Is there any phrase in journalism more compelling than “fiery crash?” Just saying it makes my mouth water. We had one this morning in Detroit, which followed another Pavlovian term, “high-speed chase.” Rumor has it a TV station had video, which I didn’t see; the TV doesn’t go on until late in the day at Casa NN.C, and that station in particular, the Fox affiliate, gives me bleeding hives.

Besides, if you wait, sooner or later everything goes on YouTube. Note ironic detail: Although the truck was stolen and the driver fleeing police, the crash was actually precipitated by another motorist, who failed to yield and turned left in front of the truck.

I hate police chases. We’ve had a couple of late hereabouts, and while they’ve all ended the way they’re “supposed” to — i.e., with the culprit smashing into something and injuring only himself — it’s only a matter of time before one doesn’t. What if the truck this morning had hit that minivan broadside and killed not only himself, but the people in the van? We’d have multiple deaths for a stolen car, a crime that happens approximately 11 zillion times a day around here. I know police give a great deal of thought to these things and don’t enter into them lightly, but there’s an adrenaline thing that takes over, too.

Pals, I’m working on a story this morning, trying to get it done a day early so I can spend tomorrow prepping for a week of vacay. Why don’t you guys suggest the bloggage today? If I had more time, I’d wade into this account of the fiery crash and parse the odd mix of journalese, euphemism and can’t-talk-very-well-on-live-TV language that comprises the reporter’s stand-up. The driver is “deceased in the vehicle,” which would make a great name for a band. (And note the signs on the post as the cameras pan by: HOUSES FOR SALE $9,000 or best cash offer. Good times.)

You carry the ball for a while, and I’ll be back later.

Caught part of the Joan Rivers roast on Comedy Central the other night. To paraphrase Philip Roth: Never have I heard the word vagina spoken so much in one evening, and I am a woman who has heard the word vagina spoken.

Joan’s vagina, we heard, is old, dry, old, stretched, old, foul-smelling, old, well-traveled and I’m probably forgetting something else, but you get the gist. When they weren’t talking about her vagina they were talking about her face, which is fair game when someone has had as much plastic surgery as she has. I never know how the roastee is supposed to react at those things; I guess you’re pretty much required to be a good sport, but Rivers’ face work made it hard to tell — her expression was the same smile throughout, even when they were joking about her late husband, a suicide.

But mostly the talk was about vaginas. When did we decide “vagina” was not only OK to say on television, but funny? It’s not a funny word. It sounds too medical, like pancreas. When I was a girl and first encountered the word in print — because that was a time before people spoke it aloud outside of a doctor’s office — I thought it was pronounced va-GEE-na, and as far as I’m concerned it should be. It was years before I met that hostile long-I sound, and I disliked it immediately. Saying vagina the way it’s correctly pronounced makes you open your mouth just a tad too wide. Like Joan Rivers’ vagina! See, I can be a roaster, too.

“Vagina” isn’t funny. The body part’s other euphemisms? Funny. Kitty, poontang, ya ya — all funny. “Muffin” — very funny. And the roasters were, in general, not funny, or not funny enough. If you’re going to work that blue, you better be funny, but after the first few vaginas, it just got dull. Gilbert Gottfried livened things up with a long, long vagina riff that actually was funny; it took on the surreal colors of his Aristocrats joke at the Hugh Hefner roast. It was the line about the unicorn peeking out that cracked me up. Gottfried isn’t afraid to walk right up to the abyss and lean way out; in this sense he distinguishes himself from the other no-names or never-wases on the stage. (See this classic account of the Hugh Hefner event, just weeks after 9/11, at which Gottfried brought the house down, and even Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t bad.)

I don’t know how to wrap this up, so how about if I just repeat a Gilbert Gottfried line: Joan Rivers’ vagina has tested positive for dust.

And then go to the bloggage:

The poster for the new “Mad Men” series was not Photoshopped:

I sat in a giant tank of water for a solid Saturday, and it was kind of fun, actually. I mean, once you’re wet, you’re wet. You don’t get any more wet. So you’re just kind of like, “All right, here we are.” And it was a bunch of crewmembers and waiters and an incredibly skillfully constructed set, and I think a pretty cool image that they got out of it as well. I’m sure they could have done some kind of photo trickery, but this makes for a better story, and it’s way cooler to go build it and do it for reals. I think online, there’s a time-lapse image of it filling up, too.

Santorum in 2012! No, I’m not kidding.

