off into the middle of nowhere and pursue my dream, I fell head over heels in love. (I know, I know, you totally saw it coming.)

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Hate something? Change something! And don't blame me if you can't stop whistling after watching the advertisement that launched Honda's first diesel car in Europe. I learned about it today from a posting to the Burnveggies mailing list, where all things diesel are appreciated with a mixture of veggie-oil worship and techno-geekish expertise. Described accurately by the poster as "blowing sunshine up your tailpipe," it really has to be seen to be believed. Make sure you watch the film.

And c'mon, sing along with Garrison Keillor:

"We'd like to know... why it is so
That certain diesels must be slow and thwack and thrum
And pong and hum and clatter clat.

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Those trademarks are so vivid that some longtime Altman fans (and certainly many Altman detractors) may claim that the 81-year-old director is just retracing the territory that made him a maverick in the '70s. What's more, "A Prairie Home Companion" is about the very last performance of a radio variety show -- a show that has miraculously survived for years even in the age of television, a show that, as one character puts it, has been on the air "since Jesus was in the third grade." For that reason alone, some moviegoers may see the picture as an act of desperation: Altman the outmoded cowpoke is getting ready to shamble into the sunset, so why not make a movie about a form of entertainment that's practically outmoded?

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Another sign of spring in Austin is the kickoff of the South by Southwest festivals, ambiguous showcases of indie culture that seem to be loved and loathed by locals in almost equal quotients. (They have put Austin on the map as a cultural destination and, well, they have put Austin on the map as a cultural destination.) SXSW's legendary musicfest, now in its 20th year, doesn't begin until next week, but I wouldn't be qualified to tell you much about that in any case. The fast-rising SXSW Film Conference and Festival, which began 13 years ago as an offshoot of the musicfest but has long since acquired its own identity, opened on Friday night with a packed house at the Paramount Theatre hooting and hollering for virtually every frame of Robert Altman's new film, "A Prairie Home Companion," screened here in its North American premiere.

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The latest to add his wry and humorous voice to the anti-Bush chorus is Garrison Keillor, bard of America's sensible flatland, who has just published "Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America," an entertaining encomium to the progressive values he holds dear. In it Keillor, the host of public radio's "Prairie Home Companion," writes warmly of the homespun Scandinavian wisdom that informed his childhood -- "Don't Think You're Special Because You're Not," which is just the local way, he notes, of reminding people to take care of their neighbors. It's a basic human value, Keillor observes, that the party of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Tom DeLay gleefully abandoned years ago. "They are a party," writes Keillor, "that is all about perceptions, the Christian party that conceals enormous glittering malice and is led by brilliant bandits who are dividing and conquering the sweet land I grew up in. I don't accept this."

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In the homespun humorist's new novel, "Love Me," the main character -- hard-drinkin', broad-lovin', high-livin' Larry Wyler -- shares Keillor's old Salon pseudonym, his St. Paul, Minn., roots and his former gig at the New Yorker magazine.

Basking in the glow of a bestselling novel, "Spacious Skies," and bored with his wholesome life and do-gooder wife -- his college sweetheart, Iris -- in Minnesota, Wyler sets off for headier pastures: New York City. There, he takes an apartment with a terrace that raises him to the top of the town, joins the staff of the New Yorker, and meets his idols: Updike, Salinger, Shawn, Trillin.

But things soon take a turn for the worse -- and the weird. Separated from his muse and his homeland and swept up in an intoxicating concoction of fame, women, booze and literary pretension, he's crippled by a horrible case of writer's block. What's more, he discovers that his beloved periodical is owned by a slick Mafioso "with eyebrows like cockroaches," who won it in a card game, and that his long-held heroes -- most notably the renowned editor William Shawn, whom Keillor casts as a starlet-bedding, bourbon-swilling outdoorsman -- are not exactly as he'd expected them to be.

