What sort of hot-times-in-Tijuana photos must Bob Greene have in his possession to hold the New York Times op-ed page editors in his sway? With all the fine, fine writers available in a country of 300 million souls, why is he the designated correspondent from the land between the coasts?

There must be a better way to start a Thursday, which holds little promise of being a very good one, than with Bob doing his faux-naif hayseed act in New Orleans.

After first noting that the city’s convention center is hosting its first back-to-business trade show this week — the American Library Association; hi, Connie! — he takes note of the obvious:

Last September, if you had dared to suggest that by June this city would be playing host to genteel trade shows inside this building, shows punctuated by the lilting sounds of laughter and music, you would not have been believed. The convention center, as much as the Superdome, was New Orleans’s symbol of wretched helplessness, of utter degradation.

Noted, Bob. Although I would have believed this second-person “you.” This country has a long history of swift repair of disaster areas, when we’re motivated to do so. It took about that long to cart the wreckage of two 110-story towers off a 16-acre site in lower Manhattan in 2002; what’s some new carpet and Sheetrock? But I digress. Let’s join Bob in slack-jawed wonder: …to walk through the newly reopened parts of the 3.1-million-square-foot complex next to the Mississippi River was to shake your head at what has been shaken off.

(I wonder if he’ll share some details, what we journalists call “color.” Looks like we’re in luck.)

“Never Have Dry Skin Again,” a sign at a booth offering moisturizing lotion invited. “Need Relief?” beckoned another booth, promising cures for “bunions, corns and calluses.” The business of the convention was books, but no potential want of the out-of-towners conducting that business went unaddressed. The Massage Break booth, “Targeting Convention Tension,” offered rubs of the neck, back and shoulders, for $35.

I feel like I’m there! More, please!

Actually, I’m in awe. Note that Bob manages to get in the name of the Massage Break booth, its marketing slogan, and the fact it offers rubs of “the neck, back and shoulders,” along with the price. As though, without these details, we might have trouble imagining such a thing, or could dangerously assume that the rubs were of other body parts.

Where there was hunger and thirst, now there is abundance: more cold bottles of designer water, soft drinks and juice, placed in coolers every few dozen feet, than the visiting conventioneers could possibly drink; so many restaurants and food stations that there were seldom long lines. Where the refugees waited days for someone to feed them, the Allegro Pasta booth now offered linguini with a choice of marinara or Alfredo sauce.

The contrast…my head is spinning! There’s water now? And food? Where only six months ago there was hunger and thirst? I can’t believe it. (And more padding, too: Not just water, but “soft drinks and juice;” not just linguini, but “a choice of marinara or Alfredo sauce.”)

Connoissseurs of Bob may suspect we’ve stumbled across what we journalists call his chosen padding device motif. This is how the pros work, children. Such exquisitely chosen nuggets of pure irony will drive his point home — that once this was a place of misery, and now it’s a convention center again.

The floors of the convention hall’s far concourses have been polished so ferociously that they gleam…

Where in September exhausted people prayed for rescue, a wheel-of-fortune game was now being played. …

There are moments of actual human contact; Bob gets quotes from a cashier and a security guard. The latter was trapped in the center after the storm: “We just kept thinking, ‘Maybe today is the day someone will come and get us,’ ” he said. “You can’t erase those memories.” Now, you take this the way you want — after all, Bob is a best-selling author and NYT op-ed contributor and I’m unemployed — but if you had an actual eyewitness to that experience in front of you, talking, wouldn’t you try for a better quote than the one we heard over and over and over again while the event was going on?

OK, a quibble.

I think it would have been fun to hear from a librarian, too. Librarians are smart people, though. One might make a rude comment about Bob’s career arc or the quality of his work. Probably safer to stick with security guards.

Enough Bob, then. I should just be grateful that he hasn’t come to Detroit yet, where Martha Reeves, once leader of the Vandellas, now sits on the city council:

Where once she sang “Dancing in the Streets,” now she presides over pothole maintenance on those same streets… She once crooned that she had “Nowhere to Run,” and today she cannot run from constituents… She said her love was like a heat wave, and now a heat wave is cause for concern in a city like Detroit…

Best not give him ideas.

Actually, if you’re in a pissy mood today, this is bracing. Via FWObserved, a new owner of one of the Knight Ridder orphans, rips Prince P. Anthony a new one:

On one of his first visits to the Star-Telegram during the spring of 1997 after buying the newspaper, Ridder sent the executive suite into a tailspin. Publisher Wes Turner had been on the job only a few months, and here he was in the midst of his first corporate dilemma. His new boss was irate.