Well, shut my mouth: Turns out Rove was involved in the U.S. attorney firings after all.

This is cool: Vote for your favorite song from Woodstock. I’m down with “Soul Sacrifice,” but as usual, I’m in the minority.

I have an early interview, followed by my Russian lesson, and as sometimes happens, I find myself with nothing prepared. Well, there’s this — an iPhone picture I took last night on my bike ride:

Isn’t that pretty? If only I’d had my better camera.

So, any bloggage from the night’s web-crawling? Not a lot:

Ben Stein, please shut up.

Yet another 1969 anniversary rolling around: The Manson family murders. Jezebel checks in on the ladies, sees what they’re up to.

Back in the afternoon, but I don’t know when. Behave yourselves.

The 48 Hour Film Project awards were this weekend. The event was held in a loft with the sort of sci-fi-apocalypse-hello-America-this-is-your-future view Detroiters take for granted:

That’s the Packard plant, beloved of lazy photojournalists looking for a tragic symbol of Detroit’s industrial decline; Jim at Sweet Juniper (and many others) reminds us frequently that the plant’s been closed more than half a century, but don’t let that bother you, Mr. Parachuted-in Freelancer. Its history is long and complicated and — standard for around here — tragic, but the bottom line is, it’s been abandoned for decades, fell into receivership years ago and presumably belongs to the city. Yes, it should be torn down, but a conservative estimate on what it would take to demolish and haul away more than 3 million square feet of Albert Kahn-designed factory is in the eight figures, and the city doesn’t have that kind of money. A search on Flickr demonstrates the site is a favorite of urban explorers; it stands open to the world now, but even they’re getting bored with it, and it now belongs to the scrappers, who are busily trying to take it apart from the inside, with some success and occasional self-injury — here’s a pretty good Bill McGraw column on the state of things.

The latest craze is arson, and as we stood on the deck drinking and socializing, we could hear the sound of glass breaking, as restless vandals and scrappers worked out their excess testosterone on the few remaining windows. There’s a stripped car sticking halfway out one of the windows two or three floors up; for a while I thought the project was to push it out, but no, they were firebugs, too:

It wasn’t much of a blaze, and it didn’t last long. According to McGraw, the city fire department doesn’t even bother responding to many alarms there, and never at night — it’s just too dangerous. But 3 million square feet holds a lot of puzzlement, and some of it will burn:

Kirschner said Engine 23 and other fire companies responded to a fire recently during the day and discovered about 25,000 square feet of shoes burning. The smoke, partially from the shoes’ rubber and glue, was dangerous for the firefighters and anyone in the neighborhood who might have breathed it.

Hazardous-materials crews monitored the air Monday night and found no need for evacuations. The cause of the fire was not known, but firefighters were certain it was set. They called for an arson car, but none was available.

(I hope you get a sense of the weirdness life in and around this city is, on almost a daily basis. Twenty-five thousand square feet of burning shoes? Shrug.)

The fire was only the appetizer. The main course was the awards, and how did we do? Reader, we won:

(The award says Best Film, but I’m calling it Best Picture until someone tells me to stop.) This puts us in the running for the nationals, and enters us automatically in Filmapalooza, held next year at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas. I have very few illusions about our chances up against the fearsome teams of Los Angeles and New York, but on the other hand, I’ve never been to Vegas, and don’t you think I should go before I die? The NAB meets in early April, a little late for spring break, but what the hell.

Yes, I’ve never been to Vegas. Atlantic City, yes, but once you’ve seen “Casino,” do you even need to go to Las Vegas? I don’t think so.

We were lucky. Ideally, when you make a film, you start with a story and add your elements. In a challenge, you start with your elements (genre, prop, character, line of dialogue) and craft the story around them. The time constraints and guerrilla element means you have to work with what you have, and this lends a certain Mickey-and-Judy air of homemade chaos. Stories get shoehorned into places where someone had a friend who would let them shoot — a haunted house, a tattoo parlor or, in our case, the Theatre Bizarre, which was easy to work into our thriller/suspense genre draw. One team drew Musical and put on a fun show called “Love Between the Lanes” at the Ypsi-Arbor Bowl (which has one of the great names, and great signs, in Michigan business). Another, faced with a dud genre (fantasy), threw up their hands and did a “Princess Bride” takeoff that was pretty funny. But there was a lot of crap, too; I haven’t heard so much expository dialogue since, well, the last 48-hour challenge.

