NN.C is hitting the road for a few days, laptop in tow. Which is to say, posting may be sporadic, but I’ll burp up something every once in a while.

(I’m so glad John the Web Guy disabled the counter, so I can’t see the damage I’ve done to my beloved readership over the last few months. Sigh.)

I confess to a soft spot for the Style Invitational, a weekly puzzle/word game/whatever run by the Washington Post’s fab features section. It’s sort of an upmarket parlor game of widely varying tests of skill, hard to describe, but rarely boring.

Scroll past this week’s bizarre challenge to the results of last week’s: Feed text to Google’s translating engine, then feed the result back into English. I should make you click through to read first place, but it’s too good not to share right here:

Original text: I am the worst president elected ever. (From French) I am the worst president never elected.

You had to know it would be French, didn’t you?

The rest are pretty funny, too. As the judges said, we don’t think real translators have any fear for their jobs just yet.

The WashPost, with predictably good reads, on Red America and Blue America.

Well, it’s official. We’ve been replaced.

This picture doesn’t really do it justice and the squirrels obviously got a few, but you get a sense of “Imagine/Align,” the half-mile-long string of daffodils marching in single file across the Nichols Arboretum. Very Christo. Rather cool.

I suppose anyone who attends a Catholic college should expect a level of ideological discipline on a level with the Politburo, but at the same time, those who seek to bend reality to their point of view have a certain responsibility to do their homework first.

Back in Fort Wayne, local daughter-made-good Dr. Nancy Snyderman was dis-invited to speak at the commencement ceremonies for University of St. Francis, an event years in the planning, days before the event. Her crime? Journalism. Snyderman, an M.D. who also covers medical stories for ABC-TV, displeased her hosts with her reporting:

During the story on “Good Morning America,” Snyderman discussed a woman who had suffered from infertility, but then had become pregnant with septuplets, Snyderman said.

“I report facts. As a medical reporter, I report science,” she said.

The bishop was unhappy: The letter informed Snyderman that the offer to speak had been rescinded.

“The university recently received information from (D’Arcy) containing comments by you on the topic of abortion, and these comments appear to be contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church,” the letter read. “As a Catholic university, we have no choice but to rescind our invitation.”

You’d think, before extending the invitation, they might have made a few phone calls and discovered Snyderman was not Catholic and hence, might hold an opinion or two contrary to the church’s teachings, and as a journalist, has a responsibility to report facts the church is uncomfortable with. On the subject of her personal beliefs, they might also have cracked one of her books and discovered she carried an out-of-wedlock pregnancy to term at a very difficult time in her life, which traditionally earns back-patting from Catholics.

What an interesting story. “No choice,” they say. Ironic, doncha think?

OK, this may be a hard swallow for those of you not in the newspaper business, but for those who are, you must read this Ron Rosenbaum piece on the incursion of evil management consultants into our business:

To me, the pièce de résistance of the Raines essay—the anecdote that captures the true texture of management-guru culture—is his description of the elite management retreat in which a management-consultant guru painstakingly explains to Times executives the management-guru-approved method for firing people. …At this particular retreat, Mr. Raines tells us, the “coach and facilitator” announced the lesson for the day: “how to fire people.” The poor Times execs were coerced into dividing up into groups to role-play firing scenarios Or, as Mr. Raines puts it, the groups “practiced termination interviews.”

Anyway, Mr. Raines tells us, the “main precepts” communicated by the “termination” guru were “to sit directly facing the employee in a posture that indicated openness, receptivity—legs uncrossed, arms resting loosely on the arms of the chair. After saying to the person in a calm tone that he or she was being dismissed, and giving a brief, neutral explanation of the reason, we were to listen patiently while the employee vented freely. If he or she became angry, we were to say we understood the anger. At every turn we were to express personal sympathy but to offer no concessions. Once the soon-to-be-exiled worker realized the hopelessness of his or her situation, we were to collect the person’s identification card, if that could be accomplished without a wrestling match.” In other words: break them down, treat them like children and kick them out while disguising your contempt for them.

Man, winter can be hard on a house. It’s especially hard on a 90-year-old house, although, in houses and in humanity, preventive maintenance helps.

This is our Indiana house I’m talking about here. We ran home this weekend to sweep the cobwebs out of the joint, mow the grass and see how badly the cold weather treated everything. Answer: Not as badly as the never-ending sewer project on our street, which has disrupted everyone’s lives since Thanksgiving. “Boy, did you pick a good year to be gone,” all the neighbors said; evidently they pray for rain these days, to settle the dust that drifts into every eye and dulls every house.

So, I guess the lesson is: Even with cobwebs and a mummified mouse in one of the cold-air intakes, it could have been much worse.

The kitchen faucet did spring a fatal leak, however. Alan replaced it, leading me to thank the lucky stars once again that I married a man who can repair plumbing. Why do so many love songs concentrate on liquid eyes and strong muscles? Show me a man who can handle a pipe wrench, and there’s your good husband material right there.

I took some time to walk around the neighborhood, just to see who’s moving and who isn’t. After nine months in Michigan’s Second-Most-Expensive City, it’s a shock to hear neighbors taking umbrage at the gall of another, who is asking $165,000 for that house, which is merely roomy and well-located and well-maintained and has a brand-new patio with a fountain and water garden. I mean, who the hell does he think he is?

Michigan’s first-most-expensive city (or so I’m told): Birmingham. Now you know.

After sweeping and dusting and scouring and mowing and uprooting and cutting back and filling a thousand lawn-and-leaf bags, it was back to A2 (the Fellowship is over, but Kate’s still in school), which is increasingly feeling like home, although God knows why because I really miss my kitchen equipment. Alan has a theory: “I don’t think I’ve seen a NASCAR jacket since I’ve been here.” Nor a Sam’s Club, nor a Wal-Mart. Even fast food can be hard to track down; there’s a Wendy’s way out that way and way out this way, but not close by. Ypsilanti, which I’m told has all of these things and the famous Brick Dick, does the dirty work for us.

And today? I’m recovering. Some vestigial Fellows are coming for dinner, and Alan and I are going over to the Nichols Arboretum to see Imagine/Align, “a site-specific, community-based art installation blooming now at the University of Michigan Nichols Arboretum. This project, conceived by artist Susan Skarsgard, is a line of 20,000 yellow daffodils as far as the eye can see, traversing the environment, mapping thought and inspiring contemplation on the idea of lines, borders and imposed definitions.”

Yes, that’s Ann Arbor for you. Back in the Fort, they just call it a flower bed.

…And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood” (fragment)

Congratulations to the Knight-Wallace Fellows, Class of 2004. Now I’m going to bed for a week.

What a find in the film/video library in these last days of the Fellowship: “The Lifestyle,” a documentary about swinging among the Social Security crowd that was, according to Salon, judged too hot for even the film-festival crowd:

The film was eventually accepted at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and later at the Seattle Film Festival. Every other film festival in North America rejected it. Schisgall says that the person who runs one of the best known, most prestigious festivals in North America was convinced the film had been paid for by the Lifestyles organization and “did not want to take the film because he thought it was too positive a portrayal.”

What’s got people so hot, if not under the silks, then certainly under the collar? Good question. “The Lifestyle” presents an utterly banal world of group sex, where wife-swapping is pursued only a little more avidly than recipe-swapping. You have never in your life seen a less erotic take on the subject, although I laughed out loud many times, as when one subject noted that — how to call it? — er, multiple serial-partner intercourse is now called “marathon,” since “those black bastards up in L.A.” ruined the term “gang banging.”

You might find this one via Netflix, but not at your local Blockbuster. Wherever you stumble across it, Joe Bob says check it out.