A day-early April Fool’s Day joke that really rises above the fray: Chinese Democracy is finally finished:

Rose has also retained his pathological distaste for the media, lyrically attacking the editors of Vanity Fair, MTV personality Sway, numerous teenage bloggers, and the city hall reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer (who, curiously, has never written about pop music).

See, it’s funny because it’s true. Or could be.

Vast momentousness coming to the Hoosier state this weekend: Daylight Saving Time, for the first time in decades. No topic is good for more endless jaw-flapping. No topic is, for a columnist, so evergreen. You’d think this would be ending with the changeover, but apparently there’s lots of hilarity ahead. Our ace correspondent in Elkhart, Connie, files a brief report:

I have received endless messages at work in my email, basically explaining how to go on daylight saving this Sunday. From the State Chamber, State Library, assorted political news lists, etc. I have answered endless questions from co-workers who have never gone on daylight time before. Example: 2 a.m.? So I have to get up at 2 a.m. to change my clocks?

Is this so hard? Who knew? I am amused.

But hey, that’s nothin’:

But IT staff at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, fear the change will create complications galore.

Currently, most Indiana computer users set their PCs to a special “Indiana East” setting — Eastern time that doesn’t spring forward every April. Starting this April, however, they’ll change their PCs to Eastern Daylight Time. The few who observe Central time set their computers to Central, and will also make the switch. Tally predicts the changeover will create havoc with the widely used Microsoft Outlook calendar application. When the time changes, he said, appointments will still be listed according to the old Indiana East time. The calendars of Central time Outlook users, in turn, will continue to list appointments according to Central time.

Well, there’s a tragedy.

A BoingBoing link offers more hand-wringing:

I happen to be an IT manager for a philharmonic orchestra in Indiana and the changeover is going to cause massive problems for anyone who uses outlook as a calendar. By the time this is all said and done, it’s going to end up costing businesses in this state a lot of time and money. Perhaps the greatest irony is the fact that our governor pushed the change under the premise that it was going to increase revenue in the state. I’ve been actively encouraging fellow IT professionals in my area to contact the governor and give him an idea just how much the change is costing their company in money and man hours.

Oh, get a grip, girlfriend. When I moved to the enlightened ranges of DST last year, how did I handle it? Let me think…oh yeah, I opened the control panel and changed my home city. Of course, I had actually changed my home city. So what’s to stop all these IT people from just changing their own home cities — in essence, to tell their network a little lie? Can it possibly be this complicated? Some calendars are disrupted? Big deal.

I guess this is progress. When I was there, the argument was made that it would throw milking schedules off and young children would be kept up dangerously past a healthy bedtime.

Good luck, Hoosiers. Keep us posted — if you can get booted.

Misc. bloggage:

I don’t know about you, but stories like this make me break out in hives. I love a good trend as much as the next person, but as a writer, when editors start talking up ideas like this I always pretend to have an urgent appointment with my periodontist.

Literally, a Web Log is after my own heart. The other day a local news anchor who likely makes 30 times what I do said, “Bob has literally poured his heart out over these kids.” I thought, hmm, messy. LaWL tracks abuse of the word.

Next stop: Hopefully.

Bike-riding season is officially open. It’s been open for a while, but today is the first I managed to kick it off right — with a few downloads from the iTunes Music Store.

I hadn’t been there — to iTunes — for weeks and weeks, and I see that in my absence Steve Jobs has only redoubled his efforts to part me from all my money, 99 cents at a time. They’ve been adding to the iTunes Exclusives library, virtual albums built around a theme. I only needed to see they have a whole series devoted to the ’70s to start drooling.

Some people maintain the 1970s were an unrelenting sump of suckishness. They couldn’t be more wrong, especially when it comes to pop music, most of which was at least listenable and some of which was simply great. I’ll put ’70s funk up against Motown any day.

