Today in Embar­rass­ing Pic­tures, we again refuse to embar­rass the pro­pri­etress, instead throw­ing her hus­band into the line of fire:

“These two boys are hav­ing fun demon­strat­ing proper tooth brush­ing” dur­ing National Children’s Den­tal Health Week. “Albert Ramirez, son of Mr. and Mrs. Genaro Ramirez, 810 Nicholas St., looks on from the left while Alan Der­ringer, son of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Der­ringer, 405 North­field Ave., does the brushing.”

Among the odd­i­ties of this pic­ture, which I can’t pre­cisely date, other than to say, “Man, when was the last time you saw a kid wear­ing a wrist­watch like that, eh?” Both kids come from intact, Mr. and Mrs. homes. No one objected to hav­ing their exact address printed in the news­pa­per. And when Alan’s mom died, she still lived at 405 North­field and still had her phone listed under Roger Derringer.

Also note the long-standing His­panic pres­ence in north­west Ohio (this was in Defi­ance). I won­der how Mark Kriko­rian would pro­nounce Ramirez?

I like the way Albert is “look­ing on.” Some­one is always look­ing on in old news­pa­per pho­tos. For news­pa­per jour­nal­ists of a cer­tain age, we lived for the day we wouldn’t have to take pic­tures like this or write their wit­less cap­tions, and if you were any good at all, sooner or later you beamed up to a big­ger paper, which as a rule didn’t run this stuff. And now, here we are decades later, and the buzz is in hyper­local jour­nal­ism web­sites that wel­come and solicit pic­tures like this, and guess who’s writ­ing the cap­tions? Full circle.

My pledge: No one will ever look on in my cut­lines. Unless it’s in an ironic, retro way. Because oth­er­wise I will have to start drink­ing a lot more.

Because it’s Fri­day, another no-cal bon­bon. Thanks, Char, for send­ing this “hastily made Cleve­land tourism video.” As for the punch­line, well, yes they are. They just don’t know it yet:

I have to go to a meet­ing, edit a pile of copy and do some seri­ous writin’ today. You folks take it from here.

Peo­ple these days are always accus­ing one another of liv­ing in an echo cham­ber. To be sure, it’s a haz­ard of mod­ern life. You may find your­self writ­ing things like this:

So, are we sup­posed to use the Span­ish pro­nun­ci­a­tion, so-toe-my-OR, or the nat­ural Eng­lish pro­nun­ci­a­tion, SO-tuh-my-er, like Niedermeyer?

That’s Mark Kriko­rian, writ­ing at National Review’s brain­less group blog, The Cor­ner. And OK, so he wrote it, big deal, these things tend to be self-correcting. Not in echo cham­bers:

Most e-mailers were with me on the post on the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Judge Sotomayor’s name…

Well, of course they were. Per­haps they pre­fer the Ellis Island option, in which the Supreme Court nom­i­nee would have been renamed Sally Sut­ton in exchange for her par­ents get­ting that cushy public-housing apart­ment. But Kriko­rian goes on:

But a cou­ple said we should just pro­nounce it the way the bearer of the name prefers, includ­ing one who pro­nounces her name “freed” even though it’s spelled “fried,” like fried rice. …Defer­ring to people’s own pro­nun­ci­a­tion of their names should obvi­ously be our first incli­na­tion, but there ought to be lim­its. Putting the empha­sis on the final syl­la­ble of Sotomayor is unnat­ural in English…

Then there’s a bunch of non­sense about how his name has been angli­cized from the orig­i­nal Armen­ian — one whole syl­la­ble got added, oh my — and you just think stop stop stop you’re going to choke on your shoe, man, but nooo:

Part of our suc­cess in assim­i­la­tion has been to leave whole areas of cul­ture up to the indi­vid­ual, so that new­com­ers have what­ever cui­sine or reli­gion or so on they want, lim­it­ing the demand for con­for­mity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where con­for­mity is appro­pri­ate is how your new coun­try­men say your name, since that’s not some­thing the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch.

You hear that? There ought to be lim­its. Con­for­mity is appro­pri­ate. A man can only bend so far. You let peo­ple pro­nounce their names how­ever they want, and the next thing you know, we’ll have a man in the Oval Office named Barack Hus­sein Obama.

