I’m crim­i­nally tired today, to the point that a third cup of cof­fee is not the solu­tion. What is? Short Atten­tion Span Blog­gage The­ater, that’s what!

A lede that made me laugh:

British Oscar win­ner Kate Winslet has revealed exclu­sively to marie claire mag­a­zine that she was bul­lied as a child and lived with the nick­name ‘Blubber’.

When I started as a free­lancer, I thought maybe I’d pitch some stuff to women’s mag­a­zines, even though other free­lancers warned me off with wav­ing arms — “they’re run by insane peo­ple, they make ridicu­lous assign­ments, they change their minds when you’re 90 per­cent done and expect you to redo the whole thing for no more money, and they take for­ever to pay.” I never did much pitch­ing to them, as it turned out; they didn’t like my ideas, so I turned my efforts else­where. The only per­son I’ve even heard of who is suc­cess­ful with the lady books writes under a pseu­do­nym, so as not to sully her more upmar­ket rep­u­ta­tion as an respected essayist.

But mostly I’m dis­cour­aged by, you know, read­ing them. Some­one sat down at a key­board and had to actu­ally write that stuff about Kate Winslet. I hope they had as much fun writ­ing as I did read­ing. It’s the “has revealed exclu­sively” that slays me every time, that Hedda Hopper/Deadline USA/stop-the-presses usage that only serves to under­line the triv­i­al­ity of the rev­e­la­tion. It’s a sta­ple on the gos­sip blogs. Some­one is always reveal­ing some­thing exclu­sively to some ink-stained hack. In fact, I think they’ll keep call­ing them­selves ink-stained hacks well into this cen­tury, long after ink has gone the way of quill pens.

That was my favorite part of “Shake­speare in Love” — the scenes of Will at work, sharp­en­ing his pens, dip­ping and scratch­ing, the ink grad­u­ally spread­ing up his fin­gers. You had to be moti­vated to be a writer, once. Which reminds me of my favorite pas­sage from that Christo­pher Buck­ley piece we dis­cussed ear­lier in the week:

He fired up his com­put­ers. He hunched unsteadily over his key­board. I hov­ered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

“I’m going to have to dic­tate to you,” he said.

“I’m a lit­tle rusty at Word­Star,” I said. “It’s been a quarter-century or so.”

Pup still used the word-processing sys­tem he first learned in the early 1980s. Gen­er­a­tions of his com­puter gurus had had to install this anti­quated sys­tem in his increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated com­put­ers, which were like F-22 fighter jets with the con­trols of a Sop­with Camel.

Word­Star, jeez. I hadn’t thought of that in a thou­sand years. I can’t even remem­ber what word proces­sor I used back in the Ceno­zoic era, on my very first IBM PC — Word­Per­fect, maybe? The thing required so many floppy swaps that I went back to the type­writer after the nov­elty wore off, and stayed there for a few years, until we bought our first Mac and adopted MS Word, a pro­gram I have come to loathe. Lately I’ve been doing most of my in-and-out writ­ing on Google Docs. Wal­ter Feigen­son has an amus­ing rec­ol­lec­tion on his inter­sec­tion with the Buck­leys and Word­Star, prompted by the same passage.

Right before my last Mac died I down­loaded Write­Room, which is sort of like Word­Star for those of us who suf­fer from fatigue-induced ADD — green let­ters, black screen, no distractions.

Finally, Jim at Sweet Juniper is not only ten times the reporter I am, he puts me to shame with his curios­ity. He’s the full-time dad to two lit­tle kids, and he still finds time to pho­to­graph dozens of bot­tles of hobo pee. If you don’t click that link, you will be sorry.

I was work­ing my way through this story about today’s GOP dilemma — a broader party or a purer one? the head­line asks — when it occurred to me this is exactly what some were say­ing, with great plea­sure, when the cur­rent pope was elected. It would be a smaller church once Bene­dict XVI drove out all the lesser souls, but a purer one, and yes, that was exactly the word they used — purer. And while the Catholic church and the Repub­li­can party have very dif­fer­ent mis­sions in the world, it’s inter­est­ing that both are hav­ing the very same dis­cus­sion, isn’t it?

I’d make my own obser­va­tions about it, but as I may have told you: I’m tired. You feel free.

And now it’s 10 a.m. Work beckons.

The news­pa­per melt­down has moved beyond tragedy and well into farce. Michael Miner at the Chicago Reader reports on a jour­nal­ism awards ban­quet in that great city. One of the win­ners, Melissa Isaac­son, had been laid off two days pre­vi­ous. She heard her name called, went up to col­lect her plaque, and found…

…(By) the time she made her way up front to accept her plaque it had dis­ap­peared. That’s because (still-employed Tri­bune man­ag­ing edi­tor Jane) Hirt had hopped up from the Tri­bune table next to the dais to claim it for the Tri­bune. “My friends asked me later if I got to bask in any of the applause,” says Isaac­son, “but there was no bask­ing. I had to go find my award.”

I think Isaac­son got the best part of this deal. She lost a plaque, but gained a much bet­ter story she can tell for the rest of her life. The plaques I gath­ered in my cursed career are all in a box in the base­ment some­where, and the most good any of them did me was when we used one of Alan’s AP awards to prop open a win­dow with bro­ken sash cords. It was a lit­tle bust of Mark Twain, and was just the right height to do the job. (This was in our home office, and I found inspi­ra­tion in his lit­tle golden face, hold­ing up my win­dow on warm days. Twain would have appre­ci­ated it, too.)

And I remem­ber when the debate over jour­nal­ism awards was about Gan­nett, famed at one time for buy­ing great papers, turn­ing them into pale imi­ta­tions of their for­mer selves, and then buy­ing ads that claimed all its papers’ Pul­tiz­ers for itself, even those won before under pre­vi­ous own­er­ship. (Gan­nett is now famed for sur­viv­ing into the cur­rent era.) Times have changed.

