One reason I’m glad I’m not being graded on these classes I’m taking: I’m missed all of them today, and will miss all of them again Friday, for Fellowship activities. One reason not to care: The Fellowship stuff is more fun. Today was a day trip to Detroit. Go ahead, jeer and catcall. I’m here to tell you, it was sort of cool.

The first stop was Bloomberg, where I marveled at the fully stocked newsroom snack bar (with video fish tank on plasma-screen TV), the Aeron chairs, the super-cool and up-to-the-second technology at every work station. Then I thought: I wouldn’t work here at gunpoint. Just…didn’t like the vibe. Also, business isn’t my groove. (Listen to me: Groove. Vibe. What the hell?)

Then it was off to the Free Press, where we were guests at the morning news meeting, which reminded me why I’m fellowshipping, and let that be the end of that. But we picked up a deputy M.E. there, who led us on sort of a Journalists’ Tour of the city, which is to say, we saw where the Tigers play and the corner where the 1967 riots broke out, the Joe Louis memorial and the blocks of decimated neighborhoods, where vacant lots are like holes in a jack-o-lantern smile. It’s quite a place, which reminds me to plug The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, a wonderful, loving web tribute to what’s left of what was once the country’s sixth-largest city.

But the city is making a comeback of sorts, and we saw evidence at Orchestra Hall, about to reopen after a long restoration, and at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is also about to undergo a huge makeover. While there, we saw the Diego Rivera murals, which were the highlight of the day, for me. I could have spent all day just in that courtyard. (I especially liked the vaccination scene, a little joke on the Nativity. The nurse has Jean Harlow’s face.)

Then we came home, in the hands of a driver I fear was, oh, not very competent at bus-driving. He missed exits. He got lost. He had to do more backing up to straighten out and get through corners than any driver I’ve ever seen, and I think at one point I saw him reading a pamphlet called "Getting your Chauffeur’s License," but I may be wrong. He had to be directed to the Free Press building, which didn’t surprise me, because I saw it off to the side of the freeway, and then we went two more exits before finally getting off and making our way back.

It made me wonder how safe you really are, on a bus. You’re back there in your cushy seat, talking to your fellow Fellows, and what the hell do you really know about who’s behind the wheel, anyway? Not much. Plus, there are no seat belts, and people routinely stand up to talk to their buddies in other seats. Who says South American bus plunges can only happen in South America? Not me. "Fellows perish in Motown bus plunge" — is this not a headline you might read in your local newspaper? I think so. It’s a tough town.

And I’m a tired piece of work. More treatment, or maybe a nap first, then treatment.

Tomorrow, anyway.

A valuable lesson today: Almost any detour you take at this place, even one you didn’t particularly want to take, turns out to be worth the trip. Today, for instance, the screenwriting Fellows were told to attend the Paul Schrader master class on "Writing the Antihero." Turned out the antihero wasn’t really even mentioned, but we did get a pretty good introduction to finding powerful themes for your stories. (Tip: Write down what you’re most afraid of.) But alas, the class ran from 3 to 5 and the Fellows must fall out at 4:30 every Thursday afternoon for seminar, and this is our priority No. 1.

Really. It’s one of a mere three rules you agree to when you come here, but it’s unbreakable for most things short of spontaneous combustion, and certainly for master classes. So.

I have to say, I left the class reluctantly. The seminar was a tour of something called the Media Union, and given a choice, I’d rather have heard Schrader talk about how he conceived "Taxi Driver."

OK, but we went. And it turns out it was worth the trip. In a nutshell, the U of M Media Union is a vast building crammed with state-of-the-art technology, all available to anyone with an M-Card, and, as they told us over and over and over, "It’s all yours! And it’s all free!"

You can, among a thousand other things, use the state-of-the-art audio studio; record your own CD; compose electronic music; mount a performance and record the whole thing; edit the performance tapes; capture video in all formats and transfer it to any other format); scan photos, negatives or slides; print a poster; play around with 3D imaging, design and software; mess around in the virtual reality cave, even print out your 3D creations — in 3D.

Yes, a 3D printer. I saw the thing work. You model your action figure, ball bearing, high-tech sneaker insole or architectural design, hit "print" and the machine spits out a model of it, in gypsum. If I hadn’t seen it myself I wouldn’t have believed it. The lab was working on a for-profit job, "printing" — it still seems weird to think of this as printing — 200 identical miniature railings for an architectural model, for a client in Las Vegas. In case you’re wondering how long it takes: 45 minutes per vertical inch. Amazing.

