Just a quick pop-in to say hi. We’re having ourselves a fine time. We have (spotty, imperfect) internet access. We have not gone native. We are tourists, out ‘n’ proud:

This trip — rent a bike, cross the bridge, lunch in Sausalito, ferry home — is highly, highly recommended, especially on a day that starts cloudy and ends in blazing sun. Even though I was faked out by the heavy morning overcast, failed to apply sunscreen and got my first burn in years. Even though riding the bridge means navigating with the squadrons of hard-charging native cyclists, none of whom are amused by our slow-moving, head-swiveling, camera-toting presence. I call all these people, male or female, “Danny.” I never got an open sneer from a Danny, but I did cross against the light in front of one, forcing him to slow and probably making the microscopic difference in his lung capacity that will tank his time in his upcoming triathalon.

Sorry, Danny. Shit happens.

Yesterday was Golden Gate Park, the seashore, a little shopping. Today, lunch at Ferry Marketplace:

Ah, I have found my people.

(Actually, that’s a complicated question. For every happy surprise — walk into an ordinary-looking pizza joint and find it stocked with tradesmen enjoying pizza with [angel choirs] fresh tomatoes and diced fresh basil on top — there’s more than a hint of foodier-than-thou, which can get real tired, real fast. However, it still tastes very very good, and my palate is enjoying this trip very, very much.)

Breakfast, then lunch awaits. Gotta run.

I’ve run dry, folks. Blogging may resume mid-week, depending on my internet connections, or it may not. Consider this an open thread for whatever you want to discuss. Active this week: Bloggers at The New Package start in on Generation Kill, and I’m sure Coozledad will have a few stories to tell. Back July 21 at the latest.

Last day before vacation, and it’s already filled with duties and errands. So not much today but a bit of attention that must be paid:

My ex-colleague William Carlton, arts writer for The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, died unexpectedly earlier this week. The story going around is that he called 911 in the middle of the night, and by the time the medics arrived he was unresponsive. Bill had a history of heart problems and lived alone, as befits the odd duck he was.

How odd? Well, let me tell you who Bill’s previous employer was, before joining the N-S when I did, in the large Class of ‘84: The New York Daily News. That paper was already struggling then, and offered buyouts to reduce staff, and Bill took one. Why he was crazy enough to come to the opposite end of the earth from New York City remains a mystery to me, although I asked him several times, and got explanations that all boiled down to a shrug: Why not? He brought a lot to the newsroom — a certain tabloid, rat-a-tat-tat prose style full of puns and wordplay; a gruff personality that could still sparkle, usually when the topic was ribald; and a wide and deep knowledge of the arts that revealed itself in both his work and in his casual newsroom conversation. It was always a pleasure to talk to him and be surprised by his knowledge — he once explained to me why opera singers are the greatest musicians and the truest artists on stage today, and did it so concisely and expertly that I still believe it.

Not that he was a snob. He had an abiding love for boxing, and could explain the ballet of a heavyweight fight with equal authority. I once asked him how George Foreman or Buster Douglas or some unlikely victor had done it, and he pointed to a spot on his chin and said, “See this? There’s a button right here. If you look very closely, it says, ‘The Puncher’s Chance’ on it. Hit the button just right, and goodnight Irene.”

The paper asked Alan and I me for memories of Bill, but mostly they’re, um, unsuitable for a family newspaper. I remember when a local bail bondsman who owned a few massage parlors was on trial for pandering, and Bill, an unapologetic customer of one of them, explained to a rapt metro staff how the front-room procedure worked. (”But forget Friday nights. The high school football teams tie everything up.”) I remember his story about going out drinking with the Daily News staff after work, and the obscene Algonquin Round Table banter: A drunken photographer sat down opposite a crusty old national correspondent, a woman, and said, “Barbara? I want to eat your pussy.” Barbara took a world-weary drag of her cigarette and said, “Jesus. Doesn’t anyone just like to fuck anymore?”

Alan told them about the time a penguin at the zoo unleashed a torrent of digested smelt all over his brand-new Banana Republic khakis and Bill expensed them. That’ll probably make the paper.

When the turmoil at the paper started, the real downsizing, Bill stuck around to see what the new editor was about. He took her measure accurately in about five minutes, and decided to retire. I don’t know if he ever looked back. I got an occasional e-mail from him, and like so many people you spend eight hours a day with one day and zero the next, more or less disappeared.