The under­state­ment of the year, that.

So how is your week going? I’ve been track­ing swine flu. This is part of my night-shift job, edit­ing health-care news. It leaves me both opti­mistic and, well, not. The opti­mism comes when I reflect on what a mar­vel our public-health sys­tem is when it works well, and so far, I think it’s work­ing well. You’re already hear­ing the usual naysay­ers, point­ing out that tens of thou­sands die from the flu in a nor­mal year, that most peo­ple are recov­er­ing from this par­tic­u­lar vari­ety just fine, that once again, the gov­ern­ment is spread­ing panic, etc.

I would advise these folks to read past the sec­ond para­graph. The public-health emer­gency declared over the week­end, as was pointed out in nearly every story, was mostly a for­mal­ity. The com­par­i­son was to declar­ing a trop­i­cal storm a hur­ri­cane; it frees up money and staff to work on it, and is not even close to a cry to run for the hills. A global pan­demic, even of a viral ill­ness most will sail through with lit­tle more than lost time from work, is noth­ing to sneeze at. (Sorry.)

The dis­cour­age­ment comes from the real­iza­tion that despite all these pro­fes­sion­als and this mod­ern information-dissemination sys­tem, we really remain incred­i­bly igno­rant of some pretty sim­ple things about our health. You know how many sto­ries have moved assur­ing peo­ple that they can­not get swine flu from eat­ing pork? I’ll tell you: Scores. The con­fu­sion comes from some­thing Alan used to harp about all the time when he was a health reporter: We don’t really know what flu is. It’s a res­pi­ra­tory ill­ness. It affects the lungs. You get it when peo­ple cough their germs in the air nearby, and they fly over to you and make them­selves at home. But because we’ve chris­tened every case of stom­ach upset “stom­ach flu,” it’s prob­a­bly nat­ural that some will fig­ure it comes from some­thing you ate.

Any­way, it’s prob­a­bly a good time to short your pork futures.

In health jour­nal­ism, as in all things, there’s a huge gap between the best and the rest. The best are incred­i­ble; my shift cov­ers pub­li­ca­tion of the Wall Street Jour­nal, New York Times and USA Today, and all three have ace health reporters who not only know their beats, but can explain them capa­bly to the aver­age reader. And then there’s the rest:

“It’s a fine line between edu­cat­ing peo­ple and fright­en­ing them,” said Dr. Mar­vin J. Tenen­baum, the direc­tor of med­i­cine at St. Fran­cis Hos­pi­tal on Long Island. He has been mak­ing the rounds of patients and respond­ing to their con­cerns about the out­break, con­cerns that he said had been ampli­fied by patients’ watch­ing cable news in their hos­pi­tal beds.

Even as news anchors preach cau­tion and pledge that they do not want to cause undue anx­i­ety, the sheer demands of the 24-hour news cycle of cable news and the Inter­net have ampli­fied the story. Typ­i­fy­ing the some­times over­heated cov­er­age, a Fox News Chan­nel com­mer­cial on Wednes­day exclaimed that “swine flu plagues the nation” and urged view­ers to tune into prime-time coverage.

And you know what? The report­ing was prob­a­bly OK. But when you try to boil a story down to a phrase in the promo depart­ment, you come up with “plagues the nation,” and the good work goes down the drain.

All I have to add is: Wash hands fre­quently. Avoid Mex­ico for now. And read the good newspapers.

I’m late today, so just brief bloggage:

It’s true that edi­to­r­ial car­toons in news­pa­pers are true relics of a time gone by. In an era when any­one can be a Pho­to­shop car­toon­ist, when Get Your War On shows the hid­den humor in MS Word clip art, there’s some­thing just sooo 19th cen­tury about the sketch at the top of the ed page. On the other hand, there are still a few truly gifted prac­ti­tion­ers still at it. The times that edi­to­r­ial car­toons have made me laugh, chances are the artist was Mike Peters.

Happy hump day, all.

Yes­ter­day I received an e-mail for­ward, the orig­i­nal sender a respected, recently bought-out Detroit colum­nist, announc­ing his new posi­tion with an inter­net startup that shall remain name­less. It’s not “hyper­local” but it is zip code-targeted, and since I have my own startup with a sim­i­lar model, of course I checked it out.

Hmm. Reuters, Reuters, Reuters, no local copy yet, more Reuters and oh look, here’s a story with a byline and date­line, fol­lowed by an abbre­vi­a­tion of the site name, which in my world sig­ni­fies locally pro­duced, orig­i­nal con­tent. (By Cubby Reporter, COPENHAGEN (AP) — like that.) It’s a story out of Mary­land and it’s locally sourced, tightly writ­ten and pro­fes­sion­ally pre­sented. Which means it’s time to fire up the Google and, oh my, whad­daya know, it’s stolen.

Down to the last comma, it’s stolen. Only the byline is changed, which I’m sure would come as a sur­prise to the reporter who wore away his shoe leather get­ting it in his employer’s paper. So I checked out another story on the main page, also branded with a byline and the site’s name, and it’s stolen, too. From the Asso­ci­ated Press. So. E-mails to the thief and the vic­tims, screen caps for all, and my work as Junior Jour­nal­ism Detec­tive is done, except for a small rant:

I AM SICK TO DEATH OF THIS SHIT. In my research yes­ter­day, I found a few press releases about this startup, all crow­ing that they intended to pick up the pieces of the shat­tered news­pa­per busi­ness’ adver­tis­ing base. “There’s a new paper boy in town,” was the money quote from the local con­tact, an ex-radio guy. Well, the new paper boy is deliv­er­ing crap. Today’s front page has a story on swine flu with no fewer than four bylines, all with the site’s local-content sig­ni­fier. Two are asso­ci­ated with var­i­ous con­spir­acy web­sites and one runs an online “vac­cine infor­ma­tion cen­ter” that — I hope you are not sur­prised by this — opposes manda­tory child­hood vac­ci­na­tion. And that’s who’s writ­ing about swine flu. (And yes, I sus­pect they don’t know they’re writ­ing about swine flu for this par­tic­u­lar web­site, but I only work on behalf of real jour­nal­ists. They can enforce their own copy­right, if they care to.)

