One of the more amusing widgets on my new desktop is one that tells me if Mercury is retrograde at any given moment. I believe in astrology about as much as I believe in the leadership capabilities of George W. Bush, but I do believe in easy, stupid explanations for a run of bad luck, and “Mercury is retrograde” works as well as any. (For a time, my friend Mark the Shark started blaming everything that happened in his life on El Niño. This worked well, as it fit in with what everyone else in the world was doing, at least as reflected in the newspapers, where everything from a plague of leopard slugs to a bad losing streak was credited to El Niño.)

After this last couple days of pratfalls, screwups, bad weather and hit-and-run drivers, I need an explanation. I went to the grocery store yesterday and discovered I’d left my wallet at home, having removed it to file my insurance report. I went home and walked the dog. Nothing like walking the dog to settle the old nerves. The leash broke. I drove Kate to school this morning because it was unpleasantly chilly, and the remains of my taillight fell out in the middle of Mack Avenue.

Went home and checked the widget. “Mercury OK,” it said.

Here’s a nice explanation of how retrograde motion happens, if you’re interested.

A nice interlude at the state police post yesterday, sitting in their sterile little waiting area, where there’s nothing to read but pamphlets, but the TV is tuned to the History Channel. I caught the end of a show on Old Las Vegas. In the usual fashion, they kept the titillation for the end, with a discussion of the early topless shows and prostitution on the Strip. Cut to the Las Vegas sheriff, who said with a straight face, “There still may be some prostitution in Vegas, but no more than anywhere else.” I looked around to see if the troopers behind the counter were as wide-eyed with astonishment as I was. They remained intent on their computer screens; it’s just background noise to them.

One of the cops was wearing shades, indoors on a cloudy day. I thought he was just rockin’ the macho cop look, but no — he’d recently had Lasik surgery, and the lights were bothering him. We discussed the pros and cons of this elective procedure, and he said some departments — not his — were making Lasik available free to all working officers. A cop without specs is not fogging his lenses at critical moments, and the prices are now low enough to make it cheaper, over time, than a new pair of $300 glasses every couple years. So far, in Michigan, this enviable health benefit was only available free of charge to — wait for it — state legislators. At least that’s what he said; I have no idea if it’s true, but if so it’s funny, since the distinguished gentlefolk in Lansing are currently displaying extreme myopia, and need all the vision correction they can get.

My first encounter with the Michigan state police came as a teenager in the U.P., where they’re known as “the state boys,” and the less said about that encounter the better. They still drive blue cruisers with a single gumball-machine light on top — none of those pussy high-tech light bars for the state boys. The other day I passed one who had a car pulled over on I-75, three adult men inside, and arrayed on the car’s rooftop — a 40-oz. bottle half-filled with beer and two tall-boy cans of same. The men inside looked glum; the party was over. The state boy sat in the cruiser writing on a clipboard. They say anesthesiology is hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. A cop’s life is 40 percent drunks and 60 percent paperwork.

Do you watch “COPS”? I don’t, but I know men who use it for father-son bonding purposes. Every so often it’s good for a laugh; I’m always amazed at the power of television demonstrated by how many of these Cletuses sign the release to be on TV. I’d think one of the great tensions in a police officer’s life would be the daily confrontation with life’s injustice and ambiguity, seeing how poverty and degradation can thwart even the strongest will, the same way money and privilege can buoy the most clueless morons. Maybe this is why cop-speak tends to be hyper-specific, a place where men and women are males and females, cars are vehicles and booze is intoxicants. The local weekly reports the police business in the language on the report, and so when drunks are pulled out of their cars for sobriety tests, it’s always due to “the strong odor of intoxicants coming from the driver’s facial area.”

Does this entry have a point? It doesn’t appear to, although there’s the strong odor of ass coming from its facial area, so let’s just skip to the bloggage and me to the shower.

Mean Christopher Hitchens on the newly departed reverend: One of (Falwell’s) associates, Bailey Smith, once opined that “God does not hear the prayers of a Jew.” This is one of the few anti-Semitic remarks ever made that has a basis in fact, since God does not exist and does not attend to any prayers, but Smith was not quite making that point. Harsh!

Via Metafilter: Runners tend toward teh crazy. Here’s evidence.

Google Analytics provides evidence that while it may not pay to pick on people more popular than yourself, it does do wonders for one’s traffic:

Another day, another stop at the body shop. Sorry for excessive lameness today; I’m preoccupied.

