One more quick blog item before I turn off the modem: Colo turns 50 on Friday.

If you grew up in Columbus, you know who Colo is — the world’s first gorilla born in captivity, at the Columbus Zoo. I wasn’t born until almost a year later, and no we don’t share a dad or anything, but it’s one of those things a kid growing up in Columbus would notice: Colo and I are almost the same age. Her first photos showed her in a frilly dress and hat, held on the hip of a zookeeper, like a toddler. Nowadays she lives in the zoo’s ape habitat, probably the best compromise with her native Africa that a captive gorilla is likely to get — a large, open-air pavilion/cage encompassing trees and climbing ropes, part of an extended family, many of them her own offspring.

While I can’t fault the Dispatch writer for the job he did, I’d like to see what a WashPost Style writer could do with the same material, as Colo’s life covers so much cultural territory in the way we regard animals. We’ve come a long way from those dresses and the original glass-fronted, concrete-floor cage she grew up in. Colo gave birth at 11, and her daughter was named Emmy, for the mayor at the time, M.E. Sensenbrenner. (Subsequent babies were Oscar and Toni.) Today the gorillas are given African-sounding names like Jontu, Macombo and Mosuba. Colo was taken from her mother at birth and reared by humans; today’s ape babies are frequently entrusted to their own kind. The opening of the pavilion was a huge step forward in the apes’ quality of life, although I remember some poignant moments, too — they didn’t know what to do on the ropes and trees, having never seen them before. (A radio station promptly sent over its Morning Zoo team to play on the ropes while the gorillas watched from a safe distance. Monkey see, monkey do, etc.)

I find gorilla-watching equal parts painful and fascinating. It’s hard to look into those faces; I identify too strongly. Once I was gazing perhaps a little too hard at one of the silverback males, and he rose up on his legs and beat his chest, Tarzan-style. I jumped a foot in the air.

Anyway, that’s Colo at 50, 100 in human years. A trailblazer from the time she was found lying, still in her amniotic sac, on the floor of her wild-born mother’s cage. Many happy returns.

Columbus Dispatch photo. Used without permission.

Someone has stolen David and Amy Flach’s horse. They’d like to get the horse back, so they offered a description, to wit:

Mecca, estimated to be 16 years old, is described as having speckles and a scar on its right rear knee.

Sigh. Horses don’t have “rear knees.” Neither does any other four-legged animal. They have two knees, just like us. The hind legs fold the other way, and the joint that allows such movement is called a hock. After years in the newspaper business, I can tell you that these little details mean a lot. If you get them wrong, people who notice assume everything else is wrong, too. As a horseman, I don’t expect lay folk to know the difference between a cannon bone and a croup, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect a reporter to know the difference between a knee and a hock. We’ve all heard of ham hocks, haven’t we?

It’s little details like this that make reporters and editors such fearsome contestants on “Jeopardy!” And if we’re ever together in New York, and hail the Cash Cab? You should let me do the talking.

Speaking of quadrupeds, Kate and I went on a grocery run yesterday and ran across a living Nativity. Of course we stopped; anyone who passes a living Nativity is a person who deserves coal in their stocking. When we actually got to the tent, however, we found that we were either too early or too late, as the Nativity had no Mary, no Joseph, no Magi, no baby Jesus, but did have two donkeys, two sheep, three goats and a chicken munching hay in a pen under a tent, next to a caged rabbit.

“I missed the part about rabbits in the Gospel of Luke,” I said to the man next to me, who didn’t get the joke.

There was a camel outside, ruminating, held by a man dressed as a shepherd. His Gore-Tex boots peeked from under his robe while he discussed the living Nativity circuit with a friend: “Yeah, we’re in Sterling Heights tomorrow, then Roseville, I forget where else.” Make that camel pay for its hay, dude.

We aren’t religious, but I try to explain its rituals whenever I can, so Kate won’t be entirely ignorant of the world. I searched for one in this menagerie, considered telling her the legend of how the donkey got the cross on its back and realized it would confuse her, as it’s a Holy Week story, and it’s only Christmas.

“I once knew someone who had a donkey named Milton. Milton Burro,” I said, lamely. She didn’t get that, either.

We left.

Holiday picture week continues. Here’s frequent commenter Brian Stouder’s wife Pam and daughter Chloe with the Man last week, photo taken at Pottersville Mall. Chloe appears to be asking for her own domain for Christmas, as MySpace is just so over:

Keep ‘em coming.

