On the one hand, it’s pretty hard to argue with the local posters to various internet forums around here, who are calling the current search for Jimmy Hoffa’s body a May-sweeps perennial. We’ve only been here a little over a year, and this is the second we’ve seen in that time; the last one had agents sawing up pieces of floorboard in a Detroit house to test for 30-year-old DNA evidence — all while a TV news crew stood by recording. (“Is that a bloodstain? Could be spilled Pepsi.”)

But this one does seem better than most — the FBI is executing a search warrant, the agent in charge says the info is pretty good, and who knows? Maybe they’ll finally find him, or Judge Crater, or any of the other missing-presumed-dead cases still open out there.

But I’m not holding my breath.

…then by all means, don’t go to this helpful site, which, though in Spanish, contains links to about a gazillion ’80s-era music videos.

Because you’ll get sucked in, you will.

On the bright side, though, they have Rapper’s Delight. Oh, kill me now and clear the calendars.

I was going to link to a story in the Freep today that illustrates and reinforces many of my personal prejudices — my loathing of small towns, high-school sports, most coaches and, especially, jocks under the age of 35. Unfortunately, someone seems to have poured maple syrup into their servers (I suspect jocks and coaches). Check back later.

And now I really do have videos to watch work to do.

UPDATE: OK, the Freep site, while loading slowly, seems to be working. Here’s the story, about a small-town Michigan high-school track coach who held parties for his athletes at his house, featuring alcohol, pornography and (but of course) sexual assault. (Links to related sidebars within the main story.) This went on for several years before it all fell apart. Now he’s going to jail.

I don’t know if there’s more of this sort of thing nowadays or we just hear about it more. I don’t know if it’s a function of young teachers wanting to stay young forever and refusing to grow up. Maybe it’s just criminal stupidity. In this case, I suspect you can add a healthy dollop of deeply suppressed homosexuality to the mix (a side of the coach that he’ll be getting in better touch with behind bars, most likely).

I do know this: When a grown man encourages teenagers to call him “the Dizzle,” the best course of action for the latter party is to run in the opposite direction.

A fine, disgusting read. Enjoy!

Ah, to be a child in Ohio in the ’60s and ’70s. The simple pleasures — the misadventures of Woody Hayes, a swimming pool in flat landscape on a hot summer day, waiting for the new license plates. Yes, that’s what I said; the plates changed every year, and you always waited to see what the new colors would be. The introduction of the “Seat Belts Fastened?” plate in the early ’70s was, simply, well… it was the introduction of a license plate, but it was something you noticed.

Well. Time passes, state budgets shrink and you no longer get a license plate every year. It’s silly, really, when you can go to a five-year plan on plate replacement and show current registration with a sticker in the corner. But some states don’t even do that, and one of them in Michigan.

When I registered my car here, I was offered the usual silly array of alternatives — plates for a Michigan alma mater, lighthouse preservation, or just flag-waving patriotism. For only $5 more, I could get a plate showing the Mackinac Bridge, totem of much of my early U.P. partying years.

But I spurned them all. I wanted the navy blue blazer of license plate-hood, the venerable white-on-blue plate known only as standard.

And I do mean venerable. The plate has been in use since 1982 with only minor tinkering. This leads to a curious sight in this wintry, car-crazy state — like-new cars bearing salt-corroded license plates. (This is an illustration, but it’s a pretty good facsimile.)

Before we had the white-on-blue plate, Michigan had a white-on-black one. During the economic upheavals of the early 1980s, when thousands of out-of-work Michiganders headed for the Sunbelt in search of a better life, some welcoming Texans referred to them, sneeringly, as “the black-tag people.” You can see why, when the price of oil collapsed a few years later and Texans were being foreclosed upon, my eyes stayed dry.

Anyway, after a mere 25 years, we’re getting a new license plate. No design yet, but they’re saying most likely we’re going with the same ol’ same ol, only blue-on-white, this time. The state says it’s time to make plates using newer “reflector technology” and anyway, 25 years is a long time to be rockin’ the same plate, even if it is a classic.

Having lived through Indiana’s misbegotten Wander plate, the much nicer blue-and-white and, finally, the “back home again/www.IN.gov” fiasco, I’m just hoping whatever discussion the state needs to have about this will blow over quickly.

OK, then. It has been raining for most of the past two weeks, but not today. In fact, the sun is shining. I’m going to exercise one of the perogatives freelancing gives you and go outside. It’s not supposed to last long, so carpe diem.

You know, I’d get a lot more done if some people, and yes I’m talking about you, Eric Zorn, would stop posting links to the Ten Worst Album Covers of All Time.

Anyway, it’s a crap list, because it leaves off Mom’s Apple Pie, which I should probably warn you is sorta NSFW. The cover was stupid and juvenile and the music, horrendous.