I read some com­ments from a fel­low print jour­nal­ist the other day, spec­u­lat­ing that this is really only the begin­ning of the end, that the next sta­ble busi­ness model for legit­i­mate jour­nal­ism is at least a gen­er­a­tion away, maybe two. In the interim, we’ve got a long walk through a dark for­est to look for­ward to.

The pro­pri­etor of the thievin’ site replied to my e-mail yes­ter­day, apol­o­giz­ing for this unfor­tu­nate inci­dent, claim­ing it was the result of a dis­hon­est “user:”

We get 100’s of arti­cles sub­mit­ted every day by users. We try and go through them and val­i­date them but some slip through the cracks.

I used to think the low entry bar to jour­nal­ism was a good thing. We’re not a pro­fes­sion; we’re barely even a craft. If you can tell a story to some­one else, you can be a jour­nal­ist. Come, join the mar­ket­place of ideas. Now I’m not so sure.

Rant over.

I’m look­ing out at a chill rain, alas, and it feels very British, for some rea­son. The last few days, the tem­per­a­ture was in the 80s, with a strong, hot wind blast­ing out of the south­west, air imported from Texas or some­where. It was enough to awaken all the flow­ers, push the last tulip open and make the weep­ing cher­ries weep. It’s times like this I look out the win­dow at all this new green and think: I am so glad I don’t have pollen aller­gies. Imag­ine suf­fer­ing through a win­ter like we just had, and then finally see­ing spring arrive, only to greet it with? Suffering.

Not much blog­gage today; you guys have already seen the 747-buzzing-New-York pic­tures, so no need for me to call atten­tion to them here. But speak­ing of copy­right, I have book­marked the blog of the increas­ingly tire­some Lawrence Lessig, and it was through him that I found this NPR story on nov­el­ist Mark Hel­prin, who has stepped for­ward as spokesman for the pro-copyright argu­ment. The story con­tains an excerpt from a book he’s recently pub­lished on the sub­ject. If only we had a less windy spokesman:

At age four­teen, on a cheap three-speed Robin Hood bicy­cle that my father inex­plic­a­bly (to me) pro­vided as a replace­ment for a mag­nif­i­cent Eng­lish tour­ing cycle, the color of a Weimaraner, that I had left to rust in the rain, I set out on a trip across most of the coun­try. A great deal hap­pened in those months: I was not many miles away from Earnest Hem­ing­way on a sunny July morn­ing in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office build­ing in Ari­zona, Barry Gold­wa­ter informed me that I was not per­mit­ted to carry the hunt­ing knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remark­ably small num­ber of other vis­i­tors to Zion National Park, I lis­tened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall cri­sis unfolded. In regard to copy­right, prop­erty, and decency, the per­ti­nent inci­dent occurred in a field in Iowa.

A crowd­sourced rewrite of that para­graph could only improve it. At least I hope so.

OK, 10 a.m. cometh and I have lots of work today. Take it away, lovely readers.

Such a bou­quet of delights was the NYT mag­a­zine yes­ter­day. (I know the mag­a­zine pub­lishes online a few days before­hand, but I’m ol’-skool, and wait for the plea­sures of Sun­day morn­ing and its cof­fee and waf­fles.) I was look­ing for­ward to Christo­pher Buckley’s mem­oir excerpt, after not­ing Brother Rod and the Pon­tif­i­catin’ Pedants wring­ing their damp hands over it ear­lier in the week. Is this Christo­pher Buckley’s “Mom­mie Dear­est?” Rod won­dered, describ­ing the Buck­ley scion’s por­trait of his mother as a “mean, lying bitch.”

After tak­ing my own mea­sure of the piece, I can say it must be dif­fi­cult to go through life as a writer who is unable to actu­ally, you know, read. It’s true that Buck­ley did acknowl­edge his par­ents’ many faults, which I guess in Outer Wingnut­tia is a cap­i­tal offense, but I don’t see how any­one could read the por­tions of “Los­ing Mum and Pup” that were pub­lished this week­end and come away with the idea that the sur­viv­ing Buck­ley is get­ting even some­how. This is an enor­mously affec­tion­ate por­trait of two com­pli­cated peo­ple who had a full com­ple­ment of virtues and flaws. Nor­mal adults know this is the way of the world, but in a cul­ture that idol­izes The Fam­ily, I guess it’s bet­ter to sweep these dif­fi­cult truths under the rug and never speak of them again.

I don’t get it. But here’s what I know: Writ­ers, par­tic­u­larly mem­oirists, are charged with one job over all oth­ers — telling the truth. If you can’t tell the truth — and that is per­fectly fine, not every truth must be told — don’t even pick up your pen. Keep your mouth shut. You don’t have to wal­low in the bad stuff; part of telling the truth is telling the whole truth, paint­ing the lights and the darks, because only a por­trait with a full range of tones can come any­where close to a fair rendering.

Stip­u­lated: The truth will vary from per­son to per­son. The truth is not the same as accu­racy. The truth is never the whole truth, and rarely noth­ing but. But for Christo­pher Buck­ley to pub­lish a book that does noth­ing but under­line the fan­tasy oth­ers have about what his par­ents “must” have been like — that would be a lie. The world has enough lying writ­ers. (All of these stip­u­la­tions are themes in Laura Lippman’s excel­lent “Life Sen­tences,” now avail­able at an Ama­zon kick­back link near you.)

