Because I need another time-waster like I need another time-waster, I recently bookmarked the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new aggregator. Yesterday, Herself speaks on Princess Caroline, in a piece called “Caroline: The Reasons Why.” (How new media! In the 20th century, I was taught that was a redundancy — reasons or why, but not “reasons why.” But never mind that.) After a few hundred words of shivs to the ribs — calling her an “endive salad,” living “a parochial, socially timid life centered on Manhattan’s most cosseted enclave,” Brown decrees: “The Kennedys, blindsided by the success of pea-picking, penny-ante, polyester-wearing provincials like the Carters and the Clintons, were never all that delighted when Bill Clinton’s wife commandeered RFK’s old Senate seat.”

Jeez, you’d never know the Kennedys are only three generations from bootlegging shanty Irish trash, would you? And get that “commandeered,” too. Someone tell Hillary: All that listening? Wasted time.

Then she winds up with a bang:

The hope for Caroline’s troubled candidacy now is that another dynastic story than her own may provide her next act. When The Washington Post’s Phil Graham was the manic, magnetic media king of the New Frontier capital, his wife Katharine was drab and invisible in the background. When her husband died in a suicide, she stumbled uncertainly at first. She was inarticulate, she lacked charm. No one really imagined that she would run The Washington Post herself. Then she found, just as Caroline has with politics, that printer’s ink coursed through her veins. Yes you can, she thought. And yes she did.

I have to admit I’d love to see Princess Caroline get the seat just to watch that transformation. Perhaps that’s what the governor is betting on.

Wha-? That’s what we’re looking for in a senator? A narrative? A reality show? “A transformation” to watch? Does anyone give a shit about policy anymore? And what does Katharine Graham have to do with anything? But the Daily Beast was only getting started. Next was “Lance for Senate?” in which the cyclist takes a break from comeback training to open up to Mark McKinnon, who, it should be noted, sits on the board of his foundation. Not that you’d notice from the questions:

You are such an inspiration to so many people. Who inspires you?

What drives your competitive nature?

And, of course, the biggie:

Is there a future for Lance Armstrong in politics?

But that’s nothing compared to the answer:

If you feel like you can do the job better than people who are doing it now, and you can really make a difference, then that’s a real calling to serve, and I think you have to do that. I felt a strong desire to come back and race right now because I felt we had a place and I could have a real impact and that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t think you want to enter political life unless you really think you can really have an impact. Don’t do it for a bet, or a dare or for your ego. Or for any other competitive desire you have. Do it because you can get in there and change people’s lives. That’s why you do it. So, there will come a time, or not, that I say to myself, “You know what, I can help affect change.” And if that day comes, then absolutely.

Lance? Do you have any idea what a senator does? It may surprise you that the job description doesn’t include “getting in there and changing people’s lives,” although that might be a by-product. I really would have liked to see the unedited version of this, before the “how do you keep yourself so awesome” questions were excised.

I actually might like to see him run. I’d love to see the look on his face when someone yells at him, “How did you manage to keep your doping from being discovered?” from the press pack. Not that he’d ever get close to it. Princess Caroline and Sarah Palin showed you don’t have to do that. At least not when you have Mark McKinnon and his notebook nearby.

And just because we’re on the subject of celebrity, don’t miss this Defamer post about how Owen Wilson’s Rolex watch helped save him from suicide. Thanks to LAMary for sending it along; we’re both at a loss for words.

All is not lost, however: Dana Milbank in a priceless account of the RNC chairmanship race. Stay classy, GOP!

You meet the strangest people on Twitter. The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party is running for chairman of the national committee, and modestly tweets that his “Blueprint for a GOP Comeback” is “pretty darn good, if I say so myself.” Hmm. Well, that throws the gauntlet, doesn’t it?

We cannot continue to lag behind on this (new media) front. I have used every resource there is to communicate our message in Michigan. I Twitter; I blog; I vlog. I have a Facebook page. I am LinkedIn, and I’m a regular on YouTube. I learn from my teenage age sons about the newest ways to reach young people. I am committed to taking New Media to the next level at the RNC and creating an environment that encourages young people to compete to present the best ideas and the most innovative messaging.