And there’s always another song to buy. I chose the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power.” Every song from one’s youth has a memory attached, and this is mine: Watching a bunch of gay men dance to “Fight the Power” at the Kismet, one of Columbus’ oldest gay bars, maybe the oldest. (It still is, but now it’s called the Eagle.) Every girl who knows gay men has danced with them; it’s part of their job in straight society — dance with women whose husbands refuse. At school dances, girls dance with one another, but boys can’t, lest the closet cases on the football team decide to hold their heads in the toilet over it. And as you get older, girl-girl dancing gives way to girl-gay boy dancing. It’s a perfect expression of teenage misery, one reason the “World Happiness Dance” episode of “My So-Called Life” reached the level of absolute brilliance.

If it continues into adulthood, one venue for it is gay bars, where single women go with their gay male friends for a little frisson of transgression, among other things. So it was with me at the Kismet, where we danced and danced and danced, and then “Fight the Power” came on, and everyone started doing a line dance called the Bus Stop. I didn’t know it, and I needed a break, so I stepped off and watched for a while, all those muscles and tight T-shirts and perfectly faded jeans moving together in the line. And then it came to me: They’d really rather be dancing with each other. All that dancing-with-girls stuff — they’re just humoring us.

When you have an epiphany, you remember what was on the soundtrack at the time.

I also got Gary Wright’s “Love is Alive,” which will bring no end of abuse from Alan, who considers him Lame. He’s right — Gary Wright is lame. But again, there’s a memory attached. Wright came to Ohio University to open for Peter Frampton in 1976 or so. I think Frampton was touring to support “Frampton Comes Alive,” which meant he was doing a live show of a live album. Of course, “Frampton Comes Alive” was turgid, horrible crap, but there was a certain lemming-like appeal to seeing what was all over the radio being acted out on stage. I bought tickets.

So Gary Wright comes out to play, and no one had heard of him. He opened with “Love is Alive,” and it was fabulous, this sort of jazzy organ groove pop thing. He had three sylph-like chick singers, each one a sexy goddess, doing backup. He was in and out in about eight songs, ending with “Dream Weaver,” which we also hadn’t heard, and oh my but it was one of those opening acts you remember, so fresh and new and what about those backup singers.

And then Frampton comes out, and all our hearts sank. He isn’t really going to sing that Doooo you, you! Feeeel like I doooooo thing, is he? Oh god, it sounds just like the album. Aren’t live shows supposed to sound different from the album, even live shows about live albums? We stayed to the end, but left thinking about Gary Wright.

Gary went on to have a very very good year, and he came back to OU almost a year later, and he was headlining this time. And guess who opened for him? The J. Geils Band.

Well, you know how that went. J. Geils comes out and blows the freakin’ roof off the place. I mean, it actually levitated. It was in a smaller venue this time, and they did the same opening-act thing — concise, tight, loud. Also, with lots of harmonica solos. Ain’t nothin’ but a house party!…First I look at the purse! It was outstanding. And then they went off, and out came Gary Wright, after a hard year of touring, which in the ’70s wasn’t about yoga and fresh-made carrot juice, if you catch my drift.

There was a new set of chick singers, just as sylphlike, but not the same ones as the first go-round. And he didn’t open with “Love is Alive,” but with “Dream Weaver,” his big ginormous hit. And get this — there was a slide show.

Sure. He sang, “I just closed my eyes again…” and behind him flashed a big picture of Gary Wright with his eyes closed. “Climbed aboard the dream weaver train…” And there was a train in soft focus on the screen. And so on.

Oh my, did it suck. I mean, we’d just heard “Whammer Jammer.” We didn’t want to hear this lame-ass crap. Not even.

I’m not sure if this story has a moral, but I always think of it when I hear Gary Wright, and maybe, if I had to write it down, it’s this: Stay nimble, keep your material fresh, don’t be too literal and choose your opening act carefully.

