Life’s milestones arrive when you least expect it. Chalk up last Friday as one for me: First opportunity to search for one’s own name in a book index My former colleague Robin Yocum published his memoir of life on the Columbus Dispatch police beat, “Dead Before Deadline.”

If you follow the link, don’t believe that scowling boolsheet picture on the cover, a big fat set-up taken, like, the day before yesterday. The real Robin is in his authorial mugshot — Mr. Smiley, Mr. Forelock-tugger, the face that opened a thousand doors in neighborhoods crappy and otherwise, where daddy or mama or someone’s son or daughter had been gunned down, run down, or beaten/stabbed/thrown out a window. For, as Robin points out more than once, on the Dispatch cop beat you not only wrote the story about the mayhem, you then had to knock on the loved ones’ doors and ask them to tell the readers everything about the unlucky — but not always undeserving — deceased. Under night city editor Bernie Karsko, no juicy cop shop story failed to warrant at least one more follow-up. The first follow is always the grieving relatives, and I’m grateful Robin gave away one of the oldest tricks in the book: When you do the grieving-relatives story, ask for a picture of the deceased. When they bring out a great handful of them, ask to take them all, so “the photo editor” can choose the best one. It’s really a trick to make sure the TV yo-yos don’t get any. It’s the sort of thing you have to keep in mind when you’re getting the details, but to me, it illustrates the essential duality of reporting — half sympathetic ear, half coyote trickster.

I found what I expected to find — a lot of people who bugged me then presented as charming characters now — and a lot I didn’t. I’d forgotten a lot of the cases he wrote about, but they came back to me. Linda Marsick, who strangled herself, slowly and horribly, out of grief over the death of Elvis Presley; Jean Shrader, who was probably killed by her husband but proving it was beyond the capabilities of the law and order people; Janice and Brandon Beidleman, mother and baby, beaten and raped and strangled and smothered, another bad day for the prosecutor’s office. Dr. Jackson. Laura Carter.

Laura Carter was maybe 19 or so, a freshman at Denison University, a preppie private college east of Columbus. It was Parents Weekend, and hers were in town from Philly or somewhere like that, and they’re driving into Columbus to eat dinner at a nice restaurant. Down East Broad Street they come, Laura and her parents and a couple friends. Laura’s in back, and she’s leaning forward talking to her parents in the front seat, her arm up on the seat. Which leaves her ribcage exposed when, a block away, some men open fire in a drug dispute. The bullet hits her under her arm and tears through all the important blood vessels in her chest. They were only a couple blocks from the hospital, her father had the presence of mind to follow the signs and drive right to it, but it didn’t do any good. She was effectively D.O.A.

From Robin’s book:

Nancy Nall and I tag-teamed the story. We wrote: As the group drove west on E. Broad St. near East High School, an argument involving four men but a world apart from the car yet only a block away, exploded into violence. With the sudden ring of gunfire, the two groups were drawn tragically together.

I read this, and all I could think was: Good God, did I write this shit?

See, this is what I mean. Part of me was stunned anew by the simple narrative. Think of what it was like inside that car — one minute you’re going to dinner with your daughter and her friends and the next, she’s slumped over and everyone is screaming and there’s blood and a shattered window and you’re in an unfamiliar city and what do you do? Whatdoyoudowhatdoyoudowhatdoyoudo? It shortens your breath. And my 25-year-old self came up with “ring of gunfire” and “drawn tragically together.” And here I am 20 years later, and I’m bothered by my crappy prose. Not as much as by the crime itself, I suppose.

Hey! Personal growth!

Coyote trickster footnote: Laura Carter’s college roommate was Christopher Cross’s girlfriend. She ended up the inspiration for a Christopher Cross song. You make of that what you will.

What Robin didn’t tell you: When he needed something from someone — an interview, mainly — he was an absolutely devastating pleader. He was like Puss-n-Boots in “Shrek 2″ when he gets the big eyes. He’d tell people he was on the brink of losing his job, that he had a wife and baby and they’d all be thrown out on the street. It was quite something. But it nearly always worked.