Good for you, Saul Anuzis. Young people don’t care if you write “teenage age sons,” because traditional usage is so MSM. Actually, that passage sort of depresses me. I’m not sure I want someone at the top of the RNC spending all his time on Twitter, blogging, vlogging (a term that I cannot bring myself to speak aloud; is “video blogging” so much more onerous to say?), Facebooking and Linking In. I’m sort of sour on social networking these days. I’m thinking, what’s the damn point? I am networked nine ways to Tuesday, and most of it is an utter waste of time. Work gained from LinkedIn, despite vigorous effort? None. Facebook? Fun but ultimately less entertaining than the worst episode of “30 Rock.” Twitter? I keep trying to Tweet or whatever, but can’t shake the feeling Twitter is for people who find Facebook too intellectually challenging. As for video blogging, if I wanted to watch Ann Althouse drink wine and watch “American Idol,” or two homely eggheads discuss the Top 10 U.N. Stories of 2008, there’s already a place for it, and it’s called public-access cable.

I think I’ve reached my tipping point in the media revolution. The vox of the populi reveals itself more, day by day, as hot air and blah blah. I no longer read Jeff Jarvis (not that I did much, anyway), for fear of hearing of yet another skill I have to add to my media toolbox: Oh, now I have to report, write, summarize in 140 characters, shoot and edit video, podcast, video blog, regular blog and something else? Well, that leaves lots of time for thought and analysis. I was chatting with a friend in the dead-tree media world the other day, and he said, “We tried video. We cut a reporter free, trained him, turned him loose, and you know what? It takes him three days to do the video equivalent of a 12-inch story, only it’s not as good. He used to be able to write two of those in one day. Tell me how this is an improvement.” I couldn’t do it, except to add that I could probably do a story like that in one day, but he’s not hiring, anyway. It’s still a good question.

What exactly is the point of all this connectivity, all these channels to tell the world what we’re cooking for dinner? I thought I’d get Kate a cell phone by now, but her friends would bankrupt us sending text messages all day. (Typical text message they send to one another: “wazzup?”)

Anuzis isn’t a tool, however:

We were once the party that America trusted on national security. But when intelligence failures and poor planning led to unexpected challenges in Iraq, America lost faith in our party. We were once the party of fiscal responsibility. But when members of our own party led the way in pork barrel spending, which led to the fattest federal budget in history, America lost faith in our party. And we were once the party that had convinced America that we “shared their values.” But when Republican after Republican was exposed as a hypocrite who said one thing on the campaigntrail and behaved a different way in their personal life, America lost faith in our party.

That’s what you have to work on. Content! Content! The medium is not the message.

And so our new year begins. I drank my New Year’s champagne on Friday night, taking down the Christmas tree and eating tomato and mozzarella paninis (thanks, brother Chas, for the panini press for Christmas). Against all odds, I have high hopes for 2009, and I’m not sure why.

Give me your best predictions for the next 12 months in the comments. I’m going to bed and having a busy Monday, so I won’t be back until afternoon sometime. Peace out.

Are you guys still waiting around for a post today? Sorry. I got distracted. The basement floor drain is glugging, but fortunately, I speak fluent Floor Drain. It is saying: Don’t you dare do any laundry today. Also, I’m investigating the Amazon Associates program site again, trying to figure out a non-obnoxious, non-intrusive way to mildly monetize NN.C. I’m sending out seven million e-mails relating to my other site, which is no longer entirely mine and is going to need some major attention if our plans for its relaunch are to come to anything other than a spinning buttfall. There’s a film festival we’d like to enter “The Cemetery Precincts” in, which requires attention and more e-mails. And there’s the fact it’s Friday, Jan. 2, which feels like something other than a weekday but not quite a weekend, so I’m discombobulated.

Also, I overslept, if oversleeping means clear ’til 8:20 a.m. after retiring at 1:20 a.m.

How about a little hors d’oeuvre tray of bloggage, then:

Republicans flee D.C. on the eve of the Obama inaugurations. Stay gone an extra week, folks.

I agree with TBogg, who said that whenever he’s asked what three historical figures he’d like to have dinner with, he replies, “I’d rather have three dinners with Kathy Griffin.”

Finally, I took Kate to see “Gran Torino” on New Year’s Eve, on the grounds it was shot in and around our new hometown, including the Grosse Pointe Shores home of one of her friend’s cousins. I subjected my tender baby’s ears to a virtual barrage of profanity and racial slurs in the hope she might get a valuable takeaway message from it, and this is what she took away: “Where are the black people? I thought this movie was about Detroit.” Anyway, a big disappointment. If you’re torn between, say, Manohla Dargis’ review in the NYT or David Edelstein’s in New York magazine, take it from me: Edelstein speaks the truth. Alas.