You know the first col­umn that really landed Tim Goe­glein on my radar? It was some­thing he wrote about his par­ents after one of their anniver­saries, about how their thousand-year mar­riage had been blessed per­son­ally every day by Jesus, who guided their lives down to the last detail, and as such kept them from ever mak­ing a seri­ous mis­take or speak­ing a cross word, and how he per­son­ally handed over every one of their chil­dren in a holy glow of pure white light, and every one of those chil­dren was brought up in the way of the cross, and blah blah blah.

I thought: The bull­shit is strong in this one. He bears watch­ing.

Goe­glein was a guest at the Buck­leys’ from time to time, not that he ever dropped their names, but I remem­ber his mak­ing some ref­er­ence to “my friend Pat” in a col­umn that was obvi­ously Mrs. B. It was right after William F.‘s death that I went look­ing to see if he’d writ­ten any­thing about conservatism’s fallen lion, and, well, we know how that turned out.

Les­son: Tell the truth. (My truth: I have per­haps embroi­dered the details of that Tim col­umn. But not by much! More truth: I met Christo­pher Buck­ley once, at a library event. He was charm­ing at an Olympic level. What­ever flaws his par­ents had, they knew how to raise a son to hold up his end in social situations.)

Else­where in the mag­a­zine, Vir­ginia Hef­fer­nan takes a look at reader com­ments, a feature-not-bug of legit pub­li­ca­tions that I sus­pect we’ll be wrestling with for quite some time:

Anne Apple­baum is an Amer­i­can polit­i­cal jour­nal­ist liv­ing in Poland whose columns appear weekly in The Wash­ing­ton Post and on Slate. Her views are pro-free-trade and gen­er­ally hawk­ish. A Thatcherite in the 1980s, and a sup­porter of Obama for pres­i­dent in 2008, Apple­baum is stoutly pro-immigration, pro-intellectual and anti-torture. Last year For­eign Pol­icy mag­a­zine declared her one of “the world’s most sophis­ti­cated thinkers.” In award­ing the 2004 prize for gen­eral non­fic­tion to her book “Gulag: A His­tory,” the Pulitzer com­mit­tee called it a “land­mark work of his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship and an indeli­ble con­tri­bu­tion to the com­plex, ongo­ing, nec­es­sary quest for truth.”

But what does the ana­log world know? Online, read­ers see Apple­baum and her work quite dif­fer­ently. To read The Wash­ing­ton Post’s com­ments sec­tion is to dis­cover an out­raged throng that insists she knows absolutely noth­ing. Not long ago, a poster named jbbur­rows pro­nounced Apple­baum a “lib­eral fool.” Respon­dus described her as “a lapsed neo-con addict.” Lloyd667 on Slate wrote, “Anne gets just about every­thing wrong.”

Just about everything.

This is some­thing I’ve won­dered about for a while: Why are the com­ments on my sole-proprietor, no-budget, stitched-together, lame-o blog so won­der­ful, and those on pro­fes­sion­ally done, big-budget, well-respected sites so ter­ri­ble? I’ve referred in the past to the Free Press Klav­ern, the slaver­ing, anony­mous, brain-free troupe of read­ers who feel oblig­ated to chime in on every Detroit story and turn it racial. Let’s just go over there and see…

OK. Here’s a feel-good story about one of the city’s most promi­nent busi­ness­men, who’s mar­ried to a younger woman (not under nefar­i­ous cir­cum­stances; he was a wid­ower). She’s expect­ing twins. Let’s just fish one out of the hat:

Are they really his? I guess we will have to see what they look like.

And so on. Big media com­pa­nies go to great, painstak­ing lengths to make them­selves “diverse” inside and out, and Gan­nett prob­a­bly goes the fur­thest — they were the com­pany that decreed from on high that reporters must seek out non-white sources on all sto­ries. (Which spawned some of the great inside-baseball media sto­ries, which we can all tell one of these days after it sinks beneath the waves.) I can’t imag­ine being a black reporter or edi­tor, work­ing hard on a story, and hav­ing this stuff attached to it like a hem­or­rhoid. (It’s not just race that excites the yahoos, but that’s topic No. 1.)

I’ve heard dif­fer­ent things about Gan­nett com­ment threads, but all via grapevines, noth­ing offi­cial. The gist is that they pur­posely keep their hands off, for legal rea­sons — if you mod­er­ate, you’re respon­si­ble for what appears there, but if you don’t, you’re not, so the expla­na­tion goes. It makes no sense to me, but then, I’m not a lawyer.

It’s the anonymity that brings out the beast in peo­ple, of course. Take away the name, and peo­ple feel free to say any damn thing that bub­bles out of their id. I don’t except myself, either — I’ve been an anony­mous blog com­menter in the past, and while I don’t do it any­more, I will say that it served its pur­pose. But most peo­ple who com­ment here are anony­mous or at least some­what shrouded — I know Coozledad’s real name, and it is nei­ther Coo­zle, nor Dad — but we gen­er­ally keep things decent and respectful.

Maybe it’s the anonymity, plus the size of the net cast. When you’re one of thou­sands read­ing a MSM web­site, it just seems eas­ier to spew. I don’t know. I do know I’m grate­ful to you folks for being the fab­u­lous com­mu­nity you are, from sea to shin­ing sea and then to a few more seas (hello, Copen­hagen!). Don’t ever change, or if you do, just get fun­nier and smarter.

Russian-study time. Have a great day.

Part of my duties at Grosse​Pointe​To​day​.com is com­pil­ing the public-safety reports. After three weeks of this, I’m ready to wrap myself in cot­ton bat­ting, sell the bikes at a garage sale and never go out­doors again.

It’s the drunk dri­vers, of course. Most of these arrests are well after dark, when I’m safe in my wee bed, but the other day I came across a report for a broad-daylight arrest, on a res­i­den­tial street where I ride my bike. The dri­ver blew a .23, dri­ving with a dog in his lap. For some peo­ple, cock­tail hour boils down to “any hour that I’m awake.”

