Well, I got nuthin’ for you folks today, mainly because I gotta get somethin’ for somebody else. But we have tasty bloggage. Mull. Discuss. And check back later, when my brain will be a little more sprightly, eh?

As an occasional viewer of “Animal Cops: Detroit” I know my new hometown is to dogfighting what it is to, well, the NBA, MLB, NHL and (to a far lesser extent) NFL — i.e., a contender. Some bastard’s always getting busted with all manner of grisly training devices in his dank basement. If it’s any consolation, I can hardly see how they’re disposing of the losing pit bulls in the manner Vick was accused of, when it’s plain they’re simply released into city neighborhoods to bring their special kind of magic to the urban prairie.

This WashPost piece takes a look at the subculture of “dog men,” a widespread, underground network of fighting operations that evidently included Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels. (Why not “Kennelz?” I wonder.) Interesting.

In my time as a sports copy editor, I became familiar with many Toy Department contenders for the Academy of the Overrated, but none so deserving as Stephen Smith, aka the How-EV-uh Guy. (That was his ESPN catch phrase.) Well, someone agrees with me; he’s being stripped of his Philadelphia Inquirer column. Mitch Albom feels a great disturbance in the Force, or maybe it’s just his testicles snuggling up closer to his body cavity.

And finally, by popular demand…

The Stouder Family portrait, Simpsonized! (That’s Brian and Pam, and their kids, L-R, Shelby, Chloe and Grant.) Have a swell day.

Alan made a baldfaced, shocking statement the other day. He said Al Pacino was a lousy actor. He said he’s nothing but an arm-waving scenery-chewer, and then he dropped a bomb: “Face it, he hasn’t been in a decent movie since ‘The Godfather.’”

Well.

That’s some pretty strong meat there. His IMDb entry, admittedly written by some fanboy, begins, One of the greatest actors in all of film history… and no one has posted jeering rejoinders. This wasn’t an in-depth debate — I believe the context was whether to indulge me in my 4,592nd viewing or partial viewing of “Heat” or to keep clicking the remote — but I got that feeling of itchy doubt that suggested he might have a point. So I stopped reading the biography and clicked over to the filmography.

Alan wasn’t entirely correct; some of the best performances of Pacino’s career were made after “The Godfather,” but not long after. Two-thirds of the ones that made his bones, IMHO — “Panic in Needle Park,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” — were after the first “Godfather.” But by 1979 he was already showing us what could happen to Michael Corleone without a good director telling him to dial it down by 54 percent on take two: “…And Justice For All,” an embarrassment; “Cruising,” ditto; “Author! Author!,” a steaming pile; and, of course, the bad performance next to which all other bad performances must stand and be judged not-even-close, “Scarface.”

Then came, what? “Sea of Love,” in which we’re asked to believe Ellen Barkin is driven into a state of cross-eyed lust at the very sight of him. (I remember their hot coupling scenes, this blonde goddess of steam and the little homunculus.) “Glengarry Glen Ross” was a brief return to the early promise, and then came the headfirst slide into caricature: “Scent of a Woman,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and, God help us all, “Any Given Sunday,” in which Oliver Stone not only indulged the worst instincts of his star but encouraged others in the cast to play along. I remember watching that on the couch with Alan. True to Stone form, it was not only too long, there was another 15 minutes after the big climax, where the wounded-warrior player gets his redemption. I went to bed after the redemption scene, and as Alan crawled in half an hour later, I asked what happened.

“Al Pacino gets another job, and boy, was Cameron Diaz mad,” he said. Poor Cameron had to play every scene at 11; I guess she couldn’t even mellow after they won the big game.

I liked “Heat,” mostly because it had De Niro, Saint Val of the Chiseled Jaw, and a decent turn by Ashley Judd, and the precious Ted Levine and Diane Venora; even Tom Sizemore did work to be proud of in that thing. But now all I see are the scenes when Pacino gives it 110 percent; you want to tell him, “Keep your dignity. Stop yelling so much. Small men should command with authority, not volume, or everyone thinks they’re an asshole.” But noooo.

“Angels in America,” OK, the exception that proves the rule. He’s capable of so much more that when he sucks, it’s his own fault.

My sister saw Pacino on Broadway, in “American Buffalo.” “We were close enough that his spit went all over us when he got cranked up,” she said at the time.