(Expository dialogue: “Hello, Bob, let me introduce my sister Sally Mae. You may recall her from last August, when she fell into the punchbowl at our other sister Julie’s barbecue, which required her to take an immediate shower. While she was rubbing the stains from her shirt, the door opened and our brother-in-law Simon came in. He was drunk. Sally, why don’t you tell Bob what happened next?” And so on.)

Watching the screenings, I was reminded of my pal Lance Mannion’s observation about the terrible dialogue in “The Deep”: No one gets out of here when they can get the hell out of here. One film had that intensifier in, seemingly, every other line: What the hell are you doing? Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Where the hell are we? And so on. I vowed to never, ever write that again. And then watched our film, where a character tells another, “Lady, you need to get the hell out of here.” Wince. Live and learn.

So, then, any bloggage to start the week? Not very much, but some:

Hank liked “Julie & Julia.” So did everyone else I know who saw it this weekend.

Overheard in the Newsroom, one in a series of Overheard blogs. Makes me miss the crazy places:

Intern: “I know what happens when I assume.”
Editor: “Yep. You run a correction.”

We had one crashing thunderstorm a few hours ago, with another one expected around dawn. Best sleep while I can.

John Dingell’s town hall meeting erupted in chaos, as the Journalese goes. Some guy pushed his son’s wheelchair up to the podium and extended a trembling finger at the 81-year-old congressman; he was so calm and reasoned, the police had to escort him out. But that wasn’t the worst of it:

“You may be dead in five years!” shouted Val Butsicaris, 60, of Taylor. “They may euthanize you!” She referred to concerns of government rationing of care for elderly people.

Where do these people get these ideas? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. Click through and look at some of those pictures — the faces contorted with rage, etc. Weren’t these the same people who fretted not long ago about the lack of courtesy in American life? Yeah, I thought so. Not to mention the cognitive dissonance:

“The government wants to control my body, my health care decisions and the doctors I see,” said Christine Wofford, 56, of Canton, who distributed literature from the Liberty Council, a Lynchburg, Va., religious civil rights law firm.

Where have I heard those phrases before? And hey, Lynchburg — the San Francisco of the right wing. Or is that Colorado Springs?

Everybody’s angry these days. George Sodini, verrrry angry. Smart operators know angry is a cash machine. Here’s Sodini’s guru, “John White, who uses the professional name R. Don Steele,” a man who calls himself…

According to Steele’s Web site, steelballs.com, he is a marriage, family and child counselor in private practice since 1976 and an author since 1984. The site indicates he attended Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Penn State University and the University of Southern California before earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from California State University at Fullerton and a master’s degree in psychology from California State University at Northridge.

Steele offers blunt instructions to would-be Romeos:

“The all time DATE DESTROYER is being a NICE GUY. You must be a Man of Steel Balls,” Steele insists.

Isn’t that comforting? It’s always useful, when looking at Sodini and his ilk, to consider that the healthier ones go out and buy a Russian or Filipino bride.

Makes you want to euthanize yourself, doesn’t it? Let’s take a left turn into calmer waters. I forgot to blog this earlier, yet another NYT OMG-I-have-problems piece from Wednesday, about the New York foodie equivalent of roughing it:

Part of me loves to navigate the culinary wilderness of rental homes: the stale McCormick spices, the speckled enamel stockpots in which countless visitors have boiled their corn. Another part of me wants to make sure I can pull the cork from a bottle of wine and turn pork chops with a pair of tongs and whisk mayonnaise when I get there.

[Broad wink] Mayonnaise!

…That was my revelation this June: one needs only a cast-iron skillet to survive. I used it to scramble eggs in the morning, and make grilled cheese for my children at lunchtime, and cook bacon for spaghetti alla amatriciana, and crust up diced, boiled potatoes, and fry breaded pieces of tender Chatham cod. Not for an instant did I miss the All-Clad arsenal in my Brooklyn kitchen.

I love the bravery this woman shows, don’t you? Even in the face of stale McCormick spices, she finds a way to soldier on.

