Look! It’s Chris!

Let’s run down the list, shall we? I saw Springsteen in Chicago, Albert King in Columbus, the Rolling Stones in Cleveland, Warren Zevon in…umm, Columbus, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta and finally Fort Wayne. Saw the Grateful Dead here and there. Saw Jethro Tull, Yes, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, Talking Heads and Elton John when he could still blow the roof off the joint. Um, who else? Too many to recall them all. Saw Linda Ronstadt in Los Angeles, Jimmy Cliff in New York. My very first concert: Grand Funk Railroad, in Columbus, c. 1970 or so, on their “Closer to Home” tour. Alan’s was the James Gang and Brownsville Station, somewhere up in northwest Ohio. My friend Terry tells an I’m-so-old story, about going to Ohio University to see somebody like Sergio Mendez and Brazil ’66 and instead being told there was a last-minute substitution: “A new band we hope you’ll like — Led Zeppelin.”

Best ever: James Brown in Columbus, at a low point in his career in the early ’80s, before “Living in America” and the royalties from all those “I Feel Good” Huggies commercials. He played two shows, rocked the house off its foundations and lived up to his nickname.

Over all those shows and all those years, there’s one place that I would have sworn you’d never, ever see me: Standing in the midst of a bunch of 8-year-old girls and their chubby mothers, all wearing identical “soul patrol” T-shirts, waiting to see the luckiest prematurely gray man in America massacre “Jailhouse Rock.”

Yes, it was “Idols on Tour.” The things we do for our children.

Actually, it wasn’t a wasted evening. I was happy to accompany Kate to her first concert. My parents didn’t take me to mine. My friend’s dad dropped us off and picked us up at St. John Arena. That was when the concept of a parent attending a young person’s entertainment was considered an insult to adulthood. Adulthood was more fun then, as was adolescence. (As were concerts.) Now it’s all packaged and sold to the widest possible demographic slice. Kate likes to listen to Radio Disney in the car, and I’m constantly pointing out how many of the top hits are old songs covered by Disneyfied pop singers — ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Cheetah Girls’ version of “Shake a Tailfeather.” Backbeat provided by the muffled thumping of Ray Charles, spinning in his grave.

Same with “American Idol,” the repackaging of once-great hits by instantly forgettable artists that somehow, perversely, makes great entertainment. The show last night opened with the TV show’s opening theme and graphics on the Jumbotrons, which set the little girls to screaming. It’s their favorite show, only it’s happening right in front of them! It’s like they’re in the Kodak Theater in Hollywood with all the lucky stars’ daughters who get on TV!

Well, not exactly. The first person you miss is Simon Cowell. The next one you miss is Ryan Seacrest. The show desperately needs a unifying force, an M.C., someone to guide these innocent lambikins through the jungle of an arena-size rock show, because the biggest thing these folks lack is not talent but scale. They really are just like us, in all senses of the word. Standing on that big stage in the cavernous Joe Louis Arena, they were the opposite of Lawrence Olivier. You’ve probably heard how Sir Larry had trouble dialing down his stage technique for the movies, where the big expressions and gestures you need in the theater just translate as hamminess. Katharine McPhee is a beautiful girl, but she needs TV to tell us so. Stripped of multiple camera angles, she’s just a wan little figure in black, sitting — always sitting, with this girl! — on top of the walkway, singing that black-horse-in-a-cherry-tree song.

You know who has a clue? Kellie Pickler, of all people. She made jokes about how much her life has changed from a year ago, when she was “rollerskatin’ burgers around Sonic” and now look at her — a new haircut and a red bustier. But even she needed help, and I offer it now: Kellie, just because the song has “walking” in the title doesn’t mean the best way to illustrate it is to walk around the stage. Patsy Cline is not amused.

Some were revealed as empty balloons. Yes, Bucky Covington, I’m talking about you, or at least the near-inaudible version of “singing” you’re collecting a paycheck for. Others got the strange-new-respect award. Chris Daughtry, for all his pouting over not winning, will be the only one with a career in five years, except maybe Elliott Yamin, who will earn a living the rest of his life as a lounge-type wedding singer, or singing jingles or doing that sort of mid-level, out-of-the-spotlight work that fills Nashville subdivisions with respectable working musicians. Ace is ready to go back to lifeguarding, or whatever it is he does. Paris will be singing contemporary Christian music in megachurches. Lisa Tucker can continue in the road company of “The Lion King,” or wherever they found her.

