¶ The drop is slight, to be sure, but it’s the first ever (all right, in twenty years): the percentage of American households with television sets declined from 98.9 to 96.7. It’s pathetic to be cheered by such small change, but we can’t help it. Even if the same content can be viewed on computer screens, the interaction is entirely different. ¶ A martyr, not a a suicide: Football star Dave Duerson was right to shoot himself in the heart: his brain, sent by his family at his request to a clinic at Boston University, reveals the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the players association, said in a telephone interview that Duerson’s having C.T.E. “makes it abundantly clear what the cost of football is for the men who played and the families.”

So, we Americans were right all along: Osama bin Laden was living in Pakistan, even though that country’s government insisted that he wasn’t. Given the size and fortified character of the Abbottabad compound, apparently built for the terrorist in 2005, it is impossible to believe that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was genuinely unaware of his presence. As Simon Tisdall writes at the Guardian,  the discovery that climaxed in the death of bin Laden “is an enormous and dangerous embarrassment for Pakistan’s government.” We would underscore Mr Tisdall’s use of the present tense.

We Americans also seem to be treating the event as a championship victory. Score one for us! The fact that the operation against bin Laden involved the surprise invasion of an uneasy ally’s territory was not deemed important enough for a headline in today’s print edition of the Times — although Jane Perlez’s online analysis generally accords with Mr Tisdall’s. “With Bin Laden’s death, perhaps the central reason for an alliance forged on the ashes of 9/11 has been removed…” This is the real news, and it is momentous in every way. The military and intelligence officials whose cooperation made the capture of Osama bin Laden deserve every kind of praise as well as the nation’s gratitude. But we see no call for jubilation.

¶ We cannot believe that it has been sixteen years since we gave gym mogul David Barton a thought! Did he really get married to Susanne Bartsch in a loincloth way back in 1995? That little boy that the nudieweds held (he was wearing more than a birthday suit, thank goodness) is now approaching graduation from St Ann’s in Brooklyn. How the tempus does fugit! Tim Murphy’s profile would bring it all back, if we’d been there in the first place. ¶ Moby, now ensconced in the Hollywood Hills, is not going bankrupt anytime soon, but he finds it easier to stay off the sauce when he’s not in Manhattan. Sobriety must also have induced the “techno musician,” né Richard Melville-Hall, to answer Joyce Wadler’s probes about his interesting chilidhood — it seems to have distracted her from taking an interest in his relationships (not really). ¶ Bob Morris’s piece about Gotham’s misbehaving canines makes it clear that the brutes are merely acting out their owners’ neuroses. When doggies bite, it’s the lunk at the other end of the leash who ought to be shipped off to rehab. (Same goes when kiddies bite.)

¶ The British consulate in Florence is slated to close, bringing 450 years of English presence in that city to an end. You could take it as a story of mutual deflation: Britain is no longer grand enough to maintain a diplomatic outpost in a city that is not grand enough to require one. Or you could wave a European Union flag. ¶ Maurice Szafran, chief executive at Marianne, surmises that the French press (that is, everybody but him) “is more passionate about the story than the French people are.” What’s he talking about? The royal wedding, of course. Reporter Matthew Saltmarsh sees an opportunity to trot out the names of two pretenders to the French monarchy, Jean d’Orléans and Louis Alphonse de Bourbon. We don’t see why the French shouldn’t be ruled by German princelings just like everybody else. ¶ Looking more than a little spiteful, Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, has announced the cessation of political contributions, ie political contributions to Democratic candidates, who, in his view, have done precious little for unions. We couldn’t agree more, but also we can’t think of a more naturally Republican Party constituency than America’s firefighters. If they could only repackage their union as a cartel, everything would make sense.