C.J.: Stand down ladies; Keillor is not on the market

Stand down ladies. That smooth-talking Garrison Keillor is apparently not on the market.

Seeing "Garrison Keillor is no longer listed as 'married' " on his Facebook.com page was fun while it lasted over the last 24 or so hours. At 4:34 p.m. Monday, the status of the millionaire author and host of "A Prairie Home Companion" returned to "married."

About 9:55 a.m. Monday I left the first of two messages at the St. Paul home of Keillor and his wife, the very private Jenny Lind Nilsson. Facebookies were stirred up about an alteration in Keillor's marital status and I wanted to know what was up. (As a fan of marriage, I would much rather Keillor stay with one of his wives. I was sitting here feeling sorry for her about him possibly posting something hurtful around Valentine's Day. )

Some Facebookies ,who understand the system much better than I do, say Keillor might have inadvertently changed his status. Another said no way, you can't do this by accident. One Facebookie hypothesized that Keillor may not have realized that by deleting "married" from his status he was announcing something different to the world.

After my second phone call to the Keillor residence, I also tried to reach him through his syndicate, Tribune Media Services in Chicago. Not wanting to be scooped, I declined to be any more specific about the reason for my call beyond saying that it was prompted by information on Keillor's Facebook page. A little before 4:30 p.m. I called TMS again to notify them that an item had been posted at Startribune.com about the change in marital status on Keillor's page, which was viewable to 600-plus Facebook "friends," a group of which I am not a member. The first web item I posted contained the hopes that either Keillor would call and explain himself or just quietly fix this Facebook.com notation.

Without any explanation, as is Keillor's shy way, his Facebook status changed shortly thereafter.

I had already been working the phones trying to get someone from Facebook to comment on a situation related to me by a "Phil Rodemann," responding to my first Keillor item posted on Startribune.com: "C.J. I know of more than one person who [has] been having problems with Facebook randomly changing their marital status from 'married' to 'not married.' One person, a co-worker who lives and works in NJ had it happen seven or eight times in the span of a few weeks. Facebook is probably having an issue."

Facebook is one of those arrogant operations that makes it impossible to get a person on the line if you have a problem, whether you're a Facebookie (I am) or media (again, I am).

So was this change in marital status Facebook's error or Keillor's? We'll have to wait to see if Keillor writes about it in a future column because Facebook will probably never tell.

False alarm, ladies.

C.J. is at 612-332-TIPS or cj@startribune.com. E-mailers, please state a subject -- "Hello" doesn't count. Attachments are not opened, so don't even try. More of her attitude can be seen on FOX 9 Thursday mornings.