Another spe­cial day in the D yes­ter­day: A pissed-off young man enters a church look­ing for his estranged girl­friend, finds her mother and shoots her dead. Dur­ing ser­vices.

Even in Detroit, this pretty much tops the Heinous­ness scale. It also res­onated with some­thing I read recently in the New York Times, linked here with­out the reg­is­tra­tion and so on; it’s about how more homi­cides today are sparked by petty dis­agree­ments. To wit:

Sus­pects tell police they killed some­one who “dis­re­spected” them or a fam­ily mem­ber, or some­one who was “mean-mugging” them, which police loosely trans­late as giv­ing a dirty look. And more weapons are on the streets, giv­ing peo­ple a way to act on their anger.

Police Chief Nan­nette H. Hegerty of Mil­wau­kee calls it “the rage thing.”

That sounds about right. While we await the chin-scratchings of local edi­to­r­ial writ­ers and colum­nists, I was also struck by this com­ment, by Ron Scott on the Det­News blog:

What I found even more chill­ing was an inter­view with the young woman who had wit­nessed the assault. She made ref­er­ence to the type of weapon used by the assailant with stark speci­ficity. She called it a “gauge,�? short for a 12-gauge shot­gun. How would she know this? Why would she know this? The famil­iar­ity with this kind of nomen­cla­ture reflects one who has been nur­tured in a war­like envi­ron­ment.

Yep.

OK, let’s move on to juve­nile del­i­quency of a some­what less-lethal nature (although if I were this kid’s par­ent, it would come close): At the DIA on Fri­day, a mis­chie­vous 12-year-old boy vis­it­ing the museum with a school group took a piece of barely chewed Wrigley’s Extra Polar Ice out of his mouth and stuck it on Helen Frankenthaler’s 1963 abstract paint­ing “The Bay,” dam­ag­ing one of the most impor­tant mod­ern paint­ings in the museum’s col­lec­tion and a land­mark pic­ture in the artist’s out­put.

But lo, the museum did not over­re­act:

Though museum offi­cials were upset, they didn’t yell at the stu­dent or dis­ci­pline him. At first, Hart tried to explain to him the museum’s role in pre­serv­ing cul­tural and visual his­tory. “I knew that prob­a­bly wouldn’t make any sense to him, so I asked him what kind of music he liked,” said Hart. “He said he liked rap, so I said, ‘Well, you know what rock ‘n’ roll is,’ and he did, so I said, ‘Can you imag­ine if some­body had messed up the beat in rock and roll so you didn’t have any rhythm in rap.’ And he looked at me, and he got it imme­di­ately.”

This kid must be smarter than I am, because that exam­ple made no sense to me at all. I think I would have gone for the “See my boot? Imag­ine how you’re going to feel in about six sec­onds when I plant it two feet up your fun­da­ment, kiddo” expla­na­tion. The museum says he’s been duly pun­ished. Ohhh-kay.

Do not ask why I love rail travel. It makes no sense. The equip­ment is falling apart, the atten­tive­ness to sched­ules casual, your fel­low pas­sen­gers a mix of Grey­hound mis­ery and Peo­ple Express cheap­skates.

(True story: A friend of mine was trav­el­ing by bus one day, com­ing back to Colum­bus from some­where in south­ern Ohio. Her seat­mate said she’d been vis­it­ing her hus­band in Lebanon. “What’s he doing there?” my friend asked. “Three to five,” she replied.)

It doesn’t make finan­cial sense, either. For short hops, you might as well drive. For longer ones, fly — it’s faster and cheaper. But for trips like the one we did this week­end, Detroit to Chicago, it still works. Travel time is less than an hour longer, and you avoid the big-city headaches of traf­fic and park­ing. Tick­ets for Kate and me cost $192 round-trip. We saved $70 in park­ing and $60 in gas, leav­ing a dif­fer­ence of $62 for the sat­is­fac­tion of hav­ing five solid hours to sit back with a book or stare out the win­dow at the pass­ing junk­yards and rust-belt indus­trial grave­yards. I’d call that: Price­less.