Some­one tell Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito — I mean, Andy Scalls and Sam Allen — there’s a lady com­ing who’s going to give ‘em all fits.

One of my Twit­ter fol­lows said it best: It’s spelled Kriko­rian, but it’s pro­nounced “Kracker.” HT: Vir­go­tex.

Yeesh, what a week so far. Gath­er­ing the police news this week, I found a report of two coy­otes attack­ing a cat. The wit­nesses called police to see if the cat had sur­vived. In clas­sic cop­s­peak, the report revealed: “The offi­cers found that it had not,” and dis­posed of the body. This seems sad all around. Sad that some fam­ily lost its kitty. Sad that two coy­otes lost their meal, although the report wasn’t that spe­cific, so it’s pos­si­ble they got away with enough to make a decent lunch. Sad­der still that this par­tic­u­lar sub­urb spent quite a bit of effort in the last two years try­ing to erad­i­cate their coy­ote pop­u­la­tion, with lit­tle suc­cess. They caught a female with pups, but any­one who knows coy­otes knows this is like killing six rats and pro­nounc­ing the prob­lem solved. Not that coy­otes are rats. Just…it’s sad.

I’ve bored you before at length about one of my favorite things about Detroit — the wild ani­mal life that thrums below the sur­face of human activ­ity. If it can sur­vive at this lat­i­tude, we have it, the coy­otes, the ghetto dogs, pheas­ants, exotics. It’s not exactly Miami, but it’s get­ting there. Speak­ing of which, did any­one read the New Yorker piece last month on the spread of the Burmese python through­out Florida? Worth your time, and then some.

It seems the right time to kick off the blog­gage, then. Another from my Twit­ter clan:

Feral chil­dren — they have their own web­site. With some killer prose: Cer­tainly, it’s true that some ani­mals wouldn’t make good par­ents. It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a croc­o­dile doing any­thing other than eat a human baby. Noted.

You’ve watched “Mad Men.” So you shouldn’t be sur­prised by some of the ad cam­paigns they dreamed up. Check out the one for the Lysol douche. Yikes.

Nate Sil­ver decon­structs the “Obama is tar­get­ing Repub­li­can car deal­ers” meme by point­ing out the obvi­ous: Most car deal­ers are Repub­li­can. There you are.

And here I go. Have a great Thurs­day, all.

A note on our type prob­lems: J.C. is aware, and is work­ing on it from his vaca­tion in the Upper Penin­sula, where wi-fi is some­thing no one’s really heard tell of yet. Good news: This seems to be a home-page prob­lem. In the mean­time, if you click the head­line, it’ll take you to a sep­a­rate page (with com­ments) where everything’s OK. Noted? Noted.

EDIT: Type prob­lem seems fixed, for now. Thanks, brother Jim! Also, a ver­sion of the Eaton Beaver clip is now linked in com­ments. Thanks, Duffy.

It’s a mea­sure of how scat­tered I’ve been of late that I’ve been sit­ting here for two days think­ing I have noth­ing to write about, and then — fore­head slap — I remem­ber that I went to see Elmore Leonard last Thurs­day. He did a read/chat/sign at Border’s, sup­port­ing his new one, “Road Dogs.”

The read­ing was brief, just the first page of the novel, which in the usual fash­ion, starts halfway down the page. Maybe three para­graphs, after which he said, “And that’s what the book’s about,” shut it, and started talk­ing. He was aided in this by his son Peter, who just pub­lished his sec­ond novel — it’s a father-son book tour. The two chat­ted back and forth for about half an hour, took some ques­tions, signed some books. Among the highlights:

Peter talked about the party his father threw for the cast of “Out of Sight,” after they wrapped shoot­ing in Detroit. He walked into the din­ing room to find George Clooney had just arrived and was stand­ing by him­self. They chat­ted for a while, and then “the women heard he was there.” Surrounded.

