No excuse, sir — it was just one of those days. Got to bed late, slept badly, woke early, went back to bed, still slept fitfully. I always take a pulp novel to bed to help me sleep. Since I reread almost everything, reading one of my well-thumbed Travis McGee paperbacks is like hugging a well-loved teddy bear, and just as calming. Someone comes to Travis for help. Travis comes to the corrupt town to hunt down his quarry. A babe falls into his lap. And so on. I can drift off knowing the universe is still in proper order.

But today’s — “A Purple Place for Dying” — just kept me turning the pages. I couldn’t remember reading this one, although I obviously had. It kept me awake. That’s usually a good thing, except today it was bad.

Finally rose and shone close to 11, although I still felt cloudy. Showered, drank a gallon of coffee, took myself out to lunch (Thai). Problem…solved! There’s little that can’t be fixed with those three, is there? It’s like a good cry.

But since the day was effectively truncated, I have little more to add. Onward to bloggage!

He feels so princessy, so it’s not surprising the gay community has adopted Johnny Weir as one of their own. Regrettably, he’s a sore loser, but at least one who gives good quote: “I missed the bus. They changed the schedule,” Weir said. “It was every 10 minutes. Today it was every half-hour. I was late getting here and never caught up. I never felt comfortable in this building. I didn’t feel my inner peace. I didn’t feel my aura. Inside I was black.”

Girlfriend, I know just how you feel.

Hang on to your wallets, suckahs: Detroit is asked to bid on 2008 GOP convention. Wanna rent my house? Lots of fellow travelers here in the Woods.

Loved the book, looks like I’ll hate the movie. “Freedomland,” that is. Casting Julianne Moore as the white-trash mama? I know she’s a brilliant actress, but come on.

Finally, this Muslim cartoons thing is proving revelatory in so many ways. Not publishing them is becoming the newspaper equivalent of a 40-year-old virgin — the irrational protection of something now so overvalued it can hardly be brought into proper perspective. I’m glad to see college journalists trying their best to do the right thing, equally disheartened to see many getting nipped in the bud. Eric Zorn looks at the case at the University of Illinois, and is, in the bargain, exactly right.

You leave a place, you lose touch. But hey, that’s what the people left behind are for. And besides, being late doesn’t make “Lazy Muncie” any less amusing.

Not recommended for dial-up. Brief profanity, more than leavened by humor.

(My favorite was the khakis-and-blazer. Yours?)

Hat tip: Indiana Parley.

This is a day late, but I’ve been hella busy — a Smart Money deadline at week’s end, an Hour Detroit one after that, my Great Big Essay on Newspapers for another client and in between, I have to wrangle a newsletter into shape, while many of its opinion-laden contributors and principals are in Turkey, Spain and other distant lands.

I don’t normally talk about my clients here, mainly because most of them are magazines and don’t post their content online, so what’s the point if you can’t link to it? But it occurs to me that many people, reading this blog, would assume I have one of those “careers” that sort of asks for ironic quotes around the word, and that isn’t the case. I really do write and edit for a living. My workload waxes and wanes, but at the moment it’s all wax, baby.

So let’s get to it, then.

Roy Edroso at Alicublog has become one of my favorite lefty bloggers, mainly because he has the patience to do what I don’t — read and respond to a great deal of the krep being churned by the so-called blogosphere. (He’s particularly devastating on Lileks.) Anyway, he took the time to write this, and for “Have a Right-Wing Valentine’s Day,” I’m grateful.

Nathan Gotsch has been working the Fort Wayne blogworld for the better part of a year, and not badly at all: All those stories he’d been doing about Fort Wayne topics, sometimes showing up or outright shaming actual paid local reporters in the process? He was living in L.A. most of the time. (“Has any editor in Fort Wayne approached you about maybe taking a job there?” I asked him once. After all, he can already write and work sources and demonstrates an eye for a good story. The answer: “No.” But of course. Not that he wanted a job there, but you know, you’d think someone might have made the gesture.) This week, though, he’s hanging up his cleats and turning the name, archives and all the rest of it over to ex-state legislator Mitch Harper, who’s now running Fort Wayne Observed.

