Why does Florida have to hog all the weird news, anyway?

So yesterday we — OK, I — were/was discussing the miracle of the modern internets, and ho ho, here it comes again.

Britney Spears, put on some damn panties!

I confess: I’m an occasional — OK, daily — reader of Wesmirch, the only gossip blog aggregator you’ll ever need. I don’t do it because I give a fig about such things, but because it’s so easy for a person like me, aging and working alone in the house all day in an unhip neighborhood, to wake up one day and feel entirely out of it. I still do, even with daily gossip intake. Half the faces in People magazine are strangers to me. Who the hell is Tara Reid? Have you ever heard a song by Babyshambles? Justin Timberlake, how’s your uncle Mark, with whom I went to school for a while? Is he still the Bambi-eyed, pudgy boy I remember? And which one of you is Justin, anyway?

The celebrities whose paparazzi-chronicled activities I used to pay attention to — Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn — all look like escapees from a nursing home and/or wino flop. If they go out after dark at all, I’m sure it’s only because they’re rich enough that they don’t need the early-bird special to make ends meet. But I’m sure they’re all snoring by 11 p.m., too.

Anyway, back to Britney. In the last week, a mere seven days, she’s become best friends forever with Paris Hilton and a messy old sot who goes out at night in short skirts, sans undies. Once you can forgive — every girl needs to throw down after a divorce filing — but twice? And then three times? That’s when the wire services start noticing. That’s when all the goodwill that you got by dumping your parasitical husband starts to ebb away. People start to ask questions: Did she flee the house without so much as a suitcase? Is this some sort of newfangled therapy for herpes?

Because, as I say so often around these parts, I don’t get it. Never once have I “forgotten” my panties when I was wearing anything other than sweatpants around the house on a Saturday morning. I can certainly understand how no-panties would feel more comfortable than a thong, but am I the only girl in the world who knows the secret of Jockey for Her? They’re perfectly comfortable, they come in breathable cotton, many attractive colors and cuts. I think I’m going to buy a three-pack of the bikinis and send them to this girl. Clearly she needs an underwear intervention.

Actually, many young actresses do. For all the money spent on La Perla and various other high-end lingerie brands by Hollywood celebrities, too much of it stays at home in the drawer. I will say this: It’s certainly entertaining to see the new slang that has grown up around our most slang-worthy body parts. When Lindsay Lohan got caught in a similar fix, one blogger referred to her “shredded pastrami.” Snicker.

If you’re wondering why the blog looks the way it does, I have no idea. We seem to be having some problems down in Atlanta, but my main blog guy is in Lansing, nursing sick in-laws. I’m trying to keep everything in perspective. Sick old people are more important than my blog theme.

Well, same ol’ same ol’ Mac, for now. The genius did this and that with it, recommended this and that, said we didn’t have to get medieval on anything just yet, and sent me home with a prescription to do an archive-and-install system software thing, maybe reset some deeply buried preferences in there that are making the thermostats go blooey. And maybe shoot some compressed air through the heat vents, too.

If all this fails, it’s back for the $75 diagnostic. My guess is, I’ll be buying a new MacBook sometime in the new year.

So many computer problems have a human equivalent: abdominal pain. Abdominal pain is the Pacific Ocean of ailments. Could be anything from nervousness to bad clams to a rotten appendix to cancer. For now, we’re treating with Alka-Seltzer. No need to pull the plug on the patient just yet.

I was the second person through the door at the store at 10 a.m., and the place was full within minutes. They haven’t set up the iPod-only register yet; that’ll be later in the Christmas season, I expect. But if you’re a longtime Mac user, if you’ve come through the time when PC dipshits would say, “Oh, look, a toy computer,” then it’s pretty gratifying. Apple is still a fraction of the market and always will be, but I’d say they’ve gotten their act together, and I wouldn’t use anything else.

LATER: Did the software thing, blew out the vents. Things seem to be running cooler, but I’m now officially in backup-every-48-hours mode, preparing for the worst. In my troubleshooting I did discover something, however: I’m down to my last 2 gigs of hard-drive space. How the hell did that happen? Pictures and music, that’s how.