This got me think­ing about Alco­holics I Have Known, and the humil­i­a­tions they went through en route to either sobri­ety or a part­ing of ways with your truly. Bed-wetting, seizures, prop­erty destruc­tion, emo­tional dev­as­ta­tion, and the usual run-ins with the author­i­ties. I thought of the times I spent watch­ing drunks make that another-round ges­ture at the wait­ress, the cir­cling finger.

“But I don’t want another,” I might say.

“That’s OK, I’ll drink yours.” Never let a cock­tail go to waste.

A year or so ago, I linked to a Wash­ing­ton Post pro­file of Elmore Leonard, the first I’ve ever read that dis­cussed his drink­ing prob­lem, con­quered years ago:

One day in the early 1970s, Dutch came back from one trip to Los Ange­les — where he might go through 20 drinks in a day — and started throw­ing up blood. It was acute gas­tri­tis. His doc­tor told him this was usu­ally seen in “skid row bums.” He found him­self argu­ing with his wife “every sin­gle night,” with him say­ing “vicious things, which I couldn’t believe the next day. I’d be filled with remorse.”

He moved alone into the Mer­rill­wood Apart­ments, where he lived and wrote and went to Alco­holics Anony­mous meet­ings and tried to stop drink­ing for another three years. “I was flat broke.” The book he was work­ing on, “Unknown Man #89,” was rejected by 105 pub­lish­ers before find­ing a home.

“It was a very dif­fi­cult time,” remem­bers Bill Leonard.

The cou­ple divorced in 1977, the year he had his last drink — Scotch and Ver­nors gin­ger ale one morn­ing while shaving.

It was funny to read this, because alco­holism was a theme in his 1970s-era work, and even a casual reader would know the details came from hav­ing walked the walk — stag­gered the walk, maybe — to the point that I had to put “Unknown Man #89″ down from time to time and let it soak in for a while. Two char­ac­ters are alkies in var­i­ous stages of recov­ery, and the pic­ture he paints of one of them sit­ting in a Cass Avenue bar, order­ing glass after glass of cheap white wine, is like some­thing by Edward Hop­per. He even gets the stance of the bar­tender down, the way he leans back against the ice machine and props one foot up behind him, hand rest­ing on his thigh. I think I’ve been to that bar. It’s called the Good Times. Ha ha ha.

The other detail that kills me: The drunk drinks wine. Because every­one knows that if you only drink wine, you’re not an alco­holic. I know a guy whose dad killed a fifth — yes, an entire bot­tle — of bour­bon every night between 5-something, when he walked in the door, and 8-something, when he went to bed. His mom nearly matched him. She had to have a hys­terec­tomy, and the doc­tors told her she needed to at least taper off before the surgery, so she switched to wine, usu­ally two bot­tles a night. The father was a high-ranking exec­u­tive at a major cor­po­ra­tion, had a Har­vard MBA. He wasn’t an alco­holic because he had an impor­tant job that he was good at.

(They had four boys. One had a drink­ing prob­lem and died young in a one-car fatal, another lost his med­ical license for self-prescribing heavy-duty nar­cotics, a third was diag­nosed with Korsakoff’s syn­drome while still in his 30s and the fourth seems OK. The old man was told he was threat­en­ing his health with his drink­ing and quit in his old age, just­likethat. Well, he always did have an iron will.)

There’s another Leonard book, “Freaky Deaky,” with a char­ac­ter who prob­a­bly does have Korsakoff’s, although it’s not stated out loud. He’s just addled from a life of drink­ing. I love that Scotch-and-ginger-ale detail from the writer’s life, because there’s a long pas­sage in that book about an end-stage alky’s morn­ing rou­tine — his ser­vant brings him two vodka-and-ginger-ales on a tray for his eye-opener:

Don­nell would have to wait for the swollen face to show life mixed with pain, then for the man to get up on his elbow and take the drink. Don­nell would then step out of the way. Soon as the man fin­ished the drink he’d be sick start­ing right there if he didn’t get to the bath­room in time. Start­ing this wake-up ser­vice, Don­nell had brought the man Bloody Marys, till he found out being sick was part of wak­ing up. Did it one week and said, Enough of this Bloody Mary shit, clean­ing up a bath­room looked like somebody’s been killing chick­ens in it.

Part of liv­ing with an alco­holic means clean­ing up their messes — of all sorts. I never had much of a taste for it.

A note: Every so often I write about drink­ing in this petu­lant tone, and it usu­ally kicks up a pri­vate e-mail from a reader, sug­gest­ing I’m “strug­gling” with drink­ing myself. For the record: I find myself drink­ing less these days than ever — hardly ever dur­ing the week, mostly only on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day night. Since I’m chron­i­cally sleep-deprived, one too many glasses just makes me soporific. Also, the older I get, the less I need to drink to feel it the next day. Hang­overs suck. I’m lucky to down three glasses on a Sat­ur­day night, these days. So I’m cool. If I’m strug­gling with any­thing, it’s how to pass these lessons down to the next gen­er­a­tion. Is it pos­si­ble to learn about drink­ing with­out major trial and error? I wonder.

OK, then. Off to work. A bit of blog­gage before I go:

Chris Matthews: Capa­ble of learning?

I won­der if it dri­ves Alice Waters crazy that suc­cess­ful cook­books are writ­ten by peo­ple like Hun­gry Girl. “Cap’n Crunch Chicken” — it is to laugh. (If you click through, exam­ine the pic­ture and weigh in: Cheek­bone implants, or are those the real thing?)

It’s not all bad news in the econ­omy: Aber­crom­bie & Fitch is strug­gling. Huzzah.

If I want to get done in time to take a sprained-knee bike ride (with wrap­around ice pack), I gotta get going. Have a good week­end, all.