So, Bob, I guess I won’t need you to scan those slides for me. I’ll take them over to the Media Union. Oh, and one more thing? It’s open 24 hours.

I’m going to take training there in Final Cut Pro. What the hell, it’s for me! And it’s free!

This tour was the next to last of our get-to-know-the-university sessions, and the lesson is pretty clear by now: If there’s something you want to do, you can do it here. You have world enough, and time. At least some time, anyway. Enough to get a good start. Enough to get some new ideas. Which I’m starting to get.

The bad news: As we finished up, I started to get the telltale tickle in the back of my throat that says: You’re next, Mom. We were already having a schedule conflict over Alan’s Thursday-night class, my "Taxi Driver" screening and our sitter’s pledge to be home by 9. So I took the fall and made a date to watch "Taxi Driver" at home, on DVD. (Schrader’s doing another class tomorrow, so if I have any questions, I guess I can ask him then.) I picked it up last weekend, when Border’s had a tent sale in a parking lot nearby. They were selling previously played CDs, DVDs and books for practically nothing, and I got the collector’s edition. For six bucks.

I tell you: Even the shopping’s better here.

Bloggage: Carolyn wants me to link to the Edna Buchanan profile on the New Yorker site, a Calvin Trillin classic she still has in her files, in hard copy. I think they put that up because Trillin has another reporter profile in the current issue, on R.W. Apple Jr., aka Johnny Apple, who was at our food conference last week. There was much … discussion about some of the things he said. In the interest of diplomacy I won’t repeat them, but only note: Trillin seemed to a good job capturing the whole man. And that ain’t easy, it seems.

Have a swell weekend. See you Monday.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the facts in evidence:

1) I have a Russian test Friday. A real one. Vocabulary, verbs and endings, endings, endings.

2) I have a full day of classes tomorrow, plus a Fellowship seminar, followed by the Paul Schrader stuff. (Sitting through a screening of "Taxi Driver" with its screenwriter, of whom you can ask questions — please understand this is not something I’m bitching about.)

3) I had a three-hour class tonight, after which I went out to dinner with some fellow Fellows.

4) Now it’s late and I have to study, then go to bed.

5) Something has to give. I think it’ll be this, but just for tonight. I’ll tell you all about Schrader tomorrow (respecting whatever embargo the Film & Video department wants to slap on his comments in various venues, that is).

So that, I fear, is that.

OK, this: I bought a postcard of this building the other day, and had precisely the same thought about it that the readers of Cabinet magazine seem to have had when they gave it the honor detailed here. And it’s just on the other side of US 23! I must see it myself one of these days.

After I study.

See you tomorrow, late.

My brain is rapidly calcifying and the repartitioning of its hard drive to college life is still incomplete, and so I forgot that yesterday’s mini-rant about lousy headlines and boring newspapers was touched off by something I didn’t even mention: The apparent caning the Sacramento Bee is administering its political columnist, Daniel Weintraub. For the life of me, the only reason I can see for the crackdown is that Weintraub dared to speak an opinion in a forceful fashion that offended some people, and God knows we can’t have that.

On the paper’s political blog September 1, he wrote:

If [the California Lt. Governor's] name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher. Thus there is reason to wonder how he would handle ethnic issues as governor.

And while people can debate forever whether MEChA and its more virulent cousins do or do not advocate ethnic separatism, it’s indisputably true that the Legislature’s Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity.

The whole entry is here. It’s strongly worded, but by no means crazy or off-the-wall. But, as you might expect, it started a chain reaction. Romenesko has been following the story — you can find links there, anyway — but this ombudsman column from the SacBee seems to sum it up, if you can parse newsroom politics the way a Kremlinologist can the May Day photograph. The problem, the column politely says, isn’t what Weintraub said; it’s that no editor had a chance to wring the life from it before it went up on the blog. (OK, I’m paraphrasing, with extreme prejudice.)

