LAKE WOBELONGGONE

Garrison Keillor kissed off his hometown St. Paul Pioneer Press with a nasty letter to the editor the other day from his new digs in Denmark: “I’m glad to bid you goodbye. People who depend on you for their news have chosen to live a smaller life.”

He’d long been feuding with the PP, which has printed his address and otherwise took shots at the chronicler of Lake Wobegon.

So, when Keillor wrapped his “Prairie Home Companion” on public radio and headed for a writing life in Denmark, the paper bid adieu: “The rocks he chucked at this, his hometown newspaper, smarted but life is not idyllic in St. Paul, or Lake Wobegon either.”

This brought more rock chucking from Keillor: “My gripe with you has nothing to do with idylls, everything to do with your dismal view that a man’s claim to the right to live a decent private life here is frivolous.

“You were wrong. Privacy isn’t a favor that someone grants you, it is a sweet necessity of life, to be violated only if a great pubic need demands it. You violated mine to satisfy your personal whim.”