Right now I’m tired enough to walk into walls, but we’re having a great time. When the director and I assembled our team for the Detroit-Windsor International Film Festival Challenge, one of our crew was designated “fixer” — he was the guy who could get us locations, talk us into private homes, etc. Among the goodies in his existing tool belt were a big scary decaying mansion and a limo.

We needed the limo. Every time I look at it, I chuckle. A 1977 Lincoln Continental stretch, navy blue, customized with TV antenna (the TV’s long gone), venetian blinds (1977 being before window tinting), and no fewer than three 8-track tape decks. There’s even a flagstaff on the front bumper. Plastic seat covers. Pervasive interior mildew smell indicating long warehousing. Oh, it is glorious:

The edit bay is so busy now it’s smokin’. Five hours to deadline.

I’ve been reading the news from the Mississippi basin.

(That sounds like the first line of a bad blues song, doesn’t it? Been readin’ the news from the Mississipp’ / Say the levees there done los’ they grip. Maybe we need some other music.)

Anyway, I’ve been paying attention to the situation along America’s mightiest river, and I’ve come away with an overwhelming impression:

I’ve read all this before.

As most of you know, I used to live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fort Wayne is laughingly called the Summit City — it’s near the continental divide no one takes pictures from, and it really was the highest point in the Wabash-Erie canal system. Now that’s sort of a joke name, because this is a summit that floods. A lot:

That’s from the summer 2003 flood. Fort Wayne had a big flood in 1982. The president stopped by to pretend to throw sandbags, and my newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize. (This was before I got there, I am required to mention.) That was the Flood of the Century, Until the Next One. There was flooding in 1985 and, it seemed, every year or three afterward. Every year, when the waters receded, something would be done to make sure it never happened again. The Army Corps of Engineers was permitted to denude a pretty urban riverbank and replace the sycamores and cottonwoods with riprap. Houses in the flood plain were bought and razed. Chins were stroked, opinions aired. And every few years: Another flood.

I will say this: Fort Wayne city officials really knew their floods. They had it down pat — what streets would flood at what river level, how to scramble a sandbag crew, where to deploy them. But floods can be tricksy things. That one in 2003 — that was a summer flood, a single-river flood (the city has three), in neighborhoods that never flooded before, due to a weather system much like the one plaguing the Midwest this month. Sixteen inches of rain fell in the St. Marys River watershed in about a week, and the next thing you knew? You guessed it.

Here’s what I learned about floods: They are nature’s most boring natural disaster. No TV-reporter standups in the howling wind, no piles of wreckage to pose next to — it’s approximately like watching a toilet overflow. It’s coming up it’s coming up it’s coming up oh man there it goes. Worst is when it recedes. The smell, oy you can’t believe. And while a hurricane or tornado takes your wedding album and scatters it to the winds, a flood covers it with raw sewage, along with your carpet, your drywall and everything else. Nothing like a wedding album that smells like poop. Now there’s a metaphor.

The same stories get written every time. The NYT’s Dan Barry discovered the sandbag crews, a story that’s been done approximately 12 million times in Fort Wayne. I could write one now from my own mental boilerplate:

They came from neighborhoods that still stand high above the rising waters, to help those that face inundation. They park their cars outside the city’s garage on Lafayette Street and go inside, where they are assigned to crews to fill, close and stack 25-pound sandbags on dump trucks. Some will follow the trucks to Lakeside, where the bags will be used to strengthen dikes along the…

See? It’s like I can do it in my sleep now.

Another story we wrote over and over was the “Fort Wayne responds to flooding elsewhere” story, almost always pitched as a “our hearts are so big, and we’ve been there ourselves, and so we help others.” Carnack-like, I predict I can find one in one of the dailies in the last week, and…

…whaddaya know, I was right:

The Fort Wayne area, one known for its giving spirit, has now sent 20 Red Cross volunteers to flood-stricken areas in southern and central Indiana, Iowa and, by today, perhaps Illinois, said Amanda Banks, spokeswoman for the local chapter.