And Mickey Kaus, here, claims the problem wasn’t public reaction to Weintraub’s comments (as the ombudsman states), but newsroom reaction, and that I can believe. Wrote Kaus, His provocative anti-Bustamante comments were enough to trigger a newsroom-led bureaucratic Thermidor. (It was as if he was criticizing affirmative action!) Executive editor Rick Rodriguez says "folks on the staff brought" the issue to him after Weintraub’s posting. They "wanted to know if it was edited," he says, though he adds he suspects they mainly wanted to "yell at some editors" about it. Rodriguez volunteers the ethnic makeup of the angry newsroom "folks": "Some were Latino, some Anglo, some black." The result was a review of Weintraub’s status. "Our policy at the Bee is that everything’s edited," Rodriguez declares.

Amazingly, this may be the Bee’s best defense–in effect, "We didn’t let the Latino caucus muzzle Weintraub because we muzzled him first!" …One obvious test of the new arrangement: Would Weintraub’s new pre-clearance editors have allowed the offending sentence through? "Maybe, maybe not, but I think that conversation ought to be held," says Rodriguez. Other informed sources agree that some editors would OK it, some wouldn’t. That’s enough to confirm my suspicions that Weintraub doesn’t have the freedom he once had.

So, it seems the original question here — Daniel Weintraub can’t say that, can he? — has been obscured by the second one: Can he say that without an editor? It’s perfectly reasonable for a newspaper, which has much deeper pockets than Joe Blogger & Co., to want to edit every word that goes into it, for obvious reasons. But the implication here is that editors would want to "have a conversation" about saying such rude things about a Latino politician. Why? You can figure that out yourself: Because it would offend people, that’s why! And a newspaper must never, ever offend anyone! Especially over race or gender issues!

(Weintraub, who is a columnist and hence is permitted to have opinions, offers one example of the Latino caucus’ short-sightedness here.)

I’m not surprised newsroom elements — black, white, Latino or otherwise — were upset. There’s a deep-seated feeling in many newsrooms that while readers may call and complain over a photo from "Queer as Folk" on the cover of the TV book, they just need to get with the program. But if they call to say they’re offended on an ethnic question, then we need to improve our outlook. A few weeks ago, a Hollywood screenwriter who spoke to our class said the one thing you must never, ever do in a movie is hurt an animal. There’s a similar rule in journalism — do not arbitrarily offend on the basis of race or ethnicity.

And given that race is the elephant in the national living room, the one subject hardly anyone can discuss honestly, this doesn’t bode well for honesty arriving anytime soon.

I have a reader in California who’s a Weintraub fan. He wrote: Bad newspaper decisions? Look at the Sacto Bee over the weekend. They decided to hamstring their great weblog guy, Dan Weintraub, the "insider". I commended him to your attention some weeks ago as the guy with the word on the recall business here in California. He had become what amounts to the national person of record on the recall and was bringing an enormous amount of attention and status to the Bee. They looked like real forward thinkers in the newspaper world: a medium daily finally getting with it in the electronic arena. Then the Bee received a little complaint from Cruz Bustamante’s henchmen and bang! Just like that they knuckled under to the first peep from the first pressure group and took a dive back into mediocrity.

So you see, it’s not just me. It’s readers, too. Will editors ever figure out that for any discussion to move forward, it has to be discussed the way people discuss these things over their own dinner tables? I doubt it. And again, I’m reminded of what Susan Ager told us in Detroit last summer: People don’t cancel their subscriptions because they’re outraged. They cancel because they’re bored.

But we need to leave this subject smilin’. Another note from Deb: the headline at the top of sunday’s food page:

one of the first caveats I remember from j-school was this pearl from dr.ralph izard: "copy editors need to have dirty minds." tell it, bro.

Yes, testify.

Why am I bitching? I just got back from dinner at the director’s house. Duck on the grill, lentil salad, mixed fall greens, selection of cheeses. Oh, mama, but that was a meal. And all in the name of collegiality! Whatever our problems in the newspaper business, I’m sure we can solve them, if we eat enough grilled duck in the process. Also, we heard the news that one of our fellow Fellows has a best-seller in Turkey. The Turkish Jay McInerney! And I had dinner with him. Ain’t life sweet?

More tomorrow.

The other day I picked up a Michigan daily newspaper that will remain nameless, although God knows why. (Actually, I know why: Someday, I’ll need a job.) It was the day after the president presented the (first) bill for services rendered in Iraq, you know, the $87 billion one. Another Michigan daily that will remain nameless got "$87 billion" in the headline — good doggie. This one did not. This was the headline:

Stay the course in Iraq, says Bush.