We kick off our End of the Year Foto-Festivities 2006 with this bang-up two-parter by Bob Pence, talented amateur photog and all-around good guy. He’s been at it awhile, as this pair will attest. First, Christmas in Fort Wayne, 1962:

This was taken at the corner of Calhoun and Berry Streets, the heart of downtown. Old-timers get tears in their eyes talking about Christmas shopping downtown, back in the day. Fort Wayne was never Chicago, but once upon a time it had a certain Bedford Falls-like feel to its downtown, and you get a sense of it here — a few blocks dense with stores, activity and holiday lights. You can almost see Uncle Billy, about to come toddling into view with a snootful.

Ah, but then Pottersville Mall opened out by the bypass. The same corner today:

Notes Bob: “Notice how much more tidy downtown looks, now that we’ve gotten rid of all those retail stores with their glaring signs.” Yes indeedy.

(By the way, thanks to all who’ve sent photos already. We’ll get to them soon enough.)

A Christmas card arrived the other day, with photos. I was stunned to discover that the little baby I’d once visited in Milwaukee is now a) grown up; and b) has a Jewfro, even though he’s Catholic. How did that happen?

This didn’t start me down a weepy path of nostalgia and humming “Sunrise, Sunset.” It made me think I want to see Mary’s backyard Christmas cactus in faraway Los Angeles, which she claims blooms at Christmas every year. Yes, friends, it made me think of …the power of pictures.

So now until the end of the year, it’s Send Me a Picture time here at NN.C. I’ll start:

If I were an Airedale, I’d have killed you by now.

You all know who this is. The day he got his hair cut, there was an Airedale in the next cage at the groomer’s, a dog of truly fearsome energy. Airedales are terriers, but with the complicating factor that they weigh 80 pounds or so. When we were struggling to train ha ha our own terrier, Alan and I would often remark that if this dog weighed an ounce over 20 pounds, the experience would be a lot less comical and perhaps even life-threatening. (Yes. Spriggy flunked out of puppy first grade when the instructor decided to assert her dominance over him by pinning him to the floor and he brazenly growled in her face for several minutes. He never did stop, although the instructor decided she had other dogs to teach and finally let him up, with a comment that he might actually be untrainable. This was the next-to-last session, and we didn’t go back for graduation. By the way, as soon as she let him up he was all waggy and friendly again, but man, this dog does not submit to anyone.)

He will wear his antlers for 30 seconds or so. Be quick with that camera, and you’ll get your shot.

OK.

Sorry to be boring today, but I have two stories to write and that 7,000-word (plus appendices — I keep having to add that) anal blister of an edit to get started on. I’ll leave you with a huge story you can read if you feel like it and wring hands over in the comments: Little Hotties, from last week’s New Yorker. It’s about the Bratz dolls, which give parents fits. Why? Because they look like pint-size hoochie mamas, that’s why. I’m pleased to say that Kate has already passed through her Bratz period. I considered objecting to them — it’s hard to hide your horror when you see them the first time — but decided on a different strategy: Going limp. Not only did I go limp, I aided and abetted. When Kate asked for a new Bratz for Christmas, I went out and bought the trashiest one I could find. The Bratz I bought that year made a Vegas streetwalker look like Julie Andrews — short skirt, bootz, and my favorite style detail, a faux-fur shrug over a halter top.

See, my Barbie experience taught me something that they don’t teach in Women’s Studies courses: Little girls don’t see dolls the way you do. You see “slutty,” they see “pretty.” Kate didn’t ask for short skirts and halter tops; she just played with them. And then she graduated to American Girls and all the Bratz are down in the basement, legless and seminude, waiting for the next garage sale. Parents of younger girls, behold I say unto you: All things must pass. And so will this.

Life is unfair. This should be neither a surprise nor particularly upsetting to anyone older than 17 or so, but still, it can sting the most hard-hearted of us. I wonder, should Sen. Tim Johnson recover enough to read the stories about his sudden illness and surgery yesterday, if he’ll be terribly vexed that the political angle to his story emerged in paragraph five and not 25:

Apart from the risk to his health, Johnson’s illness carried political ramifications. Democrats emerged from last month’s elections with a 51-49 Senate majority. If he were forced to relinquish his seat, a replacement would be named by South Dakota’s GOP Gov. Mike Rounds. A Republican appointee would create a 50-50 tie, and allow the GOP to retain Senate control.

Get well soon, senator.

I accepted an editing job yesterday, for a friend, which meant I extended the special Friend Rate of $0 per hour and dinner at my choice of restaurants in the Fort Wayne metroplex sometime during Christmas week. While I try to limit my pro bono work to NN.C, I guess there’s something about the holiday season that puts me in a giving mood. What the hell, it’s only 7,000 words plus multiple appendices and I owe him one. Which is my way of saying, I may be scarce around here for a while, and when I am here, I’ll be boring. But let’s not hold ourselves back from making hash of the issues of the day, shall we?