Have a good weekend.

Greetings to all on 1/1/09. My resolution is the same one every year — Get your shit together — and I suspect I’ll have the same success I had last year. My shit remains scattered all over the place. Why do I do this to myself? I only wish I knew.

But since January 1 is always associated with fresh starts, clean closets and deep cleansing breaths, I thought I might start with the four or five draft entries to NN.C that linger in my WordPress drafts folder. These are abandoned entries, things I started but never finished, or at least never published. A couple of them are obvious; it was plain, once I set it down in prose, that the old Morrises joke that went around my social circle one summer (remember, Borden?) wasn’t funny at all, and really required alcohol to sell, but I never trashed the draft. It might be the only existing account of the Morrises joke! I’ll use it somewhere. Others I’ve already thrown away, because the world already knows how I feel about Mitch Albom, and underlining it isn’t necessary.

But here’s something I’m going to go ahead and copy/paste here. From the embedded link within, it looks like it dates from 2006. It’s about one of my favorite things about newspapers — the little inside jokes that somehow make it into every issue — and since 2009 will probably be the year at least one major U.S. city loses its daily, now’s the time.

So best of luck to all in this new year. (And please, will someone sit down with Dick Clark and have a heart-to-heart with him, before another year passes?) Below, something from the notebook:

When I returned to work following my fancy-schmancy journalism fellowship, only to discover my new assignment would be the 5 a.m. shift on the copy desk, I wasn’t exactly pleased. But — this part is complicated and not interesting to anyone but me — it would do. And honestly? Once I got back to work, to my enormous relief and equally enormous shock, I found I still cared.

I still wanted to do a good job, that is. I still cared that the stories I handled were as good as I could make them. Reporters who wouldn’t check simple facts still bugged me, as did editors who let sloppy prose pass by unmolested. And to some extent I fell victim to Copy Editor’s Disease, in which I became enormously nit-picky.

For example: I edited the movie grid, and for several weeks running, it included “Around the World in 80 Days.” Each title had a one-line description, and its was “A man travels around the world in 80 days.” This drove me insane. I always changed it to, “An adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel.” That there was probably not a single reader who would appreciate or even know about this change bothered me not in the least. It just seemed important, and if you can’t see why, well, you’re not my colleague, buddy.

So, then, you can maybe see why I was so tickled by this Jack Shafer piece in Slate, about the folks at the New York Times who write the one-line descriptions of movies that run in the TV listings. Only they do more than just describe; they’re a micro-mini review, too:

The capsules spend 20 words—and usually fewer—to pass informed judgment on movies. Even if you never intend to watch any of the films, the capsules make for good morning reading. Consider this taut kiss-off of The Matrix Revolutions: “Ferocious machine assault on a battered Zion. Stop frowning, Neo; it’s finally over.” Appreciate, if you will, the efficient setup and slam of the 2 Fast 2 Furious capsule: “Ex-cop and ex-con help sexy customs agent indict money launderer. Two fine performances, both by cars.” And for compression, it’s hard to better the clip for the Julie Davis feature Amy’s Orgasm. It warns potential viewers away with just four syllables: “Change the station.”

Good newspapers are full of stuff like this, little gems inserted by smart people who are frequently working in below-the-radar jobs that the folks who run the place don’t even think about. The Columbus Dispatch’s College Preview column ran in agate and was supposed to be a pretty dull agate-type spacefiller on what the Saturday football schedule had in store, until they turned it over to someone who didn’t do dull agate well. (Actually, several people.) Instead, they gave them art in very small type. Here’s a sample, previewing a Florida-Tennessee matchup:

Jocks in Socks: A tongue twister by Dr. Seussaphone. Jocks. Socks. Blocks. Knoxville. Jocks in socks knock blocks in Knoxville. Which jocks knock whose blocks in Knoxville? Why the Gators of Steve the Fox, sir. Chicks built like bricks come. Hicks in stick shifts come. Chicks come. Hicks come. Chicks and hicks from the sticks come. Vols take licks like sick hicks from sticks. Please, sir, Vols don’t like taking licks in Knoxville. I’m so sorry, says Steve the Fox, but you Vols I vow to knock. Here’s an easy game to play. Here’s an easy win today. Who beats whose butt? Steve beats Vols’ butts. Steve beats Vols and Fulmer’s full butt. Beats Phil’s full butt? To a pulp, sir.

By the time the suits caught on, it had developed a readership.

Content always wins.

