Two thumbs down. Control freaks from both parties put together a 32-page “memorandum of understanding” that covers room temperature, podium height and the selection of makeup artists for the three presidential debates and the one vice-presidential debate. It also stipulates that the candidates cannot address each other, move around the stage or refer to people in the audience.

These finicky directions are designed to eliminate the kind of surprises that make debates more interesting. The parties, it seems, see the debates as being about them, not about the voters. And the goal isn’t the public interest; it’s the avoidance of revealing moments.

Then again, these are the same folks who have wrung all spontaneity from the national conventions. Perhaps the media should send theater critics rather than political reporters.

No matches required. It’s not the kind of occasion you celebrate with a greeting card, but Banned Books Week comes to a close Saturday. The American Library Association spearheads this observance every year as a reminder that, the First Amendment notwithstanding, free expression is under constant attack.

In a coda to one edition of “Fahrenheit 451,” his novel about book-burning, science fiction author Ray Bradbury described getting numerous suggestions to revise another work, “The Martian Chronicles,” to include more diversity in the characters and to get rid of alleged stereotyping.

His reaction to the advice: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority – be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquare Gospel – feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.”

One of the most attacked books on the American Library Association’s list, by the way: “Fahrenheit 451.”