Among Nathan’s many accomplishments in a short time is the humiliation and otherwise stick-a-fork-in-him-he’s-done barbecuing of the maroons at Mediawatch. (I’d link to the amusing podcast he did about their great trademark dispute, but it’s gone with the switchover. NO IT’S NOT: It’s here.)

Once again, terriers rule.

I keep reading about Cheney’s hunting screwup, and I notice that the quail, on this hunt, were farm-raised. Most people know something about “canned hunts,” where exotic, aged or fenced-in animals go toe-to-toe with armed Bwana Diks — Carl Hiaasen made them the focus of one of his comic novels, and they’ve gotten a lot of publicity. I’ve read defenses of them here and there. My feelings run across a range from open contempt to shrugging dismissal. I have no problem with most hunting, but if you want to shoot an animal in an unfair fight, that’s its own punishment, in my opinion.

Farm-raised birds are another variety of manipulated hunting. It goes without saying that this is a wussy-boy pursuit; one reason I generally respect hunters is, they get out of town and actually go into the country looking for their quarry. Most ethical hunters are also environmentalists (Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited), so we have that in common. But getting into the country requires some exertion — walking, hiking, even trudging. Evidently the vice president cannot be bothered to trudge.

Ultimately, I’m with Jon Stewart. As the WSJ reported a snippet of his “Daily Show” monologue:

The other player in the drama? Ranch owner and eyewitness Katharine Armstrong.

Jon Stewart: “What kind of hunting story begins with getting out of your car? As I sighted the great beast before us, my shaking hands could barely engage the parking brake. Slowly, I turned off the A/C and silenced my sub-woofers…”

Many years ago I read a story about these sorts of bird hunts. They were called, not ironically, “shootenannies.” Snicker.

More tomorrow or later. Back to the grindstone.

I’m astonished:

The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had “a minor heart attack” Tuesday morning, hospital officials said.

The victim, Harry Whittington, was immediately moved back to the intensive care unit for further treatment, said Peter Banko, the administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial in Texas.

Yep, that’s Professor Ashley, on the Krewe de Vieux float, the first of 2006 Mardi Gras. Guess he always wanted to be a mime.

(Note: He’s a real professor. Dunno about Professor Longhair.)

Viva NOLA!

It was his fault I shot him. Next: The bitch was just askin’ for it, y’know?

Also, Hank Stuever finds the real romantic archetype for our age: Lloyd Dobler.

I know my brother sometimes reads my site, so I hope he’s reading today, to learn the influence he is having upon the next generation. The scene: The final session of Kate’s “hip-hop dance” class, yet another effort to break up the tedium of Michigan’s endless winter. All the parents are watching. One move is called “your tall uncle” — it’s the one where you point to the upper corner of the room. “Point at your tall uncle!” the instructor hollered, then called for a break.

“My uncle is short,” one kid observed.

“My uncle is tall,” said another.

And then, in the clear, piping voice that has made my small daughter identifiable in crowds her whole life, I hear:

“MY UNCLE GAMBLES!”

One of the nearby fathers cracked up. It made me recall the last bit of avuncular advice Kate was offered by my brother:

Never bet on baseball.

Noted.

I don’t know why everyone’s getting all het up about Dick Cheney’s buttertriggerfinger. Hunting accidents like his are pretty common, although I always heard the leading cause of hunting deaths and injuries around here was falling from your tree stand. Bob Knight winged a friend a few years back. Far more interesting is the oh that aspect of the information release, and, of course, the “it’s just a flesh wound” angle, when it turns out the victim stayed in ICU overnight.

Paul Begala has a few thoughts, fairly cogent ones.

Even wasting as much time online as I do, it’s still possible to miss things, and I apologize if someone else sent you here first, but not really. (People apologize for all the wrong things and none of the right ones.) I’m speaking of Picky, Picky, Libby Copeland’s amusing essay on what happens when people who have too many choices bring their attitudes to the battlefields of love:

There is something peculiarly modern about this phenomenon, something aligned with our dark privilege of too much , this consumeriffic culture in which jeans and houses and breasts and ring tones are customizable. Consider it all: geographical dislocation, cities filled with singles, extended childhoods and postponed childbearing, speed-dating, the growing sense that the dating pool is as vast as the 454 men-seeking-women between the ages of 29 and 31 within five miles of your Zip code on Yahoo Personals.