Here’s a novel resolution some of you might be interested in. I know I am. And it is:

Use fewer words.

Ha ha, said Little Miss Logorrhea, knowing this would be one of those resolutions that would fall to the wayside by noon on New Year’s Day. Still, I think it’s important to take a stand. What made me think of it was this quote from Kwame Kilpatrick in the Freep today, a reconstruction of how their own reporting reverberated in the mayor’s inner circle last year:

“I’m going to need you to step up,” Kilpatrick said.

A generation ago, he’d have said, “I need you to step up,” or “I need your help,” but the “I’m going to” is the mark of our age of blah blah. It so happens I watched “Office Space” over the weekend, and this is how the evil boss talks: “Yeah, Peter, I’m going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday…” All those filler words thrown in there, like packing peanuts, the mark of the passive-aggressive personality. Not: “You have to work Saturday,” but “I’m going to need you” and “go ahead” and “come in,” etc.

The other day I saw a sign in the salon where I was fighting another skirmish against the gray:

“Start the new year right! Swap out your old cosmetics and get a 20 percent discount.” When did “out” hook up with “swap,” anyway? No one just says “swap” by itself anymore, and now we have two words doing the work that used to be done by one: “Exchange.”

“Change up” — that’s another one. I first noticed it on “The Wire,” and I always assumed it was ghetto usage, until it started spreading like an ink stain: “And then he changed up, and it was all over.” Or else he changed up and swapped out, which I swear I saw somewhere living in the same sentence, but I forgot to clip it.

Everybody talks and writes these days like they’re being interviewed by Charlie Rose, and no one wants to sound stupid by not giving a full answer. And so we change up and swap out, and we’re going to need you to go ahead and come in this Saturday, mmm-kay?

Use fewer words. Cultivate that tight-lipped air of mystery.

That doesn’t mean fewer letters, however. Somehow I got on a Star-Tribune mailing list and thought I’d immediately unsubscribe, until I was sucked in by this amusing urban-trend story, about a man who shot a 15-point buck — and friends, that’s a trophy anywhere in the world — with a crossbow on the shoulder of a busy Minneapolis freeway. How often do you get to read a sentence like this?

The buck jumped back over the fence and died in a nearby parking lot.

“Bed, Bath & Beyond, I bet,” said Alan. Discussing what constitutes a “point,” however, reminded us of a story last month in the Free Press, about a teenage girl who hunts with her dad, and bagged a “three-oint buck” her first time out. We thought it was a typo, but it was repeated later in the story: a three-oint buck. Cutbacks on the copy desk, I guess, or maybe a novel way to save ink.

Today’s holiday photo wasn’t submitted as such, but I like it and I’m stealing it. Readers, our own Coozledad, taking his new toys out for a spin down on Vegetarian Farm, or whatever he calls his acreage:

I’ve said before that little makes me happier than seeing animals doing the work they were bred to do, and something about the expression on Andy and Barney’s faces as they bend to the task at hand — hauling firewood — makes me smile. Plus, I like equines in furry winter coats (until they roll in the mud, and you have to spend an hour currying it off of them).

See you in the new year, then. Safe celebrations, all.

Lots of talk in Blogland of late about this Wall Street Journal column, much of it stupid (the talk, that is), almost all of it predictable. So predictable, in fact, that I wish journalists who throw pitches like this — it’s about the impending death of ink-on-paper news — would learn a few sinkers and sliders and stop sending big fat slow ones over the plate. The writer, Paul Mulshine, takes a few unnecessary cheap shots at bloggers, which elicits the usual response: Wah wah wah someone said something mean about Glenn Reynolds how arrogant how MSM I can’t wait until they’re all dead wah wah wah, followed a few hours later by welcome Instapundit readers…

These side squabbles, which all seem to boil down to “he didn’t write it the way I would have, so I’m going to get on my new-media blog and whine about it,” distract from Mulshine’s message, which comes low in the piece, and isn’t talked about enough, i.e., who is going to do the boring work newspapers do when they’re gone?

…The writer in question (who covers mundane government meetings) is performing a valuable task for the reader — one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the “executive summary.” Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.

This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren’t doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they’re under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.

So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don’t expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won’t be able to do it either.