We took the Wolver­ine, which ran on time and reaf­firmed my faith in rail sched­ul­ing, prob­a­bly because this train only goes back and forth across the Mit­ten, three times a day. The trains I took out of Fort Wayne — the Capi­tol Lim­ited, the Lake Shore Lim­ited and the Empire Builder — were long routes, NYC to Chicago and beyond, and had many, many oppor­tu­ni­ties to get behind sched­ule. It wasn’t uncom­mon for them to be an hour or more late arriv­ing at the cursed sid­ing in Water­loo, Ind., which served as the Fort’s sta­tion. (We once had our own, and lost it — long story. Short ver­sion: It was the railroad’s fault.) Bonus: You’d some­times take your seat to find that day’s Daily News or Post aban­doned in the pocket in front of you. And maybe you have to be a writer, but there’s some­thing about sit­ting down in the club car with a beer and look­ing at the posters for the other routes on the wall — the Cal­i­for­nia Zephyr, the Sun­set Lim­ited — that makes me think, “That’s one for me.” It just has a nicer ring than Flight 32.

I didn’t grow up rid­ing trains. If Colum­bus, Ohio had pas­sen­ger train ser­vice, it was long gone by the time I was going any­where. Peo­ple in the east­ern states take rail travel for granted, hav­ing done the Boston-New York-D.C. route too many times. Large city interur­ban routes are noth­ing spe­cial to them, either. I guess it’s even pos­si­ble, in these places, to see your car as an escape from the drudgery of rail com­mut­ing. All I can think is, rail com­muters read news­pa­pers, and dri­vers lis­ten to morn­ing radio. Case closed.

Only once did I spring for a sleeper. I went to Syra­cuse to visit my friends Lance and the Blonde, and got a berth for the trip out. Fort Wayne to Toledo, where I caught the Lake Shore Lim­ited around mid­night, just in time for the porter to fold down my bed and plump my pil­low. I climbed in with a copy of “Clock­ers” and drifted off in per­fect com­fort. I awoke sev­eral times through the night, watch­ing one frozen town after another pass by through the frosted win­dow, and drifted hap­pily back to sleep, know­ing some­one else was dri­ving. It was like being a kid asleep in the back seat, heed­less of seat belts, while my dad took us home.

Yes, we had a great time in Chicago. A bit chilly, but oth­er­wise fine. More tomor­row. A lit­tle blog­gage:

I never thought of Bode Miller and George Bush as the same per­son, but when you put it this way…

There’s a moral in this story — sort of a Mid­west­ern ver­sion of the two Samu­rai stand­ing in the rain.

This has been a good week for spot­ting our old sem­i­nar speak­ers, but not always in the, you know, good sense.

Juan Cole was one of them. He’s a Mid­dle East­ern scholar at the U of M who blogs here and is widely inter­viewed. I thought this inter­view with him in our oth­er­wise pretty limp alt-weekly was must read­ing, par­tic­u­larly if you’re look­ing for a rea­son to stick your head in the oven:

There is a prob­lem, and I don’t think peo­ple have any idea how much of a tightrope we’re walk­ing in the Gulf region. If Iraq did go to a con­ven­tional civil war; if it drew Iran, Saudi Ara­bia, Jor­dan, Syria, Turkey into it; if you have gen­er­al­ized guer­rilla war among coun­tries; and if they started hit­ting pipelines the way they’re hit­ting pipelines in Iraq, you could really send the world into another Great Depres­sion.

Cole: I would give it 5 per­cent. I don’t think it’s a high prob­a­bil­ity. It’s out there as a pos­si­bil­ity.

There’s the worst-case sce­nario: Full-on civil war in Iraq trig­gers world­wide depres­sion. I hit Cole’s blog today. I knew the news would be hor­ri­ble, but it was worse than that:

Tues­day was an apoc­a­lyp­tic day in Iraq. I am not nor­mally exactly san­guine about the sit­u­a­tion there. But the atmos­pher­ics are very, very bad, in a way that most West­ern observers will miss.

Ter­rific.

Off to Chicago. Try not to dwell on the bad news.