When I was at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan I had the plea­sure of attend­ing one of Ralph Williams’ lec­ture courses: The Bible as Lit­er­a­ture, I believe. He’s a leg­endary pres­ence at Michi­gan, and has been there long enough that his lec­ture on Job had to be moved to another build­ing and held on a week­end, because so many par­ents wanted to come. Prob­a­bly many of them had been his stu­dents, too.

Williams is retir­ing this year. He gave his final lec­ture this week:

“The world will not much care, nor long remem­ber that which you gather as cap­i­tal,” said Williams to the mostly college-age crowd. “But it will remem­ber and cel­e­brate the beauty you create.”

Words to live by in an ugly age.

I gen­er­ally update this blog in the morn­ing, when I’m use­less any­way. I read the papers, start the cof­fee, drink the cof­fee, open the lap­top and take my morn­ing bat­ting prac­tice while I wait for the French Roast to work its magic. I gen­er­ally try to be done by 10 a.m., and that’s when my day really begins, work-wise.

It turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong:

A young man I’ll call Alex recently grad­u­ated from Har­vard. As a his­tory major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semes­ter. He also ran a stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Week­nights were devoted to all the school­work that he couldn’t fin­ish dur­ing the day, and week­end nights were spent drink­ing with friends and going to dance par­ties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed impor­tant to “maybe appre­ci­ate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impos­si­ble, Alex began tak­ing Adder­all to make it possible.

Adder­all, a stim­u­lant com­posed of mixed amphet­a­mine salts, is com­monly pre­scribed for chil­dren and adults who have been given a diag­no­sis of attention-deficit hyper­ac­tiv­ity dis­or­der. But in recent years Adder­all and Ritalin, another stim­u­lant, have been adopted as cog­ni­tive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, over­com­mit­ted peo­ple take to become higher-functioning and more over­com­mit­ted. (Such use is “off label,” mean­ing that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s man­u­fac­turer or the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion.) Col­lege cam­puses have become lab­o­ra­to­ries for exper­i­men­ta­tion with neu­roen­hance­ment, and Alex was an inge­nious exper­i­menter. His brother had received a diag­no­sis of A.D.H.D., and in his fresh­man year Alex obtained an Adder­all pre­scrip­tion for him­self by describ­ing to a doc­tor symp­toms that he knew were typ­i­cal of the dis­or­der. Dur­ing his col­lege years, Alex took fif­teen mil­ligrams of Adder­all most evenings, usu­ally after din­ner, guar­an­tee­ing that he would main­tain intense focus while los­ing “any abil­ity to sleep for approx­i­mately eight to ten hours.” In his sopho­more year, he per­suaded the doc­tor to add a thirty-milligram “extended release” cap­sule to his daily regimen.

This is the lede of a fas­ci­nat­ing story mak­ing the rounds this week, from the New Yorker. Mar­garet Talbot’s piece on the off-label use of pre­scrip­tion stim­u­lants and other ADHD drugs is both thrilling and ter­ri­fy­ing, the idea that there could be real help for those of us who stum­ble through our lives unable to con­cen­trate, even if we have to whee­dle our doc­tors for it. Here’s the ter­ri­fy­ing part:

Recently, an advice col­umn in Wired fea­tured a ques­tion from a reader wor­ried about “a ris­ing star at the firm” who was “using unpre­scribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started get­ting on my case for not being as productive.”

Wel­come to the new world. Please take your Adder­all and get to work.

A few years ago I read a first-person essay by some­one who’d taken Ritalin with­out a pre­scrip­tion, and described the effects as noth­ing short of rev­o­lu­tion­ary — the “bet­ter than well” sense of energy and focus that allowed the writer to not only work, but work bet­ter than he ever had in his life, to con­cen­trate for long peri­ods, to ignore dis­trac­tions, to fin­ish his novel. How easy it would be to become depen­dent on such a drug. How sim­ple it would be to fit it into your life.

I can’t believe my gen­er­a­tion spent all those years sit­ting around in smoky liv­ing rooms smok­ing pot, when we could have been swal­low­ing Ritalin and accom­plish­ing something.

(As you can tell, the French Roast is kick­ing in.)

It’s trendy to refer to our nation’s efforts against self-administered chem­i­cals as “The War on Some Drugs,” or “The War on Some Classes of Peo­ple Who Use Some Drugs.” You read stuff like this, and you see why it’s funny — because it’s true.

OK. It seems some of you are still back in yesterday’s thread, argu­ing about tor­ture. Here’s a new start­ing place for that throw­down, a pretty fair-minded look at how, exactly, we deter­mine what “high-value infor­ma­tion” is and how it’s obtained.

If you’d rather take an eas­ier road, tor­ture dri­ves Shep Smith to for­get the car­di­nal rule of live broadcasting.

Mean­while, why do peo­ple bring infants into homes with aggres­sive dogs? Why, why, why?

And now it’s 10 a.m., time to get to work. Fully engaged, but I could use some Ritalin.

The teacher set up a cir­cuit course for us for yesterday’s weights class at my gym, with plans to push us through it three times. “Let’s warm up with some jump­ing jacks,” he said. So we com­menced jumping.

A dozen jumps in, some­thing hap­pened in my left knee. It wasn’t the clas­sic pop of a ten­don or lig­a­ment tear, more like an alarm­ing buckle — a feel­ing that whoops-something’s-going-somewhere-it-shouldn’t, imme­di­ately fol­lowed by it’s-back-where-it-belongs-but-there’s-going-to-be-hell-to-pay. Fol­lowed by numbness.

Well, hell. And this is my good knee.

It’s just a sprain, I’m sure, but it means days and weeks of not-being-right, and, as you might expect, the numb­ness pre­dictably gave way to pain. I fished out the brace from my last adven­ture in this area, and I think the crutches may be called for, too. Also, ice, elas­tic ban­dages, ele­va­tion, and resentment.