I should have known it would be a lousy night. The proverbial strong line of thunderstorms blew through the area late in the afternoon. When I showed up for my writing workshop at Wayne State, I was one of two (2) to do so. And it wasn’t a very productive session, either, even with a vastly improved student-teacher ratio.

I got disoriented leaving the library — why are college campuses laid out so oddly? I ask you — and had to walk halfway around a long city block, in the driving rain, to find my car.

And then it was out onto I-94 for the chariot race home, only things were moving slower because of the rain. But it was moving, and then the taillights up ahead started winking red for something involving police lights. This being Detroit, it could have been anything from a flooded dip in the road to a rabid pit bull firing a machine gun. I was slowing down in the center lane when the person behind me on the right did the quintessential D-town freeway move — the multiple-lane high-speed cutover in heavy traffic. I felt the crunch as s/he clipped my left taillight.

And watched as the offender sped off into the twilight.

I scanned my options for a moment and considered the correct one was probably the most ridiculous: Pull over, stop, call 911 and await further instructions for a no-injury, minor-damage accident during a howling thunderstorm. Or I could get proactive. Reader, an air bag of inspiration deployed; I gave chase.

Hit me and take off, will you? Well, we shall see about that! The vehicle, a pickup, was easy to track — DODGE in big white letters on a black tailgate. I gained on it, dropped in behind, flashed my brights in search of the plate number. At which point the driver felt an urgent need to exit, which fit my purposes perfectly; I could catch up the way a yellow flag bunches up a Nascar field. I got the license plate, scrawled it on my writing-workshop folder, and what’s this? S/he’s pulling over? Excellent. I pulled over behind the truck. As soon as we were both stopped, the driver laid rubber going away. I followed for a few more blocks of amateurish left-right-left-right shenanigans, then stopped and called 911. I didn’t need to get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood at night. The man at the state police post was very nice. I have to go down today and file a report, at which point the system will yawn in my face. As much as I might hope for a CSI-style investigation, complete with flyovers with infrared scopes and Marg Helgenberger gathering paint chips from my bumper, this is a no-fault insurance state. No injuries, no complications, sign here and here and here and pay the $500 deductible.

So that was my night. How was yours?

It got me thinking later, when the blood had settled a bit. The last time I was in an accident serious enough to get insurance adjusters involved was nearly 20 years ago. I was sitting at a light at Creighton and Fairfield in lovely south-side Fort Wayne, Indiana when I looked up to see a driverless car leaving the gas station, approaching my passenger door at a 90-degree angle. It hit me hard enough to push me into the next lane. I got out and walked over to the car. Sitting behind the wheel was a smiling, gurgling, apparently unharmed boy of about 2. His father had left him unrestrained in a running car while he went inside to buy cigarettes or something. Guess what he said when he came out to discover his son had had his first fender-bender before he was toilet-trained.

“I told him not to touch nothin’.”

Well, at least I have amusing accidents.

Moving on, then. I see Brian got a little miffed at the “grave-dancing” in yesterday’s comments, over the late Rev. Fartwell. No less a pinko than Roy opted out as well. Fine, it’s a defensible choice. When someone dies, it zeroes the scales, or at least reduces them by 21 grams. Don’t speak ill of the dead, etc. At the same time, though, we have to give a dead man his due. I really don’t have an ax to grind with the guy — he existed in the realm of Ann Coulter for me — so I started thinking back, as dispassionately as I could, on the Rev’s public statements, trying to recall if, even once, he tried to be taken seriously, if he ever brought anything to the discussion to indicate he wanted to play fair in the fields of policy debate.

And I couldn’t think of anything. Tim Noah at Slate gives us the highlights. And let’s not forget his role in the Clinton Chronicles. I won’t say “good riddance,” but I will say: I won’t miss him. Oh, and thanks to Kirk for finding this YouTube clip from the breaking-news cycle that shows, as if you needed to see it again, how credulous too many journalists can be.

The iPod threw out a gem on yesterday’s bike ride — “It’s Madison Time,” by the Ray Bryant Combo. It’s the most complicated dance record in history, I think: Now when I say hit it, I want you to go two up and two back, double cross and come out of it with the rifleman. Later verses call for a “Cleveland box,” “Jackie Gleason” and a “basketball, with a Wilt Chamberlain hook.” What-ever. I first heard the song in “Hairspray,” original recipe. I figured it, like so much in that movie, was an obscure Baltimore reference, and thought of asking Ms. Lippman about it. Asked Google instead, and I’m so glad I did. Because it turns out the Madison started in…Columbus, according to William “Bubbles” Holloway, anyhow. (Warning: Really obnoxious embedded sound.) The scanned newspaper clip on that page shows a sharp-looking line of black folks doing the Madison at “the LVA Club on E. Long St.” Get out!