The “10 rules of writ­ing” were deliv­ered at Boucher­con, the con­ven­tion for crime-fiction writ­ers, and were some­thing he just whipped up on a legal pad. Today the list is a book, and one of the most often-quoted in sto­ries about him, prob­a­bly because they’re short, snappy and don’t require much intro­duc­tion. One of the rules: Never use a word other than “said” to carry dia­logue. Another: Use no adverbs. Because they suck. (In the sign­ing line, I told him about the reporter for the Ohio Uni­ver­sity Post who used “ejac­u­lated” to describe an excla­ma­tion. His edi­tor announced to the room: “Some­one ejac­u­lated on Tim’s copy.” That was hard to live down.)

My favorites were the sto­ries about the old days, about being called in to a movie set to con­vince Charles Bron­son — I assume this was “Mr. Majestyk” — that yes, his char­ac­ter would have a par­tic­u­lar female char­ac­ter with him in the pickup truck dur­ing the big chase scene, because oth­er­wise who would be dri­ving when he crawled into the bed with a shot­gun to fire at the bad guys? (“I don’t know why the pro­duc­ers couldn’t have told him that.”) But also about the era of pulp fic­tion, which he barely touched on, other than to say he’d been paid 2 cents a word for “3:10 to Yuma,” “which was the top rate for the pulps.” I wish he’d talked more about this bygone era in Amer­i­can fic­tion, where so many great writ­ers paid their dues and learned their craft. (I was once lucky enough to inter­view an expert on the mass-market paper­back, and I could have talked to him for hours and hours about cover art alone.) Fic­tion work­shops are all well and good, but there’s some­thing to be said for strong char­ac­ters, snappy dia­logue and the whip of the mar­ket as a nav­i­ga­tor of plot­lines. Every so often Leonard is asked why he switched from west­erns to crime fic­tion, and he always shrugs and notes that that’s what the mar­ket wanted at the time. Try telling that to the next MFA you meet.

(That said, my favorite MFA, Lance Man­nion, is a great respecter of genre fic­tion and its writ­ers. So this may not apply to all of them.)

Mar­tin Amis, in an essay about Leonard col­lected some­where, described his writ­ing as jazz, and that’s the truth. He said he doesn’t out­line his nov­els, never knows where they’re going to end until they do, and that sounds to me like a nice bebop solo, the trum­peter step­ping out to noo­dle around with phrases, themes and melodies for a while, until he’s said all he has to say and steps back to let some­one else take a turn. Leonard is Miles Davis with a pen.

I bought “Road Dogs,” which I’m inter­spers­ing with “The Quiet Girl,” two books that couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent. If Leonard is jazz, Peter Hoeg is atonal­ity, trans­lated from Dan­ish. I can only rec­om­mend one, and I think you know which one it is.

So, a lit­tle blog­gage? Sure:

A tale of two Michi­gan economies — Ann Arbor and War­ren. From the WSJ.

The right’s talk­ing points on Sotomayor, by Dahlia Lith­wick, another writer near­ing national-treasure status.

Only in Detroit: A city coun­cil­woman is billed a pit­tance in prop­erty taxes for a decade. How much of a pit­tance? Try $68 a year. Turns out the city records show her address is a vacant lot. Her reac­tion: Huh. I won­dered about that. Now it turns out she prob­a­bly won’t have to pay much at all. This city. I ask you.

Only in Detroit Jour­nal­ism: Yes, I saw the “Eaton Beaver turns 69 today” clip from one of our local TV station’s happy-birthday roundup on the morn­ing show. No, I can­not direct you to it, as the sta­tion has effec­tively wiped out the clip. More proof every news orga­ni­za­tion needs an edi­tor well-versed in dirty jokes, puns and Johnny Fucher­faster stories.

And now, I have a barn to raise and a day to do it. Onward to the work pile.

I have a sick dog and a full plate, two fac­tors that fill me with a desire to go back to bed, but alas — the long week­end is over, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, although I spent a chunk of it working.

I’m wor­ried about the dog. He stopped eat­ing yes­ter­day and showed other signs of intesti­nal dis­tress, per­haps a result of lick­ing up some bone meal Alan spread around the plants the last few days, or per­haps due to the fact he’s 17.75 years old and has the cus­tom­ary unknown expi­ra­tion date. He no longer has the phys­i­cal reserves to sus­tain an extended ill­ness. I’m tak­ing him to the vet today, if I can get in. Fin­gers crossed for Spriggy.