By the time Taylor Hicks made his entrance, through the middle of the house — I shit you not — so we could watch him fight off the clawing hands of the Soul Patrol, I was ready to be rocked. I wasn’t. He, too, was well-nigh inaudible, although it’s hard to sing when you’re doing all that spaz-dancing he’s so famous for. I only hated him briefly, when he dedicated that ghastly “Do I Make You Proud” song to “all the troops.” Well that’s pretty damn cheeky, don’t you think? Asking soldiers getting their butts shot off for affirmation? “Do I make you proud, sergeant?” Yes, that’s why we’re fighting: Truth, justice, Big Oil and American Idol. Give me a break.

But the show had many moments. Paris and Lisa did a nice duet on “Waterfalls,” the TLC song with the nonsensical chorus. Chris did “Whole Lotta Love” and managed to not disgrace himself. The evening passed in a pleasant blur of singalongs and exhortations to scream.

But there was this: I lost count of all the Motown songs we heard, and no one even mentioned their birthplace. It was up to Taylor to finally make the connection, and it came, God help me, when he was introducing “Hollywood Nights,” “by a guy who’s from here, Bob Seger.” Good lord. Would it have killed the showrunner to jot it down on an index card for Paris or Lisa to memorize? “It’s my pleasure to sing this Stevie Wonder song in the city that gave him to us?” Huh? Maybe I’m too sensitive. By the time the finale came — “Living in America,” what else? — I’d forgotten the slight and was just thinking about beating the traffic home.

Congratulations are in order for my young Fort Wayne friend Zach Klein, who has achieved the American dream at the tender age of 23: Selling his new-media internet company to deep-pocketed old media — story here — for big, big bucks. Selling price undisclosed, but you can bet there are many digits to the left of the decimal point. Enough that he will be buying the drinks next time, and every time until I get bought out by Barry Diller, too.

I met Zach when he was still in college and we were two of the very few bloggers in town. He was home from Wake Forest for the summer, interning at Lincoln National (and not liking it too much). We had our own Meetup, at Chili’s on Coliseum Boulevard. We had margaritas, which I think were purchased illegally, because Zach was not yet 21. It’s not every day that I get the opportunity to contribute to the delinquency of a minor at my age, so you can see why I remembered it.

I have to say, his company’s main site, CollegeHumor.com, gives me the willies. In my day, when we wanted to humiliate someone who was passed out drunk, we just took a photo — Sharpies never entered the picture. (Please don’t get me started on The Shocker.) And yet Zach is the guy for whom the phrase “what a nice young man” was invented. He stopped after one margarita at our Meetup. I don’t think he even owns a Sharpie. Although maybe he’s just continuing the long young-person’s tradition of bullshitting his elders. It’s entirely possible.

Zach’s blog. His Flickr page. His Vimeo page, another of his startups. Invest early.

UPDATE: Oh, and not to pile on, but Fort Wayne Observed takes note of what my ex-employer thought this story was worth. To recap, this is a local kid (now lives in NYC, but parents and siblings still in the Fort), about to become a multimillionaire at 23, previous stated interest in becoming a patron of his hometown’s worthy causes, background story on file and winner of the newspaper’s own high-school scholarship competition six years ago. This story was, wait for it … a one-paragraph brief in the business digest. The other paper wrote nothing. Well, Zach always was modest.

More bloggage today:

Another friend sent me a link to one of his friend’s photos — you know, we should start an internet networking site…oops, Zach is already hooked up with one of those, too… — of the Gay Games, last month in Chicago. Endlessly fascinating stuff — ballroom-dancing lesbians and no-surprise-there bodybuilders, and my personal favorite: Brokeback Mountain on ice. A great gallery. Enjoy.

Well, it’s not like I didn’t suspect this would happen: I spend too much time working on a long, blustery post about the purported terror plot against the Mackinac bridge, and today it’s pretty much blown out of the water — the purported terror plot, that is, not the bridge. Which was my point. It’s not the Amish Popcorn Factory, but sorry, it wasn’t very convincing from the get-go.