Elsewhere yesterday, for the first time in a long time, my attention was taken by events back no-longer-home in Indiana — the county GOP chairman seems to be having some domestic problems. I could write 10,000 words about this guy, but I won’t, in the name of bygones, etc. But here’s what interests me about all this: How the story is an example of how media consumption is different now. Note, for instance: Three bylines on the newspaper story, including that of the very conservative columnist, who I assume was brought in to get the quote from the chairman.

(And what a quote, too: “I want the public to know how challenging it can be for families: finances, children’s problems, drugs,� he said. “Family values are important … but life isn’t perfect. I have yet to find an Ozzie and Harriet. This is part of life.�)

When three reporters work on a simple police-incident story, dear readers, it’s a tip-off that it’s time to go spelunking. Ten years ago, I’d call around to people who keep up with stuff, ask them. Today, I check the blogs and find, ho ho, it’s the county Democratic chairman who’s been bird-dogging the story, and has been for some time. There’s also a good question that this involves more than a marital dispute, which may be touched upon in a 911 call, and the state police are withholding the 911 call and transcript.

I told Alan last night that five years ago, there’s a very good chance this story wouldn’t have seen the light of day at all. We had an editor who was hesitant to look at people’s private lives, even public figures’. No charges filed? A broken-off key in a car ignition? Oh, this is hardly domestic violence. We very well might have looked the other way.

Now, I’d be willing to bet the GOP organization is telling a few people to get their good suit from the cleaners and be ready to put on the red tie on a moment’s notice. Thanks to the internet. The brave new world.

In the last two days, my laptop’s fan has taken to running continuously, and for good reason — it’s hot enough to give my actual lap second-degree burns. (Of course, as it’s now 3.5 years old, it’s entirely possible that the machine is menopausal, and these are hot flashes.) As my editing job requires me to stay online for four hours a night, this gets on my last damn nerve, as you can imagine. So it’s off to the Apple store we go this morning. I’m hopeful for a repair, but as these things usually happen, there’s at least a 50-50 chance I’ll be coming home with a new computer, dammitall.

(And, of course, now I’ve had the thing running for 10 minutes and the fan hasn’t come on yet. Which is probably what will happen in the store. …Ah, there it goes. Still broken.)

So you carry on here, and I’ll be back eventually, probably poorer. Now to go online and make a reservation at the Genius Bar. (Sheesh. You know, I love Apple, and I love my Mac, but sometimes they make it a little hard.) Wish me luck.

Thanks, I had a nice birthday. “What do you want to do on your special day?” Alan asked.

“Take a road trip,” I said.

“Where?”

“Port Huron.”

Why Port Huron? Because I’ve never been there. And now that I have, I don’t think I have to go back. Not that there’s anything wrong with Port Huron, except the fact that the downtown riverfront view is of an oil refinery on the Canadian side. Our part of Michigan is full of reminders that we’re not Santa Fe, with an economy based on art galleries and restaurants, but man — that’s a depressing sight for a Port Huronian, I’d imagine.

Anyway, we saw Port Huron. Shared a pizza with the fam later, had a super-delicious chocolate cake and watched “Thank You for Smoking” on pay-per-view. It was exactly as I remember the book — a fine good time when it was going on, almost instantly forgettable afterward, which makes it a three-star flick in my book. Nothing wrong with that. Aaron Eckhart has quite the chin dimple.

Somewhere along the course of the weekend, I made time to watch “Thin,” a documentary airing on HBO. It’s about women at an eating-disorders clinic in Florida.

If you’ve known anyone with an eating disorder — what am I saying? Everybody has known someone with an eating disorder. I met my first one in college, one of my roommates. She was recovering from anorexia, although she obsessed about food more or less constantly and had a million strange eating habits, including munching on carrots to the tune of a pound a day. The palms of her hands were orange. Another friend shared an apartment in Manhattan with a bulimic. The layout of the apartment was symmetrical, with a bedroom/sitting area on either side and a bathroom in between. A couple nights a week, the roommate would binge and purge, binge and purge, all night long. A few weeks of listening to vomiting and flushing sent my friend back to the closet she was sleeping in, in Brooklyn.

Anyway, it’s very common. And like all problems, it occurs along a continuum. The women in “Thin” are at the shithouse-rat end of the spectrum; one has a tube in her stomach, which her parents had inserted to keep her alive, although it didn’t take long for her to figure out how to flex her stomach muscles to make it work the other direction. The shots of her gaunt belly, with both the tube and the belly-button ring, were ghastly.