Let’s bring the bloggage full circle, back to Detroit, as we wrap up with Detroitblog’s report from the Cinco de Mayo parade:

The Freep mentioned the parade on its front page the day before, so I expected an influx of newcomers eager for a glimpse of the city outside the usual downtown radius most people think of as “Detroit.” Instead there was a mere handful, consisting either of pale hipsters exposing their pasty flanks to the climbing sun, or several odd academic types in their 50s, complete with standard professorial attire like a tweed jacket (seriously), whose confused demeanor suggested they came to observe this mysterious and heretofore unfamiliar phenomenon called Local Mexican People, who constitute nearly the entire population of this area.

The prof types near us looked slightly disappointed or bewildered as the parade plowed forward, as if they expected to see perhaps a solemn procession paying tribute to ancient Mayan roots, or marchers carrying effigies representing genocidal conquistadors imposing an alien culture on meek native peoples, the kind of scene that brings a flutter to the modern academic heart.

Instead they got chihuahuas, Virgin Mary tapestries, low-cut shirts, pit bulls pulling children in wagons, child boxers, tortillas handed out from floats, and hot rods galore, painted in varying levels of gaudiness and beauty. Their facial expressions suggested that they were seeing brazenly and merrily paraded before them the same supposed stereotypes they’ve likely lectured their students to avoid assuming.

But every ethnic parade is a host of stereotypes, or cultural icons, depending on your point of view. One person’s stereotype is another person’s “screw you, I actually do like hot rods.”

Me, too. Off to do battle with the insurance industry.

Two newspapers, same story. First headline:

DaimlerChrysler more than doubles first-quarter profits to $2.6 billion

Second headline:

Chrysler loss near $2 billion, mostly on restructuring

Both headlines are accurate. The first reports profits for the DaimlerChrysler Corp., the second for just the Chrysler group, a subtlety that may be missed before your morning coffee. Not that anyone gets both papers anymore, it’s just amusing in a wry, bitter kind of way. It kind of reminds me of the period at my old newspaper in which unemployment numbers were reported as employment numbers. Six percent weren’t out of work, 94 percent had jobs! Always look on the bright side of life, as the crucified man said.

If that seems like a really stupid way to report the news — 250,000 Metro Toddlers Not Mauled By Pit Bulls Today — well, join the club. Someday I’m going to write something about my experience working in journalism’s minor leagues. All those years have to be worth something. It’ll have to be fiction, since most of it is so unbelievable in the first place. Who, for instance, would swallow the idea that an editor could seize upon highlighting — yes, yellow bars of color over significant blocks of text, the way you marked up “Silas Marner” in high school — as a way to serve readers? This was an idea an editor of mine had during the grim years in the ’80s when we kept getting readership studies that people were spending less and less time with us; at that time the figure was something like 17 minutes. The editor thought, OK, if you only have 17 minutes, we’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version.

The bosses liked the idea enough to print up a few dozen copies and run it past a focus group, where it flopped like a fat kid off the high board. The papers were gathered up and destroyed, and one of my great regrets is that I didn’t steal a copy for posterity. But I saw one, I swear I did, just like Winston Smith with that newspaper photo in “1984.” Part of the problem was that newspaper stories, written well, should essentially be the highlighted version of events. We don’t write about what the city council members were wearing, or the pleasantries they exchanged, or the jokes they made about the weather, all of which you can get on the local-government cable channel. We report the important stuff that happened, i.e., the highlights. And the standard inverted-pyramid style, with the important stuff in the top few paragraphs, is a form of highlighting in and of itself; you always write a story knowing that most people will only read part of it.

But the highlighted version we gave them was different. (I may have a highlighted-text tool in my HTML editor, but if so I can’t figure it out, and I’m not going to call my web guy and bug him about it. Just imagine the bold words are highlighted.) It ran kind of like this:

City Council passed a sweeping anti-smoking ordinance at their Monday-night meeting, in front of a boisterous crowd more suited to a football game than a government meeting. Supporters cheered, and opponents jeered, as the council voted 7-2 in favor of the measure, which bans smoking in most indoor public places, including bars and restaurants.

I suggested if we were going to do that, then maybe we should go all the way and write our stories like those ads you used to see on buses and in the back of Seventeen magazine: If u cn rd ths msj, u cn bcm a sec nd gt a gd jb. Talk about your bold measures! For some reason, no one liked this idea. I never was management material.