I guess Alan wins this one. Make a contrary case, or nominate your own entry. I have to work on a newsletter.

In movies about big-city columnists, there’s always a moment where our hero stands on a corner and a bus passes by, emblazoned with an ad for their column. Those of us who wrote in smaller markets? We got rack cards for the vending machines. This was mine, but it was version 2.0. The first one misspelled my name. Yes, misspelled my name. “Null,” if you’re interested. Oh, and the artist added those earrings. The hair? Yet another of the Bad Perms of the ’80s.

Thanks to Leo for sending this along. He said it turned up in some newsroom furniture rearrangement recently.

Lately signs have been going up in the neighborhood — OUR TROOPS HOME NOW. It reminds me of 2003, when the signs in Fort Wayne said PRAY FOR OUR TROOPS and the ones in Ann Arbor commanded NO BLOOD FOR OIL and others advertised ANOTHER FAMILY FOR PEACE. Ann Arbor was a photo-negative version of Fort Wayne, I told people at the time; I’m sure it still is.

I never thought the war was a good idea, but I hoped it wouldn’t be a disaster. I hoped it would go the way we were promised it would, that the casualties would be minimal, the shooting brief, the outcome something not too shameful. Well, it turned out to be anything but those things. For most of 2003 I was living in Indiana, and I remember the runup to the invasion, the endless letters to the editor about the importance of supporting the troops and the tiresome repetition of what even then were talked-out talking points, about “fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here.” There was just so much of that crap. Alan was scowled at in a news meeting when he suggested, not long after Mission Accomplished, that we were going to be in Iraq for quite a bit longer. All of this — and, to be sure, a few other events in my life — made me feel I was regarding my community from behind a thick sheet of plexiglass. I’d sit in meetings, interviews, and want to ask, Who the hell are you people?

Things change, and I apologize for woolgathering. It’s just that here we are, four years later, and everything’s different, eh?

Sunday the New York Times ran “The War as We Saw It,” a column with seven bylines, all sergeants and specialists fighting in Iraq. The short version: We’re being lied to, yet again. The surge isn’t working. The situation is FUBAR. No one has a clue. I was struck by this paragraph:

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

That’s my emphasis, by the way. To save the village, we must destroy it, in other words. Saving ourselves, eh, that’s another matter. It’s times like these that I think the Rose Garden doesn’t need a wedding, it needs a hanging. Several hangings.

How depressing. Sorry about that. How about a Simpsons avatar instead?

It’s amazingly accurate, everyone who knows me will attest. Get your own.

I guess I’m not surprised to hear “John From Cincinnati” isn’t being renewed. The show really was a disappointment. (Did I watch all 10 episodes? Of course. That’s how I know.) I preserved high hopes to the end, thinking perhaps the promo guys were telling the truth when they said “all will be explained” in the final episode.

It wasn’t. As far as I can tell, God sent JFC to earth to save a surf-gear business, but I could be wrong. The show sort of went off the rails for me after John made his speech at the barbecue a few episodes back, a sermon that sounded like it was written, but not delivered, by potheads on the fifth day of a smoke-a-pound binge. A commenter at Television Without Pity said it best: Dear Mr. Milch, Please, put the drugs away. When the series was debuting, he (David Milch) went on Craig Ferguson’s show and said, “The wave — which I’m told is what surfers ride — is the only visible embodiment of what physicists tell us all matter is composed of, which is particles held together by some kind of magnetic or molecular force, and that’s what makes the waves move. And if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of man, he might use some drugged-out surfers.”

My gut reaction to this was: What b.s. But I wanted to believe. And I didn’t learn much about the deepest nature of man, except that Milch really needs to lay off the pottymouth dialogue and if I never hear the phrase “whippin’ his skippy” or “dump out” again, I can die happy.

Ah, well. “The Wire” will be with us eventually. Some compensation. And “Big Love” is really hitting its stride this season. I’ll keep HBO another year, I think.

You know what day we got digital cable with HBO? September 11, 2001. I could hardly bear it when the cable guy had to disconnect service briefly to get us hooked up to the ones-and-zeros feed. I told him as much when he got it reconnected, and said to just leave it on CNN, I’d show myself around the premium-channel landscape later. He said, rolling his eyes, “Yeah, man, this stuff” — gesturing to the carnage in New York — “it’s crazy.” Not the word I would have used, but OK.