I covered the Iowa flooding of 1993, a trip the photographer and I called the Day Late and Dollar Short Tour, easily one of the most misbegotten reporting trips I’ve been on, but I’ll spare you the details. We arrived in Iowa several days after the water had receded, and wrote about the cleanup, which was awful. Some houses had been inundated to their third row of shingles. One guy showed me his washing machine, which had stood in an alcove off the kitchen. It was full to the lid with filthy water. We interviewed a parachuted-in salesman selling cleanup systems — a variation on bleach, basically. We were the last reporters to arrive, and we got the last stories, along with a six-pack of canned drinking water, donated by the closest Anheuser-Busch brewery. Apparently they can convert the line to water-only for just these occasions.

Good times, good times.

Anyway, sorry about all those people in their own personal watery hell. If you really want to help, donate a dumpster. They’re going to need about a million of them. Also: Slate explains the sandbag. Because, you know, it needed doing.

So, bloggage:

Sorry I Missed Your Party, a blog that rounds up other people’s party pictures from Flickr. You will fear for your country.

It’s the summer solstice! And I’m about to spend the next 48 hours on this insane movie challenge. < last minute cold feet > What have I done? What have I gotten myself into? < / last minute cold feet> Play amongst yourselves, and I’ll see you if and when I return.

Since I didn’t leave you with any earlier today, here you go:

Michael Musto has a picture of a vintage Raquel Welch on his site today. (With the notation, “This might be the first time there’s even been a woman in a bikini on this blog.” Probably the last, too.) There’s something weird going on with her belly button. I can’t figure out if it’s a crude scar from crude tummy surgery, or if — and I think this is more likely — it’s a surgically created b.b., Raquel Welch having been grown from seed in a wombtank. For the record, this is really the only female body to aspire to, IMO. I hope it doesn’t cause Coozledad any problems.

And Bossy has a funny story about hair products that involves spying on Jennifer Aniston’s shower. You’ll like it. (I just looked up the price for the hair product featured on Bossy’s blog. Five ounces? Fifty-three dollars. Thank God I don’t have frizz.)

A friend writes to remind us of Lee Abrams’ real crime:

True, this guy is one of those hilarious clueless douche bags that big thinkers at failing companies like Tribco believe will breathe new life into their franchises and, as his memo amply demonstrates, what he knows about newspapers would fit neatly under your thumb nail.

But his greatest crime is the creation of the so-called “superstar format” that transformed the wild, wonderful and creative world of FM radio into the banality of the AOR format in the 1970s. His ruthless insistence on tight playlists relegated thousands of acts to oblivion, particularly black music but also punk, metal and other kinds of rock while embracing elevator rock by the likes of Foreigner and Supertramp.

Proof that a woman’s worst enemy is almost always another woman:

As a distant observer of fashion, but a close student of the semiotics of female power, I am a little puzzled by Michelle (Obama’s) frequent choice of sleeveless dresses at official moments. She is an attractive woman, whose height gives her a commanding presence, and it is clear that she puts effort into toning those upper arms. So the dresses look good; but this is not about pretty. She is in her forties, and the sleeveless sheath is the province of younger women, and/or socialites; it works for cocktails or a barbeque, but not church or work. (And yes, she is clearly channeling Jackie Kennedy. But Jackie’s clothes — and everyone’s in the early 1960s — were a lot more grown up and sophisticated.) The sleeveless bit seems too casual, and maybe a little too revealing for the role she is currently playing, and the one to which she aspires. Successful First Ladies — and here Laura Bush is a good model — manage to convey a careful mix of distance and familiarity.

Meow! Maybe Mrs. O. wants to demonstrate her lack of Kill Whitey tattoos. (Note that I am not so catty as to reproduce a photo of Mrs. Bush in one of her fun, distantly familiar outfits. But TBogg did.)

