For Canadian lefties, this has to count as one of the all-time greatest schadenfreude-y highs.

Far-right newspaper baron Conrad Black has been dumped— sorry, has resigned — as Hollinger International’s CEO.

It doesn’t end there. David Radler — he of the infamous comment, “I am ultimately the publisher of all these papers, and if editors disagree with us, they should disagree with us when they’re no longer in our employ” — is no longer the company president. And a host of other hangers-on have also vanished from the corporate letterhead.

The issue, apparently, was $32 million in unauthorized payments to Black, Radler, Hollinger Inc. and two other executives.

Over the years, Black earned the enmity of just about anyone involved in Canadian politics who didn’t think that Generalissimo Franco got a bad rap. Venemous, vituperative and vindictive, he made himself the poster boy for the right-wing abuse of media power. U.K. journalist and media commentator Roy Gleenslade describes Black as “your typical verbose, bombastic megalomaniac.”

So seeing him go down is grimly satisfying. But it’s hard not to speculate on whether karma is finished with Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Remembering his incessant stream of hang-’em-high editorials on crime leads to idle daydreaming: Conrad being perp-walked into the back of a police van (forever after referred to as a Conrad Black Maria). Conrad breaking down in the interrogation room and offering to give up Barbara Amiel in exchange for a reduced sentence (“She’s the real Mister Big! I can give you names, dates, burial sites!”). Conrad’s publishing efforts being reduced to stamping out 10″x6″ license plates.

Mmm. Schadenfreude. It screws up your karma, but it tastes so damn good…

If you’d told me 20-odd years ago when I was angrily listening to the album “War” that one day I’d be singing soft U2 lullabyes to my daughter, I’d have said you were nuts.

Well, turns out she’s highly susceptible to “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Which leads me to the question…

…What’s changed more? U2’s musical style, or yours truly?

In the great scheme of things, this is pretty minor. But it’s nice to know that, as Apple relegates my computer to the no-longer-supported column, someone — namely Charles Moore — is bearing witness to its passing.

That said, my mighty WallStret has just withstood the latest insult to its durability: a glass of water straight into its innards a few months ago.

At first it wouldn’t boot at all, emitting piteous whines from the hard drive. Then Chris, miracle technician at Mac Station, suggested I disconnect the keyboard — that just maybe, that could allow it to boot.

So it did, and for the next two months I ran this critter with a USB keyboard plugged into it. This was the cyberequivalent of extreme life support, and reluctantly I started trying to scrounge together enough used equipment to persuade a dealer to let me swap it for, say, an iBook.

Several discouraging calls later, I was disabused of the notion that my worldly possessions were worth diddly. I was losing hope.

And then late one night, I realized the system was going to need a restart. I saved the document I was working on, gave it some name or other… and realized I’d just been typing on the WallStreet’s keyboard. It was working again!

Even weirder, I had no memory of reconnecting the keyboard. Somehow, gravity, the pressure of the external keyboard or some mystical lifeforce deep within this laptop’s logic board pressed a set of connection terminals home. And now it works again.

I’m grateful, of course. But I can’t help but think that maybe we’re each allotted a certain number of small miracles in our lifetime. And if that’s so, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have chosen to use one up this way.