First, congratulations are in order. NN.C’s BFF Deb’s husband — are you following? — was the editor of one of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced yesterday. This one. So that’s good. Also, our virtual pal Gene Weingarten won for feature writing. I’m sure today’s regular chat will be something, if he can fit his head through the door.

This, however, is bad: The Seattle Times is cutting 200 positions, 49 in the newsroom. Part of me wants to see the end of the ink-on-paper newspaper, if only because I want to stop fearing the next thing and just see what the next thing is. (The other part doesn’t want to lose 65 percent of our household income, not to mention our health insurance, followed by our house and all of our possessions.) I keep thinking that once you take ink, paper, presses, Teamsters, gasoline, trucks and all the rest of those costs out of publishing, maybe the decreased ad revenue will cover a few meager salaries for those of us who provide content. Or maybe not.

The other day I took a left turn (oh, never mind how) and happened upon a porn blog. Immediately I was served a banner ad offering to hook me up with some hot babes in Grosse Pointe. Their adware had figured out a way to access my Zip code — fine with me, and not because I want to meet hot babes in Grosse Pointe. I want the newspaper industry to continue in one form or another, and needless to say, this does not happen when I land on the Free Press or News sites. Let’s check now and see who is advertising there. A bank and the lottery on the home page. A house ad — an ad for the paper itself, one that doesn’t return revenue, in other words — on the first inside page I visit. Elsewhere, not bloody much.

If a pornographer can figure out what Zip code I want to meet hot girls in, why can’t the newspaper ad staff figure out a way to sell a similar ad to a local bakery having a sale on muffins? Why doesn’t the ad say, “36 garage sales in Grosse Pointe this weekend! Search the listings by clicking here!” Just wondering.

Bossy is a humor/domestic-life blogger. I’d call her a latter-day Erma Bombeck, but I always hated it when people compared my column to Erma Bombeck’s, so I’ll just say she’s like a far, far hipper great-grandniece thrice removed from Erma Bombeck. She writes about home and family life and trying to get a decent haircut, and she knows intuitively how to write for the web, how to use photos and strikethroughs and different colors and styles of type to enhance the story she’s telling. Go ahead and poke through her archives if you don’t believe me. At the moment she’s on a road trip, one lap of America to meet her readership. And guess what? Somehow — she hasn’t revealed how — she got a car company to sponsor her. Yes way, as Bossy would say. Saturn is loaning her four — four! different! — hybrid vehicles to make her drive in. I don’t know if she has some agreement with them to feature the vehicles in any particular way; I will say that so far (she’s on vehicle No. 3, the Sky) what she’s written about the cars hasn’t seemed intrusive or product-placement-y. has been a little product placement-y, but at least in an amusing way. So my question for you today is, if Bossy, one little non-corporate blogger somewhere around Philadelphia, can figure out a way to get a major GM brand to give her four cars to drive around the country in, in return for the exposure they’ll get in her little non-corporate blog, why can’t the professional sales staffs of the nation’s newspapers figure out a way to rework their advertising the same way? I know at least part of the answer — accepting the loan of a car for a week for a road-tripping writer would taint their holy journalistic integrity — but that’s not the whole answer. At least some of the answer is: They don’t know how. If the people running newspapers had half a clue, one would have hired Bossy by now. They wouldn’t have her coming into the building, but they would have some sort of arrangement whereby they link to her blog, feature her on their site, and figure out some mutual back-scratching financial arrangement.

And Bossy is just a humor blog. Imagine what could happen if newspapers took the time to find independent partners in the rest of the community, the ones they have trouble penetrating anyway — ethnic groups, young people, enthusiasts of this and that. What if there were big, clickable badges on related newspaper pages, and a regular monitor to tell the paper’s readers, “Bossy has a great story today; be sure to check it out.”

As some of you know, I have a part-time job that requires me to spend a great deal of time visiting newspaper websites. I’m becoming intimately acquainted with all the ways I can be served ads on a website. Many of them are annoying. Some are clever. All are necessary. Most are rare. But I want to see local papers trying them all, and then some. I can’t think of the last time I had to pass through an ad screen (like you do at Salon, and several other big sites) at a Detroit newspaper, if I ever did.