A little pre-weekend bloggage, then?

Is she really going out with him? Not only that, they’re engaged. Jenna “the drunk one” Bush snags a pasty-faced fiancee. Let’s hope they don’t wind up on that John Waters show.

Make cruel fun — you know you want to. Back later.

The Committee had an early meeting today. That would be the Committee to Deprive Nance of Her Hard-Earned Rest. Over the years it’s had various subcommittees and chairs, but at the moment, the Worker Men are in their ascendancy, and have wrestled control away from the Blue Jays, the previous cadre at the top of the pyramid, squabbling REALLY LOUDLY for the chance to wake me up at an unreasonable hour.

The Worker Men are the guys in charge of tearing up our street, then leaving for a couple weeks, then coming back to push some stuff around, then leave for a couple more weeks, etc. Ostensibly they’re replacing a water main, but the new main has been buried for weeks now, and once again, work seems to have stalled. That doesn’t keep them from making an early appearance. For several days, someone was in charge of moving a backhoe from one end of the street to the other — CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK — at 7:45 a.m., then leaving it there, unused, for the rest of the day. I go to bed somewhere around 1 a.m.; all I want to do is sleep until 8; IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Apparently so.

This morning they put in a stronger, and louder, show of force, pushing several pieces of heavy equipment around, complete with those horrible beep-beep-beep backup noises. I look outside, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what they’re doing, other than making noise. I suspect the whole crew is comprised of toddler boys, who have discovered this cache of really big Tonka trucks, and are just having fun driving them around.

OK, rant over. Second cup of coffee in progress. I guess if I wanted I could close the windows and turn on the A/C, but it’s a cool, pleasant morning and I want to feel the breeze on my face as I sit next to the window. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Never mind. Counting blessings now.

Actually, if it were permitted, I’d love to hang out with these guys for a day or two, just to watch them work. No one really knows how things are done anymore, do they? What’s involved in building a bridge, replacing a water main, raising a skyscraper? I’m 95 percent clueless. That’s where I envy Alan his time spent working in factories while he decided whether to finish college; he understands the grit-and-grime part of the world far better than I do. (Too well, actually; having worked in a canned-soup factory, he won’t eat canned soup. His stories about moving dough around in the frozen-pizza plant will put you off frozen pizza forever. The less said about Etch-a-Sketch production, the better, and if I can leave you with one lesson, it’s this: Don’t ever buy manufactured housing, unless you want to learn how “DAP it” became a catch phrase in our household.)

Well, obviously I got nuttin to say. Do I have bloggage? Not much of that, either. (The world is on vacation.) But a little:

Why charity is complicated these days: CARE turns down 45 million American dollars, because a needlessly complex system of shipping subsidized American crops overseas to sell in the Third World wastes money and undermines local farmers. Color me shocked.

Hacking Starbucks, testimony that nonfat journalism doesn’t have to be boring.

In my perambulations around Flickr the other day, I found this gem, shot by Bobby Alcott, a local Detroit pro. It reminded me of my ex-neighbor Dennis in Indiana, who left our little street in the city to move to the country and breed championship Angus cattle. He mostly dealt in embryos and frozen semen but kept a few head around the place, and I loved to scratch their sweet-smelling foreheads. “You really like livestock, don’t you?” he asked once, amazed. Well, how can you not? They’re irresistible.

This story has so many coulds, mights and isn’t-even-on-the-drawing-board-yets you wonder why it even exists, but the idea is intriguing: a muscle-car hybrid. A Camaro hybrid. I’d buy that just to piss people off, even though I know it’ll fall apart in six months and cost me thousands of dollars and thousands of tears. It’s just funny.

What’s that I hear outside? It’s the beepbeepbeeping of a backhoe! Time to get to work.

The big news from the Hoosier state is pretty big, as Hoosier news goes: The Republican nominee for mayor of Fort Wayne was indicted yesterday. Nothing like a perp walk in handcuffs to cast a pall on a campaign, I always say. The nominee is a squeaky-clean kind of guy; when he was doing some last-minute primary campaigning at stoplights in the spring, he ran across none other than Alex, our regular commenter here at NN.C. The candidate, Matt Kelty, asked for his vote. Alex said he lived outside the city limits and couldn’t help.