If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I got nothin’ today. I’m prepping for a meeting, calculating end-of-term grades and looking forward to the rest of August, which I intend to spend working on Fun Writing, as opposed to the non-fun kind. I can’t identify with Angry right now. Maybe you folks would like to discuss the films of John Hughes, which I liked, but not as much as I did his National Lampoon-era fiction (“My Penis,” “My Vagina,” et al) — he’s sort of the male Nora Ephron, for me. Although they all pretty much blur together, don’t they? “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” — that’s my favorite. “The Breakfast Club” doesn’t hold up, never saw “Sixteen Candles,” and “Home Alone” boiled down to the kid slapping his cheeks and making an O face. I’m reminded of a friend’s summation of Robin Williams: Stop me before I warm your heart again. But if you liked him, that’s fine. We all have our enthusiasms.

Off to organize papers. Woo.

Slate has a story today on why vintage stoves are better than modern ones, and while the writer, Regina Schrambling, comes at the subject from a somewhat more oblique angle than I would have — she bought her ’50′s-era Wedgewood as “vintage” in the early ’90s — we arrive at the same place. Not long ago the New York Times ran a story on Jim Harrison, the poet/novelist, at his winter home in Arizona. Harrison is a famous gourmand, and one of the great pleasures of his writing are his descriptions of food and meals. But I was delighted to see, in a video accompanying the story, that he cooks on a plain old standard-size electric range that looks as though it came from Sears.

“Why spend $6,000 on a stove when you can spend $6,000 on food?” he said. Dean & Deluca thanks you too, Mr. Harrison.

I’m a dedicated home cook, and while I far prefer gas cooktops (I have electric), I have to admit my basic suburban kitchen setup is good enough for 95 percent of anything I want to do there. If I had my druthers, equipment-wise, it would be nice to have a second oven, but I admit it would only get used at Thanksgiving and a handful of other occasions. The one thing my modern stove has that Schrambling’s likely doesn’t — a self-cleaning cycle — is a pretty big plus. (I remember Easy-Off, which was neither.)

But we agree in principal principle. Here’s my popcorn popper:

It’s a Kenmore, and it’s older than me. My mother recalled it was a gift from our Aunt Charlene to my brother and sister when they were toddlers. Both qualify for AARP membership now. (So do I, but only on the early-admission program.) I have no great sentimental attachment to it, and will give it up without tears if it ever breaks, but it refuses to do so. Schrambling writes of her Wedgewood:

So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you’re asking for a crash. Google “I hate my Viking” these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.

My popcorn popper doesn’t have an on-off switch. You plug it in, and coils in the bottom unit — the stained, non-washable part in the photo — come on. Put one tablespoon of oil and one-third cup of popcorn on the bowl and replace the lid. In a couple of minutes, the popping will start. Keep your ear cocked to when it stops, unplug, empty and serve. If you like, you can melt a tablespoon of butter in the bowl after you dump out the popcorn — it takes about another minute. That’s it.

Popping corn is so simple, you wouldn’t think planned obsolescence would come into the mix, but it did — poppers where the lid doubles as the serving bowl, where the butter can be melted simultaneously, where you can dispense with oil altogether — all these have come and gone since Sears sold this antique to Aunt Charlene. And yet the Kenmore soldiers on, homely and dented, but still showing up for work. What more can you ask?

Some bloggage before gym time:

Detroit culled its 167 or so city council candidates to nine finalists Tuesday. The top vote-getter was Charles Pugh, whom I remember during his time in Fort Wayne, as a reporter for WKJG. He hadn’t started shaving his head, wasn’t openly gay and was, as I recall, sort of dim. Well, you could have made the same claim about me. People change, and let’s bloody well hope it’s true in this case, because Detroit has had all the dim-witted city council members it can handle. (I’m not completely confident in this case. Pugh was the subject of a fashion feature in a local magazine a while back, and confessed that his trademark glasses — he has 30 pair or so — are completely for show. Clear-glass Non-corrective lenses. What sort of serious person indulges a witless vanity like that?)

The primary’s big loser: Martha Reeves, who sounds as though she’s losing her marbles. Or just criminally dumb. Sad.

Coozledad brought this to our attention yesterday: Your health-care vote or your life? This shit is getting out of hand.

Off to press and squat. Happy Thursday.

As you can imagine, yesterday wasn’t a very good day all around, even as we were all certain we did the right thing. Sprig started to fail on Sunday. At first we thought it was a repeat of the bad indigestion he had a couple months ago. But by Monday evening I was taking him to the animal ER for subcutaneous fluids and an anti-nausea shot, which the vet told me bluntly was “hospice care.”