I expect we’re in for a great deal more of this. As a frumpy resident of the frumpiest part of the heartland, I only recently learned the meaning of “style” when used as a verb. My daughter’s friends, all cable-TV subscribers, “put together outfits” for one another, holding them up on hangers with necklaces and accessories draped over them. “Who are you wearing” is not a question for Jame Gumb anymore.

But you know what I like about the way Mrs. Obama dresses? That it looks like she does it herself. Maybe she doesn’t, but there’s a certain pleasant simplicity to her style, like she has a closet full of good, classic clothes and flattering accessories that she could put on in the dark and still stand an 80 percent chance of looking fine. I’m tired of all this batshit Pat Field “Sex and the City” sartorial lunacy. Michelle Obama wears her clothes; they don’t wear her.

In other words, she doesn’t need Andre Leon Talley, and if she has half the brain she took to Princeton, she’ll keep a few million miles between the two of them.

I’m always running out of here early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but after weeks of dragging myself through Rob’s 10 a.m. torture sessions at the gym, I’m finally feeling — if not seeing — some results. So I’m giving it priority. But I’ll be back later, to fill out the ideas for the last two genres in the DWIFF challenge — mockumentary and chick flick. (Groan.)

Someone in comments a while back — I think it was Jolene — made an observation about charges of “elitism” against Barry O. To paraphrase: Why do we encourage our children to excel in school, work hard, achieve, get good grades, get into the best colleges, think independently, read widely, etc., if at the end of all this they’ll stand before us and we’ll call them elitists?

Good question.

I thought of it again when I read, via Romenesko, a heart-clutching memo from Lee Abrams, a former radio guy who’s now something like “chief innovation officer” for the painfully evolving Tribune Co. He’s supposed to be the fresh-eyed outsider charged with re-imagining newspapers in the new era. A few of his thoughts:

ASSUMPTIONS: Possibly the biggest problem. Assuming. I met a reporter who spent 4 years in Baghdad. Dodging bullets…staying in Hotels protected by the Marines. Yet, I’ll bet NO-one outside of the building knew this person was risking their life in Iraq to get YOU the news. If it were CNN, you’d see rockets and RPG’s in the background as the reporter ducks shrapnel. In the paper, it’s usually a small byline.

Hell, papers should have photos of the reporter with Iraqi kids…be writing diaries. Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news…Because the paper “assumed” I knew.

THE NPR FEEL? Newspapers strike me as being a little TOO NPR. I like NPR, and their shows like Morning Edition do well. But NPR can also be a bit elitist. Morning News Radio has a lot of similarities to papers: Similar target audience; Old Media; Time restraints. It’s probably a good thing to study the feel of a well honed All News Radio station. Yeah, a different medium, but I sometimes get a slower more intellectual NPR feel from papers than a usually quicker paced and more mainstream News Radio delivery. It’s all about being INTELLIGENT…not intellectual. We are in the mainstream business. The 2008 Mainstream business. SMART…but not elite….and we DO get a little NPR at times. (And I DO like NPR…)

I can’t go back to newspapers. I just can’t.

At least he didn’t suggest we all write STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS with random caps; Like This; …like our READERS DO. They’ll understand, because more of them are like Lee ABRAMS, a man who made a fortune in radio but DIDN’T KNOW that reporters actually GO PLACES LIKE IRAQ to cover Iraq. The paper just Assumed he knew that when a Story has a Dateline that says BAGHDAD, that means IT WAS WRITTEN THERE.

OK, I’ll stop.

But this is, simply, bullshit. I love the part about crafting the paper more in the model of all-news radio than NPR. Of course, I am an elitist — THERE, Lee Abrams, I SAID IT — but I’ve been listening to NPR so long now that I simply cannot abide any other sort of news radio. It’s imperfect, granted, but on most days it’s an oasis, and if it were to disappear tomorrow I’d just throw all my radios away. YES, Lee, I WOULD. Of course, I happen to hate all-news radio with a passion. Hate. The weather on the sevens, traffic on the nines, sports brought to you by your friends at GutterHoods.com, the constant yapping commercials, all of it. Some of us are trying to understand the world’s events, not cram a few phrases between ellipses and call it news.