And so they did, just (one can only hope) in time for Chairman Ridder to make his next tee time after giving one of his holier-than-thou speeches on the urgent importance of good journalism.

Hee. He came to Fort Wayne once. Hands were wrung and brows were mopped, certainly, but mostly: Asses were kissed.

Oh, stop it. How about some tasty bloggage:

A still-employed Chicago Tribune columnist, Eric Zorn, cuts to the heart of it in his reaction to Barack Obama’s dumb speech earlier this week: Strawman to Barack Obama: Uncle!

You all enjoy. I’m off to do a rewrite.

So, after my 3,000-word job last week, which came at the last minute and so counts as a financial windfall, I was feeling flush. Went to Lowe’s on Monday and bought a ceiling fan for my office. What’s $119? I earned it!

Came home and found the dishwasher had finally given up the ghost. There’s $400 right there. Then, yesterday, I spilled half a cup of coffee on the couch, which will necessitate a visit by Stanley Steemer. Might as well have them do the carpet while they’re here; it needs it — $200 more.

What is that deathless line of Ice Cube’s? Didn’t have to use my AK / I’d have to say, it was a good day. I need one of those days.

I guess yesterday was pretty good, coffee spill and all. There were many fine, fine one-liners about the Limpbaugh affair:

Who knew the EIB Network stood for Erection in a Bottle? — TBogg.

Men have needs, and if Viagra enables the little fella to jut proudly from the folds of the dragon kimono bequeathed to Rush by the late Allan Bloom, it is not for us to cast judgement. — James Wolcott

I spent much of yesterday, the final day of existence for Knight Ridder, jotting down notes for a possible essay on Life in the KR Minors, a sector of the company overlooked by …pretty much everyone. I say “possible” because I’m not sure I want to brand myself as unemployable forever and ever, but I figure if I make it zingy enough, someone might be dumb enough to hire me later. I dunno, it may just end up as notes for a comic novel, who knows? I sent an e-mail to a fellow exile, asking for anecdotes I didn’t remember. He sent this:

There was the time the newspaper did three polls during the mayor’s race between Win Moses Jr., the incumbent, and Paul Helmke. The polls were at the start, in the middle, and eve of election, and fairly well mirrored the final outcome, an upset by Helmke. These were done by a professional polling firm. The next race The News-Sentinel had one poll, done by in-house pollsters in the marketing department. The third elex for Fort Wayne, our polling consisted of a photog asking man on the street questions in front of the library/City-County Building about who they plan to vote for in November. The photographer had to ask the questions and take down the answers because a reporter wasn’t available that day to help out, being assigned something else.

Stop it, you’re killing me. Anyone else want to contribute? You know where to reach me.

I don’t understand. Why would Rush Limbaugh even need Viagra, especially for a vacation to the Dominican Republic?

I mean, it’s not like he’s married.

Like 99 out of 100 tween girls in the Pointes, Kate has a pair of Crocs this summer. For a pair of plastic shoes, they’re priced a little steeply at $25, but eh, it’s summer and she’s never going to be 9 years old and thrilled by turquoise plastic shoes again. (I hope.) However, buying the shoes is only the beginning. Perhaps because everyone has a pair, some in several colors, the next step has to be personalization. After some discussion about the wise use of one’s allowance, we went online to buy a few Crocs charms to stick into the holes.

If you look at the link immediately above, you’ll see the splash screen features a shoe with “LOVE” spelled out in letter charms. I told Kate all about Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter” and how amusing and cool it would be if she got charms so that one shoe said “LOVE” and the other “HATE.” Astonishingly — astonishingly! — she rejected this idea, perhaps perceiving that she had grown out of the age when she could be propped up in a stroller and dressed in a T-shirt reflecting her mother’s political opinions.

Still, it would be an amusing sight gag for a mean-girl character in a contemporary teen movie. At least as long as Crocs stay in style. Which, given the time it takes to get a movie made, means…forget it.

Man, what a weekend. Pulsating sunshine, azure sky, low humidity, mild temperatures. We/I celebrated by going sailing in fairly light wind, which sort of sucked (but the sunbathing was nonpareil); working on Project Table; riding the bike all over hell ‘n’ gone; watching “Closer” and going on at least a portion of the Grosse Pointe garden tour.