Wherever he is now, I hope there’s a good title fight on pay-per-view and and opera across the street. Bill appreciated the whole spectrum. I guess that’s the point.

Every so often Lance Mannion mines his old notebooks for blog entries. Well, I don’t have old notebooks, but I do have NN.C. I started this site in part because it would require me to write something every day, to keep a journal of sorts, to keep a notebook in one form or another. So here’s something I turned up in my search for the Dexter column yesterday. Be glad you don’t know me in real life, for I am, apparently, insufferable.

This is from February 7, 2002:

Yesterday one of our neighbor’s kids stopped by. Middle-schooler, collecting information for a school paper on peregrine falcons.

“There’s been a peregrine falcon in our neighborhood,” he said.

“No way,” I told him. “Not around here. You’re almost certainly confusing it with a hawk. Red-tailed, Cooper’s, one of those. They’re big, they look like falcons.”

He insisted it was a peregrine. I insisted it couldn’t be. We had a short argument over whether they roost in trees in populated areas. I suspected I was putting him off, so I told him he ought to check out the Raptor Chapter, a non-profit that does rehabilitation on injured birds of prey. “Do you have the number?” he asked. I invited him in while I fetched the phone book. Alan walked in at this point. “Connor here thinks he’s seen a peregrine falcon in the neighborhood,” I said. “No way,” he said. Etc., etc. “Besides, they’re migratory,” I said. “They’re on the coasts at this time of year.” Connor said they weren’t. “I think you’d better check your research,” I told him.

Alan wondered what I was doing with the phone book. “I’m looking up the Raptor Chapter number for him.”

“The Raptor Chapter? They didn’t have the permits! The duck dicks shut her down,” Alan said.

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

“While back,” he said. “Of course we ran a couple paragraphs inside, after all that stuff we’ve been writing about her all these years.”

At this point I looked at Connor, who appeared somewhat dazed, no doubt thinking, Why the hell did I ring the doorbell of these lunatics? “I have a field guide, if you’d like to check it,” I said, gently. “Or you could call the Indiana DNR. They have lots of information. Guy name of John Castrale runs the peregrine reintroduction program.”

Finally, the thought occurred to me: “Why did you stop by, Connor?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d seen the falcon,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. And with that, he left. If I could have that five minutes to live over, I’d do it differently.

Bloggage:

I have a friend who works in TV news here, and whenever I bitch about the pathetic journalism — and fourth-rate star power — of local anchors, he rolls his eyes and give me a jaded, what-can-you-do look. However, I think even he would be appalled by news of a Detroit news anchor participating in a crooked deal between a sludge treatment company and the city council, and I hope on behalf of journalists everywhere, this paragraph made his eyes pop out:

Stinger, who joined Fox 2 as an investigative reporter in 1997 and became an anchor in 2004, was paid about $325,000 a year by Fox 2 Detroit in 2005, according to divorce records.

Actually, as TV-news anchors are paid — she anchored the morning news show — this is pocket change. All to look pretty. No wonder every Miss America contestant wants that gig.

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

Early exit this morning — it’s back to the gym for mommy.

If you haven’t seen this, you gotta see this:

He quit rather than lower flag for Helms.

I’ve spent so much time on this blog complaining about other columnists, I should probably send a little love to the good ones. So indulge me:

Who are your favorite columnists, Nance?

There have been many over the years. I always liked Mike Harden, although he was sometimes uneven. (As are all columnists.) Carl Hiaasen had some gems, but was mostly Florida-centric, and so the bulk of his newspaper work was lost on me. Dave Barry, of course, but only in the early, funny ones. (That’s a joke.) Gene Weingarten. But through it all there was one guy I read religiously. His weekly column moved on the wire on Mondays, and I would actually wait for it, start checking around the time it usually moved, be sad if it wasn’t on time.

Pete Dexter.

Dexter is sort of famous in journalism circles. He wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News when that paper was unique among American newspapers, a tabloid with a real sense of humor about itself, and I guess he wrote your typical big-city newspaper column. Then he fell in with Randall “Tex” Cobb, whom most of you know as the evil biker in “Raising Arizona,” and the two of them got into a pretty serious bar fight. As Wikipedia tells the tale [citation needed]:

(Dexter) began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely.