The next week or two is going to suck, audibly. The wood for the floor was delivered today, followed by a visit from the Floor Guy. Who says the schedule is not looking good for a wrap-up this week. The wood needs to acclimate to our microclimate before it can be installed, and then it has to do some other things, and sanding is involved, and the bottom line is, if we want it done right — at this point I always want to jump up and say, “No! Do it wrong!” — it’ll probably be next week before we can reclaim our family room and living room, which is currently serving as a storage room for all the family-room furniture.

Which means we’ve been driven upstairs for our living space. The good news: Alan hooked the cable box up to the primitive tiny upstairs TV, so we can all watch “American Idol” tomorrow night gathered on our bed like a heap of puppies. Yeah, I know it sounds fun, and it probably will be.

At least the kitchen is still operable. When we did our kitchen floor in Fort Wayne, I thought I’d explode if I had to eat another takeout meal.

Because Alan moved the cable box, I got to see “The Sopranos.” Discuss.

I love the way David Chase keeps slammin’ the truth in our faces. All those weeks building sympathy for poor Vito Spatafore, taking his first tentative steps out of what had to be a very large walk-in closet, making his new home in Gaytown, N.H., and then pow — he reminds us that, at heart, like all of these characters, Vito’s just a murderin’ piece of shit. Tony, self-described “strict Catholic,” cheats on his wife, kills his nephew’s fiance, spreads evil like a slug trail… but objects to a homosexual business associate. Carmela, ditto strict Catholic, goes over to bring her destitute friend a surprise birthday celebration, wearing a fur coat and driving yet another in a long line of fancy cars purchased with ill-gotten gains. And then leans on her husband for not leaning on the building inspector harder, so she can build her spec house with substandard materials.

Sooner or later, everyone will get what they deserve. (Bobby Bacala already has, obviously.) I used to think the series had to end with Tony dead. Now I’m thinking it has to be worse. One of the kids has to go. Obviously, it’s A.J., but maybe Meadow, too. We shall see.

So: Bloggage

Mitch Harper at Fort Wayne Observed reports — and I think he’s correct — that my ex-newspaper, The News-Sentinel, is the only one of Knight-Ridder’s Dejected Dozen to have no reported or rumored buyer. I will repeat what I learned in my final years there, which may be the most important thing I learned there: Never say it can’t get any worse, because it can always get worse. Al.Ways. And probably will. Not that not having a buyer is the worst thing in the world — I doubt McClatchy will leave them beside the road like a foundling — but man, it’s gotta be humiliating. Psychological wounds are the worst.

This week’s edition of the Grosse Pointe News carries this headline, in 72-point type at the top of Page One:

Nobel laureates opine

I’m sorry I can’t tell you much about the story — I let my subscription lapse, and wouldn’t you know the first missed copy would be one with “opine” out front — but I assume they’re referring to the gathering Jack Lessenberry talks about in this column. He mentions his disgust that neither of the Detroit dailies saw fit to cover this event, although I guess only the most foolish optimist would point out, “But if they had, they wouldn’t have used ‘opine’ in the headline.”

So I won’t.

I used to work with an opiner, that is, a woman who used “opine” instead of “said” in her copy. She was also fond of “averred,” “demurred” and, on one memorable occasion, “ejaculated.” (All over her copy!) I think I’ve talked about her here before, so I’ll spare you my personal opining on the practice. There are editors who claim no word other than “said” will do, and I agree that 99 percent of the time it’s the only choice, although I reserve the right to use “asked” and “added” where it seems appropriate. Like “said,” both are pretty invisible in copy, and in some cases even more so; I’m picky enough to be bothered by reading, “‘At what cost are we willing to continue this war?’ she said.”

At least, that’s my opine-ion. As I am known to aver.

This weekend was one for computer maintenance. I did a big backup to the big LaCie, then beefed up the blogroll here at NN.C, a chore I’ve been putting off forever. I started putting in all my bookmarks, then realized I only visit about one-third of them on a regular basis. So I made that the new criteria for the blogroll — I have to visit regularly. Some I visit less regularly — Laura Lippman’s main site is only updated monthly, but it’s always worth visiting, particularly this month’s update, “Waiting for Lippman.” Ashley Morris, regular commenter here, is getting a lot of traffic as he emerges as the Rudepundit of post-Katrina New Orleans. But the ones I’m visiting are the ones I include. Suggestions for new ones welcome. And read nothing into the order; the server randomly scrambles them with each page reload.

Another housekeeping detail: If something important happens on “The Sopranos” this week, I don’t want to hear about it. We’re having a new floor installed in our family/TV room, and we’ll be getting only non-premium, non-digital cable on our primitive 13-inch bedroom TV, so not a word. I’ll catch up via On Demand later and we can all have a nice chat, but this week? Mum’s the word.