One of the houses featured a long arbor leading from the house to the pool, with years-old roses climbing all over it. The ground beneath was littered with petals; unfortunately, the tour seemed to catch the arbor between blooming cycles. But I was amazed at the thick canes at the base of the plants, and how the thorns were proportionately large. They twined all around the arbor supports, nature’s own razor wire. It wasn’t the sort of place where you’d want to lose your balance and grab a post for support. Which gave me an idea for a fight scene in a movie, where the rich villain and the cool hero are fighting in the arbor, smashing one another against the thorns and tearing the crap out of one another — except the cool hero still looks very, very handsome — before the villain finally dies from…oh, say, a trowel plunged into the throat.

Gardening can be a very violent sport.

Do I have bloggage? I have a bit:

I loved this NYT story about Larry Kramer, the gay playwright and activist, and his brother Arthur. I suspect Larry is a difficult man to have a close relationship with, and yet I came away amazed yet again by the strange bonds of family and love and all the rest of it. The normal heart, indeed.

I know you wake up every morning and ask yourself, “Hey, whatever happened to Maria Schneider, the girl from “Last Tango in Paris”? She became a junkie, among other things. She also starred with Jack Nicholson in “The Passenger,” which is finally being released on DVD. Now you know.

And now I’m going to take a shower. See you later.

Yesterday was a 3K day. That is, I wrote 3,000 words, plus a few more. For purposes of perspective: For my newspaper friends, that’s about 100 inches of copy by most measures. Ambitious novelists strive for 1,000 words a day. Graham Greene used to write something like 487, no more and no less, and knock off for the day even if he had more in him. (Warning: I may be thinking of someone else, but I’m pretty sure it’s Graham Greene.)

And for James Lileks, 3,000 words allows him to barely scratch the surface of his latest strawman takedown.

For a freelancer, 3,000 words is a lot, but not so many when you consider you’re being paid by the word, which gives you the strength to get it done: “Faster! Faster! Our house has been reassessed and we have taxes to pay!” I do recommend light carbs for lunch, however.

While I was smearing my keyboard with my own blood, a kid came to the door. Selling magazines, for some outfit with a name that immediately makes sensible people suspicious — two capital letters separated by an ampersand, plus Enterprises. J&B Enterprises, something like that.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Are you in a crew, traveling around the country by van, sleeping on top of one another in motels? You’re not from around here, are you?”

He nodded. He was from Little Rock, Arkansas. Dressed reasonably well, but a little sour-smelling up close.

“I won’t buy any magazines, because I can’t support the people you’re working for,” I said. “But let me tell you this: If you want to go home, there are numbers you can call. The folks you’re working for are not good people, most likely. You’re not in a safe environment, but you’re an adult, and I guess you can decide for yourself. But just know that if you want out, people can help you.” (Of course, I don’t actually speak in permalinks.)

“How do you know this?” he asked.

“I’m a journalist,” he said. “There have been many stories about these outfits. A bunch of kids were killed in Wisconsin a few years ago, when their van overturned on the freeway.” His eyes widened.

“Are you sure you won’t buy any magazines?” he whined. “I can win a trip.”

“Don’t bet on it,” I said. “Remember, there’s help. Stop back if you want to, and I’ll find you the phone number. And wear your seat belt in that van.”

He didn’t come back. But it’s not often that I get to say, “I’m a journalist” the same way others say “I’m a doctor” or “I’m an FBI agent.” That was amusing.

Do I have bloggage? I have bloggage:

In the Department of the Obvious, Don’t use your cellphone outside in a thunderstorm. Experts agree!

A late-arriving commenter to the thread in which we discussed the sale of my old paper to Ogden Newspapers left a note that most will likely miss, so here it is, front and center:

Ogden owns both of the newspapers in Wheeling, so there’s no real competition. There used to be some competitiveness between the news departments, though. There was pride in writing well and putting out a quality product, especially by the afternoon paper. But when Ogden hired a new general manager – a former advertising guy with no editorial experience whatsoever – all that mattered was the bottom line. Formerly free obits now cost $$$. The two newsroom staffs were, for all practical purposes, merged. No longer was there a separate city editor for each newspaper. Then Ogden bought a few more local papers and was able to eliminate reporters by just taking stories filed for the Steubenville or Martins Ferry newspapers and using them in the Wheeling paper. I left because the pay was so bad and it became evident that management didn’t care one bit about putting out a quality newspaper. I didn’t want my name associated with it.

I repeat: They’ll feel right at home.

There’s a girl here in Grosse Pointe who’s a Presidential Scholar. That’s a pretty big honor; there are only 141 in the whole country. You get to meet the president and bestow an honor of your own, upon a teacher of your choosing. Of course this is a story in the local weekly. Here’s the headline:

Scholar remembers influencial teacher

Moral of the story, which I’m sure this girl will take to Harvard in the fall: Presidential scholars don’t choose journalism.