But worse than all of this, newspaper journalists show few signs of “getting” the web; that is, they don’t know how to add links to their copy, or embedded photos, or even of adapting their prose style to a itchy-click-fingered readership. That’s because they’re not writing for the web, but for their main product, the ink-on-paper version. And it shows — in the columns that go on too long because they have to fill a hole, in the turgid writing that has to stay turgid so some old lady in Warren isn’t offended, and so on.

The Online Journalism Review put a provocative headline on this piece (It’s time for the newspaper industry to die) but all Robert Niles is arguing for is the death of the old ways of thinking. The meat of the piece is a discussion of comments on individual stories, an idea the industry has only recently adopted. Niles points out what has bugged me since it started — how quickly comments sections can veer off-topic, and into rantfests dominated by two or three posters with nothing better to do. (One of the things I marvel about on my own little blog is how good our comments are from day to day, how I can leave for a day to attend a funeral and come back to discover a lively discussion has broken out in my absence, and I just want to sit down and listen for a while.) Where are the monitors, the guides, or, failing that, the Slashdot-type rating systems that shove the irrelevant and annoying posters to the back of the queue? (I’ll tell you where: Doing three other people’s jobs. You might have heard that staffing is way down.)

Well, this is now officially a trainwreck of a post. We started out talking about advertising, and now we’re back to writing, which I persist in believing will save us, at least a little bit. I apologize. But everything is happening so fast now. A decline I thought would play out over 10 years is now down to three. Roy is only the ten millionth smart person to point out the obvious —

Despite all the grand claims made for the groovy blog revolution, the phenomenon is still basically parasitic. Few bloggers do primary reporting. Why should they? The doomed dinosaurs do it for them, and all the bloggers have to do is link to them, occasionally adding some variant of “I call bullshit.”

Were the Times to fold, and all the other big pubs to be drawn down into its maelstrom — a consummation devoutly wished by wingnuts everywhere — these bloggers would have nothing left to talk about except one another, and reports from large rightwing publications which would presumably, as honorary non-members of the MSM, survive.

— but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. Every day, I read someone online saying, “I cancelled my dead-tree paper because I don’t need it anymore. I read all my news online!” Well, good for you, then. Check back in a decade and tell me how that’s working for you.

Bloggage:

Once again, you can financially support the family of our late NN.C community member, Ashley Morris, here. If that makes you nervous, I’m sure Ash would appreciate a donation to a worthy New Orleans charity, perhaps Habitat for Humanity.

And to end on an amusing note, Improv Everywhere calls its latest stunt “Best Game Ever.” I agree; be sure to watch the video, which is tremendous. If you aren’t in tears by the time the Goodyear Blimp shows up, you aren’t human.

Charlton Heston is dead, and all I can do is scroll through the IMDb “quotes” pages from his movies.

Nefretiri: Oh, Moses, Moses, why of all men did I fall in love with a prince of fools?

I always thought Heston’s life was self-parody enough, but I’ll leave the obits to others. Still, could this be true?

In what could have been Heston’s most audacious Jewish role, the FBI recruited the actor amid the 1993 Waco, Texas, standoff involving David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. Heston was to have played the Voice of God to facilitate negotiations with Koresh, however the plan was never used.

XM should have a separate channel called The Government’s Loudspeaker. It would have a short playlist, but a thought-provoking one, consisting entirely of stuff some law enforcement agency thought might get a holed-up desperado to come out with his hands up. The Manuel Noriega dance mix, I seem to recall, ran the gamut from extreme heavy metal to “Baby I’m-a Want You.” That would make for some interesting radio, but no one asked me.

So how was your weekend? I’m starting to dread my own. The basement drains backed up again, and Alan got two flat tires — one on his car, and one on mine. Since mine is due for four new ones, and his was in a sidewall, that’ll have to be replaced, too. Lately I feel as though I’m closing on a house, at that point where every time you turn around someone wants a check for $300. Only this weekend will be more like $600.

Oh, well, you know what they say: Pain means you’re still alive.

