If you haven’t heard, the woman involved in the day-after-Thanksgiving stampede at Wal-Mart — which spawned, among other things, a George Will chin-scratcher on returning Puritanism to Christmas, or something — is a “frequent faller” with a long history of these things.

I think it’s safe to say that if you have a child, you have a different fellowship experience than if you don’t. Tonight we had a party to bid goodbye to two of our number, leaving at mid-year, and the entertainment included a slide show of the first-term photo highlights. Watching it, I realized I’ve completely missed Thursday Night Bowling (Alan has a late class), and I left the Up North party in October before the player piano-and-charleston-dancing portion of the festivities.

On the other hand, I think it’s safe to say no one else in the KWF Class of ‘04 marched in the Ann Arbor holiday parade today.

I was a parent escort for Kate’s Brownie troop. If there’s a happier duty than watching your giggling daughter march along behind a rippling brown banner, waving to passersby on a cold winter afternoon, I don’t know what it is. OK, I know: Marching in a parade on a warm spring afternoon. But it wasn’t too cold, the band was playing “Jingle Bells” and Santa’s sleigh was pulled (on wheels) by a real, if somewhat freaked-out, reindeer.

Afterward we watched the freaked-out reindeer stand in their pen, moved on to the less-freaked-out llamas, and had a late lunch in town.

I wish I had a more entertaining post for today, but I missed “Angels in America” and the most exciting thing I have to report otherwise is this: My screenplay is done. It’s been perforated three times down the side, bound with brads and will be turned in tomorrow, if the house doesn’t burn down overnight. In September I was warned this would be “the most challenging course you will take at the University of Michigan,” and while I wouldn’t want to give organic chemistry a whirl just to see how it stacks up, I’m glad to have survived it.

Anyone who’s visited San Francisco knows that city’s homeless problem is like no other, and this week the SF Chronicle addressed the problem with a series that can be difficult to read, but is worth your time.

What’s even more interesting is the reaction to it. Romenesko reports there were picketers, but I found the transcript of the online chat with the lead reporter even more enlightening — early on, they were assailed by an advocate for the city’s “mobile residents.”

Yes, “mobile residents.” Now there’s a euphemism for you.

Anyway, I read the Sunday kick-off piece, and it was both horrifying and, I regret to say, not too surprising. Concentrating on a knot of homeless people who sleep on a city traffic island, it introduced us to the group’s leader, who died of a necrotizing bacterial infection long before the stories ran:

It was the leg that did it. He had been letting it go for years.

“I kind of like it being open because I can shoot straight into the vein, ” he said last summer, while he fingered a fat vein pulsing up through the open flesh. He was sitting on the Island with people walking by — none of whom seemed to notice him or his leg or the syringes dotting the dirt under the trees. “Gets me well (high on heroin) quicker.”

Good God. There has to be another way.

The new edition of Poynter Report is online. My copy arrived a couple weeks ago, and seeing the online link reminded me how the smoke curled out my ears when I read this, by Skip Foster:

Jill Geisler, Leadership & Management group leader at Poynter, did something shocking a couple of years back.

People lashed out at Geisler in their website feedback, filling their responses with profanity of the worst kind. Letter writers gratuitously laced their responses with profane and vulgar language, as if it were a badge of honor. Few rose in support of her position. It was frightening.

Hmm. I remember that column, and I remember a different sort of response. Yes, some of the commenters “laced their responses with profane and vulgar language” in response to Geisler’s kindergarten-teacher scolding, but the gist was more along the lines of, Newsroom budgets are being slashed, editors spend more time in meetings than at their desks, news hole is shrinking. And you think, in a climate like this, that we should worry about cussing in the newsroom? Get a fucking clue, lady.

Or words to that effect.

Foster continued: Those who responded make up a significant faction of people who work at our newspapers. They are answering the phones, dealing with the public, and serving in a variety of positions. They are a component of a newsroom culture that apparently values profanity, meanness, and hate over civility, composure, and caring.