Quite an evoca­tive photo from the archives of J.C. Burns, long­time friend of NN.C, as well as NN and every­one else in the co-prosperity sphere. You know, it occurs to me that some of you may doubt the sto­ries I tell here: Oh yeah, she says she was a colum­nist. But was she really? Well, suck­ahs, here’s the proof. My own rack card. Note the awk­ward lan­guage: “Tues­days, Thurs­days, Fri­day and Sat­ur­days.” (Only one Fri­day, evi­dently.) And that was an improve­ment; on my first rack card, they actu­ally mis­spelled my name. But I wrote four days a week. Take that, Mau­reen Dowd.

It was so, so long ago: August 6, 1990, from J.C.’s Quicken records and the meta­data, aka the head­lines you can see in the win­dow (“Bush dis­putes Iraqi pull­out in Kuwait” and “Marines res­cue Amer­i­cans from Liber­ian cap­i­tal”). And check out the rack card on the Journal’s box: “The fastest-growing daily news­pa­per in Indi­ana!” (Nowa­days it would say, “Dying at a some­what slower rate than the oth­ers.”)

Who was this per­son? I barely know her any­more. No wed­ding ring, liked neu­tral col­ors. Lived in a rented house on Buell Drive. Beyond that, hard to say.

Two house­keep­ing items:

First, I’m informed we have a power out­age at NN.C’s Atlanta head­quar­ters. “Run­ning on bat­ter­ies, but who knows how long that’ll last,” I’m told. Clap for the Mac Mini!

Sec­ond, Kate and I are off to Chicago tomor­row — on Amtrak! Which I love! — for some M/D bond­ing and a stop at the Amer­i­can Girl Place. As soon as the kid­ney bro­ker brings me the cash for mine, we’ll be ready to start shop­ping.

All by way of say­ing we may be scarce around here through the week­end. Have a good one, if we don’t see you again.

Today’s mis­sion: I have an MS Word doc­u­ment in front of me. Length…oy. Eight thou­sand, sixty-three words. It con­sists of about two dozen e-mails slop­pily aggre­gated. I have to hack, trim, pol­ish and stitch them into some­thing resem­bling a coher­ent piece of writ­ing. And yes, some peo­ple wrote their e-mails with no cap­i­tal let­ters what­so­ever.

I expect this will take most of the day. So why not put it off another few min­utes with some blog­ging?

(Note: Just had one of those work-at-home moments, where I add up the pluses and minuses of being one’s own boss and come up with a large plus. Not that peo­ple don’t crim­i­nally pro­cras­ti­nate in offices, as any­one who’s strolled through one with a view of the com­puter mon­i­tors can attest. In fact, I’m fre­quently amazed at the amount of in-bossman’s-face gold­brick­ing that goes on; a friend’s hus­band works with a woman who eBays through­out her work day, and prints out reams of list­ings and just leaves them lying on the printer for all to see. What-evuh.)

I hope you had a good Pres­i­dents’ Day. Hav­ing spent most of my career in the “you call that a hol­i­day?” world of news­pa­pers — where I have worked Christ­mas Day, Thanks­giv­ing Day and most other days when oth­ers wouldn’t go near their offices — I scarcely think of it as one. We got six paid hol­i­days, if I’m remem­ber­ing cor­rectly: New Year’s, Memo­r­ial, Inde­pen­dence, Labor, Thanks­giv­ing and Christ­mas. When I hear of offices clos­ing for MLK, Dead Pres­i­dents, Vet­er­ans and my per­sonal favorite, Colum­bus Day, I won­der how any work gets done in the world. That’s not even con­sid­er­ing Friday-after-Thanksgiving and the week between Christ­mas and New Year’s, a black hole of dead time.

