  We seek for lines of minimal distance to finitely many points in the plane.
The distance between a line and a set of points is defined by the L^p-norm,
1\leq p\leq \infty, of the vector of vertical or orthogonal distances from the
single points to the line. The known properties of optimal lines are deduced by
elementary considerations and represented using a uniform language for the
different choices to define the distance from a line to a set of points.