“Pray for me, then,” he said, dashing off to the next potential voter. This is the sort of thing people say to one another in Fort Wayne, but not so much in political campaigns. But that’s Kelty. So to see him indicted on nine counts of various campaign-finance law violations, seven of them felonies and two for perjury (!?!), this picture of a nice young man — well, it’s a shock.

The primary battle was a two-man race, with most of the old GOP guard supporting Nelson Peters, a good ol’ boy county commissioner. He was set to win in a walk when Kelty upset him the old-fashioned way — by running harder and having the luck of a record low turnout. The finance-law violations came up pretty quickly, when Kelty amended his reports to say, Oh, that $158,000 loan I made to my own campaign? Turns out that money came from someone else. See, he loaned it to me to loan to the campaign, and I probably should have made that clearer. No biggie, right? Yes, a biggie. If campaign-finance law has one purpose above all, it’s to make financial issues transparent. Voters have a right to know who’s backing whom with cash. This looked like a pretty bold case of money laundering to conceal a major donor, and it went before the three-member election board, two Rs and one D, which split 2-1 in Kelty’s favor. The D on the board asked the county prosecutor for an investigation, and lo and behold, the investigation turned up the nine counts.

This is a blessing for journalists in a slow news month in an election year, but it was hard to watch the video of Kelty getting into the police car with his hands cuffed in front of him; the man is more to be pitied than reviled, perjury or no. One had the sense of a lamb being led to slaughter, of a guy who just looked up in the middle of the road and saw a bus coming down on him. He’s a political novice (obviously), and he’s in over his head. This is only his second campaign (I think); he gave a scare to a lazy incumbent a few years ago, and I think he spent election night having red-faced men with three bourbons under the belt tell him he has a future in this party. Son, you’ll be mayor one day. He got mixed up with the wrong crowd, i.e., Allen County Republicans. That’ll learn him. Unfortunately.

I have a barn to build and a day to do it, as the Amish say, so scant bloggage today:

Only in Indiana: Deep-fried Pepsi. (Note the picture.)

Isn’t it weird when you find a picture of yourself on Flickr that you didn’t know existed? (I added the notes.)

More maybe later, when I have some time to breathe. I know you folks can take care of yourselves in the comments anyway.

Today’s question: How the hell did Michael Medved get his job, and how the hell does he keep it?

Really. His Wikipedia entry, for whatever it’s worth, paints the outlines of a real hustler, a guy who’s made artful leaps from one rock to another in the course of making his living, ranging from political speechwriting to novelty publishing to this to that. He hosted “Sneak Previews” after Siskel and Ebert left, a little like being the guy who followed Greg Kinnear on “Talk Soup,” but never mind. At some point, he seems to have crossed that invisible line in today’s media world, the one after which you cannot fail.

We’ve all known people like this, ambitious souls who never seem to do great work, or even good work, but always fail upward. Medved’s like that. He had the advantage of basing his career in film criticism, which doesn’t take a lot of specialized knowledge to do a halfway-OK job. As long as you’re reasonably telegenic and good with a catch phrase, it doesn’t really matter if you know what you’re talking about. You’re just another guy with an opinion. I mean, Richard Roeper is a film critic. How hard can it be?

(To my film-criticizing friends, I don’t mean for a second that the work isn’t serious. It’s just easy to be good-OK or good-enough. Greatness is as rare as it is anywhere.)

Medved brings something extra to the table: His “values.” I welcome someone who can talk about art and culture from a religious perspective, if only more of them did. I always find Amy’s thoughts on TV and movies interesting; she writes from an intellectual Catholic POV, puts some sweat into the effort, and never takes the easy way out. In the end, you have to have something to say other than, “God told me this is wrong, and so it is.” More important, you have to respect the art, to understand that it’s art, not propaganda, and judge it accordingly. But Medved plays dirty. Remember his crusade against “Million Dollar Baby”? He felt moved to mount his soapbox not because the story took a turn he disapproved of, but because (or so he said) he felt it was advertised dishonestly. He thought the trailers promised something uplifting, and it turned out to be a big downer about quadriplegia. He was only thinking of those clueless moviegoers who might be fooled into spending $10 on something that wasn’t “Rocky” with girls.