We touched on this last week in the comments, when our BFF Deb put it in much more pungent language:

there is something truly terrifying about these people who seem to think journalism is such a simple-minded enterprise that any fool with a notebook can do it. and how do i know this blogger in bumfaulk isn’t sleeping with the school superintendent, a disgruntled former employee with a penchant for firearms, a garden-variety whack job, a parent with a beef against the principal, or… and what will these folks do when the board decides to convene an illegal closed session? do they have a lawyer they can call? go right ahead, round up all these reporter wannabes. but when they don’t make it to the next board meeting because the streets were icy, or left early because the whole damn thing was just TAKING too long, don’t come bitching to me.

The other day Lawrence Lessig was on “Fresh Air,” talking about digital copyright ideas and related topics, and Terry Gross asked him about the future of newspapers. He skipped right over the newspapers part — he gets all his news from Google News, he said — and said that what worries him far more is the future of investigative reporting. This is a common lamentation among the intelligentsia: screw Dear Abby, what about investigative reporting? It drives me right up the wall, because it tells me the intelligentsia knows little about reporting. Maybe HBO could put “All the President’s Men” back into the rotation, so we could all refresh our memories of Watergate and take a lesson about the most famous journalistic investigation in modern history:

It started as a routine story on the police beat.

We forget that Bob Woodward wasn’t Bob Woodward back then. He was just some guy in the metro desk bullpen who had to work Saturdays. He got a tip and caught a break. The rest was just following leads, shoe-leather reporting.

Many larger newspapers maintain so-called I-teams, but the fact is, the best investigative reporting is like that — bottom-up. (If you know your local reporting staff, you’ll frequently find the beat reporter’s byline, along with one of the I-teamers, on big projects. The former knows the territory, and the latter knows how to work databases and other specialized reporting tools.) So when Lessig says he worries about who will support investigative work, I have to say I don’t. Some Gates-type foundation will arise to fund worthy projects, ones that will make all concerned feel virtuous at the annual banquet. There will be investigations on crime rates and welfare-to-work programs and the fate of the Pacific salmon. There won’t be too many projects about public-servant thieves like Kwame Kilpatrick, because those come from beat reporters keeping their eyes and ears open as they do the scutwork of the job — going to meetings so boring they peel paint from the walls, checking police blotters and court dockets, schmoozing secretaries and clerks.

That’s what will be lost when newspapers go away. Get to work, citizen journalists.

Not much bloggage today. The news seems to be taking the week off, too. Well, there’s this, an NYT story about the difficulty of ending your marriage in a collapsed real estate market. I don’t know why the strawberry blonde in the second photo made me think of “Lyin’ Eyes,” the old Eagles song. Just something about her. I bet she opened lots of doors with just a smile, back in the day. And the fact she says money from their multiple homes would be her only income. Time to get a job, hon.

More coffee for me.

Oh, wait! We have a holiday photo. It’s Beb, all tired out from reading his Fun Calendar, colonized by cats:

Now more coffee for me.

It all started with a conversation with my sister, who used to sell telephone systems to big corporations and now sells antiques, in an antique mall and on eBay. She specializes in American glass — depression, carnival, that sort of thing. Mostly utilitarian items prized by collectors. Pretty things. Hostessy stuff.

One day I was watching her pack stuff for eBay shipping, and she said, “If you ever see a square cake stand at a garage sale or something, buy it. You can name your price.” The lesson sunk in, and a couple years later, I saw a square cake stand. This one, in fact:

This was at a Grosse Pointe estate sale, notorious for overcharging. It seemed someone had already named their price, and it was ridiculous: $90. But the thing was in mint condition, so I called my sister and described it. “That sounds like Fostoria American, and if it’s perfect, it’s worth a lot more than $90.” So I bought it. Checked eBay, and she was right: Fostoria American square cake stands with the rum well and in mint condition were selling for about $300 at the time. (Less now — recession — but still well over $200.) I considered giving it to her to sell, but thought eh, it’s pretty, and added it to my china cabinet, to stand as a memorial to the day a simple peasant woman got a bargain at a Grosse Pointe estate sale.

So this Christmas, we went to my sister’s, and guess what one of my presents was? Ten cake plates, in the Fostoria American pattern:

But wait, there’s more! Also, a Fostoria American cake knife:

I mention all this to underline something we all learn about ourselves sooner or later: One minute we’re the sort of girl whose most prized possessions are a hand-written letter from Warren Zevon, a signed copy of “Freaky Deaky” and a “Kind of Blue” CD, and the next you own a Fostoria American cake stand, matching plates and a knife. As David Byrne says, “And you may ask yourself, ‘how did I get here?’”

That’s how.