This story, from yesterday’s DetNews, lays out the gist: Three Texas men with Arab names (U.S. citizens of Palestinian descent) were apprehended with a) 1,000 prepaid disposable cell phones, and; 2) pictures and video of the Mackinac Bridge. For this they were charged with “providing material support for terrorist acts and terrorism surveillance of a vulnerable target,” and held on $750,000 bond.

Their families said the men were buying the phones up here because they’re scarce in Texas, and they intended to bring them back down south and sell them at a profit. The police were tipped by a Wal-Mart employee after they scored 80 phones in one store. This all happened in the Thumb area, Tuscola County. Terry Nichols country. I guess they know their mad bombers there.

The police and prosecutor pointed out that cell phones can be used as remote detonators for explosives. Then you have your Arab names and your bridge photos. The conclusion was obvious.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I found the defendants’ explanation entirely plausible. I really do. Maybe it’s because I recently snapped several photos of the Mackinac Bridge myself. (See self-incriminating evidence, above.) More to the point, though, the Amish Popcorn factor is rearing its inconvenient head. That is, the Mackinac Bridge? WTF?

A few points to ponder:

** Palestinian terror is a fact, but one thing we know about it is, it’s usually directed against Jews. The northern lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan may be America’s most Jew-free region. I know the Jews had a diaspora, but I don’t think any made it this far. Not even Jane and Michael Stern — the area has some of the most disappointing native cuisine in this or any land.

** While the Mackinac Bridge is a great big feat of American engineering and infrastructure, the fact is, it links two areas of enormous, um, non-consequence to the world at large. At least not flashy, media-ready consequence. Timber moves through here, and raw materials for steel plants and stuff like that, but the closest Wall Street gets to this area are the lovely vacation homes on the lovely lakes. The most severely affected would be the local residents of the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula, deer hunters and other tourists.

** Also, 1,000 phones? Would that be for, what? One thousand IEDs placed along the bridge? Installation could be problematic; even in coveralls and hardhats, I’d think three swarthy Arabs would be spotted by the real work crews. When would they be detonated? Perhaps during the Bridge Walk, the annual Labor Day end-of-summer celebration, in which 50,000 locals and others take one lane of the bridge and hoof it across.

In the second-day story, this was the part that pierced me: “They were in Wisconsin and they drove to the U.P. and then down here,” (their lawyer) said. “The Mackinac Bridge was an amusement to them. On the camera there’s 50 pictures, 20 of the bridge. The rest are a deer, ducks, flowers and trees.”

Deer, ducks, flowers and trees. Three Texas guys enjoying a little break from the heat up north like millions of other tourists, snappin’ pictures. They weren’t model citizens — one was a registered sex offender — but I think it’s safe to say they weren’t al-Qaeda, either.

So you figure, they’re free now, right? I mean, once the prosecutor realized his paranoia, he let them go, correct?

Um, no. Their attorney is pushing for release today, but so far the prosecutor hasn’t said sorry-’bout-that or my-bad or anything. I’ll be looking forward to the day’s events. Maybe they can charge them with something. I suspect they will.

UPDATE: Re: Our conversation in the comments about Michigan cuisine:

It was a severe understatement to call Michigan a culinary wasteland the further north you traveled. Once on a fishing trip with Clete, Warlock had been served a bright yellow chicken gravy on a slab of gray roast beef. With the advent of the microwave ovens he suspected that many of the mom and pop operations rarely cooked, only reheated. He revered the words of an old Jewish literature professor who said the downfall of a nation could be detected in the misuse of language by its public officials, and the disintegration of its eating habits.

– from “Warlock,” Jim Harrison.

I know I used a version of this picture before, several sunflowers-in-the-silver-pitcher episodes ago, but this is why I bought this thing. It might as well get its publicity.

It was a sunflowery day, the kind of day that makes you wish summer would never end, even though I noted with chagrin today that I must start monitoring the front window again. As the sun creeps south, it lengthens its reach into the living room and threatens to bleach the furniture. In winter, a sunny day means the blinds stay closed most of the day. And now…

…I’m starting to sound like Lileks. A better solution: Get some of that bleached-muslin furniture and let the solar radiation make it even whiter..