What interests me about eating disorders is how mainstream they are, not just in their frequency but in the increasingly open acceptance of them in regular society. For all the dying supermodels, it’s becoming clear that some people don’t really see anything wrong with it. Supportive pro-anorexia and bulimia websites are out there, and unashamed. Victoria “I’m not anorexic” Beckham claims to have a 23-inch waist. A British writer noted this was the exact circumference of her head. I just got a tape measure and checked — mine, too. Women come in all sizes, but this is ridiculous.

Lately I’ve read about something called “exercise bulimia,” no barfing involved, just obsessive exercise to nullify every calorie ingested. This was reported with a shrug; if you have to be bulimic, might as well be this variety.

But I really goggled at a review of “Thin” in the New York Times, in which Virginia Heffernan noted the infantilizing atmosphere at the treatment center where these women are housed, and then writes:

And after all this restraining of their evil ways, the women can only conclude that they are undisciplined, depraved and out of control, though to look at their gaunt forms and hear about their seriousness of purpose, you can hardly imagine that willpower is what they lack. …Why do these so-called professionals talk like carping schoolmarms? Anorexics notoriously inspire annoyance in other people; it’s not clear why. Maybe, in their self-discipline, they make the rest of us feel slovenly.

Calling anorexia “willpower” and “self-discipline” is like saying someone who washes hands 400 times a day has an impressive commitment to personal hygiene. All you have to do is watch these women eat. They ingest every forkful as though it’s toxic waste. One has to polish off a birthday cupcake and takes forever to do so, complaining throughout that it’s “too sweet” and looking, by the last bite, as though she’s just eaten a turd.

It’s true — anorexics inspire annoyance. It puts me off my feed to see someone at the table mopping butter off an English muffin with a thick stack of napkins. It’s annoying to see someone who can’t spend five minutes without thinking about what she won’t be eating for her next meal. All the women in “Thin” came across as girls, even one who already had two children of her own. One was made that way by her own mother, who taught her the tricks of the game, and another hinted at unspeakable trauma in her past, but in all the family sessions you got the feeling their loved ones were trying hard not to slap faces.

Anyway, in a weekend devoted to overeating, it was an interesting contrast.

So, bloggage:

Gene Weingarten diagnoses John Kerry’s humor problem in a tight paragraph:

The man is as strait-laced as a whalebone corset, as rigid as Formica. His business is politics. He should never be anywhere near a joke.

The same Jerry Seinfeld joke, as would be told by John Kerry– The problem with mall garages is that your mother’s a whore.

Elsewhere in the WashPost, the fascinating story of the AK-47, portions of which I stumbled across in the past. If you saw “Lord of War” you got a nutshell version of this in a Nicolas Cage voiceover, but the story is far more thorough:

The story of the gun itself, from inspiration in Bryansk to bloody insurgency in Iraq, is also the story of the transformation of modern warfare. The AK blew away old battlefield calculations of military superiority, of tactics and strategy, of who could be a soldier, of whose technology would triumph.

When one war ended, arms brokers gathered up the AKs and sold them to fighters in the next hot spot. The weapon’s spread helps explain why, since World War II, so many “small wars” have lingered far beyond the months and years one might expect. Indeed, for all of the billions of dollars Washington has spent on space-age weapons and military technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet, transforming conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. With these assault rifles, well-armed fighters can dominate a country, terrorize citizens, grab the spoils — and even keep superpowers at bay.

And all Mikhail Kalashnikov was after was a decent, non-jamming weapon.

On a more peaceful note, NN.C reader and sometime commenter Jeff Gill turns up in the Columbus Dispatch, defending the Hopewell Indian mounds of Newark, Ohio. Well done.

And now we are 49. Sigh. Oh well — maybe I’ll have a career again by 50.

I seem to be taking a break. Please enjoy your holiday weekend, and I’ll be back in a day or two.

Dorothy asked for a Wire post. Said she wanted to share her theories. I encourage her to do so, as my feelings about “The Wire” this season are pretty direct:

1) Every episode rocks the llama’s ass, and;
2) Every episode breaks my heart into a million pieces.

