Why? Because he’s the swellest, that’s why. Tonight at our seminar he passed out gifts for all — photo CDs packed with scenes of our wonderful year, each one customized. I am — we all are — overwhelmed. Above, a scene from September, when we visited the Detroit Institute of Arts. This is the room with the fabulous Diego Rivera murals. I’d crop it to make the details pop a bit more, but today, it doesn’t seem right to alter the master’s vision, you know?

Man beats another in shushing incident. One man talks at the movies, another man objects, and before you know it we have a felony charge of “assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder.” But not by much!

Our cable bill is — well, never mind what our cable bill is. Throw in the digital package with 12 HBOs (10 of them in English) and the broadband internet, and all I can say is, I’m glad we’re moving in a couple months. (We got the first seven months of service at a reduced rate.)

On the other hand, what do we watch? Movies and HBO. Tonight in screenwriting class, we briefly discussed the difference between writing for TV and the movies, but we didn’t get too far into the third way — the TV that HBO and other premium-cable channels are remaking, while network TV throws any old reality crapola up there. (Sorry, I still can’t get into “American Idol.”) David Milch, the creator of HBO’s latest series, “Deadwood,” was interviewed in the NYT Sunday, and this is, in part, what he said:

David Milch is at least partly responsible for the cop drama as we know it. As a writer on “Hill Street Blues,” and then a creator of “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” Mr. Milch helped turn a just-the-facts genre into one heavily streaked with racial tension, sexual longing and moral confusion. And yet, at a recent interview in his Upper West Side apartment, Mr. Milch, now 59, spoke with regret about what he and his peers had wrought.

“Every time I want to throw up when I watch one of Dick Wolf’s shows, you know, because everything gets solved so neatly,” said Mr.Milch, who also noted the overly tidy endings of “C.S.I.” on CBS.

Milch echoes what David Chase, the “Sopranos” godfather, said in the same paper a few weeks earlier:

Q: How is “The Sopranos” different from the rest of television?

CHASE: The function of an hour drama is to reassure the American people that it’s O.K. to go out and buy stuff. It’s all about flattering the audience, making them feel as if all the authority figures have our best interests at heart. Doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists: sure, they have their little foibles, some of them are grouchy, but by God, they care.

I just watched the “Deadwood” rerun, and as usually happens, it’s growing on me. The queer dialogue — 19th century speech patterns woven with many Lenny Bruce-style obscenities — put me off at first, but your ear gets used to it, and after a while, you can’t imagine the folks in Deadwood spoke any other way. That’s because you get lost in the characters, who are all at least interesting, which is more than you can say for Lenny Briscoe these days. I started taking a TV writing class this term, and dropped it — too much work, and also because the teacher seemed to believe TV writing is best accomplished by headline-ripping. “As a writer, all you have is story,” she said; the characters belong to the lucky duck who dreamed the show up in the first place. Which is why, after a while, so much series TV starts to stink. You get the infamous Melrose Place Personality Transplant, in which characters start acting like different people from week to week, because the writers decided they needed to drive someone off a cliff this week, so by sweeps they can bring her back with a big scar on her head and a thirst for revenge.

To be sure, “Law & Order” avoids the personality transplant canard — opting instead to just fire and replace — but face it: When you get to the point someone puts up a random plot generator on the web, and it works, you’re way over.

Ahem: The body of a model is discovered in the bad part of town by a blue-collar man on his way to work. Lenny and Curtis initially pin the crime on Matey McYardarm, but after a scam is exposed, they arrest a misguided gang member. McCoy and Kincaid prosecute, but McCoy must deal with an old rival lawyer to win. The old DA looks annoyed and says “Advice is like castor oil, easy to give but dreadful to take.” Tom Selleck guest stars.