Oh, well. We went down swinging, even if we didn’t land too many punches.

I was going to give you some tasty bloggage today, but my husband just walked into the room and said, “Oh. Hey. Happy anniversary.”

For the first time ever, I’d forgotten about it, too. In case you’re wondering, it’s 14 blissful years since we were joined together by a gay Methodist preacher in the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. If that strikes you as a lousy place for a wedding, you weren’t there. (I forget what exhibit was hanging in the gallery where we did the deed, but I do remember Alan checking on it, because it was preceded by a photography show — self-portraits of some woman with colon cancer, featuring her colostomy bag. That might have sent us to a nice park somewhere.)

Anyway, happy anniversary to us. I’m knocking off early.

Elmore Leonard’s on “Detroit Today,” a local call-in show on WDET, promoting his new book, and jeeeeez, they just made him sit there while they replayed my essay about him.

(Pause. Razor poised over wrist.)

Hey, he said he liked it.

Well, now I’m awake. Back to work.

I have a big deadline today, and I intend to make it. I’ve already tried two or three short, dashed-off entries for you folks to splash around in the comments over, but they all sucked more than usual and so: Bleah.

Besides, the only thing I can think about today, besides the deadline, is last night’s “Sopranos” episode, which left me with so much to chew on that I’ll be working it over for days. I know not everyone here watches the show, but hey — if you do, have at it. We could start with the episode title: “Kennedy and Heidi.” Those were the names of the two girls in the car Chris nearly collided head-on with, but what’s the deeper meaning? And, of course, there is a deeper meaning — this is “The Sopranos,” after all — and particularly when you consider Tony’s remark when he saw Kelly at the funeral (“Jackie Kennedy”). Or maybe there isn’t. And not to take anything too literally, I’m wondering if Chrissy is Ba:

Number four is Ba, the heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Or maybe he’s Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the western lands.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the next to go is A.J. Discuss. I’ll be back later, A.D.

And thanks to Ken Levine for finding this clip on YouTube, which I think says it all:

Some people got to discussing grace — as in “the prayer before eating,” not “the love of God” or “elegance of movement” — in the comments yesterday. It reminded me of one of the pitfalls of not raising our child in any religion, i.e. she can’t say grace when called upon. On the summer to-do list: Teach her one or two.

At camp with the girl scouts a couple weeks ago, we were asked to “take an attitude of respect” for a short blessing before every meal. A different troop was called forward to lead us each time, and some smartass Brownies called for the Addams family grace:

Na na na nah (snap fingers twice)
Na na na nah (snap fingers twice)
Na na na nah (sing three times then snap fingers twice)

We thank the Lord for giving
The food we need for living
Because we really need it
And we like it too!

Note to self: Not that one.

We said a grace in our house, on holidays and special occasions only, that I have come to think of as “Catholic grace:” BlessusohLordandthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceive
throughChristourLordamen, and a lunge for the mashed potatoes. Grace is frequently said at breakneck speed in Catholic families, because families tend to be large and if you don’t move fast, you go hungry. In Alan’s Methodist family, they say Protestant grace: Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen. I know it’s Protestant because I later found it cross-stitched onto a set of placemats made for our family by my mother’s Lutheran aunt. Anyway, no one makes the sign of the cross first. It always bugged me because it rhymes. Prayers shouldn’t rhyme. (Google attributes it to Martin Luther, the famous rhyming heretic, but that sounds like a crock. What’s the German version?)

Even though I was raised Catholic in a WASP-y neighborhood, I really didn’t experience the untracked territories of grace until I started eating with my best friend Becky’s family. Her father was a United Church of Christ minister and her mother was southern, which meant a certain hybrid style — a prayer in which hands weren’t folded in front of us but joined around the table. I’m not a hand-holder under any circumstances. Remember Larry David in the prayer circle on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” trying to get away with no more than a fingertip of human contact? That’s me. But her mother was a great cook, and it seemed a small sacrifice to make in the name of being a good guest.

And then the Jesus Revolution came to our little suburb, and all of a sudden we were into the free-form prayer, to which there’s only one reaction: God help us all.

One night, in the very earliest days of the televangelist era, I was asked to stay for dinner at my friend Jeff’s house. Jeff was heavily into the then-unknown Jim and Tammy Bakker, particularly Tammy. (Of course Jeff was gay; do you even need to ask?) We would talk to one another in Appalachian accents for long stretches, asking one another to cast out the demons of multiple sclerosis from a lady in Iowa who was holding her hands on the TV in hopes of a cure. So we sat down at the table, and Jeff’s mother said, “Did I forget anything?” and I said, in my best southeast Ohio hillbilly twang, “Nope. All we gotta do now is thank the Lord.” As soon as my tongue touched my palate to form the L sound, I remember that Jeff’s father had recently become a born-again Christian, and was inclined to be a real pain in the ass about it. Too late!