But even knowing what a duplicitous fellow he is, even I was shocked by this column in USA Today. Perhaps shocked by its honesty; he seems to be dropping all pretense of being a critic, and promoting himself straight to Minister of Cinema in the Republic of Gilead:

Why would Hollywood release a controversial feature film about alleged Mormon terrorists of 150 years ago while all but ignoring the dangerous Muslim terrorists of today?

For the same reason “Hollywood” made a movie about the sinking of the Titanic and not a fatal wreck at the Indy 500, about the 1980 Olympic hockey team and not the 2003 Detroit Tigers, about a rat that cooks and not an elephant elected to Congress, I suppose — because that’s what the movie’s about.

But to answer the question honestly would mean a one-paragraph column, and Medved has space to fill. And so on he goes, accusing “Tinseltown” of having too much “respect for Muslim sensibilities” and that “Hollywood’s reluctance to portray Islamo-Nazi killers remains difficult, if not impossible, to explain.” (Islamo-Nazis? Is that what we’re calling them these days?)

I guess Medved left “Syriana” before George Clooney got his thumbnails pulled out by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe “Black Hawk Down” passed him by. “Three Kings” was probably too easy on ‘em. I understand.

He makes the case that Americans shouldn’t be making movies about American religious terrorists as long as there are still movies to be made about Islamic religious terrorists, and they shouldn’t be making movies that make Mormons look bad as long as there’s a Mormon running for president. OK. Medved has a background in screenwriting, connections to vastly wealthy people who share his feelings and a nationwide soapbox to publicize his efforts. What’s he waiting for?

Seriously. Wouldn’t you think a person who’s made his living writing about the movie business would have a clue or two about how it works, starting with the fact there is no “Hollywood” monolith that decides which movies will be made? (Or is there some committee I’m unaware of? It’s possible.) If Medved and his buds want to see movies about bloodthirsty Ay-rabs, the Screen Actors Guild has quite a few swarthy types in their files, and I’m sure they could find plenty for the cast.

You know this rant. I’m bored already.

Here’s something, though: We’ll see movies about Islamic terrorists, eventually. And I predict the best ones will be made by Muslims. They’ll certainly have the deepest understanding of the culture, societies and institutions that breed Islamic extremism, just as an American might feel they’d bring something to a story about American religious extremism. Just sayin’.

Do I have bloggage? Only this:

I’m so old, I used one of these. Filed stories on it, although I preferred the next generation, with the tilt-up screen, so you could see more than four lines at a time. I think it had a 128-baud modem; you stuck the phone into two giant cups on top.

I don’t know why you read the newspaper. I read it to fan the always-flickering coals of irritation at the continuing degradation of the language of Shakespeare and Lindsay Lohan.

From a weekend review of “Skinwalkers”:

The werewolves ride into town on motorcycles, sporting dark sunglasses, shaggy but mostly human except for pearly white, canine teeth.

There shouldn’t be a comma between “pearly white” and “canine.” I guess if I looked through my Strunk & White I could find the precise reason, but I play by ear and I say no. That started me thinking about how you use a comma when you have multiple adjectives in front of a noun. I would write, “MaryMarv* lived in a big blue house,” but also “MaryMarv* is an arrogant, elitist asshole.” I’m sure both are correct, but I don’t know precisely why. Some nice English-teaching nun in the readership, tell me. (Here’s my case: There’s no natural pause between big and blue if you read it aloud, and there is between arrogant and elitist. As I said, I play by ear.)

The next case was more irritating. The story was about a teacher at a local school who’s had some public problems with her temper of late:

Those two incidents earned her a one-day suspension and rebuke this year from D. Allen Diver, then the school’s principal.

“Unfortunately, these patterns of berating individuals have happened far too often during my six years at South,” Diver wrote July 11. “I am continually forced to diffuse situations that you have created because you sometimes appear to speak without thinking or have sent e-mails that are inflammatory.”

Educators are sometimes the most enthusiastic misusers of the language, but this one drives me crazy. It’s “defuse,” not “diffuse,” D. Allen Diver, please. I see this all the time. You defuse a touchy situation the way you defuse a bomb. You diffuse a bad smell by fanning a magazine in the bathroom before you leave. My Oxford American says:

USAGE: The verbs diffuse and defuse sound similar but have different meanings. Diffuse means, broadly, ‘disperse’; defuse means ‘remove the fuse from (a bomb), reduce the danger or tension in.’ Thus: Cooper successfully diffused the situation is incorrect, and Cooper successfully defused the situation is correct.