Apparently? Or it could be that we value plain speaking, honesty and traditional newsroom values over yet another head-scratching staff meeting over what our 21st century mission statement should be; or maybe we remember when raises amounted to something and employees were not told they’re now part of a “performance-based” workplace culture (no raise for you!). Or maybe we think, crazily enough, that newspapers ought to cover their state legislatures, and when we don’t, we feel like swearing.

Just a thought.

The idea that Foster thinks the same person who uses a bad word to describe Geisler’s dumb column cannot be trusted to answer the phone without saying, “What the hell do you want?” speaks volumes about why reporters think editors are clueless and out of touch.

One view: Somehow, our crucial watchdog role has morphed from healthy skepticism of the powerful into a dark force – an ugly brew of anger, mean-spiritedness, and antagonism that alienates readers and turns newsrooms into personality war zones. We have lurched from the honorable mission of holding the powerful accountable to a wholesale mistrust of anything that moves, even our colleagues. That attitude of mistrust and a disconnect from the newsroom and community is reflected in this “defense of profanity.”

Oh, for God’s sake.

You can read the rest of it — at the bottom of it all, he’s onto something, although I don’t think he knows how to fix it, because it seems to boil down to more meetings and team-building exercises — or you can turn the page.

I know what I’d do.

Had a little academic diversion today — Alan’s entrepreneurship class had a guest speaker, Ari Weinzweig, so I tagged along to the luxe U of M B-school. (Yes, luxe. They could fund some more scholarships if they just sold the very nice print collection — Stella, Longo, Close — that lines the hallways.)

You’re forgiven for not knowing the name. Weinzweig is a founding partner of Zingerman’s, Ann Arbor’s peerless deli/bakery/catering business, generally acknowledged to be on a par with Dean & Deluca and Zabar’s, and hardly anyone else. I was interested in what he’d be like, since Zingerman’s is one of those hippie success stories, a retail business with the sort of structure every employee wants — health insurance, open-door meetings, bottom-up communication and all the rest of it.

Weinzweig told the story briefly, stressing his core beliefs, particularly the importance of having a vision for your life and business. That is to say, not a windy masala of business-speak, but an idea of where you want to be and what you want to be doing in X time period, so you at least know where to steer your vessel. When he opened the floor for questions, I asked him how much customer education he had to do, if for no other reason than to soften people up for items like an eleven-dollar loaf of bread.

He said something really important: That “we sell nothing anyone needs, and a lot of things nobody wants, until they’ve tried it a few times, and then decide they want.” For instance, he said, gesturing to the cream cheese he’d brought, to go with a loaf of the $11 bread (cranberry-walnut, mmmmmm), that cream cheese grew out of the company’s stated vision: to sell high-quality, full-flavor and artisan-quality food. To make the cheese, they first had to research what cream cheese was like before mass food processing. Then they had to figure out how to make it. Then they had to sell it, and people didn’t like it at first, because it didn’t meet their expectations of what cream cheese should be. But because they trusted the business, they sampled it, and after a while they started buying it, and now they won’t eat anything else.

The same rejection-acceptance-devotion curve happened with the bread, and most of the other products they sell.

So, in other words: In order to thrive, they first had to lead. Which is, it seems to me, the secret of most business, especially ones that sell products no one needs. It’s one thing, if you’re selling disposable diapers, to ask people what they want a disposable diaper to be. But if you’re selling expensive, high-quality bread that most people have probably never tasted in their lives, or any product people don’t get up every morning needing to get through the day, you have to show the way.

If you’re suspecting this is not evidence of a newfound interest in entrepreneurship but a warmup for a rant about the newspaper business, you’re half-right. I really don’t have the energy for a rant, but yes, it occurred to me: Publishers should save the money (not all, but some) they spend focus-grouping, market-researching and pulse-taking, trust their guts more and lead the way. Of course, when those publishers and their top editors are, increasingly, carpetbaggers (the last corner-office crew at the Indianapolis Star stayed a little under two years before moving on to greener pastures), they probably need the help.

The cream cheese was delicious, by the way.

I first encounted Lily Burana’s byline in a funny story, and fabulous read, about NYC strip joints — from an inside perspective, because Burana’s a long tall drink of water in a brick shithouse. Or, you know, whatever. She’s a stripper with a keen wit, a sharp eye and a pen. And not afraid to use it.

