CBC Radio's Mike Hornbrook reported this morning that the normally e-loquacious Conrad Black is not responding to e-mails these days.

And Black appears to be taking efforts to avoid being photographed in the waning days of his pre-incarceration freedom.

Black's lawyers were in court in Chicago on Wednesday. They are arguing for him to allow to remain free on bail awaiting his appeal rather than commence serving his sentence on Monday as scheduled. Black may hear the outcome of that application today.

Sadly, Black wasnt' successful, so the big house looms ever closer.

The Star's David Olive passed along this observation on Feb. 25:

And now, an irony within a paradox wrapped in an enigma:

Journalist Doug Bell, who blogged impartially on the Conrad Black trial last year for Toronto Life, has come upon a recent, resigned observation by Himself in the Irish press: "The place [prison] I have been assigned to is relatively good and if I do go there, they will ask me to teach, but I guess it's an elite occupation in a prison," Black said. "It's like back to boarding school, without, one dares to assume, the tedium and indignity of corporal punishment." As he made clear in his mid-1990s memoir, Black regarded many of his Upper Canada College instructors as kapos.

Not sure what's more retch-worthy here: that Black always places himself on the most elite plane that circumstances allow; or his implication that outside of prison, teaching – a vocation of more critical importance to a healthy society than, say, investment banking – is very much sub-elite.