I see that 10 years later, we’re finally able to put a lid on the death of Princess Diana. The verdict: It was just another tawdry drunk-driving accident, mitigated by pursuing photographers but otherwise pretty routine, as these things go. No one was pregnant, MI5 wasn’t involved, Prince Philip has no blood on his hands. No conspiracy. Also — and I’m amazed this wasn’t in paragraph two — no seat belts. Four people in one of the best-designed cars in the world hit a fixed object at 60 miles an hour, killing three; what did the survivor do that the rest didn’t? He buckled up. If you need a clearer lesson from this tragedy than this, I can’t help you.

OK, maybe this one was clearer: Don’t drink and drive, especially if your job is driving princesses.

I get as irritated with Mark Steyn as any other moderate-lefty, but I still think he wrote one of the most perceptive pieces about these incidents way back when; you can find it here. Bonus: Trashing of a Free Press columnist, and a moment with Whitney Houston.

Proof that those meth labs out in the sticks may be leaching creepy stuff into the groundwater: Seven-legged, hermaphroditic deer killed in Wisconsin. By what else, residents of deer-y states? Yes, a truck. Still. Ewww.

Big news here: Creepy Dr. Kevorkian is being paroled, free to live out his remaining days — of which he is said to have only a few — outside the walls. This is sparking the usual reactions here and there, but mostly they boil down to: Yawn. Also, this: He won, they lost. People outside Detroit either forget or never knew in the first place that the multiple unsuccessful prosecutions of Dr. Death led to the ousting of the Oakland County prosecutor, by an electorate who said, basically, “Time to move on.” (He’s now with Tom Monaghan’s legal eagles, fighting for intelligent design.) Brian Dickerson states the obvious:

No physician I’ve talked to believes physician-assisted suicide ended with Kevorkian’s incarceration, and there is reason to believe it has become more common — albeit under the guise of aggressive pain management, since Kevorkian has been out of circulation. The legal debate over euthanasia will continue, and Kevorkian’s moment (and Michigan’s) at the epicenter of it is probably over for good. But wherever he spends his final days, Kevorkian can rest assured the market forces he set in motion will survive him.

“Market forces” is kind of a cold-hearted phrase, but regrettably, it’s probably accurate. Medical ethicists have long noted that our technology always outpaces our ethical framework for dealing with it. If Kevorkian caused us to at least start that discussion, then he can die in peace.

One book I read recently, which didn’t ahem make the right rail here, was “The Last Days of Dead Celebrities,” by Mitchell Fink. I needn’t have been ashamed; it’s an entirely respectable work of journalism, and if you squint your eyes a bit, it even works as a collection of cautionary tales about how to deal with the end of your life, whether you see it coming or not. I got it from the library because I wanted to read the chapter on Warren Zevon, but I found others more interesting, especially that of Ted Williams, the baseball player.

I lost the thread of the family wrangle over Teddy Ballgame’s remains — as I recall, Bob Greene wrote a really stupid column about it that queered me on the whole story — but it turns out the forces of evil triumphed, and somewhere in California or Florida Williams’ disembodied head rests in a cryogenic suspension, waiting for science to make a whole hell of a lot of advances, so that one day it can…do something. Not sure.

Anyway, it was yet another reminder, if any of us needed it, that families are fractious things. Today comes another: Billy Graham’s sons are fighting over where to bury the old man. The fact he isn’t, technically, dead yet is only one interesting angle of this story. One son wants him buried at the still-under-construction memorial library in Charlotte, which is built to look like a barn and silo, and features a cross-shaped entry and a mechanical talking cow. The other wants what his mother wants — a more dignified and private final resting place in the Carolina mountains. The fact that the sons are even capable of disagreeing over this astonishes me, but probably shouldn’t. We’re all human.

I watched a Billy Graham crusade on TV when I was about Kate’s age. My attention span hadn’t been shredded by the internet, remote-control channel-changing and the like, but I still think it’s remarkable that my attention was captured and held for some time. At the altar call at the end, I stood up and wanted to walk down to Billy and make my commitment to Jesus. Only he was imprisoned in a small black-and-white television, and I remembered I was Catholic and had, technically, already made the commitment. So I sat back down and changed the channel. Still, the man could preach.

OK, subject change: One of the earliest and most lasting bonds between Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, and me, back in the day, was our shared devotion to the comics page. I still credit the Blonde with handing me one of my most satisfying columns, the great Journal Gazette Doonesbury/Spiderman “Sucks” Flip-Flop, which I’ve shared here before, so I won’t bore you. When Alan became features editor, I was elevated to a post of rare power vis-a-vis the comics page; I had the ear of the Decider. Still, it never came to much, because by the time that happened a new world order was ruling newspapers and especially comics, and it was: Less space, more crap.