Later, she was New York magazine’s spy for a story on plastic surgery. They sent her around to all the nip/tuckers who advertise heavily in the city, collecting on the free consultations they all offer. I forget what she asked for, but based on the discreetly draped nude photo of her on the cover she had nothing to ask for. Her body is, how you say, perfect, and her face is nothing to hide, either. Would it surprise you to learn that only one of these doctors had the confidence to tell her so?

“You look like an ‘after’ picture that any one of my patients would kill to resemble,” this brave man of medicine told her. “It would be criminal to touch you with a knife.”

Anyway, she wrote a book a while back, a farewell-to-the-pole valedictory, and I haven’t heard much from her since.

Until this week, when she popped up in Slate as a diarist. Surprise, surprise: She married an Army officer, and she’s living at West Point. Isn’t life strange.

Poor Columbus, another perfectly respectable city with a towering inferiority complex. To understand why, you need only glance at the WashPost story on the highway shootings.

It’s datelined Chicago. Columbus lies nearly at the halfway point between the two cities.

Whew. It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, eh? Sorry about that. My week has been, as they say in the business world, front-loaded. And I have chores galore to finish out the week, leading up to the crown jewel of our Fellowship experience:

Yes, it’s an all-expense-paid trip to Buenos Aires! (Cue wild applause.)

We leave in a week. You are permitted to be envious. The almanac reports it’s summer there, or nearly so.

But there’s still a little time left. Monday night was my last screenwriting class, rescheduled from Wednesday so our teacher could go do a “Lord of the Rings” press trip. We had to turn in our completed second act, and I did so. For you non-screenwriters, the second act is pretty much the whole movie, so it’s about 90 percent done. I still can’t believe I did it — there’s a certain Cletus-like joy in regarding this big thick stack of paper, thinking I wrote that thing! The mop-up will be done in the last 10 to 15 pages. I’m not saying it’s good, but it still feels like a huge accomplishment.

One of the seductive things — not in a good way — about newspaper work (and blogging) is this: At the end of the day, it’s done. You write a few hundred words, file, and go home. There are projects reporters who nurse single stories through months of research, but even those are rarely more than a few thousand words. Daily journalism isn’t terribly taxing work, and you can make a so-so living at it, and after a while the thought of actually writing something longer-form, like a book — 90,000 words or so — can be utterly terrifying. Yes, a book is written a day at a time, and frequently authors aren’t nearly as productive, on a day-to-day basis, as even average reporters, but still: A book. You have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You have to have a plot. You have to have characters. You have to have arcs. You have to pull the reader along. If you have any self-doubt, you can be sunk before you raise your sails.

It’s so much easier to stick to the who-what-where inverted pyramid lead, or a 600-word column, and call it a day at quittin’ time.

So just to finish this thing, not a book but a long-form fictional story — written in 10 weeks, one sweat-soaked page at a time — will be heady stuff. It’ll make the trip to South America that much more celebratory. And the opportunities for celebration look pretty cool. Tango, rare beef, polo, good cheap wine. These are a few of my favorite things. Yowzah.

But I’ll be here for a few more days. In the meantime, if you have any BA tourism tips, send them along.

Every so often, I’ll be talking to someone I work with, or used to work with, and I’ll say I’m living in Ann Arbor, and they say, “Oh, did you know Mark and Keryn are living there now?” Mark and Keryn are ex-Fort Wayne colleagues. He’s a graphics guy, she’s a copy editor.

And I say, “Sure, we had dinner with them a while ago.”

And they’ll say, “I know Mark’s at the News, but what’s Keryn doing these days?” And I’ll say, “Mostly she’s a mom, but she has a part-time job.”

“At the paper?”

“Why, no. She’s Twist ‘n’ Shout. She’s a clown.”

“Get outta here.”

Well, you get outta here. I have evidence.

I’ve read some version of this argument against a Defense of Marriage constitutional amendment too many times to count, but Dahlia Lithwick makes it so well:

Do you want to know what’s destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we’d get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: “Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? Room—honey what room is this—oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep.”