Mean­while, here’s a funny video, via Roy, via Wonkette:

Peo­ple some­times tell me, “I’m not a Repub­li­can. I’m a lib­er­tar­ian.” This sounds to me like, “I want to smoke pot with the loose-moraled Demo­c­ra­tic girls, but still not pay taxes.” To be a lib­er­tar­ian is to spend your life writ­ing checks you’ll never have to cash and know­ing that no mat­ter what hap­pens in the next elec­tion your side won’t win, and will only have to spend the next four years hav­ing, and express­ing, grand opin­ions about those who did. You ask me, you guys can take a lit­tle ridicule.

God, I hope the dog is OK. Here’s hop­ing. You guys carry the dis­cus­sion today. A few ideas:

Nice NYMag piece on the ancient roots of Jew­ish humor in the new Woody Allen movie. (Although why is it, when I hear that Allen likes to start pro­duc­tion on a film when his chil­dren are out of school — i.e., have an excuse to be else­where — that I feel simul­ta­ne­ously relieved and creeped out?)

Also, word is we’ll have a Supreme Court nom­i­nee by mid­morn­ing. Let it be some­one good.

I’ll be in and out, and maybe back by midafter­noon, if I’m not at the vet’s.

Smells like onions.

Hey, are you guys work­ing today? The day before a three-day week­end? Silly wab­bits — hardly any­one else is. So today seems as good a day as ever to kick off a new Fri­day fea­ture, which I’m call­ing Embar­rass­ing Pic­tures, because, well, you’ll see.

Long-time read­ers will rec­og­nize this one, which I’ve used before, but not for a few years, so it’s fresh to most of you:

Just another self-portrait before a Sat­ur­day night out, c. 1981 – 82, around in there. Colum­bus, Ohio. I’m not in this one, but let me intro­duce you to the group. At left, some girl named Jea­nine, who was friends with the other two girls in the pic­ture — Lynne (with the cham­pagne bot­tle) and Janet, known as Tall Janet for obvi­ous rea­sons. The guys, in the back row, Jeff, Paul, Craig. Jeff and Craig were broth­ers. In front, Dan, known to all by his nick­name, Futz. And at far right, in the Way­far­ers, our very own Jeff Bor­den. I like this pic­ture because it’s entirely a happy acci­dent — Bor­den put the cam­era on a a tri­pod and used the self-timer, bounced the flash off the ceil­ing, and every­one just sort of assem­bled them­selves. No one directed the pose or styled the outfits.

Details: Both Jeff and Craig were gay, lend­ing sup­port to the genet­ics argu­ment, but both were nat­ural per­form­ers, and I love the way Jeff is look­ing at Jea­nine, like he’s about to throw her on the floor and rav­age her, when in truth he couldn’t have been less inter­ested. I love the way the ash on Jeanine’s cig­a­rette is this­close to falling. Futz and Paul are wear­ing but­tons — but­tons were big, back then. I still have my favorite from the era in my jew­elry box. It reads VICTIM OF THE PRESS. I picked it up from a LaRouchie at one of their air­port tables. I don’t know what was going on with Lynn’s sparkly disco vest, but she rocks it, I think. Borden’s wear­ing a hat because even then, barely 30 years old, he was stalked by the curse of a reced­ing hairline.

Also, this: Jeff, Craig and Paul are all dead. AIDS. As I men­tioned, Jeff and Craig were broth­ers. In the years imme­di­ately after they died, I thought a lot about them. Since Kate was born, I think mainly of their mother. Imag­ine los­ing two of your chil­dren, in sub­se­quent years, to that disease.

Any­way, even though I wasn’t there, I was there. I think of this pic­ture as exhibit A in the life I led at the time, when Bor­den and I lived across the hall from one another, left the doors open all the time, ran speak­ers from one apart­ment to the other, and had some great parties.

Good times.

That’s it for me, I think. Long week­end ahead, and I won’t be back until Tues­day. Dis­cuss what you like in the com­ments and enjoy summer’s kick­off. Let’s hope it’s a long one.

Ahem:

“Punch­ing, flog­ging, assault and bod­ily attacks, hit­ting with the hand, kick­ing, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shav­ing, beat­ing on the soles of the feet, burn­ing, scald­ing, stab­bing, severe beat­ings with or with­out clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed posi­tions for lengthy peri­ods, made to sleep out­side overnight, being forced into cold or exces­sively hot baths and show­ers, hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hang­ing from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, phys­i­cal assaults by more than one per­son, and hav­ing objects thrown at them.”