I once wrote a col­umn about work­ing Christ­mas, which I actu­ally came to pre­fer, when I was sin­gle. It paid out dou­ble time, dou­ble brownie points and was so news-free, it usu­ally con­sisted of spend­ing a day at the office read­ing news­pa­pers and eat­ing stale Christ­mas cook­ies, wait­ing for the roof to fall in. Most years, the roof stayed up, but there were excep­tions — a seri­ous below-zero cold snap that frac­tured water mains all over town. (This was the year I learned the First Rule of Note-Taking in Sub-Zero Weather: Always carry a pen­cil.) There was a bank rob­ber who was bailed out by an anony­mous good Samar­i­tan, so he wouldn’t have to spend Christ­mas in a warm jail cell, but in his cold, incred­i­bly depress­ing fur­nished room that was only mar­gin­ally roomier.

Any­way, if you had the day off, here’s hop­ing it was appro­pri­ately pres­i­den­tial. Hail to the chief of your choice.

So, blog­gage:

Remem­ber those heady days of ear­lier this month, when it seemed Detroit really could get its act together, stop the city-suburban squab­bling, pull up its socks and be a city?

Yeah, it’s hard for me, too.

Ear­lier this week, the City Coun­cil voted to shut down the zoo. Yep. Sure, it’s in a fis­cal cri­sis along with every other pub­lic insti­tu­tion around here, but unlike those, there was a plan pro­posed that would have allowed the city to retain own­er­ship, give up man­age­ment and keep the facil­ity open. Win-win, you might say. Of course the coun­cil voted it down. Because they were in a really bad mood! They got the plan late! And besides, the zoo is in the sub­urbs, and you know what that means — another chance to stick it to the man.

Alan watched the late news last night, and reported a coun­cil­man — can’t say which one — was carp­ing that she was get­ting angry calls from “north of Eight Mile” and some­one needed to tell these peo­ple hey, Slav­ery is over, and we’re not on the plan­ta­tion any­more. I’m amazed at how often pub­lic offi­cials say that around here; it’s like, the default sound bite. When the (broke) city was caught spend­ing $130,000 for bot­tled water for city work­ers, here’s what the mayor said: “Slav­ery is over. It is. We don’t need for massa to tell us to get some water.” Huh? The race card is played so often here you’d think it would have dis­in­te­grated from han­dling by now. But no.

On a more com­i­cal note, Coun­cil­woman Martha Reeves (yeah, that one) was on TV say­ing, “It was a good vote. We agreed to dis­agree.” And close the zoo. Oh.

OK, I can’t put it off any longer — time to start hack­ing.

I can­not tell a lie: Last night I kept one eye on the ice danc­ing while I was work­ing, and day-um, it was great. Those Ital­ians, who stared each other down? Price­less. I wanted sub­ti­tles: You clumsy piece of left-footed crap!

NBC, for once com­mit­ting jour­nal­ism, offers a good gallery of the sequined car­nage. And Slate has it all in a nut­shell: Given that ice danc­ing seems to require lit­tle more than basic coor­di­na­tion, mediocre rhythm, a ter­ri­ble out­fit, and a cheer­leader grin, these falls bor­der on the sur­real. You would expect such a per­for­mance from Will Fer­rell. You expect more from your Olympians. Thank good­ness these wob­bly bal­leri­nas defied my expec­ta­tions. Tonight, for the first time, I’ll turn on the Olympics with the express pur­pose of watch­ing the ice danc­ing finals. I don’t care who wins, but I’ll be hop­ing that some­one falls.

When I was a j-fellow at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan two years ago, a sem­i­nar by Bill Miller was one of the many unex­pected and delight­ful treats. I for­get what the title of his chat was, but I went in with low expec­ta­tions, think­ing it would be 90 min­utes of law-school yam­mer­ing. It wasn’t. He took us on some­thing of a romp through such top­ics as the nomen­cla­ture of jus­tice, the nanny cul­ture of man­ag­ing risk and Ice­landic blood feuds, keep­ing us chuck­ling through­out.

One thing he said that night that stuck with me: The phrase “life is cheap” is used as a phrase of con­dem­na­tion, but actu­ally, it’s a sign of great progress. If you run into some­one in your car and cause them to lose the use of their leg, which would you rather do? Pay them some money, or give up the use of your own leg? Valu­ing life cheaply is actu­ally what allows civ­i­liza­tion to advance.

I never thought of it that way.