In a world of infinite possibilities, the notion of falling in love, of finding The One, seems itself like the taquito girl, small-town and old-fashioned. Once upon a time, The One would’ve lived in your village or another one like it. Now, she could be this sweet girl across from you at the dinner table, but she could also be someone you haven’t yet met. What if there’s another woman somewhere in the world, like this girl, but better? Someone who will snowboard with you, and doesn’t do that strange throat-clearing thing?

There are people like this, I know, people like Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom character, capable of pushing the trapdoor button on women with man hands or the wrong laugh or whatever, but I’ve never had the luxury. Copeland quotes a personal ad:

Online, people attempt to custom-order mates with the awesome specificity of children at a Build-a-Bear Workshop. In the personal section of Craigslist, a man describes his dream woman: “you are very feminine but also a tad clumsy. you are short, but you love high heels . . . you have long dark hair and big eyes. you like to wear mascara and other eye make-up, and/or you have long lashes.”

I’ll bet my next freelance check — which will be a big one! — that this man is still alone.

But I think about this sort of thing in idle moments. I keep trying to finish this essay on newspapers, and I think a lot about whether they’re doomed because they’re badly run by the insecure hirelings of greedy corporations, or just because the very idea of a “general-interest” anything is simply antique. No one wants what everyone else has anymore. At the auto show last month, I wandered into the Rolls-Royce press conference, for no particular reason other than I had the time and I wanted to hear cultured British gentlemen say “motorcar.” The honcho giving the presentation said the biggest growth area in their company was the “bespoke sector,” i.e., the customizers. When you spend half a mil for a car, you don’t want to drive the same one the next guy with half a mil gets; you want one with chinchilla upholstery or paint the precise color of your wife’s hair or with a built-in cooler here or bulletproof glass there.

Maybe it stands to reason some think it can be applied to other people, too. Sooner or later they’ll learn.

By the way, I think newspapers wouldn’t be in quite so much trouble if they’d run more stuff like Copeland’s essay. I dunno about you, but by the time I read the features section, I’m not looking for tuna recipes or smart parenting stories. Maybe that’s just me.

A few days ago, some of were discussing school-play disputes in the comments, which only goes to show that NN.C commenters are ahead of the New York Times, which weighed in on Saturday with this depressing dispatch from the Culture Wars, about the cancellation of another play, this one in Missouri, after “some residents” (note: three of them) objected to its moral foundation.

The play: “Grease.”

To many, the term “culture war” evokes national battles over new frontiers in taste and decency, over violence in video games, or profanity in music or on television. But such battles are also fought in small corners of the country like Fulton, a conservative town of about 10,000, where it can take only a few objections about library books or high school plays to shift quietly the cultural borderlines of an entire community.

The complaints here, which were never debated in a public forum, have spread a sense of uncertainty about the shifting terrain as parents, teachers and students have struggled to understand what happened. Among teenagers who were once thrilled to have worked on the production, “Grease” became “the play they’d rather not talk about,” said Teri Arms, their principal, who had also approved the play before it was presented.

By the way, the principal also cancelled the next play — “The Crucible.” Wouldn’t want to produce anything that makes Christians not look like the loving, tolerant people we know they are, right?

Random bloggage:

Someone made Mitch Albom wait. No one makes Mitch Albom wait! That’ll teach him, Mr. Bigshot Doctor.

Hey, I like the Olympic beret. Others…don’t.

Back when I was a person who owned both a car and a horse, I used to get a catalog from an equestrian-themed travel agency. They could hook you up with a fox hunt in Ireland that would be glad to have you ride along with the hounds, or a Dutch dressage trainer with no objection to having you work his Grand Prix horses for a week or so.