I just watched Ep. 11 this afternoon, a week ahead of you folks without On Demand cable, or the discipline to wait and watch with the rest of the country. (I always love how the whole neighborhood settles in and watches at the same time; you can practically hear the exclamations from nearby houses, and as soon as it’s over we all go outside and stand in the street and discuss it over beers. In brown paper bags.)

I don’t want to make predictions, as I’ve signed on for the ride and I’m willing to be led in a new direction, but so far, a few random impressions:

Chris is emerging as one of the more subtle and interesting characters of the season. His beatdown of Michael’s…father? Stepfather? …was as revelatory as anything he’s done all year, and shows how much he knows without being told. He should really be Marlo, but maybe we’ll see that happen.

Michael: Soul sold. Dukie: May yet make it. Randy: Jury still out. Namond: Oy, that mother. Was the whole school project about demonstrating the uselessness of No Child Left Behind? Has Prez bet on yet another losing horse? Where’s Cutty? More will be revealed.

Dorothy, take it away.

Here’s my “Alice’s Restaurant” tradition: For a number of years when I lived in Fort Wayne, I would rise on Thanksgiving Day, shower and immediately head out for Columbus, in happy anticipation of dining with my family in a few hours. Depending on atmospheric conditions, I could usually catch the entirety of “Alice’s Restaurant” twice and sometimes three times, on classic-rock stations in Fort Wayne, Columbus and sometimes Dayton.

You needed to know that, didn’t you?

I mention this only because the WashPost has an amusing story about Stockbridge, Mass., Alice, Arlo and the song that made it famous in Sunday’s travel section.

And so we kick off all-bloggage Monday. Why? Because there was some good stuff in the papers over the weekend, and I’m so tired I can’t think of anything else to say.

My brother claims that he once told a gym weightlifter that “today is no-grunting Tuesday.” I’m sure the weightlifter wasn’t amused. No-grunting rules, however, are no joke, as this NYT story points out:

Albert Argibay, a bodybuilder and a state correction officer, was at a Planet Fitness gym with 500 pounds of weight on his shoulders one afternoon this month when the club manager walked over and told him it was time to leave. Mr. Argibay, the manager explained, had violated one of the club’s most sacred and strictly enforced rules: He was grunting.

He continued lifting, but soon was surrounded by town police officers, who told him to drop the weight slowly and pack his bag, then escorted him from the gym. Now Mr. Argibay is considering suing the club, claiming the notoriety the incident earned him in this cozy 5,000-person town 75 miles north of Manhattan is tantamount to defamation. Mr. Argibay said he has endured ridicule from colleagues who call him and make grunting noises, and he fears that inmates will lose respect for him.

No grunting at a gym? That’s like no sweating. I can see a please-minimize-your-grunting rule, but man, this place goes a little overboard:

At Planet Fitness gyms, grunters and other rule-breakers are treated to an ear-rattling siren with flashing blue lights and a public scolding. The “lunk alarm,� as the club calls it, is so jarring it can bring the entire floor to a standstill. (A lunk is defined, on a poster, as “one who grunts, drops weights, or judges.�

The worst grunter I ever saw wasn’t even at a gym. It was at a public playground in Fort Wayne, on a weekend. On weekends, the ratio of caretaking fathers to mothers increased dramatically, due to either dad’s-turn or custody weekend. On this particular weekend, an impressively bulked-up dad turned his kids loose and promptly went over to a set of parallel monkey bars and started working on his guns. He grunted so loudly I thought at first he’d taken a stray bullet from a nearby gun battle. But no, he was just being a jerk.

Busy day, leading up to the holiday. More later, maybe. Discuss The Game, if you want to. I had my hopes pinned on the last few minutes, but it wasn’t to be.

In the Freep, Bill McGraw visited Woody Hayes’ grave. (If I’d known, I’d have had him wave to my friends Jeff and Craig Clark, brothers, buried just a few doors down at Union Cemetery. AIDS, if you’re wondering. Both of them.) He spent a second entry remarking on the epitaph etched on the headstone:

And in the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love hears the rustle of a wing.