Any­way, he’s writ­ten a book about the con­cept. Laura Miller reviews it in Salon. You’ll have to watch an ad, but pfft, it’s worth it:

Of course there was no insur­ance in those soci­eties. We like to think that life was cheap in those cul­tures, but the prob­lem was that it was so expen­sive they couldn’t get any­thing done. Life is cheap with us, despite all our talk about how we can’t have cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment because human life is too valu­able. Do you know there are these signs up on the Michi­gan high­ways that say, “Kill a worker, pay $7,500″?

Yes, because not only are you going to go to prison, but you’ll pay a lit­tle fine. But every­one who dri­ves by and reads it sees it as an insult. Seventy-five hun­dred for a high­way worker! “Hey, I’ve got $7,500, let’s knock one off!”

A most excel­lent sur­prise in the New Yorker this week — an essay by Nora Ephron. I used to love Nora Ephron– no, I still do. Hand me a copy of “Scrib­ble Scrib­ble” or “Wall­flower at the Orgy” and I can almost quote large chunks of it from mem­ory. She’s one of the writ­ers I read when I was — I hate this phrase, please under­stand I use it under advise­ment — find­ing my voice, and she’s one of the rea­sons I do what I do. If you want to be a writer, you need to find a few who make it look easy; oth­er­wise you might never try. And she always made it look easy, even when it was obvi­ously hard. You want to know what a great mag­a­zine essay/story looks like? Read “Deal­ing with the, uh, prob­lem” from “Crazy Salad,” about the devel­op­ment of the fem­i­nine hygiene spray. It’s simul­ta­ne­ously a total stitch and a sting­ing indict­ment of an indus­try that did its best to con­vince women that their ya-yas had such strong odors that needed to be cor­rected and sweet­ened.

(I was read­ing it once, and gig­gling, and Alan asked why. I told him. He said, “Never in my life have I been able to smell a woman’s p*ssy in a social set­ting.” There you have it. I guess nobody told the suits at Alberto-Culver, mak­ers of FDS.)

Any­way, the essay this week was called “Ser­ial Monogamy,” and was about Ephron’s rela­tion­ships with cook­books. Only, of course, it’s not about just that. I should quote a sec­tion, but it’s not online, and I’d have to go upstairs and find the mag­a­zine, and I have to go to work in a few min­utes and excuse excuse excuse and whine whine whine. Just buy the mag­a­zine — it’s the Eustace Tilley anniver­sary issue.

When some­thing appears in the New York Times, you can’t really say it isn’t get­ting atten­tion, but I was struck by a pas­sage in this Selena Roberts col­umn, about Johnny Weir, the flam­ing fig­ure skater, and wanted to point it out:

He isn’t required to sat­isfy anyone’s curios­ity (about his sex­u­al­ity). He doesn’t need the val­i­da­tion. He is guided by his con­fi­dence and by working-class par­ents who nur­tured his indi­vid­u­al­ity from the start.

“He is a role model in how he has achieved a goal,” Bat­tiste said. “But he hasn’t really said, ‘This was my child­hood and here’s how I dealt with it.’ Maybe he will. I have to keep remind­ing myself that Johnny is still young.”

I was talk­ing to some­one a few weeks ago, who has a friend with a son like this. Five years old, plays with Bar­bies, loves to play dress-up and clam­ors to help mommy arrange flow­ers.

“Let’s put these in the liv­ing room,” he said when they were fin­ished. “It needs some detail.”

I asked another friend about this, one of those gay-from-birth men, won­der­ing what he’d tell this mother. And he said he’d do what Weir’s par­ents seem to have done: Nur­tured his indi­vid­u­al­ity from the start. It’s a fine line for a par­ent to walk, between “You’re per­fect just the way you are” and “If you wear nail pol­ish to school, sooner or later you’re going to get your ass kicked.”

He wrote me, “I have a feel­ing that the Isaac Mizrahis of the world had moth­ers who gladly let them play with the sewing machine and gave uncon­di­tional encour­age­ment. Today Mizrahi’s prob­a­bly the number-one rea­son any of his class­mates attend a reunion.”

I think he’s right.