Picked up a Free Press yesterday, which is, I remind you, the winner of Detroit’s newspaper war. Within a decade, they’ll stand astraddle the pile of bloody corpses alone and bellow their terrible thanks to the heavens. (And won’t that be something to see, eh?) The paper seemed thin, and was. Ah, but it was a Tuesday, and my last dim memory of the business side is that Monday and Tuesday are not wide spots in the revenue stream.

Good thing. I started paying attention to the ads. In the A section — varicose vein treatment, the Michigan lottery, air duct cleaning and, oddly, two for different piano stores. (Is June when you buy a piano? I had no idea.) In Metro — more air ducts, cell phones, some odds and ends, the obits. Business? Cars and computers. Sports? Cell phones, a get-rich-quick seminar. Features actually had the most individual ads, mainly for more varicose vein surgery, dentures, calls for volunteers for medical research, something called “virtual colonoscopy.”

Ah, here’s a quarter-page ad for an all-natural colon-cleansing product. A woman is leaping into a man’s arms; both are open-mouthed with delight, and who wouldn’t be, given this headline: “No more constipation, hemorrhoids, or gas!”

Are any themes emerging? Yes. You have varicose veins and dentures and a colonoscopy in your future. You’re in the market for a nice upright piano, now that you have time on your hands to finally learn to play. Hello, grandpa.

Editorial images are shaped in conference rooms, but advertisers know. The little display ads in the classifieds are as clear an indication of a publication’s id as you’ll find. I once wrote a column about this, after noticing that in conservative political rags, you’ll find enticements to build your word power and learn how to stop moving your lips when you read. In liberal ones, many 1-by-2s offering to introduce you to girls who share your beliefs and values. If you want a flattering look in the demographic mirror, try Wired or Vanity Fair. (Although I often wonder, whenever I see ads for Gucci, all of which seem to feature models with limbs that stretch the length of a furlong, and all of whom seem really, really angry. People only smile in the ads for cosmetic dentistry, and even then, in the bigger national books, it’s a knowing, ironic smile. The models — they’ve seen too much to ever beam happily again.)

Ooooh-kay, then. Stop me before I buy a cell phone with Bluetooth ever again. Did you know you can upload MP3s from your laptop and make them ringtones? Why didn’t anyone tell me this? Is it safe to say I’ll be the only person in Metro Detroit — perhaps anywhere — using “Itchycoo Park” as a ringtone? That’s for all callers except those from my home number, which got “Pennies From Heaven,” mainly because it has a nice meandering tinkly piano intro, which is all you’ll hear, anyway. Billie Holiday’s version, if you’re taking notes.

Bloggage:

I’m going to be reading this book, if I can stand it. Josh Marshall has a succinct summation of why: I said he was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you? God help us all.

Ashley has another cri de coeur from New Orleans. I hope he never shuts up.

In Detroit, teenage girls from the suburbs hang out in drug houses. Sometimes they die there.

Jon Carroll was a boy in southern California when Disneyland was being built, which gives his take on it a certain authority: When Disneyland opened, the world was so naive that injectable substances suggested nothing more than a penicillin shot. Later on, a new generation of citizens began visiting Disneyland. The Disneyland brass did not like that development — as the brochures displayed at the museum made clear, Disneyland was a park designed by white people for white people, and employees were forbidden to wear beards, mustaches and a long list of other offensive things that might suggest deviation from the norm. Which was ironic, because people soon discovered that getting loaded and going to Disneyland meant a day of big fun. It was an endless playground for people who said “oh wow” a lot. You could, you know, shake hands with Goofy. (“Shaking hands with Goofy” would be a pretty good code phrase for any number of proscribed experiences.)

And now, a glance at the weather map shows giant red blobs headed our way. Best get this uploaded before the power goes out.

As a rule, I’m not a big observer of the Hallmark holidays, and that includes Mother’s Day. I happily accept the homemade cards and macaroni necklaces, but hold the presents and even the brunch and corsage. In this, I hope I’m in alignment with how we treat Father’s Day already.

Poor dad — his holiday arrives after school is dismissed for the year, so no art project. He doesn’t wear corsages, and does any man need another tie or pair of socks? Nope. So last night we opted to take Alan out. Then we made him pick up the check. Fatherhood in a nutshell.

I regret the restaurant, which I recall as scene of several pleasant lunches last summer, was having a bad night. An approaching thunderstorm was snarling the outdoor seating, and the hostesses didn’t seem to know how to handle it. I had to revert to my Big Bitch mode, which I thought was reasonable under the circumstances, and was certainly rewarded, in the sense that the Big Bitch got us seated, finally. Although things didn’t improve from there.