This had to hap­pen to me because the great gods of karma had kissed our work only an hour ear­lier — we got that grant we were in the run­ning for. A Pulitzer couldn’t have thrilled me more, so of course I had to be pun­ished. Good thing it wasn’t a really big grant — that would have meant tumors or amputation.

So, given that I’m gimpy, behind and oth­er­wise dis­tracted, how about some links and I’ll duck out early to change the ice pack?

Only in Detroit: The papers print these sto­ries to give sub­ur­ban­ites some­thing to screech about, I think. Woman goes into the city to buy a wig for her “cancer-stricken grand­mother,” leaves her car 10 min­utes, comes out to find her two Chi­huahuas stolen. Com­menter help­fully adds, they were prob­a­bly stolen for dog-fighting bait. Way to make a lady feel better!

Gan­nett edi­tor tells employ­ees to reserve Face­book and Twit­ter for their pri­vate time. Two days ago, I F’booked a com­plaint about how stu­pid the site has become of late, and received a note from one of my still-employed ex-colleagues, who said she Face­books for laffs while she waits to be laid off. So that’s why!

Looks like there’s a good chance the Supremes will rule strip-searching a 13-year-old girl for two Advil is just the price we have to pay to keep schools under admin­is­tra­tors’ con­trol. Joy.

Mau­reen Dowd, tour­ing Cal­i­for­nia and Sil­i­con Val­ley, keeps low­er­ing the bar. How does she manage?

Off to limp to the shower. And make some coffee.

It rained all day yes­ter­day — hard, cold and side­ways — and now some­thing hard and needle-like is falling on the sky­light. Could it be? Yes it could: Freez­ing rain/hail! And spring is delayed another day or two.

Don’t mind me. I always liked the feel of a nice snug straitjacket.

A few notes/clarifications/follows:

My com­ments about Susan Boyle got linked here and there, and read­ing the com­ments on other blogs, it seems there are some who believe my con­tempt was aimed at her, not at those sur­round­ing her. Noth­ing could be fur­ther, etc., although I do won­der why any­one, let alone a nice Scot­tish vir­gin (say that phrase in a Scot­tish accent — it’s fun), would will­ingly climb between the sheets with Simon Cow­ell — talk about your deals with the devil. But obvi­ously there aren’t many pro­duc­ers will­ing to take a chance on a woman like Boyle, and if she wanted to be heard out­side her Scot­tish vil­lage, this was prob­a­bly the only way it was going to happen.

No, my prob­lem is with the peo­ple who treat her like some sort of sideshow, and in so doing reveal their not-particularly-hidden con­tempt for any­one who dares break the mold of what’s con­sid­ered accept­able in our culture.

One more note: Not long ago I heard some­thing on pub­lic radio about John Philip Sousa’s reac­tion to Mr. Edison’s infer­nal inven­tion, the phono­graph. He saw in an instant what it would lead to — the loss of music as an ama­teur pur­suit, that’s what:

…when music can be heard in the homes with­out the labor of study and close appli­ca­tion, and with­out the slow process of acquir­ing a tech­nic, it will be sim­ply a ques­tion of time when the ama­teur dis­ap­pears entirely…

In Sousa’s time, music belonged to any­one who had the min­i­mal dis­ci­pline to learn it. Every­one — or, at least, far more peo­ple — could pick out a tune on the piano, favor the group with a song, play the fid­dle at a Saturday-night dance. When enter­tain­ment was scarce, every­one enter­tained. You lent your tal­ent, what­ever it might amount to, to your church choir, your com­mu­nity band, your local musi­cal soci­ety. When the music busi­ness amounted to the sale of sheet music, it was a far more demo­c­ra­tic insti­tu­tion. Music was like the local plant life — unique in a par­tic­u­lar place, shaped by cir­cum­stances and geography.

Boyle is, I think, far more rooted in this older world than ours. While she’s obvi­ously influ­enced by the musi­cal the­ater and other mod­ern insti­tu­tions, she seems to have one foot firmly planted in a time when being able to carry a tune meant you were some­where on the scale from normal-to-gifted, not a super­star wait­ing to be discovered.

Of course her new Sven­gali will help her make a record. Here’s hop­ing it enables her to spend her remain­ing years wher­ever she wants, in Scot­land or on a beach some­where, singing like a canary just for the joy of it.

Also, I saw most, but not all, of HBO’s “Grey Gar­dens” the other night, and I have to say, I was impressed. I thought com­bin­ing the Edies’ back­sto­ries with their degra­da­tion brought a note of empa­thy to the whole sad and squalid affair, and the act­ing, par­tic­u­larly Jes­sica Lange’s, was out­stand­ing. Just the right com­bi­na­tion of needy and cal­cu­lat­ing, mama spi­der sit­ting in her web wait­ing for the right moment to wrap her daugh­ter up in it for good.

Need­less to say, the wardrobe was fab­u­lous. Why don’t we wear cloche hats any­more? They looked good on everyone.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Detroit Free Press for their well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Unre­lated: The other day I read about a pros­ti­tu­tion ring in the metro area that relied on Craigslist, and the Free Press arti­cle said:

Sher­iff War­ren Evans charged Wednes­day that Craigslist is major source of pros­ti­tu­tion. He said the evi­dence will be sent to Chicago to bol­ster a fed­eral civil case filed March 5 against the giant Inter­net firm by the Cook County sheriff.

“Giant inter­net firm.” I ask you. It is the truck that ran over our indus­try, and we don’t even know what color it is.

For what Wikipedia’s worth, the giant inter­net firm oper­ates out of a non­de­script house in San Fran­cisco and has 28 employ­ees.

And now I am off to mail the let­ter that will seal my sum­mer in a nice pack­age: I’m teach­ing a class this spring/summer term. At the uni­ver­sity level, which I’m sure will give all you tuition-paying moms and dads pause. In inter­net jour­nal­ism, at Wayne State. I’m as stunned as you are, but for now, I have to get my let­ter of offer back to them before the dead­line. So I’m off, eh?