The crap mostly came because of, who else, fretful editors, who thought they could hang on to readers by introducing, say, a comic strip featuring a young black couple. The funnies should look like America! And so on.

Of course comics are over. A few stalwarts hang on — Doonesbury is still worth your time, and we always have hope for another Calvin & Hobbes — but in the age of Photoshop funnies and Get Your War On, what more can be said in three panels?

Well, there’s this: “Mary Worth” comics in digital video, including the original camera angles. Enjoy, the Blonde! P.S. You’ll need QuickTime.

It’s amazing what “research” indicates these days: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals. Kinda says it all, eh?

A holiday party invitation that recently arrived at NN.C Central promised “piping hot chili.” While I’m pleased that we won’t be having somewhat hot chili, I had one of those moments you sometimes get when you look at a word too long. That is: What the hell does “piping” mean, anyway?

Piping is what pipers do. It’s what plumbers install in your house. It’s the little row of cord or decorative seam that runs along your sofa cushions, or down the leg of an usher’s trousers. Hmm, what else? Adjectives — The child spoke in a piping voice. That is, he piped up. OK, like a flute. But how does something very hot become piping? (Richard Dawson voice.) Dictionary SAYS?! “Because of the whistling sound made by very hot liquid or food.” Huh. In a teakettle, maybe. I’ve had casseroles that sizzled a bit. But nothing that could be confused with actual piping.

Resolved: Never say “piping hot” again. And so, little by little, we banish clichés from our beloved language.

Further resolved: No more “deeply religious” or “badly decomposed” again, either. If you catch me at it, say something.

Gah. A kwazy-busy week stretches before me. I only volunteer for a few school activities a year, and yet they always seem to arrive in the middle of a deadline week. Fortunately, to leaven the seven-grain dough of this week (huh?) I have the rich stew of humanity all around me, which calls itself…Detroit.

Really. It’s weeks like this that I pity those of you living in places like Salt Lake City or Indianapolis. You should hear the morning traffic reports: “And we have a backup on the Lodge Freeway, apparently due to an engine block sitting in the left-hand lane…A pothole on the Chalmers exit ramp from eastbound I-94 has flattened the tires of at least two dozen cars, and they’ve run out of room to pull over, so expect delays there…” (Note: Paraphrasing of actual traffic reports, with very little exaggeration. The pothole actually had only 12 cars disabled and pulled over, and the engine block? Word. A couple weeks ago it was a driveshaft in the road. Ah, Detroit iron!)

And today? A man fleeing police this morning made his getaway by jumping into the Detroit River. Since the likelihood that this was either Mark Spitz or a battle-hardened Channel swimmer is pretty slim, it’s safe to say this tactic constituted suicide and not an unorthodox bid for asylum in Canada. The other day we drove downtown on surface streets instead of the freeway, and Alan pointed out the latest wrinkle in urban life — razor wire around industrial and commercial buildings’ rooflines, to keep thieves from stealing the rooftop air conditioners. And yet, the town refuses to die. You gotta love it. It’s Miami with snow.

A little bloggage today, for your amusement:

Do not, whatever you do, go to the Generator Blog. I mean, if you have work to do. Because you will not be coming back soon:

The NYT has a story today on gay evangelical Christians. You can tell the gay gene is a little weak in these guys because they have a really ugly coffee table. (Regrettably, the online version crops most of it out, but take my word for it — it’s plate glass on top of two ceramic elephants, Pier One c. 1980-something.)

Off to beat my head against the wall of a corporate PR machine make some phone calls. Make merry in the comments.

The thing about “The Wire” is, you can never say you didn’t see it coming. Disaster lurks around every corner, and is usually standing smack in front of you when you get there. But because this is TV, the land of 12-minute DNA tests and prosecutors who never lose, you keep hoping for a miracle. TV is supposed to make us feel good. “The Wire” never does that. And yet, we don’t feel bad. We — I, anyway — feel something else.

The season’s centerpiece was four middle-school boys teetering on the precipice; they could go either way. Of course the odds were overwhelmingly against them, and that’s how it went. One is now a coldblooded killer. Another is living with the first boy, earning his keep dealing drugs. A third has been thrown back into the organization we laughingly call child protective services, and the fourth is kinda-sorta safe, but probably not. Which is pretty much the way these things go. You can do everything right, and yet, when you’re this kind of kid, it’s still not enough to save you.