The author is Robert Greene Ingersoll. McGraw said it seemed “slightly out of character” for Woody, and I guess if all you knew about him was his football persona, it does. “Three yards and a cloud of dust” might seem more fitting, but you didn’t have to know much about Woody Hayes to know he was a lot more than the bullnecked coach you saw on the sidelines.

He was what you might call old-school, a student of classics who made his players keep their hair trimmed. He didn’t allow them to appear in Playboy’s Pigskin Preview. After his famous flame-out at the Gator Bowl he laid low for a while, then emerged as an elder statesman. He lectured at Harvard on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he used in his coaching.

The best thing I ever read about Woody Hayes was a column by Columbus Dispatch columnist Mike Harden, written after Woody’s death in 1987. It’s almost 20 years old now and I’m going to quote from it liberally, probably busting copyrights all over the place, but what the hell, I just paid $3 for it from the Dispatch archive and I’m giving credit where it’s due. Here’s how it starts:

When Woody Hayes wheeled his Chevy into Glenn Webb’s Shell Station in West Jefferson, Ohio, he paid scant attention to the loitering locals, the scrawny kid resting his back against the Coke machine. But the kid noticed him, and so did the locals. With the possible exception of an occasional horrific wreck on Rt. 40, not much stirred in the Madison County hamlet. So when Woody Hayes, the Woody Hayes, pulled in for a fill-up on that lazy summer day in 1963, the news traveled up Main St. to Smitty’s bar before the coach’s gas tank was half-filled and was already old gossip at Doc Mellott’s Rexall by the time Glenn had scrubbed the last dead bug from the coach’s windshield.

…In my youth, my opinion of Woody Hayes was a mixture of personal awe coupled with the echo of comments voiced by my father and his cronies as they sat around the radio nursing longneck Strohs and listening to the game. To them, Woody was half prophet, half good ol’ boy — Moses with Charlie Weaver’s voice. It was not that they thought him above reproach, for their hindsight refinements of the plays Woody called were always good for another six-pack after the game was finished. Years later I would recall my father’s post-game dressing down of Woody, aimed, as it was, at the radio speaker of the Philco. I was seated in the stadium watching the coach as he paced the sideline studying what appeared to be an index card. He called three consecutive power slants into the line, gaining four or five yards at the most. The punting team ran onto the field, and Woody was still contemplating the card when the fan seated next to me shouted, ”Dammit, Woody, turn it over. There’s plays on the other side.”

If you grew up in Columbus in the Woody era, you know that scene like you know Christmas morning. He was simply part of the fabric of life, whether you attended OSU or not, whether you liked football or not. But of course, the times they were a-changin’; Harden continues:

Woody Hayes and Ohio State football were congenitally joined at the hip; yet, the first time I personally heard him speak in public, it had nothing to do with the game. It was the spring of 1970. My first quarter as a freshman at Ohio State was about to be cut short by the campus riots. The Oval was filled with strikers, gawkers and campus cops. Some firebrand revolutionary who wouldn’t have known Lenin from Irving Berlin was admonishing the crowd to seize the moment as they chanted, ”On strike! Shut it down!” There in the throng, sandwiched amid the tie-dye revolutionaries, stood Woody Hayes. Arms folded across his chest, he listened quietly to several speakers until one of the organizers spotted him and summoned him to the platform.

Compensation. The pay-forward theory. It had seemed like some flimsy platitude penned by a greeting card company for a high school graduation card. Not for Woody. He lived it, breathed it.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about Woody Hayes today. Bo Schembechler is the one who just died. But I didn’t grow up with Bo, except as once-a-year nemesis. I grew up with Woody.

UPDATE: I assembled most of this entry last night but didn’t post it, for two reasons: I wanted the Tibetan girls to stay at the top of the blog for at least 24 hours, and I wanted to see if the Freep’s star columnist could top Harden. He wrote approximately four times the length, but it should not surprise anyone who’s read both writers to know the answer is: No.

I have my problems with charity. I suppose it comes from being a journalist too long. You write, or read, too many stories about thieving and/or featherbedding charities, and soon you start to doubt the whole lot. Of course this is wrong; there are many people out there doing truly selfless work on behalf of the disadvantaged. Just because the head of the United Way flew first-class doesn’t mean they all do.