You think you’re unshockable. Janet Cooke happened at the beginning of my career, and over the years I’ve seen my share of less-celebrated plagiarists and fabulists go slinking out the newsroom door in disgrace. They had a lot in common, most often a personal life that was circling the drain. Substance abuse, domestic strife, borderline personality — you know the drill. You can find people like them in most offices, but you know what they say. A doctor buries his mistakes, a lawyer’s go to jail, but a newspaper reporter’s get read by thousands of people who aren’t as dumb or blind as his or her editors.

But I have to say, Jack Kelley of USA Today, the most recently disgraced, is a breed apart. Plagiarist, fabulist and egomaniac, caught dead to rights, he still refuses to admit he lied like a rug: Confronted Thursday with the newspaper’s findings, Kelley spent 2 1/2 hours again denying wrongdoing. “I feel like I’m being set up,” he told them.

Set up for what? The team investigating his too-good-to-be-true stories found one after another either couldn’t be verified or could be actively disproved — the live woman who was supposed to be dead, to name but one.

I don’t read USA Today, except on rare occasions. And I don’t follow the inside-baseball stuff closely enough to know who Kelley was when his name first turned up. But as I read the excerpts from his stories, they set off every b.s. detector in the room, and I simply can’t believe they didn’t set off some at the higher levels of USA Today, too. He “watched a Pakistani student unfold a picture of the Sears Tower and say, ‘This one is mine,’ in 2001″? He witnessed, at a suicide bombing, “Three men, who had been eating pizza inside, were catapulted out of the chairs they had been sitting on. When they hit the ground their heads separated from their bodies and rolled down the street.” And no one said hmm? I’ve never seen a bombing, but I don’t think there’s anything about the human neck that makes the head more of a tear-away appendage than, say, an arm or leg. Three bodies dismember in precisely the same way and then the heads roll away so cinematically? And odd that he could somehow, with a blast so close, keep his eyes open and recording the sights so precisely, rather than doing what any other person would be doing — throwing his hands and arms up to protect himself. He even knew what they were eating! (True, it was a pizza restaurant, but maybe they were having the baked ziti. Just a thought.)

This guy tops Jayson Blair, if you ask me. Blair was at least running around town snorting coke and drinking himself blind like a true lying desperado. But Kelley, an evangelical Christian, was polishing his halo, telling an interviewer: (My editor) thinks that me being a Christian gives me a different perspective on things. I certainly hope so, because I pray which stories I shouldn’t take, and hopefully that helps. … Prayer is a daily, daily, if not an hourly part of my job here. In my entire life, I cannot separate my faith from my profession. If I did, I wouldn’t be in this profession. I wouldn’t have had the success that I’ve had. I think it’s a gift, and I can tell when I’m in tune with the Lord. Circumstances just happen. Stories just fall into my lap. I kid you not. Stories just fall into my lap when I’m in tune with the Lord. That’s probably because the Lord knows I’m too dumb to go out and find them myself, because I never find them. It’s just unbelievable. You sit back each night, and I feel his pleasure when I report, and there’s no greater feeling.

This guy better pray to God to save his sorry lying ass, because something else just dropped in his lap, and it has a fuse.

UPDATE: A commentator just noted the vanishing-hitchhiker story from Jack’s speaking career. It’s too good not to link.

I’m getting out of town for a couple days, so don’t look for me around here, unless my co-site maintainer would like to guest blog for a while. Oh, right –he has his own.

In the meantime, two things:

Fr. Tom O’Connor died in Fort Wayne on, of all days, St. Patrick’s. One of the good ones.

Bill Clinton’s book — all you ever wanted to know.

See you back here Sunday/Monday.

So there was a big State of the Media report issued earlier this week, by the Committee for Excellence in Journalism. Predictably, the overwhelming conclusion was…well, Howard Kurtz has a way with words, let’s let him sum it up:

Imagine a business that is steadily losing customers, shrinking its work force, cutting back on services and mistrusted by much of the public. That is a snapshot of the news business in 2004.