Whatever it was, it gave him a good night’s sleep. Tuesday I rolled him onto his sternum and he tottered outside and peed like a man, but that was pretty much the end of his locomotion — he’s been growing steadily feebler over the last few months, and it was clear this was just about the end. We went to the vet later, and he said, “He’s working very hard just to stay alive,” and we made the decision. We all petted him, and I held my hand on him until I felt his heart stop. He didn’t move or stir; he just wasn’t there anymore.

Later on, I bought a six-pack of supermarket cupcakes and ate two for dinner. I bloody well deserved it, too.

I’m touched by how many people stopped by to leave comments, but not surprised — this dog made an impression on people. He liked to stick his head out the window when we drove, and there was something about that eyepatch and the mismatched ears that just slayed people, who would roll down the windows to tell him how cute he was. (We called them Spriggy Davidians.) Many times we remarked that if the same personality was in a much bigger, uglier dog, he wouldn’t have survived puppyhood. But when you’re under 20 pounds and adorable, people cut you slack.

I think the template for his life was set when, at 9 months or so, we took him with us when we visited a friend in the Upper Peninsula. He was at his most exhausting, and I was looking forward to taking him somewhere we could let him exhaust himself for a change. (My friend’s cottage is on an island with no cars.) For the most part, he behaved himself, but there was a moment when we looked around and couldn’t see him anywhere. I searched the property, calling him. Nothing. We started to worry; the island, while car-free, is vast and wild in its interior, and all I could think was, he’d seen a deer, chased it into the woods, and was now out of earshot, maybe bogged in a cedar swamp, porcupine quills protruding from his nose, scared and miserable.

We decided on one more thorough search. I went to one side of the property, Alan to the other. Five minutes later, Alan came walking toward me, the dog in his arms, free of swamp mud and quills. He’d found him in the Les Cheneaux Yacht Club, which was having its end-of-summer Bloody Mary brunch. Forget chasing deer; he was chasing spilled popcorn and tipsy ladies willing to feed cheese cubes to cute little dogs. He was recruiting Davidians.

When Alan spotted him, he said, “There you are!” and Spriggy looked over his shoulder, saw his master, and ran in the opposite direction. He cornered him in a dead end near the bathrooms (Gulls and Buoys) and scooped him up. Busted. The ladies all wanted to give him a final pet as he was carried out.

He repeated this behavior the year he slipped away from the Christmas celebration at my sister’s, climbed onto the dining-room table, and ate the remainder of the pork tenderloin. He saw me see him, grabbed one last giant mouthful of sliced pork, leaped off the table and ran to the laundry room, wolfing it down as he went.

I’ve told myself to wait a few more days before picking up the bowls and beds. And a few weeks before we start thinking of another pet. Big shoes shouldn’t be filled quickly.

And thank you for all your notes, public and private. The contributions to the humane society are much appreciated, too. I’m donating his leftover special-diet food to our own local chapter; among the many tragedies of our economic decline has been the number of families leaving the area and leaving pets behind, some of which are old and virtually un-adoptable. Whatever helps, I guess.

So, howsabout some bloggage? OK:

The silver fox does it again, conservatives disapprove. Roy has the roundup.

Another gem from Detroitblog, via the Metro Times: A farm in the city, presided over by an 86-year-old woman who has seen it all:

A year later, just before the ’67 riot, (her son) Howard got into a street fight and police were called. They broke down the door of the King house to find him, and Mary wound up in a wrestling match with a cop.

“I was 260 pounds back then,” she laughs. “I got him right quick and I put him on the ground.” She grabbed his gun and nearly blew his brains out. “The devil was saying, ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’” she recounts. Instead, Mary got up off the cop. Then she was thrown in the squad car, hit with a baton and bitten in the neck, which required a tetanus shot.

All wasn’t awful yesterday — it was also the premiere of my friend Rob Gulley’s short film, “Nikki & Eli,” at the Mitten Movie Project. It was, I’m pleased to say, very fine. Great job, Rob and all concerned. Remember me when you’re giving interviews in Cannes someday.

And life goes on. At the moment it goes down to the basement and folds the laundry.

Spriggy, 1991-2009

I’ll have more to say about this later. For now, this is just to let his vast fan club know he’s no longer with us.