Of course, the reporter was quoting from a letter in a personnel file, but still. Either correct it or ‘sic’ it. (For continued friendly access to D. Allen Diver, I strongly recommend the former solution.)

Refreshed by curling my lip in scorn at the peons still employed in newspapering, I can then go about my day with a song in my heart.

There wasn’t much written about the gay debate Thursday. I know it was called something with “human rights” in the title, but I will think of it as the gay debate, since it aired on Logo, the gay cable channel, and featured gay questioners, and had the gayest audience ever, including the inevitable elderly lesbian couple, one with gray mullet. I had it on in the background while I worked, and have a few thoughts, none especially deep, but I thought it was sort of sweet and earnest — everyone had that “I can’t believe this is happening…to ME!” thing going on. You don’t see a lot of amateur television anymore, especially when presidential candidates are concerned (all Democrats, and I missed the part where they explained why). And the Logo production was decidedly amateur. The set was sort of homemade looking and some of the questioners looked just gobsmacked to be there, and yes I’m talking about you, Melissa Etheridge, and the post-game interviews were conducted by a young man who looked like he got out of high school five minutes ago. But that gave the whole production charm. Really.

Hillary sort of wiped the floor with everyone else, which she’s been doing consistently this season, although Obama and Edwards held their own. But perhaps only on Logo would you hear someone, when asked for a reaction afterward, say, “She looks really good in coral.” By the time the wrap-up turned to somebody I’d never heard of for the “lighter side” reaction, it was probably inevitable that Dennis Kucinich would be called “adorable. …like someone born in a flower.”

As a native Buckeye, I’ve thought of Kucinich a lot, but never like that.

Speaking of Ohioans, caught “The People vs. Larry Flynt” Friday night on cable. It holds up after a decade, and may have even improved with age. I was stung anew at the injustice Milos Forman perpetrates in the name of narrative coherence — he relocates Flynt from Columbus to Cincinnati. So, so wrong. Ohioans know what I’m talking about. Columbus never embraced Flynt, but it tolerated him better than the Queen City, where he was vigorously prosecuted by Simon Leis, one of those crusading, stick-up-the-butt prigs Hamilton County specializes in. When the movie came out, I wrote an essay about living in central Ohio when Larry was in high cotton, and I’d like to rewrite it now, and throw in all the stuff I had to leave out because of the family-newspaper thing. But it needs a news peg. I’ll save that for when he dies, or brings down another speaker of the house.

Apologies for lameness today. I had a more substantive, linky post in progress, and then discovered Alan had recommended the subject to one of the paper’s columnists, so I’ll step aside and let the people who provide our health insurance go first.

Do I have bloggage? Oh, a little:

I’ve been reading all I can about the current Wall Street meltdown, understanding maybe 80 percent of it. My econ training is apparently all obsolete now, although maybe not entirely. (One conclusion I’ve reached: If the Fed bails these dildoes out again, I’m becoming an anarchist.) If you’re finding it baffling — investment vehicles based on risky mortgages? ARMs as perpetual fee-generators? — you’re in good company. Slate provides a 101-level explainer, in plain English.

The last rat jumps from the sinking ship of the Bush administration. Tim Goeglein’s prolificacy of late, explained? Maybe he’s auditioning to be the News-Sentinel’s culture writer. Or maybe he was just killing time in his office while the wallpaper peeled off.

Discuss.

* name changed to spare the feelings of regular commenters named Mary. I don’t think we have a Marv yet, but I expect one to show up any minute.

Great interview with David Simon (aka Mr. Laura Lippman), about “The Wire,” of course. But it kicks off with a bang:

NICK HORNBY: Every time I think, Man, I’d love to write for The Wire, I quickly realize that I wouldn’t know my True dats from my narcos. Did you know all that before you started? Do you get input from those who might be more familiar with the idiom?

DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Yeah! Fuck them all to hell!

Enjoy.

(Regrettably, the rest of the interview will cost you eight bucks. I won’t spend it, but I feel I got my money’s worth already.)