Something is very, very wrong with “The Soloist.”

Apparently it’s a true story in which Robert Downey Jr. plays an LA Times columnist who sets out to save a talented but disturbed cellist, played by Jamie Foxx.

I’m sitting in the theater, using my “Bradley Bucks” in exchange for free tickets, the first time I see the preview. I’m thinking it looks fantastic, but backwards.

The journalist saves the disturbed cellist? That’s easy ... the cellist had talent. Heck, just last Christmas a movie had a journalist saving a disturbed dog. That was easy, too ... he was married to Jennifer Aniston, and unless you’re Brad Pitt, that’s a relationship you don’t screw up, dog or no dog.

But who saves the disturbed journalist? I’d pay real money to see how that one ends.

Another LA Times columnist, Rosa Brooks, wrote her final column this week. She’s taking a job as a policy adviser at the Pentagon. She’s technically a freelancer — no benefits — and figured she was “just too cheap to be worth firing.”

I read her column for free on the Internet.

My favorite columnist, Bill McClellan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, argues that newspapers should stop giving away the Internet.

I’m afraid that idea is more nostalgic than realistic. It seems rooted in the logic that, “If things could just be the way they were, then they wouldn’t be the way they are.”

The reality is, I read Mr. McClellan’s column for free on the Internet. And if not for that, I wouldn’t read it at all. Maybe I’ll live in St. Louis some day, and things will be different. I’ll subscribe to the paper. If it survives.

My next-favorite columnist is the snarky Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. The Times used to put up a “subscription wall” to read columns. I didn’t buy. I didn’t read.

My dad bought me a Sunday Times subscription so I’d have Ms. Dowd on my doorstep. The paper never came. I called circulation. For four weeks, we played this charade. It was too frustrating. I’ll never try that again. I asked for my money back.

And it wasn’t even my money.

This week, Ms. Dowd wrote that her salary and savings are down, so she went panning for gold in California. I wonder if this was a veiled shot at the Times boardroom — “Cut my pay? Well, how about I expense a trip to sunny California?”

I finished painting my house last weekend. Thanks to some great friends, I was able to get some awkward spots. Earlier this spring, I tried manning the extension ladder by myself.

Power lines, ladders and unsound footing were involved.

I noticed hawks circling overhead. No kidding.

I pride myself on recognizing a hawk from a buzzard. Hawks’ wing tips point forward, whereas buzzards’ angle back. Also, hawks swoop down to prey on the living, but buzzards eat the rotting corpses of the dead.

The hawks didn’t swoop down to eat me, and I didn’t fall or get electrocuted. That means the hawks were not a metaphor.

Maybe I need to check my pulse, because on second thought, they could’ve been buzzards.

Joe Blumberg covers the Buchanan County Courthouse for the News-Press. He previously covered City Hall and a regional beat. He’s originally from St. Louis and moved to St. Joseph in 2003 after graduating from the University of Missouri.