To be sure, the $87 billion part was in the subhead, but it was a very small subhead.

Sigh. Pride goeth before a fall and all that, and headline-writing is difficult — this we will stipulate. Also, this: That there’s no harsher editor than a journalist on a long vacation. But, man. Maybe someone was looking for an entry to top the boring headlines famously compiled by Michael Kinsley a few years ago. ("Worthwhile Canadian initiative," "Prevent burglary by locking house, detectives urge," and "Chill falls on warming relations between Australia, Indonesia." Among others.)

At the same time, I wonder if this particular daily is planning it this way. The story about the hairy guy, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, finally starting to spill the beans on the 9/11 plot? What detail — an original plan of 10 hijacked planes on both coasts, plus more in Asia, oh my gosh the horror the horror. The headline? 9-11 could have been worse.

That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.

Truth to tell, it’s hard to cover yourself with glory on this one.

9/11 planner details scheme — The Columbus Dispatch. Yawn. Let’s check the tabs. Now, that’s more like it: PLOT FROM HELL. The New York Post, of course.

Sometimes I wonder if it ever occurs to newspaper editors that boredom is a big reason they’re losing readers. I’ve been reading the web long enough now that, most days, I turn to columns with something like dread. It’s the one place in the paper where you can roll down the windows and turn up the stereo a little bit, and yet lately, no matter which paper I’m reading, that hardly ever happens. Bring back sensationalism, I say.

Oh, don’t get me started. I do have to get a job after this is over.

Today must be National Complain About Your Newspaper Day. In the morning’s e-mail: I was fit to be tied on saturday morning, when I read an execrable above-the-fold story in our paper about miss wisconsin. the lead said it had been 20-some years since a miss wisconsin had "stridden" the runway. I spit coffee over that one. it didn’t get better, either.

waaaay into the jump, I read that miss wis’s "cause" was organ donation. she watched her father die while waiting for a kidney transplant. oh ho, I’m thinking; this is promising. the writer gives it a mere paragraph.

Maybe I can get a job at the Gap. Probably I’ll have to.

Monday is supposed to be an easy day, class-wise, but Monday is also our lecture section in Russian, and the instructor moves at the speed of, well, her glib, babbling tongue. She must believe in the immersion model of language teaching, even at the 101 level. But the cool thing is, I’m starting to understand her. A little bit, anyway. I had to miss the class last Monday for the food conference, and spent the week recovering. Never again. Today she introduced us to "our most challenging and difficult chapter in our Russian study," the language’s six separate cases, starting with the prepositional, or locative. Each has its own set of fun endings. The language also has noun gender, which affects adjective endings, and of course verb declensions and their endings. Groan.

"This is a very exciting thing for you to be learning," she told us, as we struggled through the spelling rules and exceptions and irregular words and "My professor is sitting on the table" translations. "If we did not have this, we wouldn’t be challenged and Russian would be boring. This is where the beauty of the language is revealed." It’s also, according to that New Yorker story about mat I read last week, part of its rich tradition of obscenity, which makes use of all these suffixes and prefixes in fun, filthy-tongued ways. Then, introducing the noun for "genius," she announced we would all be memorizing a short poem by Pushkin — "Alecsandr Sergeevich Pooshkin," as she put it — by the term’s end. Russians believe in memorizing poetry, she said. Of course, under the Soviet system, there were far fewer books to be had, so you sort of had to.

But I believe in memorizing poetry, too. There’s a skill that’s utterly fallen out of favor in teaching today. In fourth grade, I memorized "The Village Blacksmith" and can still summon up big chunks of it. My colleague Mike Harden wrote a column about this years ago that is one of my favorites. A teacher quoted in it said that the fashion now is for students to write their own poetry, rather than commit "Oh Captain! My Captain!" to memory. Balls to public education, I say.

Anyway, after class, I was walking through the microfilm banks in the grad library en route to somewhere else, and there was a shelf of Russian-language periodicals. Great, I thought, picking one up and glowering at it: Kultura. Well, that’s not hard to translate, but the rest was just an alphabet soup, and in something like 9-point type. And then, as if by a miracle, I saw a headline, a movie review: Krassny Dragon. Red Dragon! Victory! Bring on the Pushkin.