Someone told me the other day that the anchor of one of Detroit’s morning drive all-news/talk stations makes $1 million a year. I think it was Paul W. Smith. He writes a column for the News. Here’s a selection from one of his most recent:

I can only imagine (but I never hope to find out) the roller coaster of emotions that affected Metro Detroiters have been experiencing since storms knocked out the electricity last week. Some people were without power for up to a week, and I don’t blame them for being angry and wondering why it took so long to fix it. Too many cuts? Where do power officials put the extra thousand workers or so when everything is O.K. — when we take for granted that the lights will come on when we throw the switch? We sure shouldn’t be angry at those men and women who have been climbing those poles, clearing those limbs and holding on for dear life as the next storm rumbled through.

He goes on to note that melons are a luxury item in Japan, condenses a press release about a zoo fundraiser and concludes with this bit of Abrams-approved self-promotion, not a photo with Iraqi kids but good enough:

Thank you, Marketing & Sales Executives of Detroit for presenting me with your 2008 Executive Leadership Award this coming Wednesday.

There’s a newspaper column written — or phoned in — in the precise style of all-news radio: A rhetorical question, an opinion no one would find objectionable, an oddity from a funny foreign land and finishing with an air-kiss to the buttocks. INTELLIGENT, not intellectual, as Abrams might say.

I’m assuming Abrams is not being paid in hugs and kisses. And yet he is unembarrassed to write, Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news. Why is it OK to call a smart person with smart-person attitudes and taste an elitist, but not to call Abrams, well, ignorant?

Just wonderin’.

EDIT: You toss off something in 15 minutes between chores, and the next minute you’re on Romenesko. Our comments policy: First-timers go to moderation before appearing. I will try to keep up, but I have to go out in a bit and there may be a delay.

Preach it, Jon Carroll:

One day last month, representative of the California Highway Patrol visited classrooms to deliver some bad news: Some classmates of theirs had been killed in traffic accidents. Alcohol apparently was involved. The students, as might be expected, were stunned. Many wept. Some screamed. School stopped as people comforted each other.

Then, a few hours later, the administrators announced that it was all a joke. Well, not a joke - it was an educational experience. The administrators had set up the stunt to make the students understand how very sad death is, and how drinking booze and driving is a bad thing. It was something the students will never forget, the administrators said, and oh how true that is.

The takeaway is: Don’t trust anyone. Grown-ups will lie to you and try to make you feel bad. The world sucks even worse than you thought it did. Guidance counselor Lori Tauber defended the exercise: “They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized. That’s how they get the message.”

Note that’s a rather lengthy pullquote from Carroll’s column. Long enough for the Associated Press to price it at, oh, $50, which last year constituted about 15 percent of this blog’s revenue. The AP’s proposal to start billing blogs for as little as five words of fair-use quoting has the blogworld in a tizzy, but I’m holding my fire, for now. Far too much hot air has risen heavenward since the beginning of the blog/MSM relationship, and there’s no need to add to it. Here’s a typical comment left on the original story linked above:

Wow. It’s amazing how a major news organization like the AP can be so woefully ignorant on this topic. Charging blogs for the privilege of fair use? Amazing! The AP should be thanking bloggers for linking their way, not trying to tax them for snipping a couple sentences.

I’m not unsympathetic to this argument — I’ve used it myself, when it suited my purposes — but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the AP works. As we were taught in j-school: The AP is a co-op. Member newspapers pay a fee to use its content, and agree to contribute in turn. (Some have subscription-only memberships; Wikipedia’s entry is about how I remember it being explained to me as a student.) Content is generated by those contributions, and by a relatively small staff of AP-employed correspondents. The daily call from the AP is a ritual on most metro and state desks, and sending them copy is part of the desk editor’s job. Once upon a time, this worked pretty well — there was lots of money to pay the fees, and lots of copy to keep the wires full, full enough that most papers employ a full-time wire editor just to stand by the sluice all day, directing stories to different departments and keeping an eye on breaking news elsewhere.