And even a few hundred bucks in un-budgeted expenses couldn’t entirely ruin the first nice weekend of the whole damn year. Gentle temperatures, sunshine, the whole works. We dragged our rosemary bushes outside to the deck and told them to fend for themselves, then raked out the detritus of winter, a basically pleasant task, considering the detritus didn’t include any dead birds or anything. Filled five lawn-and-leaf bags, then checked the forecast — freezing temperatures expected by next weekend. Well, screw it. Rosemary has a week to harden up for it, and forecasts change.

Of course I celebrated with a long bike ride. Rode down to Alter Road to scout locations for my upcoming video, imaginatively working-titled: Alter Road. I want more green before I get going on it, but I also wanted to see if there’s any way I could find a reasonably safe route to the newly opened bike paths of downtown. Google Maps’ street view has some gaps, but what I could see of Freud Street wasn’t good:

View Larger Map

(God. Google Maps street view. Signs and wonders and more signs, and more wonders.)

So I chickened out. For now.

But that made me think, well, maybe I could help complete the map, some real ground-level citizen journalism. Send Google some pictures taken on key street corners, eh? I asked my genius how I might do that. He replied:

They’re so precisely geolocated because a special vehicle with multiple cameras pointing in “all” directions moves slowly down a street and they suck up images with super-duper-precise geolocation, metadata aplenty…driven by some coffee sipping slacker (I’ve seen them in Atlanta.)

I want that job. I want it really, really bad.

OK, some sober bloggage: Funeral arrangements for Ashley are complete, and can be found here. Predictably, they contain a note of humor; mourners are encouraged to dress either traditionally or in Saints gear, or a combination of both. Memorials are to the family, left without a provider. You can Paypal ’em here.

With that, I’ve fiddled with Google Maps too long. Time to get to work. And wait for the plumber. Again.

If’s fashionable to call Detroit a third world country in the midst of the United States, but really — that’s unfair to the third world.

Take the time to browse the photo gallery. It’s simply beyond belief.

My sister buys and sells glass and ceramics, sometimes on eBay. She sent me this. Now I’m sending it to you. If you’re singing it in your head for the rest of the day, well, you’ve got company.

Nice big jugs, the video.

Since we have New Orleans on our minds these last couple of days, a story that has its roots there:

Alan and I were driving through Mississippi, en route to New Orleans, late one night some years ago. We were appreciating one of the many pleasures of the Delta — gutbucket blues on the radio — when there was a pause for station identification and a word from our sponsor.

“Do you have a loved one incarcerated in a correctional institution you find it difficult to travel to?” asked a resonant African-American male voice, not unlike the ones who had been singing a moment before. But there was a note of optimism in the question, the unmistakable sound of someone who’s about to solve your problem, and sure enough, he had the answer: A bus service making “daily trips to Parchman, Angola and other Mississippi and Louisiana correctional institutions.” For a reasonable price, you could finally pay a visit to your son, grandson, nephew or other family member living behind bars. Leave the driving to us.

Alan and I looked at one another, stunned, two affluent white people who had just been listening to musical laments about Parchman, Angola and other Mississippi and Louisiana correctional institutions, and now we were confronting actual evidence that not only did these places exist, they were not merely colorful stops on the career-development paths of Bukka White and Son House. People really lived there, and had relatives on the outside who loved them and wanted to see them.

I exaggerate to make a point. But it was a glimpse into a world neither of us had paid much attention to, outside of the movies and occasional op-ed piece. Imprisonment is a fact of life in many communities, and it should surprise no one that the links between inside and outside have their own culture and economies.

Last year, a billboard went up on I-94 in Detroit, advertising a similar service to Michigan prisons. I encourage you to watch the linked video for a sense of the pitch — a little mournful (separation hurts) but positive (there’s a solution) and soothing (we’ll do the hard part). The shot of the woman getting off the bus, and the pan that captures the chainlink and razor wire of some anonymous Michigan big house under an appropriately gray sky is just…perfect. She doesn’t smile; hell, she’s not going to the casino. She’s paying a visit to a painful place. It’s really well-done.

This sent me Googling for other prison bus services. Not a lot of hits. There’s one in California, aimed mostly at keeping (inmate) mothers in touch with their children. You see mentions of companies and state-supported services here and there, mainly on sites like Prisontalk.com, which I highly recommend just because it’s more interesting than most. (I got lost in the “ever seen someone infamous while visiting” thread: My man was in the same prison with Jack Kevorkian! …I saw one of the Manson family!)