My problem is, these days, that I don’t know where to start. I don’t belong to a church, so tithing is out. I no longer work in an office, so no United Way, either. (Besides, I stopped giving to those folks, after the Aramony scandal and my own issues with the Fort Wayne chapter, none of which had to do with mismanagement of money, I hasten to add.) Lately I’ve taken to writing checks when events seem to demand it — Katrina, tsunamis — and I try to make my giving as direct as possible. (When I cut out the United Way, I still gave to several of my favorite agencies, just minus the middleman.)

I’ve even taken to giving money to bums on the street, which we have no shortage of in Detroit. Needless to say, this makes Alan crazy. I usually give a couple bucks to a legless guy who begs at a freeway on-ramp near his office. “He probably spends it on drugs or booze,” he says. “If I had no legs and had to sit out in bad weather all year with my hand out, I’d probably want to be drunk or stoned, too,” I reply.

“I bet that guy lives in Grosse Pointe,” he replied.

But I’m on a tangent here. The point I’m trying to make is this: If you’re looking for a way to spend just a few dollars, and have it go through as few layers as possible, and help another soul in a really tangible way, I have a suggestion. You might want to consider a donation to these girls:

They’re either orphans or from desperately poor families in Tibet. A man named Dockpo Tra has just launched a school for 30 of them in Qinghai Province. They need warm clothing.

A little background: Last year I met Stephannie Piro, who worked as the secretary at Wallace House, headquarters of the Knight-Wallace Fellows in Ann Arbor. Perhaps typical of Ann Arbor secretaries, she was also a classically trained opera singer and fluent in Tibetan. She also seems to be a Buddhist of some sort, but I’m not sure about that. Anyway, she only stayed at the job a year, because she got the opportunity to go to Tibet, to live and teach and translate.

After arriving, she hooked up with Dockpo Tra, who saw a need and is trying to meet it: Educating girls. Most of the schools in Tibet are for boys, and girls make up only 25-30 percent of the student body, locally. Last summer, he traveled the province in search of girls from impoverished families interested in going to school. The 30 he found range in age from 5-13, and most come from backgrounds so poor that they own little more than the clothes on their back, and not much of those.

Dockpo lays out his ambitions for the school and the girls here.

Stephannie, now going by the Tibetan name Tsering Wangmo, aka Ane (auntie) Wangmo, has adopted these girls as well. Here’s her photo page devoted to the school, and here is her travel blog; the latest entry lays out short bios of about half the girls. This one is typical:

Tamdrin Wangmo (new name Tare Drolma) (age 12) comes from a family of seven; four of them are small children. Her father is dead. Before, the family supported themselves with a large herd of cattle, but disease wiped out all but 20 animals, and they now are unable to cover their living expenses. One monk provides assistance to the family and her mother does all of the work to care for their remaining livestock.

Here’s the good news: A little bit of money goes a long way in Tibet. Immediately, the girls need warm clothes to get through the winter. I Paypal’d Stephannie $50 last week, and this was her reply:

We bought long underwear yesterday, and your money almost covered all of it. Dockpo left today to drive it all down to the girls (a two-day trip). They’ll be thrilled to receive it — they’ve had the same pair of long underwear on for three weeks straight. It’s too cold to take them off to wash them, so the second set will be a welcome change!

I love that. Last week that $50 was rattling around my bank account looking to start trouble, and today it’s going on the backs of 30 little girls somewhere in Tibet. That’s satisfying.

I’m not asking you to give $50. I’m not asking you to give anything. I’m pointing out that even if you only have $5 or $10 to part with, you can see it go a long way in Tibet. A pair of mittens costs about $1.40. I put that much in the Salvation Army bucket every time I pass.

Obviously, giving to a stranger involves some risk. I offer no guarantees, except that I trust Stephannie, and if she trusts Dockpo Tra, that’s good enough for me. Besides, it’s not that much money. And this is the season for giving. And I have a daughter the same age as these girls. Keeping someone warm is a pretty direct gesture. I’m going to chalk this up to improving my karma.

American friends have set Stephannie/Wangmo up with a Paypal account. You can send her money at zangthal@mac.com, or e-mail her there, too. I’m sure she’d be happy to answer any questions you have. I also advise you to follow the links to Stephannie’s other photos and travels; what a beautiful country.

Have a good cause you’d like to plug? Leave it in the comments.