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If Fox's intention was to break a large, undercooked ostrich egg on its corporate face while pouring streams of golden ducats into Franken's pockets, it carried out its plan to perfection. As everyone who pays attention to such matters knows by now, a judge laughed its trademark-infringement lawsuit (Fox claimed it trademarked the phrase "fair and balanced") out of court -- even adding insult to injury by warning the right-wing media behemoth that its ownership of the phrase it claimed to have spent $61 million developing was extremely dubious. And sales of Franken's book soared sky-high on the publicity, hitting #1 on Amazon's list Thursday.

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Many people would be more than a little appalled to see this kind of cost-benefit analysis applied to what they consider a relationship founded on love. But the truth is that for much of human history and in most undeveloped nations today, children (and other relatives) have always been a "hedge" against poverty and other disasters. That doesn't mean their parents don't also love them; they just don't see love and necessity as mutually exclusive.

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I'm one of those wine-totin' crazies your airline-attendant author loves to hate -- carry-on slung over the shoulder, crammed with precious bottles winging their way home from Stellenbosch or Sonoma. No way they're prying this baby out of my hands to gate-check!

Sure, it's easy to procure spiffy padded wine shippers that zip through as checked baggage and emerge unscathed at the other end. And I use 'em all the time -- after all, why pack that silly second change of pants or spare pair of shoes when they're taking up space in a check-through piece far better occupied by a case of Cote-Rotie? But come crunch time, check-through space inevitably runs out with at least another dozen bottles that still need repatriation. And what happens next separates the pros from the rank amateurs, like the fellow on Elliott Hester's plane. So herewith some tips:

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Based on the computer-generated, stuttering '80s TV character "Max Headroom," Headrest was a shtick-figure Reagan with an unleashed id who could smear the 1988 presidential candidates at will ("So is P-P-Paul Laxalt mobbed up?") and finally declared himself one. "If elected president I promise to lie, lie!" cracked a leering Headrest from the tube. "I'll s-s-set up illegal covert operations and lie about them to Congress and the American p-p-people! If detected I promise to falsify documents, shred evidence and preserve plausible de-de-deniability! Then I'll take the Fifth! But with moist eyes! And selflessly ...!"

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Through their own actions, the airlines have created conditions
that will predictably and reliably produce violent behavior in a segment of
the mass population now flying. The airlines must take responsibility, and
should act to 1) identify and reduce the possibility that
violent outbreaks will occur under current conditions and 2) alter the
conditions that create the violence. Otherwise, an informed and clever
lawyer will be able to argue that the airline "provoked" violent behavior.

-- Denny Kernochan

Northridge, Calif.

Without minimizing what happened to Renee Sheffer, I submit that
Salon could find more immediate topics to report on instead of hyping
such a minimal "problem." My guess would be that flight crew are at
greater risk of bodily injury in airport parking lots than they are
while in flight.

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There he goes again, putting on airs. This time it's Al Gore's expansive insights on the complex nature of stock car racing. The vice president brags to Jake Tapper: "You know, in stock car races, it's usually the second car in the gun lap that wins."

Nothing could be further from the truth.
The reality is that, in stock car racing, the guy who wins the race is
almost always the one who dominates the race. Last-lap, come-from-behind
victories are quite rare. They happen, but definitely not "usually." That's
true for every form of racing, from local dirt tracks to the big-dollar
NASCAR circuit.

Perhaps the vice president is suffering from yet another delusion of rural
Tennessee life: After a hard week of stripping and putting up tobacco, young Al would amble on down to the local dirt track and soak up the last-lap victories.

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"They just wanted to intimidate me," Helmberger said. "What did I do to them?" She recovered from the threat in time to sell Ventura-themed St. Patrick's Day cards last week, but she knows that Ventura for Minnesota Inc. would like to eradicate her cottage industry. The match-up between "The Body" and a self-described "little old lady" from Minnesota may be surreal, but it has brought to the fore a bigger issue: the selling of Jesse Ventura.

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