Abu Ghraib? No. Guan­tanamo? Nope. The Mis­sis­sippi prison farm in “Cool Hand Luke”? Sorry:

Tens of thou­sands of Irish chil­dren were sex­u­ally, phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally abused by nuns, priests and oth­ers over 60 years in a net­work of church-run res­i­den­tial schools meant to care for the poor, the vul­ner­a­ble and the unwanted, accord­ing to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.

The report, linked above, is stomach-turning — this wasn’t the 16th cen­tury, but the 20th. This wasn’t one or two bad apples, it was a broad and deep con­spir­acy of sex abusers and sadists. It didn’t go on for a few months or years, but decades. One of the reli­gious orders named within, the Chris­t­ian Broth­ers, had the where­withal — and the balls, for lack of a bet­ter word — to suc­cess­fully sue the com­mis­sion before the report came out, to keep names out of it. This was in 2004. Five years ago.

When I read accounts like this, I find it use­ful to imag­ine myself in the abuser’s shoes, par­tic­i­pat­ing in, oh, let’s say the beat­ing while “hang­ing from hooks on the wall.” I try to imag­ine all the places, in the process of car­ry­ing out such a pun­ish­ment, at which one would have the oppor­tu­nity to have one of those Scors­ese camera-pulls-back moments, when one could see one­self clearly: Now I will lift this kid and hang him from this hook…OK, where did I leave my lash?…OK, swing the arms a few times, loosen up the shoul­ders… And I can’t do it. Any child in such a posi­tion must have been hys­ter­i­cal, or fight­ing, or in shock. Tor­ture is hard work for every­one; some­times it really is heavy lift­ing. You have to go home at night, look in the mir­ror and think, just another day at the office. I really can’t fathom it.

So the dis­cus­sion for today, if I may kick it off: What hap­pens when this hap­pens? What sort of group hys­te­ria takes over that keeps par­tic­i­pants from blow­ing the whis­tle? Are new mem­bers of a group cho­sen on the basis of their will­ing­ness to beat and rape chil­dren, or for their will­ing­ness to remain silent? What’s the deviant psy­chol­ogy that takes over and cre­ates the con­spir­acy of silence? Is it just the Mil­gram exper­i­ment, over and over?

Or does the answer lie in this sim­ple sen­tence, deep in the NYT story? The Vat­i­can had no response.

Your call. I’m sorry to duck out on such a bum­mer note, but I have so much to do today it isn’t funny. Turns out run­ning two web­sites is more than 2X the work.

I need some new idiots. Allow me to explain.

A while back I opened a new book­mark sub-folder for blogs. Called it “idiots.” It was use­ful in that it reminded me not to take the con­tents within seri­ously. I had a strict set of stan­dards: The idiots had to be fun idiots, not depress­ing ones. I wasn’t inter­ested in screech­ers, unless they were amus­ing, campy screech­ers. I started with seven or eight idiots, and one by one they have dis­ap­pointed me and I deleted them from the feeds. I’m down to four. Four can’t sus­tain a coffee-break web-surf, although god knows, Rod Dreher tries. But even he has backed down on the enter­tain­ing hand-wringing hys­te­ria of last fall, when the Wall Street melt­down had him run­ning to Costco for 25-pound bags of rice and fret­ting how unpre­pared we were for food riots. Now he’s back to wearily shak­ing his head and dis­ap­prov­ing of his fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives. If he can’t find a slut to kick around soon, I may be drop­ping him, too. Even Lileks is a bore these days, although it’s amus­ing to see how capa­bly he’s motor­ing through the finan­cial cri­sis at his news­pa­per, keep­ing his sunny side up, up. He’s made him­self a TV star, he’s back to fil­ing point­less columns about his dif­fi­cul­ties with cus­tomer ser­vice, he’s — ohmigosh — “fisk­ing” George Will for two mil­lion words. You need a fresher schtick to stay in my idiots folder.

