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.