As I may have men­tioned here a time or two hun­dred, I’m a retired equestri­enne. One of these days, when I get a work­ing scan­ner again, I’ll put some pix up of me in my rid­ing togs, jump­ing fences on my very expen­sive steed, who was only expen­sive to me; among peo­ple who ride, he was lit­tle bet­ter than a plug. I rode with 14-year-old girls whose doc­tor dad­dies thought noth­ing of drop­ping a mid-five-figure sum on a well-trained thor­ough­bred for their dar­ling daugh­ters, and even that was on the cheap end, even then. At the elite lev­els, a five-figure sum is the monthly bill.

But never mind that. I did my time in the sad­dle, and while I never had the build or the tal­ent or the bud­get to be a con­tender, I didn’t totally dis­grace myself, and I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned was how to fall off.

Falling from a horse, in our cul­ture, is made out to be far scarier than it is. In a movie, if a preg­nant woman gets on a horse, she will be suf­fer­ing a mis­car­riage within min­utes. Bon­nie Blue But­ler only had to put the fence rails up too high to meet her tragic fate. And while there are a num­ber of hor­ri­ble acci­dents in rid­ing com­pe­ti­tions every year, they are excep­tional. Peo­ple with fancy horses tend to work them in rid­ing rings with deep, soft foot­ing, and what’s good for Dobbin’s legs is also good for your sorry ass when you land in it. Not that it doesn’t hurt, but unless you come off head-first or some­how land on the jump or the rail, chances are you’ll be just fine. The clas­sic rid­ing injuries are not Christo­pher Reeve’s bro­ken neck but the big three — bro­ken wrist and/or col­lar­bone (from putting your hands out as the ground comes up to meet you), and cracked ribs.

Which brings us to Madonna, who either needs to toughen up or stay out of the sad­dle. I’ve dis­mounted more horses the hard way than she’s dis­mounted boyfriends, and never once did I have to go to the hos­pi­tal — on a back­board, no less — for what turned out to be bruises. I thought she was Miss Super Fit­ness. Just get up, dust off your ass, lead your mount back to the block, get back on and fin­ish the class. That’s how the tough girls do it.

My trainer didn’t cod­dle peo­ple who fell. She wasn’t a tyrant about it; a kid who was hon­estly ter­ri­fied by the expe­ri­ence wasn’t forced back into the sad­dle at gun­point or any­thing. But she never made a big fuss one way or another. It was like oopsy-daisy, every­thing OK? Fine, up you go and pick up a post­ing trot. As all par­ents know, the big­ger the fuss you make over any injury, the more the injured party is fright­ened. How­ever, I get the feel­ing that mak­ing a fuss over Madonna is pretty much the point of her exis­tence, so I’m not sur­prised she was con­tent to stay immo­bile on the ground while wor­ried faces and EMTs peered down at her.

BTW, I was dumped because of “paparazzi,” too. I could never afford a good, well-trained horse, so I rode a cou­ple of young, spooky ones. A bark­ing dog, a loud muf­fler, a sud­den hand ges­ture or windy day could turn them into the sorts of ani­mals who dis­ap­pear from under­neath you and simul­ta­ne­ously reap­pear 10 feet to the left. You felt like Wily Coy­ote, run­ning off the cliff. As I picked myself out of the dirt, I’d tell my trainer, “(X) spooked him.” She’d say, “Learn to stay on your horse.”

In Madge’s defense, how­ever, one of my favorite lines from Thomas McGuane, as a char­ac­ter is rid­ing the spooks out of a young stud colt: “By your mid-thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day it admits you.” True dat.

OK, some quick blog­gage for, what else, a dreary Monday:

How fast food can kill you. It has noth­ing to do with cholesterol.

Dear Mr. Pres­i­dent, this is how let­ters get to your desk.

It’s a good thing Berke­ley has so many rich peo­ple. White roofs for all!

Why I keep fivethir​tyeight​.com book­marked, even though the election’s over: For posts like this, about Minnesota’s Sen­ate election.

Finally, since we seem to be heavy on the popculch today, to the next per­son who sends me the Susan Boyle video:

Stop it. I don’t care how much you were moved, wowed, what­ev­ered. I don’t care. Don’t you real­ize how con­de­scend­ing this all is? Don’t you know how much you’re being played? Is there noth­ing Simon Cow­ell can’t make a buck from? You know why Susan Boyle is such a phe­nom­e­non? It’s not because she’s a great singer; how would any­one know? There are two record­ings of her singing two songs extant in the world. No, Susan Boyle is a phe­nom because she’s ugly. Go ahead, say it: Ug-ly. Leave the nicer euphemisms — frumpy, dowdy — for the weak-willed. The bot­tom line is, when some­one is ugly in our cul­ture, we expect noth­ing good from them. The idea that a ugly woman could open her mouth and have some­thing beau­ti­ful come out flum­moxes us — how could she have been cul­ti­vat­ing a love for music when she was neglect­ing her eye­brows and fit­ness rou­tine so? Doesn’t she know our pri­or­i­ties? If a gor­geous woman had come out and given the exact same per­for­mance, you prob­a­bly wouldn’t even know about it.

The next step, after cel­e­brat­ing Susan Boyle for being a fine singer, is a YouTube video of some street-looking black kid who steps to a micro­phone in a speech com­pe­ti­tion and deliv­ers a per­fect read­ing of a Shake­spearean son­net. Look, he’s so artic­u­late! Just be aware.

Also, pleeze: Does any­one hon­estly believe the judges didn’t know what was com­ing? Do you think peo­ple make it onstage at shows like that with­out a sin­gle pre-performance screen­ing? You think Simon didn’t know the cam­era was on him, red light lit, when he smiled? How dumb are we?

Pretty dumb, I’d say.