The AP doesn’t sell advertising. They collect fees and manage their content. It has no financial interest in eyeballs on their copy, except as it affects their member newspapers and broadcast outlets. The copy — er, “content” in the 21st century — is the coin of the AP realm. Make it too freely available, and it’s devalued.

(There’s another problem presenting itself, and that is the shrinking of its contributing membership. At my old Indiana newspaper, we once had a full-time correspondent in Indianapolis. He covered the state legislature, but obviously he couldn’t be everywhere. The AP filled in the gaps when he was elsewhere, and in turn we contributed his stuff to the wire. When we lost that position, the AP became our de facto Indy correspondent. But even the AP can’t be everywhere, and needs member contributions to be effective. So the AP shrinks, too. Less government coverage all around. You see why this stuff is important to keeping an eye on democracy? And please don’t give me that crap about citizen journalists picking up the slack. They. Are. Not.)

Already, several major papers post virtually everything that comes over the wire on their websites, under their brand and surrounded by their ads. Bloggers pick it up and repost it on their sites, perhaps with a few comments, perhaps not. The AP gets bupkis for this. Which brings us to another comment from that original BetaNews story:

Freedom of the press isn’t apparently. It should be completely free to take and quote from AP as long as it cites its references. Originally I thought it was just an issue of plagiarism but now I see the AP is just a bunch of greedy AH’s.

Astonishingly ignorant, that. “It should be completely free” because…why? Journalism fairies will pay the AP staff’s salaries? And “greedy”? Friend, let me introduce you to a witticism offered frequently by grimly smiling AP staffers, usually when ordering the least-expensive item on the menu: “You can’t spell ‘cheap’ without ‘AP’.” I’ve known a few AP lifers, and believe me, none of them were getting rich, and many were barely middle-class. All had working spouses.

There’s the issue of “fair use.” This it the legal doctrine that says I can quote a limited section from a piece of copyrighted material, in the interest of commenting on it. Fair use is what it is, but I doubt it covers the internet ritual sometimes called “fisking,” in which a blogger quotes a few paragraphs from an outside source, mocks, quotes a few more, mocks, and so on until the entire story is reproduced and the blogger feels very, very proud of himself.

This line in the sand may be a trial balloon. (Block that metaphor!) Or it may be a chicken coming home to roost. It’s certainly not popular. But the day is coming, people: News doesn’t assemble itself into nice 600-word chunks. People need to eat. The AP’s content is worth something, because it cost something to produce. Sooner or later, we have to figure this out. Or the entire blogosphere will be reduced to the equivalent of ham radio: Hi, this is Roberto in Mexico. Who and where are you?

So, then.

Read that Jon Carroll column. Give the San Francisco Chronicle the eyeballs. Me, I’m off to brainstorm six-minute gangster movie ideas.

Every state has its self-flattering mythology, but Texas’ is one of the worst. HT: Virgotex.

It wasn’t until I saw the flag box in the grocery store vestibule that I remembered how patriotic this part of the state is. A retired mailbox, it was repainted white and emblazoned (in red and blue, natch): DEPOSIT WORN-OUT FLAGS HERE FOR PROPER DISPOSAL. I own a flag, but it’s only been flown on patriotic occasions, so I figure it’ll last a lifetime. I can’t imagine going through so many that I’d need to use a special flag-disposal box, but like I said, Mio, Mich. is a patriotic place.

We were in Mio to launch the boat for a little downstream floating, part of CampFest 2008, the first of three planned summer trips. Somehow, two people who rarely passed a year without a camping trip managed to give it up entirely when the kid came along. (Wonder why? Wonder no longer than it takes you to imagine changing diapers in a tent. Keeping toddlers happy in a tent. And so on.) So this was Kate’s first, but not her last. At least, I hope so. We had torrential downpours both nights, our campsite was invaded by tent caterpillars, the mosquitos were vicious, and there was a war going on across the river, and she still had fun. Fingers crossed.