But I wasn’t interested in that. There were only two trips that seemed worth the time and money. One was a tour of Iceland’s volcanic inland on that country’s native ponies, and the other was a trip across the Mongolian steppes, retracing the route of Genghis Khan.

People laughed at me when I mentioned this. Both trips, the catalog warned, were not for those fearful of roughing it. The diet on the Iceland trip would be mostly mutton, and this after an average of 25 miles in the saddle each day. (But! We would soothe our saddlesores in volcanic hot springs, stay with the locals and cover those miles at a gait only Icelandic ponies do, called the “tolt.”) The Mongolian trip would be similarly grueling, with lodging in yurts and a diet consisting mostly of yogurt.

I should have done at least one of these. Now I probably never will. (I’m certainly not in shape for a 25-mile day horseback, which would have been tough at the top of my game.) But my fascination with both countries remains, although now I mostly live it out through newspaper stories like this.

Seems someone thinks he’s found Genghis Khan’s tomb:

Finding the spot where the great Mongolian conqueror was laid to rest in 1227 by his famed horseback warriors would fill in a blank that has fascinated historians for centuries. Although he and his descendants galloped out of Mongolia to subdue most of the known world, Genghis Khan was buried without a monument or even a headstone, in keeping with Mongol belief that the dead should not be disturbed. Legend has it that the soldiers who carried out the mission were slaughtered to make sure the secret was safe for all time.

You can have your Roman empire. I mean, it’s interesting and foundational to western civ and all, but there’s something about Genghis and his homies that has always fascinated me. When I was pregnant, my amnio was done by a geneticist in a one-woman office. I noticed a photo on her office wall of a yurt with a bunch of Mongols standing outside waving at the camera. So tell me all about your trip to Mongolia, I said — a question I don’t think she’d been asked since she hung it on the wall.

She explained the trip was part of her postgrad research, sampling DNA of Mongols and comparing it to the DNA of native Americans, thought to be their descendants, via the Bering land bridge, etc. etc. She said the genetic evidence in humans was strong but imperfect, but they had a much closer link between another species — dogs. The canine companions of Mongols today are closely related to skeletons found in the desert southwest. It was the best time I’ve had talking to a doctor since my family practitioner told me about going to Woodstock when he was 16.

Anyway, I have a date with the Gobi Desert. One of these days.

So, bloggage:

Whoever said women over 40 are better off carrying a little extra weight than a little less must have been thinking about Madonna.

Someone in the comments linked to this fine, year-old blog posting by Tom Watson on Jenna Jameson, and it’s good enough to throw back out front as food for thought.

And now I must change to my sweatpants, wash the mascara down the drain, take up my laptop in a place where the wireless signal is good and…go to work. Have a swell weekend.

I have a new job. It pays well, allows me to work from home, uses my brain and skills and leaves lots of time free for writing. The only downside is the hours, which take up my evenings and deprive me of sleep and, well, blogging time. So a speed entry today, one of those blogger-meme things, blatantly cribbed from Lance Mannion. Ahem:

Ten views I hold without any evidence.

1) I was right to move to Fort Wayne and stay for about 17 years longer than I planned to.

2) Warren Zevon was a better songwriter than he was a performer.

3) Dogs are better than cats.

4) Lincoln was the best president. (OK, lots of evidence for that.) He couldn’t even survive the New Hampshire primary today.

5) If Islam really is a religion of peace, the peaceful Muslims are saying so to the wrong people.

6) Certain Lutherans are worse than many evangelicals, in terms of annoying the crap out of me.

7) Martin Scorsese keeps getting robbed because everyone in the Academy is jealous of him. But: Woody Allen is the world’s most overrated director. No, Spike Lee.

Small luxuries are better than big ones. Cashmere may be the best luxury of all.

9) Evil exists in every single human being above the age of 7. Some people just keep it buttoned up a little better.

10) The best art, the best food, the most interesting culture, comes from the bottom up. Also, from the oppressed up. (What if Michelangelo had been out’n'proud? We might never have gotten the Pieta. He’d have been dancing in a Florentine disco.)

Add your own in the comments.