So I guess what I’m wondering today is, what is the ancillary prison economy? Corrections is one of the few growth areas in many states with depressed economies (cough, Michigan, cough), which can’t build them fast enough. Now that it’s common to ship prisoners across state lines to relieve overcrowding and staff shortages, and since so many are being built in remote locations desperate for jobs of any kind (cough, Upper Peninsula, cough), incarceration is truly a “buy” stock. I know we have at least one regular here, MichaelG, whose job takes him to California pens; maybe he can start the discussion. Inexpensive nearby hotels for loved ones traveling long distances to visit — that’s a no-brainer. Bus services, ditto. But there has to be something else, too.

Amazing fun fact, from the Freep via a secondary source: With nearly 50,000 people in state prisons, Michigan has one of the nation’s highest rates of incarceration and prison spending. Prisons eat up nearly 20% of the state’s general fund, or $1.8 billion.

That’s a lot of cheddar being grated. Certainly some must fall on the floor.

OK, a little brief bloggage and follow-up.

Via J.C., my genius, all of Ashley’s comments on NN.C on a single page. It makes for some odd reading, a little montage-y, since so many of the comments refer to other comments, or posts you can’t see (although there are links to those, too). But he had a way with words. I suggest just jumping around. I had to smile when I discovered, anew, Ashley’s Binary Hotness Scale:

Gina Gershon is still a 1 in my book. Oh, I have a binary weighting scale, 1: yes, you would; 0: no, you wouldn’t. Beer acts as bias.

Also, a commenter in the previous thread, Ann, says Depaul (Ashley’s employer) is now saying the cause of death was a car accident. Haven’t confirmed that anywhere, but FYI. Thanks, Ann. Now I’m told it wasn’t a car accident, that he was found in his hotel room. Sorry for the mistake.

Finally, because we need a smile today, a well-worn YouTube link to the Bulgarian Idol (real name: “Music Idol”) auditions. The hilarity is in a non-English-speaking contestant making her way through an English-language pop song, but having recently seen a woman barely out of her teens tackle the Beatles’ “In My Life,” I can’t say there’s much of a difference stateside. It was like watching Justin Timberlake play King Lear.

Have a good weekend.

EDIT: Minor glitches fixed. (I hope.) Comments open on this post, and the Ashley comments page has been un-404’d. We upgraded to WP 2.5 this week, and I’m still finding all the buttons.

Source: LisaPal

Is it possible to be friends with someone you’ve never met? If you wanted to argue in the affirmative, I could bundle up my 12, 13, 14-ish years of correspondence with Ashley Morris, for research purposes. You’d see how we “met,” back in the early days of the web, when I typed “warren zevon” into this marvelous thing I’d just discovered, something called a “search engine,” and stumbled across Ashley’s unofficial Warren Zevon page. I wrote him a note. He wrote back. It went on from there.

Ashley’s WZ page had Easter eggs in it, one of which was a hyperlinked period at the end of a sentence. It took you to a photo of a crazy-eyed topless woman doing the splits. He said it had been sent to him by another girl who’d started out a friendly correspondent and ended with abrupt questions about his penis size and an unsolicited topless picture. So you can see, perhaps, why Ashley responded to out-of-the-blue notes from strange women — you never knew when you’d get another naked picture in the e-mails.

That’s not how it went with us, of course. Instead, we wrote back and forth about everything and nothing. I guess it started when Ashley was finishing his doctorate in computer science at Tulane, after which he moved to Idaho for a spell, then to Chicago, then back to his beloved New Orleans (while keeping the job in Chicago — he had a long commute). Along the way we covered everything from his Audi Quattro (essential for Idaho winter driving) to his fondness for Cuban cigars (which may have been a plank in the foundation of his radical leftism — he must have thought anyone who could turn out cigars like those couldn’t be all bad) to his agony over the fate of New Orleans. Along the way, he went off to the Czech Republic to teach at a conference and came home with a fianceé, who stood over six feet tall. Did I have any suggestions on where she might find clothes to fit?, he wrote once. I told him you could find anything in Chicago, but for best results, ask a drag queen.