I guess I should add, if blogging gets intermittent in the following week, don’t call 911. I’ll have my hands full keeping the house from falling into full disaster-area status, and the dog out of the polyurethane.

On to the bloggage:

Everyone who goes to Paris remarks on the dogs in restaurants; every establishment seems to have a house pooch, who loafs around the joint while customers fail to freak out over the germs. My sole objection to having dogs in restaurants here is that they’d be American dogs — some overbred, others undertrained, still others wearing Burberry raincoats. Having watched the incredible bad karma spread by a single shithead who decided to bring his macho pit bull onto the playground at Foster Park in Fort Wayne one afternoon — and then put the dog down the slide, wheee, and no I’m not kidding — I kind of lost my trust in my fellow dog owner. (If I’d had a gun, I would have confronted him. If I’d had a cell phone, I would have called the police. Since I had neither, but did have a three-year-old, I opted instead to just leave.)

But even if dogs were allowed in restaurants here, I’d hate for it to be because of these people, examined in the Sunday NYT:

Health care professionals have recommended animals for psychological or emotional support for more than two decades, based on research showing many benefits, including longer lives and less stress for pet owners.

“I had never heard of emotional support animals before,” said Steve Hanson, an owner of 12 restaurants including Blue Fin and Blue Water Grill in Manhattan. “And now all of a sudden in the last several months, we’re hearing this.”

Oh, I only wish it were April Fool’s Day:

One 30-year-old woman, a resident of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., said she does not see a psychotherapist but suffers from anxiety and abandonment issues and learned about emotional-needs dogs from a television show. She ordered a dog vest over the Internet with the words “service dog in training” for one of the several dogs she lives with, even though none are trained as service animals. “Having my dogs with me makes me feel less hostile,” said the woman, who refused to give her name.

“I can fine people or have them put in jail if they don’t let me in a restaurant with my dogs, because they are violating my rights,” she insisted.

It’s a good thing she wasn’t identified, because otherwise she’d be risking about a million pieces of hate mail pointing out exactly why she has abandonment issues. Would you trust this woman to bring a well-trained, well-behaved dog into a restaurant? You think Foofie would like quietly at the feet of her mistress and wait until it was time to go? I don’t. If Foofie starts coming into restaurants, I’m going to start carrying mace.

For Foofie if he comes near my entree. And then, for Foofie’s owner. Put this in your emotional support pipe and smoke it, babe.

Never say never, I know. But jeez louise:

28-year-old Broward woman found dismembered by alligator in canal

Abducted while jogging! See what exercise can do to a person?!

“She was pulled in, in my opinion,” said Joshua Perper, chief medical examiner for Broward County. “If she had been dragged I would have expected to see grazing marks.” She died quickly, Perper said, of massive blood loss after the alligator broke one of her legs, ripped off one arm, and then the other. She didn’t drown — Perper didn’t find much water in her lungs.

I don’t know whether to be grateful that the story didn’t explain what “grazing marks” are, vis-a-vis alligator feeding. Worst single detail, for me:

Alligators tend to wander in May, the peak of mating season.

Ewwww.

Man, I’m looking forward to the end of “American Idol.” I don’t know how much more false empathy I can muster. Although the show has its entirely unexpected pleasures — Priscilla Presley being this week’s. I notice they never showed her in anything tighter than a long-medium shot, and that was a wise choice. She really is frightful-looking.

And what a tragedy. That woman was a rare beauty, and now…this. I’ve always thought being born beautiful was like being born rich — something over which you have no control, but unquestionably a real born-on-third-base deal. I know both situations have their downside, but ultimately, if you ask yourself, “Would I trade the set of problems attached to being rich/beautiful for the set of problems attached to being poor/ugly?” — the answer is obvious. Looks, like money, fade with time. Priscilla Presley’s 60 years old, a grandmother, financially fixed for this and five more lifetimes, has no discernible “career” to maintain, so, you know, come to terms with a few wrinkles. If you choose to turn yourself into The Joker, well, too bad.

And I can’t believe Chris went home last night. I had him at 5-2 to win the whole thing. Now it’s an Elliott/Taylor finale, IF THERE’S A JUST GOD IN THE HEAVENS, and we can all stop yakking about this in two weeks.