I went looking for something today and turned up something else. Since we’ve been chatting about paternity and such, it seems appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen…I give you…a selection from the great…Loretta Lynn’s…“The Pill”:

All these years I’ve stayed at home
While you had all your fun
And every year that’s gone by
Another baby’s come
There’s a gonna be some changes made
Right here on nursery hill
You’ve set this chicken your last time
‘Cause now I’ve got the pill

I’m tired of all your crowin’
How you and your hens play
While holdin’ a couple in my arms
Another’s on the way
This chicken’s done tore up her nest
And I’m ready to make a deal
And ya can’t afford to turn it down
‘Cause you know I’ve got the pill

Let’s get the party started with a little mixed grill of tasty bloggage, shall we?

I gotta tell ya, whenever those VH1 compilation shows comes on — “The 100 Most Shocking TV Moments,” whatever — they always fall short. None ever mentions what I consider the most jaw-dropping shows on television. Which are, of course, the paternity-test shows on “Maury.”

You think: It cannot get any lower than this. You think: These people must be actors. You think: No sane human being would make such a spectacle of himself. Or herself. And what about the baby?

But no.

Small wonder, then, that Maury’s paternity-test shows are audience favorites, that they have, god help me, returning characters:

Guests are encouraged to be forthright, and Sanquenetta is. “I’m not 100, I’m not 1,000, I’m a million percent sure he’s the father of my baby,” she says. “Maury, this is the first and last time you’re gonna see me on your show.”

“During her taped piece, we showed a retrospective of all of her appearances on the show,” Faulhaber says. “And she came out the first time and said, ‘Maury, I’m 110 percent sure.’ And the next time she goes, ‘I’m 130 percent.’ . . . ‘I’m 155 percent.’ ‘I’m 200 percent.’ ‘I am 1 billion percent.’ . . . And each time it’s amazing, because she sits there and she says, ‘I know it this time.’ “

You really have to read it all.

Meanwhile, I’m 1 billion percent sure you’ll be bummed out to learn that southeast Michigan seems to have a homicidal animal killer on the loose. I suspect it’s the usual story — a badly damaged person in a spiral of sorts:

Since January, authorities have found nearly 40 dead domestic and wild animals — some decapitated, some skinned — within a 3-mile radius of Superior Township, including coyotes, foxes and deer. On March 16, they started finding dogs. The most recent find, on Sunday, included the tied-up pit bull puppy and a cocker spaniel that had been shot in the back of the head.

However, as someone points out in the story, Jeffrey Dahmer got his start this way. Keep your cats close and your dogs closer, if you live nearby.

Finally, we come to the much-commented-upon Westboro Baptist Church, which has grabbed the spotlight in recent weeks by bringing their God Hates Fags act to the funerals of soldiers killed overseas:

The three protesters stood by the sidewalk, holding signs and chanting antimilitary slogans outside the funeral of Army Cpl. Nyle Yates III, who died in Iraq. “Cpl. Yates is in hell!” they screamed Monday morning, dragging the U.S. flag on the ground. “Cpl. Yates is in hell!”

Lately, in Michigan anyway, their activities have been somewhat mitigated by another group, who stand between the Westboro-ites and the bereaved family and basically outshout them. I suppose, given the choice between hearing that your dead soldier is in hell or hearing a less-cruel chant, I’d go for option B. Still.

Here’s what bugs me about this story. Two things, really — first is the language used. The Westboro Baptist Church consists of “the Rev.” Fred Phelps and a bunch of his relatives, and that’s pretty much it. And yet they have a name that makes them sound like a real church, and a website, and so instead of being called, more correctly, “a clan of crazy people from Kansas,” they get a certain gravitas just by being identified as a church congregation. Not much, maybe, but some.

This is one case where the need for journalistic “objectivity,” and the need to file people into certain easy-to-understand slots — “activist,” “protester,” etc. — really stands in the way of the first job reporters have, which is telling the truth. In this case, you have to read between the lines, add up the euphemisms and weigh them against the facts, to figure out what’s really going on.