He was raised by his grandparents, whom he thought were his parents, with a shiftless older sister that he learned late in life was actually his mother. She died a few months ago, of an overdose. Ashley opened up her apartment to start putting her affairs in order and found a fresh two-gram package of heroin on the kitchen counter. It’s a reflection of the kind of guy he was that he managed to find the humor in such a discovery:

I called the cops who found the body, and asked them what to do with the heroin. They said I could bring it in to the station.

yeah, right.

That would be the time I get pulled over for speeding. “Yes, ossifer, I was bringing this brown tar to the station! Honest!”. Or maybe, I could just announce when I got there: “HI, I BROUGHT THE HEROIN!”.

When, late in his PhD program, he was diagnosed with adult ADD and prescribed Ritalin, a turn of events that saved his doctorate from oblivion — he said he could never have finished his dissertation without it — he told this same mother/sister about it. She said, “Oh, they told us that when you were a little kid, but I just figured it was bullshit.” He said he wanted to strangle her.

He didn’t have an easy or long life, but it was action-packed. He lived in Los Angeles for a spell, rode a motorcycle he was nearly killed on, made music, cut a demo. The demo never amounted to much, but it did turn up in the soundtrack of a porno movie, a turn of events Ashley himself discussed here (first comment). He had a huge heart. This you could tell from the get-go, and if it wasn’t clear immediately, it surely was evident in “Fuck you, you fucking fucks,” his cri de coeur from New Orleans in late 2005, which proved profanity can be poetry in the right hands:

What about you fucks that don’t want to rebuild NOLA because we’re below sea level. Well, fuckheads, then we shouldn’t have rebuilt that cesspool Chicago after the fire, that Sodom San Francisco after the earthquakes, Miami after endless hurricanes, or New York because it’s a magnet for terrorists.

And fuck Kansas, Iowa, and your fucking tornados.

Fuck you, San Antonio. You aren’t getting our Saints. When I get to the Alamo, I’m taking a piss on it. You probably go to funerals and hit on the widow. Classless fucks.

And so on. He hated all the bullshit spewed into the air after Katrina, and wanted one thing and one thing only — for New Orleans to get its due. OK, he wanted other things, too. He wanted another beer and some great NOLA street food and a big cigar. Check out that picture up there, that’s Ashley in his element — sweaty, cigar in his pocket, and some dinner. You know the funniest thing about that picture? The two little pieces of broccoli. When Warren Zevon said, “Enjoy every sandwich,” Ashley always said, “Make mine a muffaletta.”

He leaves behind his wife, Hana, and three young children, along with dozens of friends, fans and fellow travelers.

One last thing: A few years back, I went to Chicago with Alan and Kate, and had vague plans to meet Ash for a beer. This was in February, and it was cold and windy, and we’d just frozen our butts off all day, and at the end of it, I begged off. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I thought we’d have another chance, and had vaguely planned for this June in Chicago, but that had recently been torpedoed, too. I thought I’d take Kate down to New Orleans later this year and show her what still had to be done there. I figured Ash would give us the tour, and then we’d have a muffaletta. Well, that didn’t work out. Maybe I should try for the funeral. I’m sure he’ll have a hell of a second line, it will rock the llama’s ass, and knowing Ashley, there won’t be a fuckmook in sight.

Last night brought the sad and surprising news that our very own Ashley Morris died yesterday in Florida. I don’t know anything more than what his wife, Hana, posted last night; if I find out anything more, I’ll pass it along.

In the meantime, keep good thoughts, prayers, whatever your inclination is. He will be missed.

Oops. Debbie Stabenow’s husband suffers from Eliot Spitzer’s Disease.

I see at least two only-in-Detroit details in the following paragraph; see if you can spot them:

Thomas L. Athans was stopped Feb. 26 by undercover officers investigating a possible prostitution ring in a room at the Residence Inn near Big Beaver and Interstate 75. Athans paid a 20-year-old prostitute $150 for sex in a Troy hotel but was not arrested, according to police reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Detroit News. The police report said officers observed Athans enter a room under surveillance and leave 15 minutes later. Detectives followed and stopped Athans’ silver 2002 Cadillac DeVille on Interstate 75 near Square Lake Road.