“Yes, let’s,” he said, smiling beatifically, reaching for the hands on either side of him. And he commenced to make a long, long, long extemporaneous prayer, asking that not only the food and the company be blessed, but that God protect Scott (another son) on the long cross-country journey he was preparing to make, and thanks for the lovely weather, and have we mentioned how happy we are to all be together around the table and –

This was too much for me. Jeff’s hand, holding mine, was crushing it with the effort of not laughing, but I was defeated and started snorting, high up in my sinuses. Would he never get to the goddamn amen? My eyes filled with tears; I’m sure my face was purple. By the time it was over, I had to throw down my napkin and rush to the bathroom to shriek into the towels, which sort of spoiled the mood. It remains the single most mortifying social faux pas of my life, and queered me on non-denominational Christianity once and for all.

My parents’ ashes are interred in the same cemetery where Jeff is buried. He’s just two doors down from Woody Hayes, so his family plot was easy to find. The last time I was there, I saw his father’s name had been added to the stone. I’m not much of a knee-bender, but I stood for a moment and threw out some silent vibes of apology.

So, bloggage? Yes, bloggage:

It’s customary to refer to the local constabulary as “(name of city)’s Finest,” but I bet they don’t say that in Dearborn, not anymore. A cop lifts some pot off a suspect, takes it home to make brownies, eats the whole batch and then bitches out on the maryjane rollercoaster. The 911 call, embedded in the page, will make you feel 17 again. Make sure to stick around until he asks the score of the Red Wings game.

From the Why Didn’t I Go to B-School file: Pasadena website outsources city council coverage — to India.

The weekend, it’s here! Have a good one.

I don’t know if there’s a way to search how many times I use words ending in “ly,” but I’m taking a vow today: No more adverbs. OK, fewer adverbs. OK, just no more of the bad ones.

Which are? The ones that appear in newspapers these days. The big three chapping my ass at the moment are “deeply religious,” “wept openly” and my current bete noire, “visibly shaken.”

There was an upset in the mayoral primary in Fort Wayne Tuesday. A reporter describes the scene at GOP headquarters:

Peters, who had the backing of the majority of Republican elected officials, left Republican headquarters on Main Street visibly shaken. “You don’t embark on a process like this without feeling you’ll prevail,” he said.

The first sentence writes the check; the quote bounces it. The candidate in question is a veteran pol and corporate HR executive, something of a career bureaucrat, and I bet the last time he was visibly shaken was when the Hurryin’ Hoosiers were upset at Assembly Hall. Yes, he was the favorite, but “visibly shaken,” to me, means he was pale, trembling, confused, teary, whatever. And if he was, then say so, dammit.

“Wept openly” — there’s another one. I suppose it’s possible to hide one’s weeping, behind your hands or in a bathroom somewhere, but if you’re in a position where you’re visible to others, your weeping is pretty open. You’re not fooling anyone with that “I must have something in my eye” trick, you know. “Wept unashamed” is better, if you have to point it out. (I had an editor once, Richard the Fabulous, who had the most deadpan sense of humor on the planet. He liked to say, “I wept openly” in describing some cheesy movie he’d just seen; it was code for “boy, did that suck.”)

“Deeply religious” — we all know what that means. Crazy religious.

I’m not the first one to say this; see Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlan on the same subject, both from Poynter.

Oy. It’s been a week, hasn’t it? I feel as though all I’ve done is rattle keys and approve comments. Thanks to all who stopped by, but if I’m going to make a living I can’t sustain this pace. Deadlines are callin’ and today I sign a contract for my summer project — text for a coffee-table book. Why Nance, you’re asking. Doesn’t that boil down to “cutlines?” No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t add up to a 90,000-word manuscript, either. More like 20K, for a book with a nice history theme, which means lots of library research, old photos, microfilm and, because this is a Detroit project, deep sighing. It’s impossible to look at What Was in this city without mourning What It All Came To. I can be fairly dispassionate about the way societies change — the wheels turn, etc. — but “no regrets” isn’t really in my DNA, either. I’m not a Detroit defeatist; the city remains, even in its ruin, endlessly interesting and worth sticking around to see what comes next. But it was once something so grand, and you have to give that a moment of silence, too.

More on this project as it gels.

Do we have bloggage today? We do.