But that’s nothing compared to the second thing, which is: They have been doing this for years and years and years. The Phelps folk, I remind you, were the ones who showed up at Matthew Shepard’s funeral waving signs reading God Hates Fags, and that was eight years ago. Since then, they’ve protested at funerals of other gay people and AIDS victims, and while I won’t say they’ve been doing it with the approval of the rest of the country, certainly far fewer people were clutching their chests and squealing the horror the horror, mmm?

In fact, about a year ago, Phelps came to Fort Wayne for a “debate,” a “forum” or whatever — some sort of public discussion. And while the closest I can come to contemporaneous coverage is this incomplete excerpt from one of the newspapers, I distinctly recall that some phrases simply weren’t attributed to Phelps — “God hates fags,” for one. In fact, Phelps was politely identified, by most media outlets, as an “anti-gay activist,” which is a little like calling a Holocaust denier a “World War II historian.”

Anyway, while it’s good to know that decent people have a breaking point, it’s less good to know it lies somewhere between screaming “God hates fags!” at the funeral of an AIDS victim and screaming “God hates fags!” at the funeral of an American soldier. Still, I guess we’ll take progress where we can get it.

Life getting you down? Feel as though winter will never end? Can’t shake a pain-in-the-ass cold? Go camping with some Brownies. The weather will still be lousy, your own cold will not improve, but hey, it was fun. Seventeen Brownies and 15 moms in one lodge made for much togetherness, but that’s what the spring camping weekend is all about. I was reminded, once again, of another good reason to have kids — to get you out of your little world, and into someone else’s. (Unless you’re one of the world’s most controlling parents, your kids move in a different world than you do, yes they do.) I made 36 hours of small talk with the other mothers. I was the extra adult for the horseback riding. I held a ball python in the critter house. And I watched the girls’ Gimme Shelter class, pictured above, although that was the point at which the cold penetrated all the way to the bone and I had to go back to the lodge and lie under my sleeping bag until my temperature rose again.

Kate had a good time, too. I think even the python didn’t feel too badly used by the weekend.

Kids are different today; when did little girls get so la-de-dah about handling serpents? They got to pick up all the reptiles and amphibians in the critter house, but the poor frogs were neglected, while the python had a proverbial line out the door. In my own troop, there might have been one snake-handler, and the rest of us would have had the vapors. In this one, the only one who waited outside with a trembling heart was one of the mothers.

Snakes get a bad rap. One of the mothers was a military wife, had given birth to her first child in a hospital in rural Alaska. She said a moose cow stood outside the window watching, licking the glass.

(“Why do they lick the glass?” I asked. “I have no idea,” she said. “I was just glad we had a second-floor apartment, because one of my girlfriends was on the first floor, and her windows were always smeared with moose slobber.”)

Anyway, she explained that the first 1,000 moose you see in Alaska are charming, and then they become a pain in the butt. It’s common to call in sick to work because it’s rutting season and a bull moose is standing in your driveway between you and your car. You swiftly learn that a cow with a calf at her side is as dangerous as a black bear. You also learn that unlike horses, moose hip joints are omnidirectional, and they can kick straight out to the side, no problem. And yet her daughter carried a cute stuffed moose. Most people say awww when they see moose along the road.

But the snake, described by its handler as “as friendly and harmless as a kitten, but not as cute”? This is the animal that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

Join the Snake Anti-Defamation League, I say.

OK, then.

I blinked last week and missed perhaps the briefest career in our topsy-turvy world of digital media — the very short story of Ben Domenech, WashPost right-wing blogger. Zip he was hired, zip he was exposed as a rather blatant plagiarist, zip he resigned. Now comes the extended period of keyboard-clattering in which everyone weighs in with an opinion. I’ll keep my own comments short: I hope next time the WashPost doesn’t feel the need to hire a punk. Go ahead and click over and read some of the assembled quotes by the WashPost’s late hire — Coretta King is a communist, Helen Thomas is an “ugly old bat,” blah to the blah to the blah. And here we thought homeschooled children were so much more polite and well-brought-up than the ones polluted and coarsened by “government” schools. His mom must have been using the collected works of Ann Coulter as supplementary reading.