Yes, a war. We camped in Grayling, home of Camp Grayling, and as usual, maneuvers were under way. The town was clogged with camouflage, and at night, the sound of machine-gun and artillery fire rang through the woods. It’s actually not objectionable at all — it wasn’t terribly loud, they’re good neighbors, and the plug is pulled at 10 p.m., which, at this time of year and at that latitude, isn’t even full dark.

Most people around here know the charming story of the Kirtland’s Warbler, an endangered little songbird once thought extinct, until a few were found nesting near the National Guard’s firing ranges. KWs nest in jack pine forest, but only in trees about head-high; they need a recently burned landscape to survive. In the years of vigorous fire suppression, they lost habitat, and only found it in the places where artillery shells had started small fires, stimulating regrowth. And so the wee birdie found refuge with the big soldiers, and if we could add some kittens and rainbows to this story, we would.

Actually, we can. This was Saturday:

Yep, that’s a threatening sky. I’m just glad the hailstorm came when we were in the car.

More video later. I have a busy morning, and then a busy week. I think I mentioned this once before, but lo it has come to pass: I’m on a team participating in the Detroit-Windsor International Film Festival Challenge, which takes place this coming weekend. Everybody meets at a central location, and each team is given a genre, a location, a line of dialogue and a prop, and we’re given 48 hours to make a four- to seven-minute film incorporating all four. The location has already been leaked — the Ambassador Bridge. There are six possible genres, which means I (the writer) have to have at least six vague ideas for short stories in each one. That’s not too daunting, is it?

Also, a final note: I freely admit to being the most out-of-touch writer in the world, but even I was amazed at the Princess Diana-ization of Tim Russert’s death. My last media intake was Friday night, after midnight, when MSNBC was still live “Remembering Tim Russert.” When I resurfaced Monday, glancing at the headlines in USA Today at the Grayling McDonald’s (did I mention I forgot the coffee in the camp kitchen), there were stories about sudden cardiac arrest and “what it means for your health.” It must suck to be famous. Is there really a demand for this? Judging from some of the vox populi out there, a lot of people felt personally connected to the guy. I don’t get it, but I’m sorry for the loss.

Back in a bit.

I know you guys have come to expect something fresh and new every day here, but the day’s tasks are piling up like cordwood and something’s gotta give.

What’s more, NN.C is taking a brief road trip to a primitive land with no wi-fi, and will not be back until Monday. I’ll leave the doors unlocked here, and y’all can play. Something we might talk about:

More discussion of Obama’s bike helmet.

Habeus corpus — not dead yet.

You’ve all seen that human-ovulation-caught-on-film thing, right? Well, if not, here it is. Shy little ovum!

Mischa Barton: Why?

Finally, a dispatch from our Wisconsin correspondent, in the western suburbs of Milwaukee:

i spent a lovely 15 minutes or so in the basement today with the boys while we waited for the latest tornado siren to stop howling. i’m not complaining, mind you. in greendale’s R section, close to the root river, water levels were up to the bottom of the stop signs. a small town south of here is just waiting for its dam to break–it’s not a question of if it happens, just when. westbound I-94 to madison is closed because one of the rivers is flowing onto the freeway now. (earlier this week, they closed that stretch down and parked semis loaded with sand at regular intervals to provide downward force to offset the upward force from the floodwaters directly beneath.)

but: not complaining. our basement, for the moment, is dry. still, we feel a little shellshocked.

Stay dry, Deb. Good thoughts to all of you caught in the deluge. Me, I’ll be back late Monday/early Tuesday.

EDIT: Oh, this is nice — Ashley Morris, David Simon and tomorrow’s commencement speech at DePaul, from the ChiTrib.