So send me some idiots to check out. No, on sec­ond thought, don’t. If I relent­lessly culled all my book­marks down to the ones I actu­ally visit, I’d be down to the Lol­cats, Gawker, Jezebel, Roger Ebert and a hand­ful of oth­ers, and I prob­a­bly should. Cull, that is. I have enough ways to be dis­tracted while work­ing. And at the moment, I have enough work I don’t need the dis­trac­tions. And Roy still does an excel­lent job as sort of an Idiot’s Digest.

Also, I have some fic­tion ideas I’d like to explore this sum­mer, although I know I’ve said that before.

Besides, it’s time I spent more time in the ana­log world, and maybe admit­ting I can’t read the entire Inter­net every day is a good start. This, for exam­ple, was pub­lished in Jan­u­ary, and I had to learn about it from freakin’ Face­book on Monday.

Also, I don’t want to end up like Kevin Smith:

As you men­tioned, Zack and Miri didn’t do as well as expected. How did you take that?
I kind of dropped out of soci­ety. I just kind of wrapped myself in a weed-infused cocoon … a coma, if you will. And it was great. It was really, really won­der­ful, man. I don’t want to be one of those peo­ple who’s all, “Let me tell you about legal­iza­tion!” But, my God, I don’t think I’ve ever been hap­pier in my life. And after years and years of … you know, I used to lit­er­ally fight with peo­ple online. I would waste days online, talk­ing to total strangers, some of them prob­a­bly chil­dren. I was a joke.

Don’t become a joke: New motto.

Blog­gage:

The line in Obama’s Correspondent’s Din­ner rou­tine that made me laugh loud­est was the poke he took at Michael Steele — in the heezy, yo! Dana Mil­bank, not so funny, but an amus­ing wrapup of the GOP’s gaffe-a-palooza.

Speak­ing of Roy, he has an amuse bouche up now, about reac­tion to Ted Kennedy’s improved health. A few of the usual bit­ingly funny lines are therein.

Admit it: The guy who res­cued the wee duck­lings is your new hero. And yes, I know there are those who say the duck­lings would have been fine with­out the res­cue, but we wouldn’t have the cute video, otherwise.

And now I’m going to make some calls, then go ride my bike for a long time. I plan to pass by an open field near the Milk River, where there will be crowds of Canada geese goslings (Canada goslings?). They will be nearly as cute as the ducks, but their par­ents are big­ger and meaner. I won’t pass too close.

Today’s ques­tion is: How do you man­age your credit cards? Mine strat­egy is pretty sim­ple, and has been ever since I stopped liv­ing paycheck-to-paycheck: Most months, I pay them off in full. If I can’t pay them off, I pay them as quickly as pos­si­ble. The longest I’ve car­ried a bal­ance in recent years is about six months, maybe seven.

Like most mod­er­ates, I walk the mid­dle of the road on plas­tic. Let me see the hands of any­one who wants to return to the days when, if your wash­ing machine broke and you didn’t have liq­uid sav­ings to replace it, you used a laun­dro­mat until you could scrape together a few hun­dred bucks? Didn’t think so. On the other hand, the last time I used a 90-days-same-as-cash financ­ing option — to buy a new mat­tress after the old one sprung a leak and started pok­ing me in the ass with a spring — the first mail­ing I got from the finance com­pany was to spread that $300 over two years for an absurdly low monthly pay­ment, etc. So I see how peo­ple become hard-liners.

I see plas­tic as an ally in nav­i­gat­ing mod­ern life, but as a treach­er­ous one that must be watched at all times. Money — or rather, credit — is a pow­er­ful drug, and I’ve seen too many peo­ple end up in rehab. My sis­ter has a friend who at one point owed a five-figure sum to Mas­ter­Card and Visa equal to half her annual salary. (She told me she knew the mort­gage indus­try was crooked when some­one offered this woman a 100 per­cent loan to buy a house, with enough extra cash thrown in to pay off all her cards, which at the time was some­thing like 40 grand.) I’ve got­ten in over my head a time or two, but was always able to recover quickly — maybe $2,000? On one card? Sounds about right.