The thing most people don’t realize about certain cake stands is that you can invert them — the base is almost always hollow — and use them as a snack plate. The dip goes in the hollow base:

OK, then. Some bloggage:

Resolved:

Sit through internet ads that appear on real, need-the-money websites (which is to say, newspapers). No more “click here to skip.” Endure the stupid thing. On favorite blogs, click one or two of the ads every day. (Boy, are they stupid, too.)

So you may have to sit through an ad for the Economist to read this NYT story about a new wrinkle in foreclosure culture: Roving bands of skaters chasing the ultimate skater perk — a nice dry pool:

Across the nation, the ultimate symbol of suburban success has become one more reminder of the economic meltdown, with builders going under, pools going to seed and skaters finding a surplus of deserted pools in which to perfect their acrobatic aerials.

In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks.

Hey, I saw “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” so I know this could well have some legs. But this smells like one of those bogus-trend stories to me. In fact, a large chunk of the story is about pool builders and real-estate developers who are looking at a fraction of the orders they had a year ago. The fact teased in the photo caption — that skaters are coming from as far away as Europe and Australia to skate American pools — is entirely hearsay, too. Still, not a bad read.

Also, not for the faint of heart: Another excellent dissection of the collapse of yet another criminally managed bank — WaMu. Sooner or later we’re going to get wise and put someone like Kerry Killinger before a firing squad. Until then, he has his millions. Un-fucking-believable.

So have a good week. Today’s Holiday Photo is from Bill, who comments here as Bill, taken last summer in Alaska when he was stalking Sarah Palin on vacation:

I think I’ll go make a cake. Later.

Hope you all had a great Christmas. I got a new camera:

Doesn’t mommy set a bourgeois table? Those cranberry candle things are embarrassing, but what the hell, how often do you get to use your late Aunt Edwina’s silver compotes, anyway? Note to lifestyle editors in the readership: How about a story on how to repurpose all those little maiden aunt hand-me-downs for the modern hostess? I have a cut-glass knife rest that will never support a knife again, but it seems you ought to be able to do something with it.

Anyway, Santa must have heard my plea the other day, because whaddaya know, the new camera shoots Tri-X:

That’s a setting called “dynamic B&W” (yes, as opposed to “smooth B&W”), i.e., Tri-X. I have to plow through a substantial owner’s manual to figure out just how many of the bells and whistles I’ll be using, and I’m hopeful I can figure out how to make run-of-the-mill crapshots like the ones above not throw 3.5 megabytes of shade on my hard drive. I think it has something to do with the delete key.

Also, I’ve heard you can get far better shots if you actually leave the house once in a while, but at the moment freezing rain is falling, and you know how that stuff is. I may be here until the thaw, at this rate.

It was a good Christmas. It continues through the weekend, after which the Great Housecleaning begins. I figure, I might not be able to sell my house at the moment, but at least I can make it gleam like a new penny. Of special concern this year: Closets. Beware, closets. I am coming for you.

From the comments, it sounds like everyone had a pretty good holiday, too. Sometime around 3 p.m. on the Eve, all my animosity about the holiday falls away and I find myself, usually unexpectedly, in the Christmas spirit. I think it’s because when the stores close, the jig is well and truly up, and you have to live or die with the preparations you’ve made, and perhaps by default, they’re almost always Good Enough. My final act was to throw a double sawbuck in the mail to my newspaper carrier, who along with many of us is going to be having a lousy 2009. (Unless that’s the year he finishes med school and starts his general-surgery internship, in which case he’ll be getting even less sleep.) I’ve never laid eyes on this man and wouldn’t know his name if he didn’t send me a please-tip Christmas card every year, but his outstretched hand doesn’t bother me. He does a thankless job well, and that’s the very definition of someone who deserves a little something extra this time of year. The day of our big blizzard last week, I went out to shovel the front step, which by the time I got up had already piled up to the bottom of the storm door. There were no footsteps on the walk and I’d assumed the carriers had been snowed in, too. And what did I find as I reached concrete? A New York Times, a Wall Street Journal and a Detroit News, all wrapped in plastic and perfectly dry. So he deserves it.

By the way, I think I’ve found the worst Christmas song ever, a new one to me. The local all-Christmas station played it on the Eve: A Soldier’s Christmas. Excruciating.