UPDATE:
Well, at
least the
girl dresses for
Michigan weather:

Sorry for the unexpected day off yesterday. I’d written and crumpled about four posts when the phone rang. It was the school, telling me my daughter has officially inherited her father’s tendency toward headaches. They’d been creeping up for a while, but yesterday was the first appearance of the big-M variety, if my amateur diagnosis is correct. Severe headaches accompanied by vision changes and nausea automatically = migraine, don’t they? (Unless, Dr. Google tells me, it’s multiple sclerosis. Or, you know, a brain tumor.) Anyway, the big purge went a long way toward making things better, but she spent the rest of the day on the couch, and my own was pretty much off the rails.

So thanks to all of you who took the ball and ran with it. Nothing like discussing that old-time cussin’, is there?

One of my old neighbors had a theory that sounds a little New Age-y, but nevertheless has a ring of truth to it. He said every person has a consistent weak spot in their body’s defenses, a door the germs will find unlocked more often than not. His son’s was his nose, Kate’s was her throat, his own was his head, mine was…I guess it was my big mouth, which has no discernment whatsoever, and will say and eat pretty much anything. Although I’ve never had trench mouth, gum disease, or even many cavities. So I guess that theory falls apart.

Anyway, all is well today, if 30 degrees colder than yesterday. Ah, spring.

Between making therapeutic Jell-O and buying Tylenol, I finally got around to reading the Harvard virgin story from the NYT magazine over the weekend. I was looking for some indication that this no-sex club was different from other no-sex clubs, and it seems to boil down to: But this is Harvard. I guess they have Veritas stamped on their chastity belts, or something. And people wonder why the Ivy League still matters. (If nothing else, it’s given us women who’ll be quoted in the paper of record calling oral sex “disrespectful and disgusting.” For you, maybe.)

This meme is making its way around, I notice:

She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone’s “powerful bonding” effect can be “a cause of joy and marital harmony” but that outside of marriage it can create “serious problems.” Released arbitrarily, it can blur “the distinction between infatuation and lasting love,” the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said oxytocin could also bond people who didn’t necessarily want to be bound, and “you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation.”

This is, I believe, the “science” behind the tape exercise performed in some abstinence classes, where the teacher goes around pressing tape to students’ arms, then ripping it off and repasting it on other arms. This underlines the important lesson that you can get all kinds of diseases from others — because the tape gets kind of gross as it goes around sticking to arms — and also…well, something, I’m sure. If you stick your tape to someone else, not only does it hurt when you rip it off, you’re less sticky the next time around. And this is backed by science! You could look it up!

No wonder these folks can’t get any traction in the real world. Not only are they up against the unstoppable force of humanity, they use bad science and stupid teaching techniques. If people wonder why I pay taxes through the nose to send my kid to a halfway-decent public school, here’s one reason: Because the last time I looked at the health curriculum, it didn’t call for duct tape.

OK, a little lite nosh of bloggage, shall we?

Most people outside the city don’t know that the Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, rolls with a security posse to rival Suge Knight’s. Brian Dickerson pulls it apart, a little bit. He offers the priceless detail that the entourage, already preposterously large to begin with, has been increased in response to “threats” against Special KK, and then notes:

In 2003, after a diamond-studded L. Brooks Patterson memorably lampooned Kilpatrick’s gangsta style by striding into the Mackinac Policy Conference surrounded by aides sporting dark glasses and earpieces, the mayor’s security footprint grew noticeably smaller.

L. Brooks Patterson is the county executive in adjacent Oakland County, and has spent his entire career goading Detroit in one way or another. Guy has a sense of humor, too.

Baseball’s Opening Day is problematic in places other than Detroit. A cool time-lapse video from Cleveland shows how hard a grounds crew can work when snow is in the forecast.

OK, enough. It’s good to be back. Now I’m up to Kate’s room, which is getting a small makeover, to blow dust off the stuffed animals and make way for some storage pieces (or “solutions,” as they’re inevitably called). Back later.

On edit: Does the type size on this site these days look just enormous? It does to me — more so than usual. I have a call in to J.C., but as long as we’re here, let me know if you like it this big. Does it mark us as a nest of baby boomers too lazy to put on a pair of readers, or is it just easy on the eyes?)