A-yup. That’s pretty much it. I’ve been thinking about this the last few days, trying to pull together a few thoughts, but I just can’t get excited. It seems futile. Al-Qaeda attacks a western European country and proves it can alter the course of free elections, the U.S. is engaged overseas as never before, and the reaction of American news managers is? Close overseas bureaus. You just think: What’s the point? Forty-seven million Americans without health insurance, almost certainly another major terrorist whacking coming down the pike, and what’s the big issue of the presidential campaign? Gay marriage, of course.

But I rouse myself.

For years, newspapers have been losing readership. Where are all these non-readers getting their local news, information on what their mayor, their city councilmen, their state legislature is up to? Almost certainly from local TV, if they’re interested at all. Now, I work in a small TV market, 103 or so, and I’m here to tell you this: If you’re getting your news from your local newscast, you’re not getting much. When you work for a newspaper, nearly all of which are quietly shrinking their own staffs and newshole, there’s a certain pot/kettle thing going on, but seriously, if your TV stations are entry-level, it’s horrifying. A lawyer I know was embroiled in the midst of a long-running community debate over a hazardous-waste landfill, and a TV reporter came to interview him. She was brand-new in town. The landfill is in New Haven, a small city that butts right up against Fort Wayne. The reporter came in, sat down and said, “Now tell me: Where is New Haven, again?”

For purposes of comparison, this would be like being a Chicago TV reporter unclear on the location of, oh, Evanston.

That’s not to say all TV reporters are fools. There are smart ones out there, quite a few. But they quickly tire of working their asses off for $22,000 a year and move on to larger markets, leaving a vacancy for yet another straight-out-of-college cutie-pie who needs a briefing on the geography of her new beat, and will probably be called upon to offer instant analysis of the school board vote in her stand-up tonight at 11.

Maybe the smart reporter who leaves will end up somewhere like Detroit. She’ll make more money, but be called upon to stick a ruler into a snowdrift on her 11 p.m. stand-up. Her colleague will set up a sting operation, luring filthy-minded adult men to a house to have sex with a “13-year-old girl” the reporter’s been pretending to be in an online chat room. His story will consist of him chasing these men down the street, yelling “Hey, buddy! You want to have sex with children?!?

Are you being served by this? Ask yourself.

Anyway, all this by way of saying today I checked a link on Romenesko. The Columbia Journalism Review was naming stations that ran all or part of the recent phony “news reports” on the new Medicare plan. One was WPTA-TV, Fort Wayne’s own perennial No. 1-rated newscast, with the largest staff of the three network affiliates. “Your home for news.”

No. 8 in the “Eight Major Trends” section of the CEJ report: Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them.

Now you know.

I’ve started carrying my camera again. With sights like this everywhere, I want to make sure my OIAA file is well-stuffed. Behold, the common home of St. Clare of Assisi Episcopal Church and Temple Beth Emeth. Well, it’s not like they need the place on the same day.

Bob Seger. You see a faded rock star whose tired-out tunes continue to pollute the predictable, classic-rock airwaves. (”Main Street,” anyone?) But others look at Bob and see…

…a healer of our racial divisions, or a force behind epochal social movements. If he couldn’t quite heal the sick, at least he brought them comfort.

Ralph Williams’ lecture on the Book of Job was yesterday. The whole family attended, including the 7-year-old, who sat reading Carolyn Haywood’s “Eddie’s Menagerie” while we grappled with one of the 900-pound gorillas of world literature. (I’m pleased to say this arrangement suited everybody well.)

It was a good lecture. I judge it so because it rearranged my thinking about the text; the last time that happened was during a 1994 performance of “Hamlet,” so I guess I’m due for these shakeups every decade or so. Everybody says “Hamlet” is about indecision. Wrong. What’s Hamlet to do — a ghost tells him his uncle’s a murder, so he should run into the throne room and shank his ass? Not much of a play there. No, Hamlet’s a thinker, an intellectual. He needs to have all his ducks in a row before he acts. This is not indecision, it’s intelligence. His uncle is a murderer, and you can’t really say that if he’d acted rashly early on, there’d be fewer bodies littering the stage at the final curtain. It’s a tragedy.