Finally saw “Syriana.” And finally, was grateful that I’d waited for the DVD, because this is a movie that requires a second viewing, preferably the next day, to sort everything out. But I’m glad I did. Everybody talks about the stars of a movie, and so it seems everyone knows George Clooney packed on a toddler’s weight in fat to play a CIA agent, but why doesn’t anyone ever talk about Chris Cooper? He’s, like, the greatest character actor since Gene Hackman, and I didn’t even know he was in this thing. In the last several years I’ve seen him play a horse trainer, an orchid thief, a Kansas state police detective, a homophobic Marine and now an oilman, and he just disappears into every character. I’d hire him to train my horse and run my oil company, I would. I think he could do it.

Anyway, it’s hard to say what “Syriana” is about, because if I say, “It’s a demi-thriller about the complexities of the global oil business,” that sounds pretty boring, and it’s not, really. You should see it, if you haven’t already, if only for Tim Blake Nelson’s speech about corruption. (“It keeps us safe and warm!”)

Not much today, as I’m busy and blah blah the usual excuses blah blah. Ashley, our regular commenter and longtime pen pal, was in both the L.A. Times and Sun-Times yesterday, and he wasn’t even charged with a felony, AND the stories were on two different topics. Links at his joint.

Meanwhile, as the nation’s threat level remains at red, I’m continuing my pie-related counterprogramming. Today: Mmm…blueberry.

I once walked in on a news photographer printing a picture, back in the pre-digital olden days. The photo was of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s U.N. ambassador. The photog printed the picture several times while I was there, burning and dodging with his fingers, messing with the contrast, goofing with this and that. Finally I asked him what was the big hoop-de-do over what was, after all, a glorified headshot.

“I’m trying to make her look more wrinkly,” he said. “I hate her.”

Huh. Ohhhh-kay. We all have our own ways of wasting time at work — you’re reading one of my favorites — and this seemed to fall somewhere in the midrange of the what’s-the-point scale. If you click the link above, which includes a photo of Kirkpatrick from roughly the same era, you’ll notice several things about her, among them a) she’s no spring chicken, and b) she wasn’t exactly Heidi Klum to start with. She was then nearly 60, and looked like what she is — a public intellectual with a low-maintenance hairdo and no patience for elaborate makeup rituals, unafraid to look her age because she didn’t live in the mirror, but in her mind. I don’t share many of Kirkpatrick’s views, but hey, we can always use more women who don’t give a fat rat’s ass what In Style says about them.

I’m trying to figure what the chances are that some impressionable soul read the story about Kirkpatrick’s speech, looked at the photo printed to enhance her wrinkles and said, “You know, if neoconservatism has no room in it for decent skin-care products, it has no room in it for me.” I’m thinking it’s pretty low. In this, it has approximately the same impact as the infamous Reuters photo that’s the subject of this Slate piece.

The link will take you to both photos, side-by-side — the original picture of a smoldering Beirut skyline, and the one Reuters transmitted to its clients, with the smoke darkened and made a little more bulbous through the clumsy use of Photoshop’s clone tool. This was discovered by bloggers earlier in the week, and made much of.

I dunno. I looked at both pictures and thought: Um, why? That Beirut was bombed is not in question. That smoke was rising was not in question. The smoke was a fact, like Jeane Kirkpatrick’s wrinkles. How many people would look at the smoke-enhanced version and say, “Well, this changes everything.” Again, I’m thinking it’s something like zero.

The rest of that Slate article points out the obvious: That every photo is a lie. This is a duh revelation if there ever was one. Haven’t you ever arrived at a vacation spot and thought, “It looks nothing like the pictures”? Haven’t you ever taken a photo and said, later, “It didn’t look like this”? Hell, haven’t you seen a photo of yourself lately? I look in the mirror and I see the same me I saw 25 years ago. Photos would suggest things are different now. Damn photos.

After years of this, I’ve come up with a pretty simple explanation: A photo is a fact, but a fact is not the truth.

It applies to most of the rest of journalism, too: A story is a collection of facts (or better be). It’s not necessarily the truth.