Just another day in the D:

One night last week, someone firebombed an abandoned house on Caldwell Street in northeast Detroit that was 4 feet from a home occupied by 22-year-old Adrian Griffin, a small, taut woman who awoke in a bedroom radiating heat like an oven.

When she opened her eyes, she saw flames from next door licking through a cracked window. She jumped out of bed and rousted her younger brother and sister. They escaped and stood on the sidewalk, watching the flames consume their home.

As she stood there, Griffin said, she thought to herself: “Is that fire engine smoking?” Yes, that was smoke. It was pouring out of the motor of the principal pumper engine on the scene, and it eventually forced the firefighters to shut down the pumper and rely on other equipment.

You live next door to an abandoned house, which is then firebombed by an arsonist, which sets your own house on fire, and the fire fighters arrive, and the pumper breaks down. Someone once told me that “living on the south side of Fort Wayne is a political act,” probably with an index finger raised in the air. But let it be said: Living on the south side of Fort Wayne is to living in Detroit what watching “Black Hawk Down” is to actually fighting on the streets of Mogadishu.

Meanwhile, Golden Wheel honoree Ron hits another one out of the park with his explication of how Michigan teachers will end up bankrupting us all. OK, a bit of overstatement, but not much. Probably not for non-Mitten residents, but for all interested in how these things get out of hand.

That’s it for me. On to the gym; my knee’s finally up for more abuse.

Humor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. (How’s that for a banal lede? I’m going for something more or less guaranteed to put every reader to sleep, because I want you all asleep by the time I realize I haven’t figured this out at all.)

Anyway, in all the Lileksian blather of the past few days, there was one comment that drew me up short every time: He’s hilarious! He’s the only reason I even get that paper; how foolish they’d be to drop him. I consider myself a person with a rich sense of humor, and I simply can’t wrap my mind around that one. It took me back to the Lileks Daily Quirk archive; surely I was missing something. Here’s Tuesday’s offering, paragraph one:

I like Pepto-Bismol. There. I said it. When I have a gut full of battery acid and barbed-wire shards, I reach for the big pink bottle, and I glug it straight. You feel it descending on your stomach lining, like a curtain falling on a bad play. It never seems to cure anything, but it’s a comfort; I always have a bottle in reserve, and it’s Maximum Strength, too, baby. Sure, it’s overkill, but once they admitted the existence of Maximum Strength, Regular was off the table. I think Maximum was like their private reserve, something they bottled for popes and astronauts. Now we all have access, and I’m not going back.

I see what he’s going for here, but it’s not working for me. If the newspaper offered this as a morning day-brightener, something to put a spring in my step as I head out the door, well, sorry. It has the flop-sweaty smell of bad standup. That the paper supposedly compensated the man who wrote this to the tune of $92,000 a year — now that’s funny, but probably not in the way they intended.

But it’s unfair to judge a man by one column. Let’s try another, from the day before:

Today’s Helpful Hint: how to customize your tissue boxes. Why? you ask. For heaven’s sake, does everything have to be customized? Must we have wi-fi enabled toilet-paper spindles that download tunes so you can customize the sound when someone rolls off a dozen squares? Maybe next year. For now, consider this: There hasn’t been much innovation in the tissue world since Kleenex invented the interfolded pop-up tissue in 1928. Imagine the reaction the first time someone pulled up a tissue and another took its place. My stars! First radio, then Lindbergh, now this! An age of marvels! At some point they added lotion, for those who want their specs to look like they’ve been rubbed with Crisco. (Kleenex does not recommend using their tissues for eyeglasses cleaning, incidentally. File that under “Don’t put Q-tips in your ear canals.”)

Better than the Pepto-Bismol effort, but still — not laughing, nor even smiling. Kleenex boxes — what’s up with that?

This isn’t a pile-on for poor, soon-to-be-bought-out Lileks. The problem isn’t him; it’s newspapers. Newspapers can be very entertaining to read — I have laughed myself to tears reading them more often than I can count — but they’re very seldom funny on purpose.