Job’s a tragedy, too, and yet what lesson do we take from it? What’s the expression? “You have the patience of Job.” I don’t think this is a story about patience. It’s about an unjustly punished man standing up to God and saying, “This is wrong.” For his resolution and acceptance of his fate — not his patience — God rewards him in the end, although it’s a pretty thin reward, if you ask me. The God of the Old Testament is not a compelling figure. He’s like the world’s worst boss, always micromanaging, speaking inscrutably from the heavens, flooding the earth and calling a do-over on his own creation. Oh, and smiting people. Poor Job. The text says God didn’t do the smiting, but Williams pointed out that the temple that fell on Job’s family, killing all his children at once, was struck by a wind “at all four corners,” and what sort of wind is that, hmm? A whirlwind? And who likes to speak from whirlwinds?

Even more disturbing is the prologue, which features God and his advisers lounging around heaven, when Satan shows up from a stroll around the earth and the two get to talkin’. “Have you seen my servant Job?” asks God. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” And Satan says, essentially, “Sez you,” (this the little-cited NN.C translation of the original Hebrew) and suggests God mess up Job’s hair a little, and see what he has to say then. And God says, OK, do what you want, just don’t kill him. This, apparently, is what a pious lifetime of service to God got you in the land of Uz — to be used as a pawn in an intellectual exercise being argued in heaven.

So either Satan or God smites Job big-time, first robbing him of all his wealth, then all his children, then covering his body with sores, and then the fun really begins. His friends come over to say, “Look, you must have done something to deserve this. Repent and get it over with.” Job is, of course, blameless and maintains his innocence, or at least no idea why this is happening. And then there’s a lot of great poetry about how God is present in all things, and no one can really understand why things like this happen, and essentially Job says, “I give up,” and God says, “Good boy” and gives him everything back, although not the original children, but he gets 10 replacement children, including three daughters named Dove, Cinnamon and Eye-shadow.

As parables of suffering go, there’s little comfort in this one. Maintain your purity in the face of unspeakable agony, and maybe you’ll be OK in the end. Don’t waste time trying to figure things out. It is as it is. God knows best.

Like “King Lear,” I think Job is one of those stories you have to be a little older to really understand. I can’t imagine how the 20-year-olds in the class took it. Although they all took notes.

If there’s one set of figures that gets less skeptical scrutiny than law enforcement’s estimate of the “street value” of seized drugs, it’s “lost productivity” claims. How do you figure lost productivity? Well, it depends, I’d imagine. If I break my ankle and I’m out for five days, on reduced duty for five more and hobbling for another month, I suppose you’d add my salary for the days I was off, take a percentage of the next five and go mfffmmfmf over the month spent hobbling and whatever that added up to, that’s my lost productivity.

Where it gets dicier is when you try to extrapolate from the known to the estimated. Which brings us to today’s Page One story in the Detroit News, about that hardy perennial, the NCAA tournament pool. Paragraph five:

Here’s the math: Employers nationwide lose about $101 million in productivity for every 10 minutes their employees spend obsessing about the tournament, according to New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

OK? This is just me here? But this is crap. That’s not to say the tournament doesn’t take people’s minds off work, but “$101 million.” Verrrry interesting. Why not an even hundred mil? Why not 99? Or 102? Or 105? By this measure, the premiere of “The Sopranos” is a veritable millstone on the American economy, and Janet Jackson, when we’re done striping her boob with the lash of our outrage, should be charged with high financial crimes against all those who employ others — for their lost productivity, of course, when they spent all those minutes around the water cooler talking about it.

You ask me, the most important part of that sentence, to the poeple at the New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, is the phrase, “according to the New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.”

Just a thought.