If he were here today, he’d be making the big eyes: “Please, buy my book.”

I saw “Independence Day” the summer it came out, although not right away. I had to be sucked in by the hype and by the (generally) good word-of-mouth, fool that I am. I tried to relax into the spirit of no-IQ Hollywood fun, but I discovered, not for the first time, that there’s a threshold to my suspension of disbelief, and perhaps it’s located at the point where we’re asked to believe average people can fly F-15 fighter jets after half an hour of training.

I was so mystified by this moronic film’s popularity that I dashed off a column saying, in effect, what the hell? For the newspaper equivalent of a summer movie, the column’s impact amazed me. I got tons of mail and phone calls from other disappointed moviegoers. My favorite single comment came from a total stranger, who pulled his car to the side of the road when he saw me walking down a sidewalk in downtown Fort Wayne, rolled down his window and shouted, “I thought that movie sucked too!”

This weekend greets yet another preposterous disaster film from the same director, The Day After Tomorrow, and early reviews say it’s more of the same. Actually, movies like this aren’t so bad, because the pans are fun to read. My old screenwriting prof Terry gets a joke in his very first paragraph: We first meet Jack Hall, the dashing climatologist hero — three words I never thought I’d string together — of the eco-disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow”…

The two-star review goes on to point out groaner after groaner — About all that smells real is the White House discovering that Los Angeles is being leveled by multiple tornadoes: “Quick, turn on the Weather Channel,” yells some policy wonk … — and maybe it’s good that they are groaners, to minimize the chance anyone might take it seriously, to assume that global warming can cause, within days, melting polar ice caps followed by a new ice age.

But who knows? Last spring, when Arthur Miller came to Ann Arbor, he threw out an aside, that because of global warming the U.K. is “within five years” of a crippling wave of ice-agey weather that will make life there impossible. I looked at Alan and said, “He’s an old man.” Just to be safe, though, I told our BBC fellow to buy a good parka at the end-of-season sales.

Or whoever that guy is who wrote that thing circulating around the internet, about how much everyone in Iraq really loves us and 400,000 people have water or immunizations or whatever.

Damn AP reporters. Traitors:

FALLUJAH, Iraq — With U.S. Marines gone and central government authority virtually nonexistent, Fallujah resembles an Islamic mini-state — anyone caught selling alcohol is flogged and paraded in the city. Men are encouraged to grow beards and barbers are warned against giving “Western” hair cuts.

“After all the blood that was shed, and the lives that were lost, we shall only accept God’s law in Fallujah,” said cleric Abdul-Qader al-Aloussi, offering a glimpse of what a future Iraq may look like as the U.S.-led occupation draws to a close. “We must capitalize on our victory over the Americans and implement Islamic sharia laws.”

Richard Cohen read the same story. Yeah, well he’s a traitor too!

Indiana National Bank asked Tony Hulman to share Indianapolis 500 attendance figures when he borrowed an estimated $700,000 to purchase Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1945.

Last fall, The Star decided to solve the mystery.

Come on, you know you’re going to read the rest, don’t you?

I posted the item below from an Ann Arbor coffeehouse, wi-fi-ing from my Apple PowerBook. I was interrupted in the midst of putting it together by a call on my cell phone. A man glanced my way as I talked, and I know he was thinking what I was thinking:

God, are you insufferable.

And God, was I ever. But I can’t help it. I overstayed the time necessary to eat a piece of stale crumb cake and drink an overpriced cup of coffee. It wasn’t the wi-fi that held me — it was the atmosphere.

Is it so wrong to like the “third place?” I don’t think so. I’ve been working at home for weeks now, and damn, but it gets lonely there. People are social animals and we need to see other animals to feel we aren’t the only gazelle left on the savannah. Offices are the designated place to work, but the last one I had seemed almost designed to be depressing — windows waaaaay across the other side of the room, dust and grime on everything, a computer that crashed every half-hour, lousy coffee. My sightline was the back of my neighbor’s computer and a wall, with a filing cabinet against it. Above the filing cabinet, an American flag printed on a newspaper page, with “September 11, 2001″ printed above. Believe me, if you worked there you’d find any excuse not to.