But I won’t bore you. The day was a cavalcade of small irritations, beginning with the sandwich guy at the shop where I bought lunch for our Sunday sail/picnic. I was wearing one of Zach Klein’s clever T-shirts — this one, in fact. It expresses the opinion that Nascar races are boring. The sandwich guy, not a fan, approved.

“A risky sentiment for the Motor City,” I allowed.

“Well, in some parts of the Motor City, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about,” he said, and switching to a mild African American voice, said, “Um, does that have anything to do with basketball?”

The casual racism I hear in this place simply amazes me. (Along with the stupidity. I mean, here I am — a total stranger and a customer, and this maroon assumes I’m down with his program. No wonder he’s making sandwiches.) To my great relief, his fellow sandwich-makers called him on it. Sorta.

“You can’t say that if you’re not from Detroit,” one said. “If you’re from the suburbs you have to shut up.”

“My family owns property in Detroit,” he said, which is not exactly being from the city, is it. The debate went on in somewhat casual fashion, although you could tell his fellow sandwich-ites didn’t have their hearts in it. He was the guy they had to put up with. Even in a sandwich shop, there are guys you have to put up with. It is the Way of the American Workplace, the way of workplaces worldwide. Go to college, kids! The annoying co-workers only get more well-groomed! They still say the same stupid things, however.

Some years ago, I did a bit of moonlighting at a well-known Fort Wayne radio station. (As opposed to the less well-known one I also worked for.) The office bulletin board was a cavalcade of amusements, including whatever 25th-generation photocopied joke was circulation via fax machine at the moment. Many were about President Clinton; one in particular was about the don’t ask/don’t tell policy regarding gays in the military, then in early discussions. It was a crude cartoon showing the “new uniforms for Clinton’s military” — a limp-wristed pansy in a dress with epaulets. We had a gay editor at the newspaper at the time, but even without him, posting something like that on our newsroom bulletin board — yes, even in Fort Wayne — would have gotten you frog-marched to re-education camp so swiftly your little webbed feet would barely touch the ground.

“Do customers and advertisers ever come up here?” I asked the program director. Sure, he said. “Do you ever think that maybe you don’t want stuff like that in public view?” He was agog. What was the problem? It’s like I was objecting to the “Hang in there, baby” poster with the kitty dangling from a branch.

Progress comes slowly, oh so slowly. But it comes.

The day’s final irritation? We planned to go sailing with Kate and one of her friends, and so the wind blew … at 30 knots. Too windy for young children in a small boat. We had our picnic aboard and then went to the pool to watch the lounge chairs blow over. I had a front-row seat for the day’s brightest spot — a floater alert in the shallow end. Good lord, it was funny. They actually roped the area off with yellow police tape while the head lifeguard retrieved the offending Baby Ruth with a long-handled net and another guard emptied it into what looked like a biohazard bag, but probably wasn’t. Still another sprinkled chlorine pellets around the crime scene and the whole area was left to disinfect for an hour or so while the kids ran around shrieking and saying ewwwwwww.

No word on whether the offender was brought to justice.

So, then. Bloggage:

Ah, the peace, quiet and neighborliness of country life.

Finally saw “Good Night, and Good Luck” over the weekend. I was going to write something about it, but it turns out Lance Mannion already did, and echoes my thoughts pretty much exactly, so why bother?

That should keep you occupied for a while.

A warm round of applause and hearty congratulations to my friend and colleague Ron French, who kicks Ruth Reichl’s restaurant-reviewing fanny off the nightstand this week with his book, “Driven Abroad: The Outsourcing of America.” An expansion of a 2004 Detroit News series, his book examines the exodus of one automotive widget maker — wire harnesses, specifically, once made in the Thumb, then outsourced to Mexico, Honduras and China, with unexpected results in each venue.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…you’ll be grateful you went to college. Although just today, one of Kate’s friend’s moms was telling me about Indian radiologists reading American X-rays and CAT scans.

Ron used to work with me at the News-Sentinel, and later at the Journal Gazette. Oddly, neither paper is mentioned in his author’s bio.

What a story:

For the fifth time in a week, a stash of drugs was found in a cabinet purchased at a Home Depot store in Massachusetts.

Key word there is “fifth.” And they’re still turning up. Mike Royko Memorial Quote of the Year goes to a local police official, who went waaaaaay out on a limb and pronounced it “a smuggling operation.” Thanks, Chief Wiggum.