Now that’s what you call reader feedback.

Anyway, Dexter spent a lot of time in the hospital, and then recovering at home, and somewhere along the line he relocated to Sacramento and then to Seattle, and there were novels and screenplays and a National Book Award, and this is about the time I started reading him. I think the first piece was in the mid-’80s, for Playboy, about a guy at the Philadelphia Inquirer who rebelled against being screwed over by management. He did so by erecting a puppet theater on his desk, and every so often a new puppet would appear that bore a strong resemblance to a top editor at the Inquirer. He arranged them in tableaux; my favorite was one where all the puppets knelt before the editor puppet. The Inquirer was, of course, a Knight-Ridder paper, and I was at another K-R property, one where the BS skills were quite as well-honed as they were in Philly, but I recognized it the way I do my own bedroom. It was a perfectly told story of life in a certain sort of newsroom at a certain sort of time, and I fell in love.

Anyway, over the years, Dexter wrote some of my favorite columns ever, but the best of them all was about Mike Tyson after one of the Holyfield losses, a grand tale of tragedy rendered in 650 words or so, and I’ve been waiting years to see it anthologized. Just the other day I learned that Dexter’s had an anthology out for a solid year and a half, and boy do I feel dumb. So I rush down to the library and get a copy, only to flip it open and discover there’s no table of contents, no index, no division by (or even acknowledgment of) publication, no nothing. The first column is 1 and the last one is 82, and if I’m going to find Mike Tyson, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and read right through to the end, and…

…OK. I’m starting to see the reasoning here.

But I have a bad feeling. I have flipped and flipped and flipped through “Paper Trails,” and Tyson’s name hasn’t jumped out at me. Neither has the word “puppet.”

A few years ago, I went into the Sacramento Bee archive (Dexter’s home base at the time) and bought the Tyson column, and ran it here on the blog, a total copyright violation, for which I received the following angry response from the paper’s lawyers: Silence. No one reads this blog.

But I noticed something. I had that column printed out and pinned to a wall in my cubicle at work, and whenever I felt in need of inspiration I’d take it like a vitamin, so after a while I got to know its phrasing pretty well. And when I saw the SacBee version, something was different. He’d described the people who flocked around Tyson after his success as “pimps, whores and gangsters,” a phrase some helpful editor recast as “men.” But remember: It’s the internet that’s killing newspapers.

[Long pause.]

OK, this is going to bug me all day. I just went into my hard-copy archives — the CD-ROM backups I did of this site back before it was a blog — and found the file on the first try. Here was the edited phrase:

By the time he went away, Tyson had replaced D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney with an assembly of men who are there to this day and will be there as long as the smell of money is in the air.

That’s a real copy-editor’s trim, that. You can sit with one all day and explain how “D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney” and “pimps, whores and gangsters” are parallel phrases, that they match rhythmically, that making this change is like playing “shave and a haircut” and then “fifteen dollars and forty-three cents, plus applicable taxes.” They don’t hear it. All they hear is some supervising editor dressing them down because an old lady called and is canceling her subscription after needing her smelling salts. Also, one of the pimps, whores or gangsters might sue.

Rant over.

Anyway, this is what I’ll be reading on the plane.

Bloggage:

Things I just learned: Coozledad has a blog! (Suggestion: Disable the SnapShots preview. Irritating.)

However, I think we have a job for Coozledad’s bull: U.S. exports cigarettes, bras, bull semen to Iran. I had a neighbor in Fort Wayne who bought bull semen, to inseminate his herd of comely Black Angus heifers. It arrived in straws frozen in liquid nitrogen, sometimes transported by a pretty vet student from MSU, and if you’re thinking that’s the setup for a dirty movie, why shame on you.

I’ve lived so long, I remember how Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen met. (She sent a nude photo of herself to his hotel room. How romantic.) So I guess it’s not surprising she would have a boob job on live national television. In Germany. During prime time. I guess they don’t have HBO there yet.

Off to do paying work. Enjoy your lovely summer day, if you have one.

The other day I was listening to a story on NPR, about people stuck driving the guzzliest gas guzzlers, and what they were doing about it. I was struck by one man’s interview. He drove a Ford Excursion, the biggest SUV evahr, the station-wagon equivalent of an F-350 SuperDuty pickup truck. The man explained that he needed an extra-large vehicle; he and his wife had five children between them, “so we had no choice” but to buy the Excursion.