And in the NYT yesterday, a great read on the difficult effort to eradicate the guinea worm. This effort is led by Jimmy Carter, doubtless a figure of pure evil to people like Ben Domenech, but never mind that. It so happens I’m familiar with the guinea worm, having read not one but two mystery novels in which it plays a part — Randy Wayne White’s “Dead of Night” and the much artier “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” (The latter was translated from its original Danish. In London, I found the English version, with the title “Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.” Two countries, separated by a common language.)

It was amazing to learn just how close we are to eradicating guinea worm, the details of which are not recommended to the weak of stomach or those with food fresh on the stomach. However, it’s those last few places where the larvae thrive that are proving most stubborn, and therein hangs a big meaty Sunday NYT tale. Worth the time.

A question on the floor today, open for discussion: Do animals have a sense of humor? Are they, in fact, emotionally manipulative? Or am I projecting?

Years of beating my head against a wall with various horses taught me that I really didn’t have the gift for animal training — I’m far too prone to anthropomorphizing the beasts. Of course, a glance at my badly trained, overindulged dog would have told me the same thing without spending the thousands upon thousands of dollars the horses cost, but oh well.

Still, though — I’m convinced, most days, that my dog is messing with my head.

We ran out of dog food yesterday. Given Spriggy’s feelings about it — oh, that stuff — this is no biggie. We feed him like a cat — in the morning, I throw a scoop into his bowl, which he ignores. Throughout the day, he may or may not nibble at it, and generally has his meal at the end of the day, after we’ve eaten and he’s convinced that no more chicken skin or steak gristle will be falling out of the sky.

But last night was different. He finished his kibble, then licked the bowl, something he never does. He looked up and gave the the Big Dog Eyes: More, please? I’m so hungry, so terribly terribly hungry!

“Sorry, buddy, we’ll replenish supplies tomorrow.”

This morning, more Big Eyes, more pitiful nosing of the empty bowl. Around noon, Kate and I ran some errands and got more Eukanuba. The first thing I did when we got home was rattle a little kibble into the bowl for my poor, starving pup. This time I got the Bored Eyes and a dismissive sniff. He didn’t actually deign to take a bite for several hours.

Messing with my head, I say.

Oy, sorry about the light posting around here today. This cold seems to have come with a special black-dog component. Or maybe it’s the decongestants. All I know is, I have to go “camping” — meaning, sleeping in a heated lodge — with 17 Brownies this weekend, and I’m not looking forward to it. Red wine around the fireplace would help, but all alcohol is strictly prohibited at Girl Scout camps. So Nyquil it’ll be, I fear.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the weather would just break.

All right then, on to the bloggage:

And the dialogue was polished by a bunch of people on the net — the evolution of “Snakes on a Plane,” a movie you’ll hear about…eventually.

Let that be a lesson to all of you.

Let’s try this again after my weekend of S’moring.

Good news and bad news out of Fort Wayne today, and it’s the same news: Carol Tannehill is leaving The News-Sentinel. The paper’s ace restaurant critic and feature writer departs soon to become editor of Home Cooking magazine, down Berne way. Alan used to be her boss, and I know how much he relied upon her, and how popular she was with readers.

Some of her best work wasn’t even food-related; she could really write a personal essay. I think my favorite was about her father’s home movies, which were years ahead of their time — on Christmas morning, he made them get out of bed multiple times, so he could get several angles and good coverage shots. She also did an outstanding job describing her breast-reduction surgery, which wasn’t easy, I’m sure.

So that’s the bad news and the good news — bad for the paper, good for her.