It’s not just the kids who are unsaved. The police, the teachers, the politicians — all bang their heads against something bigger, and all get bloody foreheads, while the immovable object remains unmoved. The overarching lesson is that it’s best not to try, except that the best characters, and the redeeming moments, come from the people who do try, and fail to move the object, but somehow find a little bit of hope. Remember McNulty last season, his career in tatters, going back to uniformed foot patrol, swinging his baton merrily and looking genuinely happy for once. Colvin tried to solve the drug problem in his own way last season, failed, but came back this year and succeeded (we hope) on a far smaller scale, by saving Namond from the corner. And Bodie, who shot Wallace in season one, found a shred of decency and tried to do the right thing, only to pay for it. He redeemed himself, however, in finding the shred. A small miracle.

So what is it we feel, then, if not good? Here’s my guess: Connection. In a TV show, connection is to feeling good what real intimacy is to just having sex. (Remember Prez’ remarks on this topic to his class?) More satisfying, deeper, sometimes painful but always worth the effort.

There is no justice in the world, so this episode, this season, will of course be ignored by the people who give the awards that make more work like this possible. That’s no reason to stop trying. I can’t wait for next season.

Discuss.

I’ve gotten a particular piece of wienie spam four times today. The first one said, “I don’t care why your woody is so small, but 81% of women do.”

The second one said, “I don’t care why your schlong is so small, but 74% of women do.”

The third one said, “I don’t care why your member is so small, but 85% of women do.”

The fourth one said, “I don’t care why your sausage is so small, but 70% of women do.”

Checking the junk file, I see I also got a version with a slightly different sentence construction, with the same tic — the euphemism changes, along with the percentage.

Oh, wait, another just arrived: “woody” and 80 percent.

Spammers. If only we could harness their powers for good.

It’s Friday, a sunny but cold Friday, which means today I’m a-gonna live large. Put in the contact lenses and wear my sunglasses, maybe hit an estate sale, work a bit and look forward to the weekend. On the strength of a hunch and a Free Press preview, I just bought tickets to the Moscow Cats Theater for tomorrow. Kate loves cats and needs to be exposed to more weirdness outside the boundaries of Grosse Pointe, so this seemed to fit the bill. I liked this detail:

When a stray cat jumps into the orchestra pit or refuses to move off the stage, Kuklachev will just move on to the next routine. “When they notice that all eyes are off of them, they will do something to win the attention back,” Gelfman says. “The show never plays the same way twice.”

Cats. If only we could harness their powers for good.

Well, the Rockettes aren’t bringing their Christmas show to the D this year, and it beats the drive-thru Nativity in Sterling Heights.

This feels like an end-of-the-week stew already, so let’s get to it:

I know I haven’t been keeping up with “On the Nightstand,” and yes, I’m about to change it, but before I put “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” back on the shelf, a plug for its wonderfulness. I’ve been reading compilations of journalists’ work for years, and not all of them are worth the paper they’re printed on, but this one — this one has legs. A bouquet of wonderful profiles, followed by personal essays of grace and style. It would make a fine book club selection, or beach reading, or whatever. And yes, it has a new website, full of supplemental materials. Enjoy.

I just read a rave of “Apocalypto” by one of my favorite critics, but you know what they say about opinions. Here’s another take, from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

Here is a partial list of the indignities to which the human body is subjected in Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic Apocalypto (Buena Vista): being impaled on a trap made of animal bones. Being forced to ingest tapir testicles. Being tricked into rubbing a caustic agent on one’s own genitals while the whole village watches and laughs. Seeing one’s father have his throat slit. Getting one’s heart cut out in a sacrificial ritual. Having one’s head subsequently chopped off and thrown down the stairs of a pyramid. Having one’s face chewed off by a panther. …Gibson’s fascination with the Mayans seems to spring entirely from the fact (or fantasy) that they were exotic badasses who knew how to whomp the hell out of one another, old-school.

Extra credit for a fresh use of that old analogy: “so (blank) it makes (blank) look like (blank).” Ahem: A chase scene at a roaring waterfall is so spectacular, it makes “Last of the Mohicans” look like an Esther Williams musical.

Mercy. I’ll wait for the cable debut. Although I still haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ.” Doesn’t Mel believe in HBO?

Finally, I pride myself — not really; I just take note of it — on not having any accent. I’m from the middle of Ohio, where the natives have no regional accent whatsoever. My St. Louis-raised parents said “fark” and “harse” for fork and horse, but they moved me to the Buckeye state before I started kindergarten, and so — no accent. Evidently, experts agree:

Glad to clear that up. Now, on to “What mental disorder do you have?” Have a swell weekend.