Five plus two is seven. That’s how many seats he needed. By my reckoning, that means he could have chosen just about any minivan, and a large number of other SUVs with third-row seating, nearly all of which get better gas mileage than the Excursion. But he had no choice.

Of course, as all adults know, there’s always a choice. It’s just difficult to make sometimes. For instance, yesterday I could have chosen to have something lean and protein-y and vegetable-heavy for lunch, but instead I had a cheese quesadilla. Then I had two Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies for dessert. If only it had been mandatory, but it was a choice. Some of you are feeling smug and superior, the same way I felt about Mr. Excursion. If it makes you feel any better, I went fiber-heavy for dinner (black beans) and took a long bike ride in penance. That was a choice, too.

I hate choices. I especially hate the way they’ve become the behavioral equipment of fiber. Been in an elementary school lately? “Make good choices” is the new “eat from all four food groups.” Earlier this year Kate was scolded by a teacher for the following: A boy threw down a book, and it took a funny bounce and hit a girl in the leg. She gave out a loud, cartoon-y howl of pain, hopping around on one foot, and Kate laughed. Laughing, the teacher said, was “a poor choice.” I wonder what George Carlin would do with that one.

We rail about wanting more control over our world, which means more choices. And then the vacuum cleaner dies, and we go to Sears. First we choose a price range, then we choose a brand, then we choose bagless or not, onboard tools or not, upright or canister, until our heads spin and we howl with pain and go eeny-meeny-miney-moe. There have been times, while buying a household appliance, that I wished I lived in the old Soviet Union. I would have happily gotten on a list and stood in line for five hours if, at the other end of the line, there was one vacuum cleaner, and the choice was: Take it or leave it.

Grumble, grumble.

OK, bloggage:

A particularly smelly Metro Mayhem today: Boy, 1, shot during fight over glasses. Eyeglasses, that is. (Huge, heavy sigh.) And they were probably knockoffs.

Christopher Hitchens speaks ill of the dead, and boy did they deserve it. Jesse Helms, of course.

Oh, and if you have time, prepare to waste it now: Look at what everyone’s uploading to Flickr, in real time, on a rotating globe. Don’t blame me when nothing gets done. (HT: Vince.)

Now, I choose to go to work and write more mediocre prose. Leave a better comment. (It shouldn’t be hard.)

The trip to Cornerstone went well, if you were wondering. As Jeff commented in an earlier post, Cornerstone isn’t really your typical Christian music festival. It’s more…alt-Christian. Multi-colored hair, much body ink, piercings, ear grommets, you know the drill. The mood was much closer to this…

…than, say, Up With People.

(Man, I just realized how little I know about contemporary Christian music.)

But the talk went well, and I had an interesting chat with Jane Hertenstein, who is a member of Jesus People USA, who put on the festival. It’s JPUSA for short, pronounced J’poosa. J’poosans live communally in their very own 10-story apartment building on the north side of Chicago, kind of like those FLDS compounds, but without the wack hairdos, child abuse, plural marriage, raids by the feds and, of course, a scary prophet. If it sounds a little hippie, I guess it is — they admit their roots are in the Jesus-freaky movement of the late ’60s and ’70s. I read a little in their website and, while I can no more imagine living communally than I can living in, say, Kabul, I can see its appeal, and they truly do seem to be doing their best to imitate Christ.

Their festival is certainly tolerant of all types:

Not sure what this guy’s journey was, but he was eye-catching.

I think this van belonged to Brother Ray:

Brother Ray wandered into the speakers’ hospitality trailer. Most people would notice his yard-long gray dreadlocks, but I was intrigued by his feet, which looked so toughened by exposure to the elements they were more like paws. If that is his vehicle, I suspect he propels it Flintstone-style.

It was a nice trip. A lot of travel for less than an hour of work, but what else is summer for but crashing in your friends’ guest room, driving far up into the wilds of east-central Illinois, crossing all the swollen rivers and creeks, hanging with the Christians for a few hours and then doing it all in reverse? I’m sorry I missed most of the speaker who followed me, from Exodus International. I could scarcely believe this crowd was swallowing it, but I also noticed the speaker didn’t wear a wedding band, so it’s possible she was selling the 20-percent-less-offensive alternative of celibacy for gay people, rather than full-out joining the other team. Dunno.

