In his book “Young Men In Spats,” the late great P.G. Wodehouse has the narrator explain to a guest the house rules governing the exclusive Drones Club where the two Brits are having a highball.

“We’re pretty broadminded here,” the man tells his visitor. “And if you stop short of smashing the piano, there isn’t much you can do that will cause the raised eyebrow and the sharp intake of breath…”

With due respect to the good ol’ boys of the Drones Club – an establishment which, I must say, sounds very much like my kind of place – Wodehouse’s description of the club’s laid-back philosophy would seem an equally good fit for the federal court that is presently hearing the Martha Stewart case.

As you well know, the 62-year-old Stewart – television personality, alleged domestic style setter and part-time Mainer who, from all accounts, fits the descriptive term “summer complaint” if ever a jet-setting Mount Desert Island interloper did – is presently up to her properly adorned neck in a messy insider-trading dustup.

The lady with the uncanny ability to glom on to tried-and-true household tips, decorating hints, snobbish cookery pointers and the like and make it appear as though she invented every last one of them, stands accused of working with her former stockbroker to cook up a phony explanation for why she dumped her ImClone Systems stock just before it plummeted on a negative regulatory report. Stewart calls it merely good business practice, the feds call it obvious securities fraud, and the Court TV network calls it really great television.

The jury in the case, eight women and four men, was seated Monday. It includes a man who lost money because of the Enron collapse engineered by greedy wheeler-dealers, plus a woman who says the government should move faster to prosecute corporate flim-flammery, and the little people get shafted when it comes to equal justice.

If that caused the raised eyebrow or the sharp intake of breath by Stewart’s lawyers, or if they even considered a challenge on the grounds that the two jurors couldn’t possibly be of help to their famous client, the fact went unrecorded in the news accounts I read. Apparently, the defense felt that the jury-selection process stopped short of smashing the grand piano, although from the outside looking in it’s difficult to see how.

Defense attorneys will tell you that cases are lost before they begin when attorneys select the wrong jury; that if attorneys don’t size up the case from the perspective of the real people serving on the jury, their goose stands a good possibility of being soon cooked. A successful defense attorney knows how different personalities might perceive the evidence, how “value beliefs” may dispose jurors to be less than neutral, what issues are most likely to be misunderstood, and what unanswered questions will stay on jurors’ minds and destroy his case.

News reporters look for the same things in assessing a jury when they sit in on the jury-selection exercise, as is their right under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Unfortunately, the judge in the Stewart case closed the process to reporters and the public on the dubious grounds that potential jurors might be less forthcoming with answers if they knew reporters were present.

For 17 media organizations, that pretty much smashed the old piano. With raised eyebrow and sharp intake of breath they immediately filed papers arguing that the judge had violated the First Amendment. Any effect of the presence of reporters “undoubtedly is dwarfed by the presence of Martha Stewart – easily recognizable and sitting just feet away,” media attorneys argued in their legal papers.

It’s pretty hard to disagree with that contention, although I’ll grant that Stewart’s presence didn’t stop one chap from admitting to the judge that he refers to the style maven as “the devil” when his wife watches her syndicated TV show. The judge thereupon threw the man out of her courtroom. So much for the benefits of being brutally honest in the absence of the news media.

When I accessed the Internet to be brought up to date on all things Martha, my computer screen flashed an ominous message, a new one to me: “This File Contains Information Not Understood By The Viewer. Suppress Further Errors? Yes. No.”

Beats me how the computer could know that I am such a dope I wouldn’t understand the information, supposing it deigned to give it to me. But I figured it was some kind of warning from on high about getting on Martha’s case. So I punched the “No” option and quit while I was ahead.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.