If you had nothing better to do, you could spend the rest of the year researching the ethics of photojournalism to know why, exactly, it was wrong to enhance Jeane Kirkpatrick’s wrinkles for personal reasons. And you could spend the rest of the next five years writing a book about the truth and lies of photography, but you might as well give up now, because Susan Sontag pretty much covered that waterfront already.

I pity photo editors these days; Photoshop has rocked their world in a million ways, many of them unwelcome. Good Photoshoppers can use the software to make so-so pictures better, good pictures great and every picture a potential firing offense. So many decisions seem so innocuous — a photographer took a Diet Coke can off a coffeetable in a news picture a few years ago, and whole forests had to die to accommodate all the fulmination. Meanwhile, the standards are different everywhere. I work mainly in magazines now, and if you tell a magazine photographer he can’t add or remove things from a picture he’ll quit on the spot; digital manipulation is as necessary as pretty models.

I guess what most interests me about this case is the essential irony of it, which is the same that lies at the heart of the Jayson Blair/Stephen Glass scandals, too — that some people want to be successful journalists so badly that they’re willing to commit the single unforgivable sin in journalism, the one that closes doors forever. That is, to step outside the facts/truth model into the bullshit/lies realm. Even before it was discovered to be a fake, that picture of the roiling smoke was small change. And yet.

…means pie level peach.

I mean, you can’t mess around when you’re at level red. Mere coconut cream ain’t gonna cut it (so to speak). Desperate times call for heavy pie artillery. So it’s peach today, because nothing’s better.

Could have done a better job on the crust, though, and certainly on the picture. I was in a hurry.

Just one bit of bloggage today: This Slate piece, pointing out how often terror-spotting technology — drones and satellites and so forth — is trumped by plain old police work:

Border patrols and detection devices are necessary tools. Like locks on the front door, they make it harder for terrorists to make plans and wreak havoc. But there’s always a back door or window that can be pried open. Preventing that from happening requires good intelligence, and good intelligence requires contacts with the sort of people who hang around the dark alleys of the world.
There’s a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bush administration’s present jam throughout the Middle East and in other danger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealing with Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria or Iran (namely, it’s an evil regime, and we don’t speak with evil regimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered and spilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would have died, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scary territory.

Police are nothing without informants, who are frequently criminals themselves. A useful lesson to remember.

Like many of you, I’m spending a great deal of time today reading the news, in many different forms. This is also a day when I have to do prep work for a great wad of deadline stuff coming up in another couple weeks, so I’m pretty much in laptops-and-phones mode. Might have some thoughts on current events in a few hours, might not. In the meantime, you-all are invited to leave your thoughts in the usual place.

Was droll Jim Romenesko having a bit of fun when he wrote this item? I think so:

Tori Daugherty’s complaint about the cursing in “All The President’s Men” got two grafs in Deborah Howell’s WP ombud column Sunday. The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel devoted 22 grafs to the 15-year-old girl’s appearance in the big-city paper.

Here’s the WashPost column. Here’s the 22-graf story-about-the-story. Here’s the part I noticed: A teenager is interested in working in journalism, but not if people are going to talk the way they did in “All the President’s Men.”

“I find it ignorant that a person who writes and a person who uses language would use language in that way,�? she said of the journalists portrayed in the film.

The story is unclear, but the chain of events seems to be: She saw the movie in journalism class, and brought her case for its offensiveness before the principal first. Unsatisfied, she then wrote to the Washington Post, demanding answers, because she’s considering journalism as a career but “I don’t want to be around (that kind of) language a lot.�? The ombudsman thought her letter was adorable and patted her wee head:

“Yes, Tori, many journalists curse,�? Howell wrote in The Post. “They curse when their computers break down, when people lie to them, when they make mistakes and when they’re on deadline. But usually, they’re nice to people…Please don’t think that cursing is a prerequisite to be a journalist. A promising young journalist who does not curse would be a welcome addition to any newsroom.�?

Awww, how sweet. When I read that, I knew that not only does young Tori have a future in journalism, she’s management material. In fact, she might as well just bypass the newsroom entirely and go straight to an endowed chair at the Poynter Institute. And then, as these incidents frequently prompt me to do, I took a trip down Memory Lane.

(Gilligan’s Island-style swimming-screen effects here.)