Hence the Third Place. Alan, in the midst of midwifing a breech-presenting series one year, would print copies of all the stories and take them to a nearby restaurant, where he’d blue-pencil the crap out of them in peace, away from his phone and the thousand stinging ants of the newsroom. Only anyone seeing him there — and perhaps some of his very own supervisors — would have said, “That guy is goofing off,” when in truth he got more done in the third place than he did in the office.

The Ann Arbor third-place scene is vibrant, to say the least. Starbucks and Espresso Royale windows are always full of laptop-open students, what looks like business meetings and other activities only tangentially related to coffee-drinking. Office managers should take note. Windows good. Coffee good. Comfy chairs even better. Third place: Good.

Some headlines just scream “read me.” HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, say, or FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

And this one: SPANKY THE CLOWN ARRESTED ON PORN CHARGES.

It’s worth following the link just to see the picture.

Thanks, Connie.

Even the owner of the drowned Hummer admits it was “stupid” to test his vehicle’s amphibious capabilities after a recent storm, but the rest of us can still enjoy a chuckle over it, can’t we?

From the Free Press, with a helpful story on why you shouldn’t assume your car can swim.

Finally made it to history class yesterday. A large chunk of the lecture was on the Schlieffen Plan, the 1914 German strategy to defeat France in a six-week campaign that would allow them to then move the bulk of their forces to the eastern front for a longer campaign against Russia.

It didn’t work out that way. There were a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was this: If you follow the link and look at the map, you’ll see the campaign sent several armies on a wide flanking maneuver to the north of France’s fortress towns south of Luxembourg. Put your fingertips on a table and rotate your hand around your index finger. Your little finger has to cover a lot more ground to make it around the semi-circle, doesn’t it? The guys on the little-finger path arrived at their destination emaciated and exhausted, having fought and marched and fought and marched and then marched some more, cut off from their supply trains.

In other words, the plan didn’t take into consideration the simple and obvious human factor. The human factor — so often the cause of those bedeviling unintended consequences. Ask the soldiers in Iraq if anyone has thrown flowers at them lately.

One of the things I thought a lot about in the past year is how people use technology in ways different than the inventors perhaps intended. Kids swap iPods as a shorthand way of saying, “This is who I am.” Text messaging is a new way to cheat on an exam. The inventor of the birth-control pill was a devout Catholic who thought he’d finally found a “natural” method of planning children that would be used primarily by women in their 30s and 40s who had completed their families; oops, he caused the sexual revolution. TV was supposed to be a great educational tool, which it is, I suppose, but not in the way we thought it would be.

You can never predict exactly how people are going to use new tools at their disposal. In my husband’s family, women cook the same meals they’ve been making since the ’50s; there’s no quicker way to freak them out than to take them to a restaurant where the phrase “pesto mayonnaise” is on the menu. But they all embraced the microwave oven like a long-lost friend. The MP3 algorithm was written to solve the problem of bulky sound files, and now it’s changing a whole industry. You want white-collar job outsourcing? How about having your MRI scans read by a radiologist in India, who can pull them up in an instant and charges a fraction of what the American guy does?

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that it’s interesting. Because this is a blog post and not a newspaper column, I don’t have to have a nice concluding paragraph. Except maybe this:

Have a nice day. I’m off to have lunch with Ron.

The headline on the Freep story today was bad enough — Girl, 9, shot dead at sleepover — and the story was worse, which you can imagine. But the closing paragraph was almost too much to bear:

Detroit Police Sgt. Eren Stephens said parents should secure any weapons around the house.

Now there is some helpful advice.

The Knight Ridder fellowships take staffers from jobs and puts them in classes at various universities or other venues, with the idea that, perhaps, hopefully they will, when they finish up, go off to other work, not necessarily at Knight Ridder-owned operations.

Convincing an idiot he’s an idiot is a no-win situation. But would it really be so much to ask that the enemies of yours truly who actually talk to this sucking orifice get their facts straight before pressing their quivering lips to his liver-spotted ear?