I have a feeling John McIntyre is one of those copy-desk chiefs I would have loved with an all-consuming passion right up until the moment I didn’t. Recently released from the Baltimore Sun, he now writes a blog at…

(May I just pause for a moment and marvel at how I could almost put that sentence on a user key? Name of Journalist worked at Name of Newspaper for XX years, was [laid off/bought out] in Year and now keeps a blog at URL. While you’re spending your richly subsidized retirement updating your Facebook friends on your golf handicap, publishers of the world, I hope you spend a few moments considering you once had a workforce that cannot stop working, who took lousy/so-so money for most of their careers and now do it free. And you flushed it away. Although that’s not what you’re thinking, is it? You’re thinking, “I could have paid them even less and bumped the profit margin a few more points. Dumb me!”)

Back to McIntyre: He, like many of us, has been considering the Strange Case of Alessandra Stanley, the New York Times’ TV critic and corrections machine. Her “appraisal” of Walter Cronkite contained seven errors. Clark Hoyt, the NYT public editor, tries to get to the bottom of it:

In her haste, she said, she looked up the dates for two big stories that Cronkite covered — the assassination of Martin Luther King and the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon — and copied them incorrectly. She wrote that Cronkite stormed the beaches on D-Day when he actually covered the invasion from a B-17 bomber. She never meant that literally, she said. “I didn’t reread it carefully enough to see people would think he was on the sands of Omaha Beach.”

It gets better:

For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year. Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention.

I could go on like this for many, many words and you know what I will say, so let’s not, and instead turn to McIntyre’s central advice to writers, because it is universal, no matter what your job:

You, the reporter/writer, are responsible for the accuracy of what you write. It is your job to make sure that every statement of fact, every quotation, is represented accurately. If you slap something together and turn it in assuming that someone else will clean up after you, you are committing malpractice.

This should go without saying, for everybody in every job, and yet, it happens every day. About six weeks into my own stint on the copy desk, after dealing with yet another editor who shrugged when I pointed out he’d just turned over a story to me, the paper’s last line of defense, with sentence fragments and repetitive passages and weird tangents, etc. … I feel the Saigon flashback starting already. Anyway, I told my own boss, McIntyre’s equivalent, that I finally understood exactly what Holden Caulfiend was talking about when he said he was the catcher in the rye. All those stories are running toward the cliff, and I have to catch them before they pitch over the edge. You get this one, and another one slips right by you, and — (descending whistle sound) splat.

If only there were fewer of them. If only the previous editor had worked a little harder on it. But as one whose true job was as a writer, to me it always came down to the source. If only the reporter had taken her job seriously in the first place. But there are lots of Alessandra Stanleys out there, or were, writers who think it’s not their job to look up silly things like how, precisely, Walter Cronkite covered D-Day, or the date of the moon landing, or anything else. “That’s the copy desk’s job” — some of them would actually say that. They were big-picture people. Details were for the anal nitpickers in the thick glasses.

No matter what your job, if you work upstream of the cliff, you owe it to everyone to do it the best you can, at every stage. Especially now. Unless you’re Alessandra Stanley, evidently.

I said at the beginning of this tedious little lecture that I probably would love McIntyre until I didn’t. Sooner or later, all writers and editors face that estrangement. Maybe it comes over the latter’s hair-splitting over convince and persuade, or the teeny lecture they want you to listen to, the one where they stand over your desk and explain the difference between an argument and a quarrel. (I know I’ve used the argument/quarrel anecdote more than once, but the way that particular copy editor brandished that distinction, the smugness in his voice as he took credit for saving 60,000 households from the horror of seeing the wrong word describing what happened before a drug-related shooting– well, it still rankles. Especially when he was also fond of disappearing on deadline to chat up the interns in the hall. See above. Do your job.)

A little bloggage before I go:

Someone sent me this Modern Love column with a note: “How many people I wonder fail to understand that one prson’s meltdown is more about that person and not the spouse?” I’m not a big fan of Modern Love, but this one was worth reading.

< marilyn voice > Happy birthday, Mr. President: < /marilyn voice > Now go get yourself a lava cake.

It’s just like sitting around someone’s basement in high school! Highdeas — a place you can post the great ideas you get when you’re stoned. My favorite from the first page: a full body tattoo on your backside, so when you were naked ( you would need to be bald too), it would like like a person walking backwards, or vise versa It’s the “you would need to be bald too” part that cracked me up.