Over the years, I’ve heard plas­tic hor­ror sto­ries from both sides of the fence, not just the in-over-your-head spenders, but also the gamers, the peo­ple who claimed to be har­ness­ing the power of their cards, using the frequent-flyer miles and cash-advance perks to their advan­tage, and it’s fair to say I trusted them only incre­men­tally more than the dead­beats. “I write two checks a month,” a friend told me once. “The mort­gage, and Mas­ter­Card.” Every­thing — gro­ceries, restau­rants, util­ity bills, cloth­ing — went on the card, which accrued frequent-flyer miles at the rate of $1=1 mile. He paid it off in full every month. After a year it had earned him a free ticket to Paris. He’s not the liar sort, so I guess I believed him, but part of me…didn’t.

Gam­ing plas­tic just sounds like some­thing too good to be true. There’s got to be a catch. There’s always a catch.

Turns out, there’s a catch:

Credit cards have long been a very good deal for peo­ple who pay their bills on time and in full. Even as card com­pa­nies imposed puni­tive fees and penal­ties on those late with their pay­ments, the best cus­tomers racked up cash-back rewards, frequent-flier miles and other perks in recent years.

Now Con­gress is mov­ing to limit the penal­ties on riskier bor­row­ers, who have become a prime source of bil­lions of dol­lars in fee rev­enue for the indus­try. And to make up for lost income, the card com­pa­nies are going after those peo­ple with ster­ling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviv­ing annual fees, cur­tail­ing cash-back and other rewards pro­grams and charg­ing inter­est imme­di­ately on a pur­chase instead of allow­ing a grace period of weeks, accord­ing to bank offi­cials and trade groups.

I did a story on credit a few years back, for a finan­cial mag­a­zine. You know what the indus­try calls peo­ple who pay off in full every month? Dead­beats. Ha ha.

I have one card now, a Dis­cover. I use it for news­pa­per sub­scrip­tions, which are set up as monthly bills, my iTunes account, and any­thing I order online, mainly because I can remem­ber the num­ber and expi­ra­tion date and don’t have to dig up my debit card. I pay it off every month and have cur­rently accrued cash-back rewards equal to a mod­er­ately priced piece of soft­ware. If they think I’m going back to the annual-fee days, they are, um, mis­taken. I’ll go back to writ­ing checks.

Why is money such a taboo in our cul­ture? If I ruled the world, I’d insti­tute a class in high school — say, sopho­more year — called Prac­ti­cal Finance, and it would be all about using money in the adult world. Half the year would be spent study­ing credit. I think it’s at least as impor­tant as sex edu­ca­tion, and maybe more.

Quick blog­gage, because I went to a city coun­cil meet­ing last night that fea­tured tears and cries of embez­zle­ment, and I want to get the story writ­ten p.d.q.

Blog­gage? Sure:

Matt Ygle­sias takes apart another stu­pid George Will col­umn. Ably. I’m not even a total believer in light rail, but this is about facts.

A Gallup poll adds up the dam­age to the GOP:

Since the first year of George W. Bush’s pres­i­dency in 2001, the Repub­li­can Party has main­tained its sup­port only among fre­quent church­go­ers, with con­ser­v­a­tives and senior cit­i­zens show­ing min­i­mal decline.

In other words, the party of Palin and Plumber. Good luck with the rehab.

One of those Sara-Jane-Olson-but-not sto­ries — prison escapee builds new life on the out­side, only to see it come crash­ing down decades later — con­cluded here today. Susan LeFevre was released today and, sur­prise, said some­thing dumb:

“Prison is a very tragic – it’s a very hard place,” she said. “Peo­ple really do suf­fer. Beneath the laugh­ter and the veneer, there’s suffering.”

You don’t say.

I say: Time to write that coun­cil story. And do it justice.

There comes a time, when one is burn­ing the can­dle at both ends, when it’s wise to snuff out one end, at least. I’m won­der­ing if it’s entirely healthy to be check­ing the iPhone for updates on how Obama did at Notre Dame when your only child is try­ing on swim­suits at Macy’s. Decided the pres­i­dent, and the world, could get along with­out me for the afternoon.

This was in Ann Arbor, by the way. We went over to deliver Saturday’s sleep­over guest back home, and stayed to check out the fairy doors. We found two; here’s one:

Here’s a Flickr page com­piled by some­one with more time, ini­tia­tive and enthu­si­asm for the Ann Arbor-ness of the whole fairy-door con­cept, some­thing I can’t quite explain. For­tu­nately, oth­ers already have.