In that spirit, of food and journalism, here’s a recipe for pumpkin muffins. I made them tonight and served them with split-pea soup. It’s really too late in the season for that soup, which is wintry, and the muffins are better in fall. But when it’s 30 degrees, I figure it doesn’t really matter. I clipped the recipe from The New-Sentinel oh…two, maybe three redesigns ago. It’s from Jane and Michael Stern’s “Taste of America” column, and the muffins are credited to the Publick House in Sturbridge, Mass. So:

Pumpkin muffins

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup light vegetable oil
2 eggs
3/4 cup canned pumpkin
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease 12-cup muffin tin, or line with paper muffin cups.

Mix sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkins.

Sift together flour, baking powder, soda, salt and spices.

Quickly stir together both mixtures and fold in nuts and raisins. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full. Bake 18 to 20 minutes, until golden brown. Cool and eat.

I have been neglecting my daily Jon Carroll click some days lately. Is it me or him? I’d say him, but hey — everyone slumps sometimes. I’m willing to ride it out.

Well, today at least, he’s back. If nothing else, it’s good to see that in San Francisco at the very least, you can refer to anti-gay activists as “vile,” “cretins” and “overbusy, underbrained worms.”

Anyway, I know this is preaching to the choir, but hey:

My older daughter is a lesbian. She is also the single mother of an adopted child, working to make and sustain a family with jaw-dropping tenacity. I am a member of that family, but she is the head of it. The idea that any part of her social agenda involves the destruction of the family is insulting and stupid. She adopted a child, which means that a child who would not have had a home now has one. It means that a child who would not have rested safely in a mother’s arms now does so. These are real family values, not the poison spouted by these thoughtless, gossip-mongering abominations.

Bring it on, baby.

The vernal equinox sort of caught me flat-footed this year. Normally, as a godless heathen, I like to welcome this pagan holiday with cups of mead and fertility rituals. Alas, in Michigan, as noted yesterday, the first day of spring is likely to, well, suck out loud. Sure, you’ve got your longer days, your clear spring sunshine, even two inches of daffodils trying to emerge in the back yard, but it hadn’t cracked 30 by the time of this morning’s dog walk. Plus, I hab a code, the first of the season (the cold season, not spring). How cruel, to avoid illness all winter, then get flattened on the first day of spring. I’ve banished myself to the snoring room. I am a temple of disease. My breath is vile. Pity me.

Actually, I should be grateful. If this had hit during the Busy Period, I’d have been a lot more miserable.

So, then, a little lite bloggage before I go back to bed with a mildewy John D. MacDonald paperback:

Thanks to Eric Zorn for finding The 20 Most Important Tools Ever, a list compiled by Forbes. Eric suggested trying to guess No. 1 before you click over, so I did, and I failed. I guessed the stirrup, based on something I read a while back, which said the stirrup changed the world, because it allowed a rider to carry and deploy weapons while astride, and gave the world Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and all the rest of it.

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, the idea of human history changing because of some relatively simple invention. There was a show on one of those grown-up channels — Discovery, probably — many years ago; I think it was called “Connections,” and tried to make those leaps. I liked it because it debunked lots of conventional wisdom and approached everything from left field. The episode on how family togetherness was slaughtered by central heating was simply a hoot.

(This was also the show that revealed Spriggy’s most baffling personality trait. Before they went to a break, the host would throw out a little quiz for you to think about during the commercials. In one, he asked, “What year was the inflatable rubber tire invented? 1825? 1895? Or 1888?” Alan asked Spriggy, who was lying next to the couch. When he got to “1888,” Spriggy leaped to his feet, barking furiously. He still does. Say “1888,” and he starts barking like Lassie giving a briefing on Timmy’s well adventures. What is he trying to tell us? I’m still puzzled. P.S. 1888 was the correct answer.)

Anyway, I was wrong about the stirrup. Take your own guess. I’m going back to bed.