Well, I finally read the Pollan piece in the NYT. Very interesting, lots of detail, mostly true, and yet, once again, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being lectured to. It’s not a good feeling. I think it was this passage that did it:

…Kitchen work itself has changed considerably since 1963, judging from its depiction on today’s how-to shows. Take the concept of cooking from scratch. Many of today’s cooking programs rely unapologetically on ingredients that themselves contain lots of ingredients: canned soups, jarred mayonnaise, frozen vegetables, powdered sauces, vanilla wafers, limeade concentrate, Marshmallow Fluff. This probably shouldn’t surprise us: processed foods have so thoroughly colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have redefined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food. Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff. So the shows encourage home cooks to take all manner of shortcuts, each of which involves buying another product, and all of which taken together have succeeded in redefining what is commonly meant by the verb “to cook.”

It’s the lumping of mayonnaise with Marshmallow Fluff that did it. Is this really an equivalency in Pollan’s special little foodie world? I know, I know, mayonnaise is so easy to make, and the from-scratch product so much better, that it’s simply a crime not to do it yourself. I have made mayonnaise many times, and yet, I have a jar of store-brand mayo on the refrigerator door, and what’s more, I use it. Sometimes all I want for lunch is a little canned tuna mixed with a single chopped scallion, a squirt of lemon juice and a fat teaspoon of Hellman’s. Saltine crackers. Yum. I would say “bite me, Michael Pollan,” but I don’t think he’d deign to — he might get canned tuna in the bargain.

I also like vanilla wafers. Too much. As for frozen vegetables, I don’t use them often, but as a resident of the frost zone, I reserve the right to.

Why do these people act like it has to be all or nothing? Why can’t we live in a world where we make soup from scratch and enjoy an occasional order of McDonald’s fries? Of course I’d like to see people cooking more at home, but honestly, I don’t think the fate of the nation rests upon it. And in many ways, I agree with “veteran food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer,” who tells Pollan:

“A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

Pollan found his interview with Balzer “somewhat depressing,” and given that Pollan supposedly once stalked and killed a wild pig so that he could call himself responsible for every morsel on his table at a particular meal, I’m not surprised.

There’s a long section on food television, ostensibly the reason for the piece, which boils down to a lot of sneering that it isn’t more uplifting and educational and has too much bacon. There’s the obligatory slam at the evil American corporate machine that crammed instant mashed potatoes and Bac-Os down our throats, literally. And then there’s the conclusion, which trots out the only reason any of us have a right to care what our neighbors eat: Health. Even without national health care, obesity and heart disease and other diet-related illnesses can be said to hurt us all. Granted and stipulated.

However.

We have many problems with food in this country; obesity and disordered eating — if you can call the way Americans eat disordered in general — are complicated issues entwined with science, psychology, tradition, public policy and probably a few other far-flung outposts of human endeavor I’m forgetting. Let’s have a conversation about it, certainly. But can we dispense with this Berkeley-based food fundamentalism? Can Alice Waters hold her tongue once in a while? Because listening to her is like listening to a more modulated but no less strident version of some Iranian ayatollah declaiming on jihad.

There was a quote that was plucked from an essay and trotted around the right-wing blogs a couple months ago. I can’t find it, but it ran something like this: Take two women of the same age, 50 years apart — today’s 30-year-old and her equivalent in 1959. Take two subjects: Food and sex. The ’50s housewife believes what you eat is your own business, but who you have sex with is governed by a strict set of social, religious and moral absolutes. The ’00s woman? Exactly the opposite. You can live in a polyamorous relationship, be homosexual, consider yourself transgendered and discuss your “top surgery” at the dinner table, and all that’s OK, but if that dinner table contains a dish of veal parmesan, something’s morally wrong with you.

Can we meet in the middle? Somewhere I can have my Hellman’s and humanely raised beef? Cook from scratch but occasionally reach for a can of Campbell’s Tomato? It will mean less work for Michael Pollan, but that’ll leave him more time for picking dandelion greens out of sidewalk cracks.

(One final note: I distinctly recall writing about this myself, back when I was being paid to. I sneered at supermarket checkout girls who had to ask me to identify the vegetables I was buying, so they could enter their UPC codes, and I’m not talking fennel or Jerusalem artichokes, I’m talking garlic and onions. I was onto this years ago, too. It never occurred to me there were New York Times Magazine cover stories and book contracts in it. Story of my life.)

So, a wee bit of bloggage? Sure thing:

She went to college, graduated and couldn’t get a job. So she asked the college for her money back.

Of Sarah Palin’s not-divorce, this is probably all that needs to be said.

WashPost writer calls out Gawker for journalistic parasitism. Makes some excellent points in the bargain.

New York magazine identifies the songs of the summer. I haven’t heard a single one. God, am I old.