We had a girl like that in our college newsroom. She was a transfer, from a small Catholic girls’ college that couldn’t take her all the way to a journalism degree. Catholics speak of “formation,” the molding of souls and intellects and the rest of it, and this girl was well-formed, in more ways than one. You could have balanced a demitasse cup on her head all day, and it wouldn’t wobble. I recall her face held one expression, which suggested she had just smelled something offensive. And she had many opinions about her new school. I only recall one: That the deadlines in journalism class were impossible. The newswriting class was 90 minutes, and the way the drill usually worked, you got an assignment in the first half-hour, and then had an hour to write your story, due at the end of class. This was simply ridiculous, in her opinion; the nuns gave you a week. (Of course the class was structured this way for a very good reason — the ratio of assignments-that-must-be-finished-in-an-hour and those-that-must-be-finished-in-a-week is, for a beginning reporter, pretty lopsided. So you might as well get your practice before your paycheck depends on it.)

This was in the days before people felt the need to inform total strangers of their sexual history, but I’m pretty sure she let us know she was wearing the letter V and would be until her wedding night.

And the punchline: She was a faultless beauty. Blonde, clear skin, fine features. She could have stood toe-to-toe with Grace Kelly and not blinked.

She disapproved of swearing, too, which is probably why she wore that expression all the time, because the walls of our college newspaper office were covered with graffiti, much of it obscene. (There was a list of euphemisms for masturbation that covered a quarter of a bathroom wall and may have been the root cause of her distress, as it included the phrase “polishing the bishop.”)

Anyway, I don’t know if this story has a point or what, but as I recall, she really, really didn’t fit in, which could say as much about us as her — we were all pretty insufferable back then. But she still found a career in journalism. Believe me, I was shocked to discover this, but a few months ago I got an e-mail from my friend Deb, who as a fellow Catholic-school transfer took a particular interest in her, informing me that not only was our former classmate gainfully employed, she was …wait for it… a columnist.

I looked up her portfolio. She still disapproves of many, many things.

So be not discouraged, Tori. I’m sure your path through the dirty-talking portion of the newspaper business will be straight and swift. Columnists frequently have doors they can close and lock. Better yet, many work from home.

Bloggage:

I never liked Joe Lieberman. I never understood the need for Gore to choose a “values candidate” after Clinton, as the voters had pretty overwhelmingly demonstrated that they considered what Clinton did forgivable. (If you were one of those upset by Clinton’s shenanigans in office, consider the alternative. Doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?) He always had that listen-to-me-the-orthodox-Jewish-sage thing going on, but in the end, a veep is always a shrug issue, for a voter — what can you do? No one votes for a veep.

I like him even less today. John Scalzi sums it up pretty succinctly.

I read Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck” yesterday. I would add it to “On the Nightstand,” but it never made it that far; I realized I’d read most of it before in various magazines, and the parts I hadn’t read I consumed while making dinner. Wide margins, generous line spacing, not very thick to start with — you know the drill. That didn’t make it unenjoyable. I will always enjoy Nora Ephron’s essays, no matter what. When I was in that graffiti-smeared college newsroom, Ephron was my role model, and still is, in many ways. Her deft touch is one I’ve aped all my writing life, and I’ve never forgiven her for stopping for so long, to make all those awful movies (with the exception of “When Harry Met Sally…”). I guess she had her reasons.

That said, there’s no single essay in here that comes close to the best of her earlier work, but ah well, the book’s about aging, so you can’t really expect it, can you? Still, very enjoyable. You could do worse.

My ex-congressman is STILL a moron. He’s quoted reacting to last month’s story about the Department of Homeland Security’s potential-target list, a little late but nonetheless dim as ever: “This is all about money,�? said U.S. Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd District, suggesting the New York Times’ July coverage of the alleged terror target list reflected a desire to secure more Homeland Security funds for large Eastern cities by “mocking the rest of America.�?

Yes, that was certainly its intent, don’t you think? Damn the New York Times for thinking New York should get more money for homeland security! There is surely no earthly reason to believe “large Eastern cities” should get more attention from the federal government than Amish popcorn factories in his district, is there?

I mean, is there?