An example: One day the morning paper in Fort Wayne ran a story about a dog that went on an incredible journey. He belonged to some extended family of mutants who lost him at a rest stop somewhere around Chicago. They were en route to Wisconsin, the whole clan traveling in an overloaded car with no brakes. They knew there were no brakes, but they all really wanted to go to Wisconsin, and didn’t think such details should hold them back. So they got on the road — U.S. 30, for God’s sake, with no brakes — and somehow coasted to a stop at this rest area, and everyone got out to pee, and the dog got loose. They looked all over for him, but couldn’t find him, so they headed off to Wisconsin in the brakeless car, had their visit, and came back. They stopped somewhere, and whaddaya know, there’s the dog, still hanging around after several days. So they took him home and called the newspaper. The story had great quotes from Linda Mae and Pop-pop and so on, and then there was the photo — the whole family of Cletuses gathered around the dog. One of my colleagues drew a little balloon coming out of its mouth: I thought I’d gotten away from these goobers. I thought this story was hysterical, although my retelling isn’t, but if you had been there, you’d have laughed, too. (The picture had a lot to do with it.)

That’s the kind of humor the newspaper does best. They shouldn’t monkey with success.

For a long time, they didn’t. The designated humor columns were utterly lame, some geezer spinning one-liners or puns. Many editors hate writers who try to be funny, especially if they’re sarcastic about it, because there’s always a contingent of readers who simply won’t get it, and can get really pissy, complaining about it. One of the Milwaukee papers was so freaked by its humor columnist that it ran a tagline at the bottom: A satirical column of personal opinion. This was funny, but again, not in the way the editors intended. In most newspapers, the only place to be legitimately funny was on the comics page, and you know how often we all crack up over “Beetle Bailey.”

One guy changed all this. Dave Barry, of course. I still remember the utter thrill of reading his early columns in the Miami Herald’s great, now-defunct Sunday magazine, Tropic. They were so daffy and original. It was such a treat to read something in the paper that made you laugh out loud from joy. He was syndicated almost immediately. Here’s an early story about how his column went over: He was writing about physical fitness, and had two paragraphs that ran something like this:

“Once upon a time, American presidents were giant waddling tubs of lard like BLANK and BLANK. (RESEARCH: PLEASE INSERT THE NAMES OF TWO FAT PRESIDENTS.)” Later on, he wrote, “An exercise routine without a plan is like a tractor without a BLANK. (RESEARCH: PLEASE INSERT AN IMPORTANT TRACTOR PART HERE.)” The blanks didn’t have anything to do with the column, unless he was making some joke about laziness, but were the sort of wild meta-tangent he liked to take. This was funny enough, but even more amusing was the Columbus Dispatch copy editor who inserted “William Howard Taft” and “Grover Cleveland” in the first two blanks and “motor” in the third, taking out the RESEARCH notes. The editor of the section met Barry at a conference shortly after this, told him about it, and said Barry nearly peed his pants laughing over it.

For many, many years, Barry set the bar for newspaper humor. The first profiles of him that ran, in the early ’80s, pointed out that while he was funny in person, he was also kind of an angry guy, too. This was no surprise; the roots of humor are in pain, as any Jewish comic could tell you. My favorite pieces by Barry remain a few that didn’t run in the usual places — one about his mother’s suicide, another about taking his little boy to the first day of kindergarten, and a rip-roarer long-form essay about South Florida weirdness. The first two were terribly sad but beautifully written, and the Florida essay had few jokes in it, but was hilarious simply for its statements of fact, like how strange it is when your kid comes home from school and reports a classmate brought a machine gun to Show and Tell. Barry understands that nothing is as funny as reality, that car full of goobers and their luckless dog; it’s no accident one of his catch phrases is “I am not making this up.”

(What’s your favorite Barry niche? Mine is Mr. Language Person. I love his rule of apostrophe usage — “to let the reader know an S is coming, e.g. ‘Try our hot dog’s.’”)

Even Barry has his bad days, though. There was a long time when I stopped laughing, and then he got a lot better, and then he took a year off, and then he more or less retired from journalism, and no, I don’t blame him. Comedy, as they say, is hard. And he only wrote once a week. Which brings us back to Lileks, who writes five or six times a week. No wonder he’s not funny. Groucho Marx couldn’t be funny on a schedule like that. He’s a fine writer, but the gruel doesn’t get much thinner than I Go Shopping for Sunglasses:

I found a store that sold clip-ons, and yea, there was much rejoicing. They were cheap and poorly polarized, which gave certain objects a peculiar pattern; when I looked in the rearview mirror, the polarized surface of the back window looked as though it was covered with a giant ultraviolet waffle. I didn’t care. Twenty bucks. But I lost them. Keep in mind that I do not lose things, aside from important financial documents needed around the middle of April. It’s possible I mailed the clip-ons to the IRS. They’ll probably send them back in 2009. Without interest.