I wonder what the rest of the headline said. ‘Red Dragon’ comes to screen with good, bad parts. Probably.

See you tomorrow.

I have to say, the past weekend doesn’t leave me with high hopes for a smooth adolescence. On Thursday Kate was sick with a fever. On Friday, she announced she felt "fine" and, with some misgivings, I let her go to school (it was Wacky Hair Day). On Saturday, she couldn’t talk. Or rather, she could talk in a strangled voice that sounded like it came through an underwater filter. Imagine this croaky little voice, then: "I feel fine. My throat feels good. It hurts maybe the eensiest, teensiest little bit."

Long lecture about lying, how wrong it is, how important it is to tell the truth, especially about your health. "Now," I said. "How do you really feel?"

Croaky voice: "Fine. Really."

Alan took her to urgent care. She has raging strep throat, plus two ear infections.

The last time I had strep throat I was so sick I could barely roll over in bed. Kate denies she’s sick because it means she has to stay home from school and can’t play with her friends, a fate she evidently fears worse than punishment for lying, which is pretty much the same thing.

A sick kid in the house, even a sick kid in denial, makes for sort of a droopy weekend. The weather was glorious, but I spent too much of it inside. So what, I got most of my reading done, and since it wasn’t the kind of reading that feels like work, it was hardly an unpleasant task. I took a couple of indolent naps. And on Saturday there was a small Fellow potluck at one of our rented houses, hereafter known as the Cat House.

The Cat House is owned, needless to say, by a woman who loves cats too much. On the front step? Cat welcome mat. Inside the door? Cat welcome mat. On the wall? Cat switchplates, cat prints, cat cartoons. On the floor? Cat rugs. Hanging from doorways and ceilings? Cat mobiles, cat clocks, etc. Framed posters? Sure — "Le Chat Noir." On the kitchen wall? Taped-up printout: "Top 10 Things Your Pet Would Tell You if it Could Talk." On the coffee table? "Catmopolitan" magazine. Is there any decorative art in evidence that is not cat-related? Why, no. Are there cat potholders? But of course.

Mitigating factor: The place did not smell like cat pee, not even a whiff. Whatever else she is, she’s a diligent kitty-litter changer.

At one point, scanning the bookshelves, I saw a photo album. Reasoning she wouldn’t have left it on the shelf if it were embarrassingly personal, I took it down and leafed through it. Cat pictures.

The tenant Fellow said he’d mentioned to someone at the U. that he was living in this woman’s house while she went on sabbatical. The other person did not say, "Oh, the cat lady," but "Oh, the brilliant" whatever-she-is. That’s one thing about academia I’d forgotten about — how often off-the-charts intellect is accompanied by some truly weird personal idiosycrasies. At one of our recent functions, Alan sat at the other end of the crowd and said, later, "There was a wino sitting in front of me."

"Don’t be ridiculous," I said. "This was an invitation-only affair."

"No, really," he said. "He had on crummy clothes, and he smelled sort of boozy, and he had chronic hiccups," like a cartoon drunk. This being Ann Arbor, though, he could have been a wino, or he could have been an internationally renowned expert on Sino-Japanese trade relations.

Why are cat people so weird? I’ve had very few experiences in my life I’d call "like a David Lynch movie," but one of them came one evening when I was driving home after a night out and remembered I needed something at the grocery — coffee, probably. I stopped at the all-night market. Only one checkout lane was open, and I took my place in line behind a tiny old man dressed impeccably in very fine clothing that looked at least 50 years old, right down to the bow tie and fedora. He had a full cart. On closer inspection, I noticed every item in it was cat-related — boxes of kibble, all brands; cans of food, all brands; bags of litter, all brands; even a cat toy or three.

He turned around very slowly and caught my eye. "I have many cats," he said in a dusty voice. Then he blinked slowly and turned back around. One a.m., Fort Wayne, Indiana, sometime in 1985.

OK, then. Last week I linked to a Mitch Albom column about Warren Zevon that I really didn’t like. Here’s one by Carl Hiaasen, 180 degrees away. P.S. This is how it’s done. A choice snippet:

We talked about the possibility of chemotherapy, and he said he might consider it after the album was done. He said, "If it means lying in bed for two days straight and watching DVDs, that comes perilously close to my life’s ambition."

See you tomorrow, then.