Alan and I are not bottled-water people. In fact, in general, I disapprove of the product. I think it’s a perfect example of an American willingness to buy anything, really, that comes with smart marketing.

A glass of water — Mom’s hard-hearted counter-suggestion for when you begged for a Coke, lest you die of thirst — is one of the America’s great nickel bargains. No, penny bargains, and maybe not even that much. You get a glass and open the tap. If you want it colder, add ice cubes. If you need to take water somewhere, fill a bottle. Technology has given us Lexan, a true miracle plastic that’s glass, but better — doesn’t break, doesn’t transfer plastic taste. A glance at the selection at Target reveals you get your choice of color, size and mouth styles.

I will stipulate a few things that may affect your desire for bottled water: One, that municipal water supplies vary widely in quality. My sister’s house in the suburbs of Columbus dispenses the worst water ever, reeking of sulfur and general ickiness. They got into the Brita thing for a while, which requires special equipment and diligence in terms of monitoring the filter quality and buying more. Two, that the world is a hotter place these days, especially in summer, and people may be thirstier as a result. But. I also want you to stipulate something for me.

That is, that bottled-water plants are a real environmental issue here in Michigan. Ice Mountain set up a plant in a depressed area up north to tap and bottle the groundwater. Local politicians love them because they bring their favorite campaign issue (jobs, even at crappy wages). Of course northern Michigan has abundant groundwater close to the surface why? Because it’s frequently swampy, which means that when you start taking a lot out you lower the level of the aquifer, which affects everything from stream quality to, ultimately, the Great Lakes. We’re all connected after all. But there I go, sounding like a wooly-headed environmentalist again.

We can all agree that hydration is important, can’t we? Sure we can. Stipulated. And one more thing: I buy about a case of the stuff a year. It comes in handy when we have people out on the boat, and we get thirsty. Guests don’t want to share our Lexan bottles. We always offer beer first, but some fuddy-duddies don’t like to start drinking at noon. And Alan insists we buy Dasani or Aquafina, which are bottled by Coke and Pepsi, and generally come from municipal supplies.

But all that said, I still think that bottled water is a big fat shuck. Of course it’s important to stay hydrated, at which point I’ll point you toward the kitchen tap. But really, do we all need to carry water with us at all times? Did our parents do that? Were they dropping like flies of dehydration? No. Reread the scene in “Gone With the Wind” where Melanie has her baby during the siege of Atlanta, on a blistering hot Georgia summer day. You can learn so much about how people coped before air conditioning. The room is kept shaded and Scarlett spends lots of time fanning Melly as she labors. She also wrings out a cloth and places it on her forehead, occasionally sending a slave out to the pump for more water. I’m sure she drank some, too, but at no point did she say, “Melly, you have to drink something. It’s important to stay hydrated.”

Here’s sometimes Alan says, usually when he’s reading a “helpful” newspaper article that, like so many of them these days, assumes its readers are total morons:

“Where would we be without newspapers to remind people to wear sunscreen?”

I ask you: Where would we be without newspapers to remind people to drink water?

Today’s Freep lets us know that school sports practices are starting up, and yes, it’s important to stay hydrated:

But how do you tell if you’re drinking enough? What should you drink? What are the signs of a heat-related illness? We asked local experts. Here’s what they had to say.

Can you guess what they had to say? Of course you can. Drink lots of water. Don’t overdo. Listen to your body. And stay away from salt tablets.

The stories always say this; apparently gobbling salt tablets was considered a remedy for thirst and dehydration back in the Gilded Age. I guess the idea was that sweat was salty and a person needed to replace lost salts. An old reporter at the Journal Gazette once said the newsroom air conditioning system consisted of a drinking fountain and a bottle of salt tablets. But I will confess, I have never seen a bottle of salt tablets in my life. Have you? Where do you buy them? What are the brand names? In what section of the local CVS do they reside? Now there’s a story: Hang out next to the salt tablets for a day and see who buys them. Then warn customers of their dangers!

(I should ask Professor Google before I write this stuff. I guess you can find them somewhere.)

Today it’s supposed to be beautiful, a break from the heat and humidity, a rare day below 80. A glance outside informs me the weatherman did not lie. I plan to go out and enjoy it. I will carry a bottle of water. Because it’s important to stay hydrated.