What’s so Ann Arbor about fairy doors? You’d have to be there, but let me put it this way: One of the places we found one was a book­store called Crazy Wis­dom, your basic alt-lifestyles depot, up to and includ­ing the upstairs tea­room for the monthly witches’ meet­ing. Their fairy door was in the astrol­ogy sec­tion, which in this place was a lit­tle like clas­sic literature.

I love Ann Arbor. These are my peeps.

After check­ing out of the news cycle I tried very hard not to pay atten­tion to Barry at the Dome, but it was impos­si­ble. My quick ver­dict: Meh, although what he said was prob­a­bly all he could say, and it seemed to go over pretty well. If it had been my com­mence­ment, I’d have felt badly used — is there any other issue where every­thing that can be said, has been said? But some peo­ple made it the ele­phant in the room, and it had to be acknowl­edged. Dia­logue? Good luck with that. The very rea­son this issue is still around is that some peo­ple think “dia­logue” con­sists of say­ing one thing over and over, maybe chang­ing the word­ing slightly, but giv­ing not an inch. Enter­ing this debate is like being slowly stran­gled to death.

I gave up my hopes for a com­pro­mise on reproductive-health issues when the so-called con­science clauses went on the table. In this day and age, I can scarcely imag­ine there’s a health-care worker out there “forced” to par­tic­i­pate in abor­tions against their will, but I can bet there are a lot of pushy, nosy, pious lit­tle jerks behind phar­macy coun­ters who can’t fill a pre­scrip­tion for birth-control pills with­out run­ning to con­fes­sion after­ward, and to the extent this person’s “con­science” had to be pro­tected — well, that’s where I leave the dis­cus­sion table.

I’m a hard-liner now, and I learned it from example.

I see Ran­dall Terry is a Catholic now. Talk about a fish the Pope should have thrown back in the ran­cid pond that spawned him. I cov­ered the Fort Wayne Oper­a­tion Res­cue arrest-a-thon, back in the day, and I believe Terry was either there or bestow­ing his sup­port from afar, like Burt Reynolds in “Cit­i­zen Ruth.” When H-hour came, I watched a woman crawl under the belly of a police horse to take her place on the wel­come mat of the clinic they’d cho­sen to block­ade. Now I’m going to see a per­son lose a hand, I thought, in the fraught few sec­onds it took a very nim­ble horse to pick his way through that mess of human­ity with­out hurt­ing any­one. These were some very bad people.

One of the local lead­ers, as I recall, had infer­til­ity issues in his mar­riage. He, too, thought birth-control should be ille­gal. Proud to be an American!

I have a den­tist appoint­ment in 20 min­utes, so I best floss ‘n’ go. One bit of blog­gage you will enjoy, from the Wall Street Jour­nal: Why you should never ever ever ruin Scotch whiskey with ice, a posi­tion I can back 100 per­cent, and have ever since a nice lady way­laid me in the duty-free mall at Heathrow and poured me a lit­tle sam­ple shot of 12-year-old Macallan, neat. It was as sweet as candy, as com­plex as a Russ­ian novel. I haven’t taken ice, or water, in Scotch since. And I still drink Macallan. That was some effec­tive marketing.

ADDED: Didn’t I once call myself journalism’s canary in a coal mine? Ahem:

For decades, suc­cess­ful news­pa­per reporters and edi­tors have looked for­ward to uni­ver­sity fel­low­ships as a chance to take a mid-career sab­bat­i­cal and recharge their bat­ter­ies. But the crop of fel­lows set to enter this year’s most pres­ti­gious pro­grams, whose names are just now being announced, shows how much that pat­tern is chang­ing. …“Peo­ple are afraid that if they leave, at a time when news­pa­pers are lay­ing peo­ple off, their jobs won’t be wait­ing when they come back — and they’re right to think that,” said Charles R. Eisendrath, direc­tor of the Knight-Wallace Fel­lows at Michigan.

Yes, I’d say they are. Still, I wouldn’t have traded that year in Ann Arbor for all the job secu­rity in the world. It was, in every good way, a life-changing experience.