Anyway, that was my weekend. How was yours?

(Note: He didn’t. But he tried.)

Bloggage:

I don’t truck much in the workings of the blogosphere, mainly because it’s a huge waste of time. The oh-no-you-di’n't between the right and the left can go on forever, and frequently does. But I still read it from time to time, and if I recall correctly, wasn’t there a dust-up about so-called liberal photojournalists altering photos to make smoke blacker or some such? I guess the practice is catching on, only in a more chickenshit sort of way. Embedded video has the visual evidence. (Gawker has it in a one-stop, non-video graphic, too.) The NYT has picked up the story, and notes the network’s defense that “altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.” I’m calling bullshit on that — there’s obvious Photoshopping and there’s this kind, which is just nasty. Note that one of the victims is Jewish; couldn’t they fit a few dollar signs on his eyeballs?

Lots to catch up on today, and I’ll be back later. Enjoy Monday. If you can.

My internet connection is spotty here, so just a couple of quickpix in advance of a bigger report later.

My friend Vahe Gregorian is a sportswriter in St. Louis. He saves stuff. Like, for instance, all his credentials:

It’s funny — I’ve always been a credential-saver, too. Of course I don’t have a fraction of Vahe’s. My guess is, he’s saving them to sell on eBay in his retirement, to supplement what’s left of his pension when the entire industry implodes.

Meanwhile, at the Cornerstone Festival, the alt-Christian culture is in full flower:

If they’d had a T-shirt of this, I’d have bought it. But they didn’t.

More next week. Enjoy your holiday.

A few short items this morning before I start packing for the Christian Burning Man:

We’ve been visiting our lake cottage in Branch County less and less over the years, and perhaps you’d like to know why. OK.

Our next-door neighbor there, who bought the cottage built by Alan’s uncle, tore it down this year. No harm in that — it’s small and had a powder-post beetle infestation at one point. It probably needed doing. Of course we knew they’d put up something much bigger, but we were hopeful it would be, er, in character with the neighborhood. They decided on a prefab Swiss chalet. Other houses on the strip had been brought there in pieces, so there was a precedent. Can they get the truck to the lot without major damage? Oh sure, no problem.

The chalet went in this week. Their truck driver backed his semi across our front lawn and without so much as an oops, flattened two 10-year-old river birches Alan planted when Kate was a baby. Number of profuse apologies that have arrived at this address, or that of my sister-in-law, in the interim: Zero. Simple acknowledgment? None.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve told Spriggy that if he’d care to entrust us with his share of Leona Helmsley’s $8 billion, we’ll take very good care of it. Jeez, what a bitter old crone — $12 million for her own Maltese wasn’t enough, I suppose. I love dogs as much as you do, maybe more, and let me tell you: $12 million for a single dog deeply misunderstands the nature and needs of all dogs. You can argue with the foundation setup — I suppose there’s always someone who needs to hear the spay/neuter argument again — but at its heart it’s the work of a true misanthrope, in love with the poochies but not a dime for humanity. You know what I think? I think it’s because LA Mary couldn’t get her the strawberry preserves she wanted for her hotels. It queered her on two-legged creatures once and for all.

Inside baseball: Hank Stuever on why Clay Felker mattered:

Appreciate Clay Felker? It’s all anyone ever did, who wanted anything to do with magazines. Was it emulation, or was it envy, or was it a fantasy — working for the perfect place, the perfect editor, at the perfect time?

When I started freelancing, I had a simple goal: To do as much work as possible for editors who could help me improve. Needless to say, I never met Clay Felker.

Metro mayhem: Someone stole the copper plumbing from one of the city’s most visible landmarks. A six-figure repair bill for a few bucks in scrap metal.

John Scalzi printed one of his famous sunset pictures and included his cat, so I LOL’d it. No one will get it:

Bonus: Stay at Scalzi’s for a little perspective on the military service/electability track record.

That should keep you. I’ll be in and out until I leave for the airport, so, y’know, whatever. Oh, and thanks for all the SF recommendations, folks. I neglected to mention, this trip is basically a rerun of our honeymoon lo those many years ago. (Alan: “You sure you don’t want a diamond ring?” Me: “I want a two-week honeymoon more.”) You brought back memories and gave me some new ideas. You guys are the best.