And now, the holiday in our rear-view mirror, we can turn our thoughts to other things, like contemplating the fate of the Lions. I’ll say one thing for this season: Sportswriters who had already turned it up to 11 after the fifth or sixth loss of the year have had to find new frequencies to wail at, some audible only to dogs. Drew Sharp in the Freep:

If you assessed the public mood eight months ago on the greater impossibility — the country shedding its shackles of racial intolerance and electing America’s first black president, or an NFL team going winless through a 16-game parity-driven schedule, the concept of perfect football imperfection would’ve comfortably won the argument.

The Lions have one-upped Barack Obama.

Passages like that make me miss the sports copy desk.

Let’s kick off Holiday Photos week, then. I actually have fairly slim pickin’s this year, mainly because you all made merry swapping links to Flickr pages in the comments last week, but no mind. This is a good one, Deborah from Chicago with her husband Steve, in happier meteorological times:

Light jackets! Short sleeves! Open water! The skyline of a thriving city! America, be optimistic — happy days will be here again. In the meantime, have a good weekend.

A few more inches of snow last night, followed by what seems to be rain. (Checking…yes, it’s 34 degrees. Rain.) More snow behind it, but tomorrow promises to be mostly sunny hereabouts, so the usual platitudes about gratitude for small favors apply. Anyway, let’s all join hands and thank the deity of our choice that we’re not with Danny in Hawaii, where he’s stalking the Obamas and sending back photos of seasonal icons rendered in baby-shit brown.

Shudder. I mean, some things are sacred. Or should be.

What I will do is flake off for the day (because absolutely no one is reading this today) wishing you all a happy and safe holiday weekend. I may be in and out here — I have some video to edit if I get a chance today — or may not. If not, safe travels, great memories and happy celebrations to all. You folks are the absolute best, and deserve it all.

Much talk, hereabouts, about this story from the Weekly Standard, by Matt Labash. The cover features a photo of the Michigan Central Depot, the most infamous abandoned building in Detroit. Guess what the story’s about? If you answered, “the decline and fall of what was once North America’s great industrial city,” pat yourself on the back. You’re on your way to earning a full scholarship to journalism school.

It’s long, and if you don’t want to read it, here are the Cliff’s Notes: Labash sets off to spend a week in our fair city. Packing for the trip, he meets unnamed people who give him him pithy quotes:

Before I’d left, I’d asked an acquaintance if he was from Detroit. “Indeed I am,” he said, “Give me all your f–ing money.”

Ha ha. He arrives and hooks up with Charlie LeDuff, a Detroit News reporter with a rather maniacally cultivated image as an eccentric renegade. (Of which I will speak no more, as conflicts of interest exist in the household.) The first part of the article is a full-on kneepads job on LeDuff, who muses that he was put in his current position by God. Then Charlie tells him to grab his coat, and they’re off to cover Charlie’s beat, which he describes as “the hole” — “forgotten people in forgotten places.” Labash recounts some of Charlie’s greatest reporting hits — the Dr. Kevorkian profile, the repo-man profile, the exhuming-the-dead piece — before sliding into the stock parachuted-in, out-of-town-journalist’s tour of the usual suspects and venues. Adolph Mongo, L. Brooks Patterson, Martha Reeves. They meet the latter at the Hitsville USA Motown museum; now there’s a place you don’t read about very often, eh? And they drop in on a firehouse that recently lost a beloved brother to a collapsing roof while fighting an arsonist’s fire in an abandoned house, surely the worst possible circumstances for such a death to occur. The Detroit fire department’s problems are a true shame upon the city, and Labash doesn’t fail to fully note it.

It’s a good piece, well-written and very readable, but it’s only a better version of dozens that came before it, and the fact it appeared in a conservative policy review, at this particular point in time, suggests a strategy underneath it all. Rod Dreher, faithful doggy that he is, catches the scent immediately:

I wondered over the holiday why it is that it’s correct to believe that New Orleans should be saved, even though it has many of the same endemic and seemingly unsolvable problems as Detroit, and faces one Detroit doesn’t: the likelihood (say some scientists) that it will all sink between now and 2100. Anyway, why is it correct to believe that it’s our moral duty as Americans to “save” New Orleans, whatever that means, but Detroit — well, it can keep going to hell, because what can anybody do with a city so far gone?

In the comments he answers his own question:

People who wish to save New Orleans generally argue that N.O. is so important culturally and otherwise to America that we can’t let it waste away. More pragmatic voices argue … that the city is in a nearly impossible position geographically, and that had Katrina not happened, it was still an economic sinkhole, with high rates of crime, illiteracy, welfare dependency, corruption and all the same demons that haunt Detroit. But there’s nothing romantic at all about Detroit.