Someone else asked what I thought of “Big Love,” now that it’s in the homestretch. Verily, it hath grown on me. As a lifelong Midwesterner, where there are so few Mormons they’re probably outnumbered by Hare Krishnas, I find the look at that culture interesting. (Oh, I know that polygamy isn’t LDS-approved, not anymore; I’m talking about the general vibe.) I love the outfits, especially at the Compound. I’m queered by how barnyard-y the whole polygamous-in-the-suburbs scene is. But I like how the show, which I feared would ultimately sell polygamy as an alternative lifestyle, is pretty honest about how much it really sucks, along with whatever pleasures it might hold. Three squabbling women trying desperately to get the attention of the grumpy sperm fountain who lives among, but not with, any of them — it’s not my idea of family, but then, I’m no fundamentalist latter-day saint.

My favorite question about LDS was from the daffy wife in “Angels in America.” Paraphrasing, “If our divine angel was named Moroni, why are we Mormons? Why aren’t we Morons?”

Good question.

Had lunch yesterday with two gentlemen infinitely more powerful and plugged-in than I am; of course both had cutting-edge cell phones (Treo, black Razr — I declined to display my stone age candy-bar Nokia). We briefly discussed the pros and cons of each, and one confessed to checking e-mail on a PDA while driving, then having a slam-on-the-brakes moment.

And you thought it was improved performance in automatic transmissions that killed the stick shift.

Maybe they should incorporate this into one of those new VW commercials. Which I think are fantastic, by the way, a feeling not shared by all, it seems:

Marderosian says she’s heard the complaints — about using “shock value” to sell, about the unpleasant reaction that accident victims might have upon suddenly encountering the commercials. But that misses the point, she says: “We’re trying to get people’s attention, yes, but not purely for shock value.” Instead, the ads are pegged to the Jetta’s four-star (frontal) and five-star (side) ratings in NHTSA’s tests.

I’m consistently amazed by the self-image so many Americans have of themselves — flinty, swaggering, cowboy-independent folks who Built This Country, dammit — and yet, we still find room to complain about the honest depiction of an event that happens every day in every city in the country, during an activity (driving) that virtually all adults participate in every day. Around here in SUV-land, one of the stock defenses for driving these behemoths is how “safe” they are, how “protected” the passengers are. And here are these little Jettas getting T-boned, while people walk away. Sacrilege!

The job I do in my evening hours involves reading health-related news, and every so often, I kick up a doozy. From Reuters:

The portrayal of coma and awakening from a coma is grossly inaccurate in major motion pictures, research shows, and many moviegoers are unable to tell fact from fiction.

Oh, get OUT. Really?

In a review of 30 movies from 1970 to 2004 with actors depicting prolonged coma, coma experts found that only two showed a “reasonably accurate” representation of coma.

That’s nothing. I once saw a telenovela in which a woman was having her bandages removed after eye surgery, apparently designed to restore her eyesight. (I base this not on my vast knowledge of Spanish, which is pretty much limited to “no mas margarita, por favor” and being able to count to eight, but on the fact I’ve seen the same scene in about eight million old movies.) Around and around her head the doctor unwound the gauze, until he got to the end, the bandages fell away and revealed — madre de dios! — two elaborately made-up eyes, including false lashes.

But back to comas. The problem is, of course, that people base their health-care decisions on something they saw on “ER,” and sometimes these people have influential columns in national newspapers and, well, they should know that problems with the depiction of coma included comatose patients, without feeding tubes, suddenly waking after years of being in a coma with no physical or mental problems and with a Sleeping Beauty-like appearance, as the story points out.

Well, I saw “Kill Bill,” too, and I never believed that stuff about Uma Thurman waking up after four years and being able to kick ass moments later. I’m such a skeptic.

But here’s the punchline:

One film showed a comatose person tapping out a message in Morse code with his finger. “We expected misrepresentation – not gross representation,” Eelco Wijdicks told Reuters Health.

Someone tell Peggy Noonan.

Speaking of health news, looks like my old congressman is up to his usual tricks, too:

The upcoming National STD Prevention Conference, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other groups, has just been given an unhealthy shot of ideology. The conference was supposed to include a symposium designed to explore how abstinence-only sex education may undermine other efforts to reduce STDs. The papers and panelists had gone through the customary vetting of peer review. But now the symposium has been abruptly retooled to include two proponents of abstinence programs—and to exclude a well-respected detractor. This is bad news, not only because abstinence-only work is scientifically unfounded but also because the switch represents a new level of government intrusion into the peer-review process of a major scientific meeting.

It’s from Slate. And it goes on:

So, who’s responsible for the switcheroo? Two senior scientists connected to the conference said they were told that Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., had intervened.

But of course. A guy who doesn’t believe in evolution would likely not be swayed by science, no matter what it has to say.

I have to stop torturing myself like this.

Yesterday’s day off gives way to today’s day on, so to speak. The good news: It involves a real grown-up lunch, which means I’d best go start the vast grooming process required, these days, to make me even remotely presentable. What makes your coma special? Discuss it in the comments.