So who’s funny now? For my money, Gene Weingarten in the WashPost, known to insiders as The Man Who Discovered Dave Barry, is the only competition. In fact, I think he’s far funnier, and here’s why: He can be mean, and he doesn’t mind showing it. One of my favorites was when he called up PR people and said he’d promote their clients in the Washington Post, in return for the revelation of an embarrassing personal secret. And they did it! “My husband left me for a younger woman,” said one, which was followed by a boilerplate recitation of the merits of some sofa pillow she was repping. Wondering how much more abuse the president can take, he suggested an upcoming weather report:

It’ll be warm tomorrow in Washington, high in the 60s, with clear skies except maybe over the White House, where, anytime now, with any sort of luck, we’re going to see the wrathful, purifying fire of a justly outraged God. Over to you, Christina, for a look at the traffic.

If you’re going to be funny, you have to be fearless. Newspapers have their backs against the wall, and live in fear of offending even a single subscriber. And so too much newspaper humor ventures a weak joke, and then adds an immediate apology: Of course I’m not seriously suggesting we draft the Bush twins, only that… Jon Carroll, for my money the best five-day-a-week columnist in this or any country, explains the roots of humor as well as anyone, and underlines the need to be fearless. He’s also fearless about making fun of himself, which is why he’s as good at being funny as he is at being serious, and he is devastating at both.

Here’s a funny experiment to try at home — Google “humor columnist.” Hit No. 1: Sheila Moss, freelancer, “a columnist for Smyrna AM, a supplement to the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal and Nashville Tennessean.” At the top of her menu, “A Night at the Opry,” which begins:

The other night I went to the Grand Ole Opry and took my grandson. I feel that children need to be exposed to performing arts in real life, not just on television. Of course, the first thing he did when found out the Opry was live on television was to call his dad and tell him to look for him in the audience. So much for the importance of reality to an eight-year-old.

Hit No. 2, Tom Purcell. Read him in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Washington Times, the Jewish World Review and hear him on the Rush Limbaugh show. Uh-oh. Most of his stuff online is pretty old; let’s enjoy an excerpt from a piece called “The Silver-Tongued Devil”:

As the president extricates himself from his latest tangle, I’m convinced of something I’ve suspected for a long time: Clinton is the devil.

My suspicions were bolstered a year ago when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd arrived at the same conclusion. But when I watched Clinton dance through his State of the Union Address, I became sure of it. Clinton is Satan, the prince of darkness, Beelzebub himself.

David Leonhardt bills himself as “the Happy Guy.” From “A Bad Hairdresser Day,” let’s read together:

“Hey everybody!” Hairdresser Lady called out. “It’s The Happy Guy.”

“Don’t try buttering me up, Hairdresser Lady,” I warned. “It’s not going to work.”

“What’s not going to work?” she demanded.

“You can’t cover up your gross incompetence with a ‘Hey everybody’ cheer.”

“Gross incompetence?”

“That’s right. Just look at my head. Go ahead, take a real close look.”

“Why, it’s a family of sparrows. What a lovely nest,” she grinned.

“No, over here.”

“My, my. If it isn’t a bald spot,” she giggled. “Should I give it a shine?”

Maybe you can see the problem. There’s just something about newspaper humor columnists that isn’t funny.

(I should pause at this late point and address the three of you who are still reading: I was not a humor columnist, but I tried to be funny lots of times, and failed pretty spectacularly, too. Once I wrote 650 words about Demi Moore’s boob job. It won an award for humor writing. I recently ran across it in some housecleaning, reread it and thought, Nope, not funny.)

I wish it were different, but this is another case of the internet ruining just everything. How can any humor columnist compete with The Onion? How can an editorial cartoonist, with one measly hand-drawn panel, compete with The Poor Man’s Keyboard Kommando Komix? An editorial writer may think he’s wielding a rapier of wit, but I guarantee you he can’t compete with Alicublog. (Note: You can substitute bloggers who line up with your own political views, if you like.)

And now, 8 million words later, what have we learned by plowing through this sludge of a blog entry? How about this: I am reminded of an old, old New Yorker cartoon, back when they were multi-panel. A guy sits writing at a typewriter, chuckling to himself. His wife enters the room with a flyswatter, and he asks her to read over what he’s written; he doesn’t want to be guilty of “too much levity.” She reads while he sits smirking, hands it back, stone-faced, and says, “No, I don’t think it’s too funny at all.”

Only one bit of bloggage today: The plight of the residents of tiny Lakeville, Mich., victims of a rule-obsessed postmaster. The DetNews story is very funny, but yes, understated. Funniest single fact: Lakeville has a lake called Lakeville Lake.

The colonists are overfamiliar. Make sure you page through the photos for the reverse-angle shot.