In other words: Because I like New Orleans, and I don’t like Detroit. Do I need to mention where Dreher hails from? Yes, Louisiana. But of course that has nothing to do with why New Orleans should be helped, and Detroit written off. It’s all about culture and romance.

But you see what he’s done? He’s conflated Detroit, the city that’s been in a death spiral since the late ’60s, with Detroit, shorthand for the domestic automotive industry. When any fool could tell him they are two very different things. Unfortunately, any fool doesn’t write for the Weekly Standard, or any of the other publications who have sent less talented writers to essentially draw the same wrong conclusion. For those of you who may be newcomers here: The problems of Detroit-the-city are related to the auto industry, but not in the obvious way. The city is full of monuments to automotive wealth and largesse and history, but the truth is, outside of the GM corporate offices downtown, most of what we think of as Detroit-the-car-business is located outside of Detroit-the-city. Maybe all of it, at least in terms of major plants and production facilities. The GM Tech Center is in Warren. Chrysler’s in Auburn Hills, Ford in Dearborn. The plants are all over the place (and around the country). There are abandoned factories in the city, but they’ve been so for decades. If you want to cover what’s happening to southeast Michigan as a result of the auto industry’s problems, you need to go to the suburbs — Wayne, Wixom, Dearborn, Auburn Hills, Grosse Pointe, Livonia…all of them, really.

But here’s something else: No one in Detroit-the-city is asking for over-and-above salvation from the likes of Dreher. Like every other city in the country, it angles for handouts from Uncle Sam, but the idea that there’s a push on for the city to be “saved” is absurd. Its problems are many and complicated, not all self-inflicted but certainly self-propagating. However, it has been so for 40 years and will likely be so for another 40. After four years of living just outside its eastern border, I can tell you I don’t really understand the place and probably never will, but I have come to like it very much and even love it, as ugly and blighted as it is. It is a city with a heart that continues to beat in a terribly diseased body, and you have to respect any place that just flat refuses to die.

Dreher claims to have read and enjoyed all of Labash’s piece, but he doesn’t mention this part, which quotes Adolph Mongo, generally described as a “political consultant,” but as with many Detroiters, that’s not all of the story. He doesn’t pussyfoot around:

When white politicians want to get elected around here, explains Mongo, “They don’t say ‘n—-r’ anymore, they say ‘Detroit.’” And so, while the Big Three have been running away from Detroit for years, they “got a rude awakening when they went to D.C.” Mongo holds that when congressmen associate automakers with Detroit, what they’re intending to associate them with are all the inept black people who come from there. Or as he puts it, when they say “ ’Detroit,’ they really said, ‘they the new n—–s.’ Welcome to the club.”

Yup.

Finally, because Dreher identifies himself as a Christian and writes for a religious blog, I’d ask him this: Since when did romance and culture become the criteria for determining who should be helped? Both Detroit and New Orleans are full of people, or as Dreher’s religion would describe them, souls. Are Louisiana souls more worthy of help than Michigan’s? I guess so. And finally finally, if he’s going to put NOLA culture up against Detroit’s, I hope he brought his lunch, because Detroit is going to eat it. I suspect he’s one of those guys who puts on his Meters CDs a few times a year and says all that bon temps roulez shit to his kids, while up here in Gritty City we’re incubating the next Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Eminem, White Stripes, Don Was or the-list-goes-on. Here’s a video taste of one show last summer. (Admittedly, an extraordinary one. Don Was is like a magnet of cool. I still can’t believe I missed it.)

So. Rant over. But it put me in such a mood! So let’s close out with a brief bit of bloggage, once again from Roger Ebert — a collection of his best zingers through the years, nearly all of them from pans:

I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer

This film obtained a PG-13 rating, depressing evidence of how comfortable with vulgarity American teenagers are presumed to be. Apparently you can drink shit just as long as you don’t say it. — “Austin Powers II”

At first I thought it was presumptuous to select your own best lines — isn’t that the reader’s job? — but I soon found myself laughing so hard I couldn’t read them aloud to Alan. So I guess I trust his judgment.

Oops, one more: The best single story about Caroline Kennedy’s ambitions, and oh my, it’s satire:

Caroline Kennedy would like to be considered Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2009 and has let the magazine’s editor know of her interest in the honor, aides to Ms. Kennedy confirmed today.

Off to shop for my holiday dinner. Among about a million other chores. Huzzah.