You’re never too old to learn something new. I managed to report the results of every contested race in the Grosse Pointes last night in a single tweet with not even a shortened URL, and given my tendency to run on at the keyboard, I think this shows not only admirable brevity but heroic restraint. Ahem:

Millages: Passed. School board: Pangborn, Dindoffer, Jakubiec. Woods judge: Metry. Park council: Arora, Grano, Robson. Park judge: Jarboe.

There is no such thing as platform-neutral journalism. That’s actually 138 characters — two to spare. Good thing the Woods judicial race wasn’t won by the candidate with the double last name.

While we’re keeping it brief, might as well three-dot our way into this note from J.C. that arrived last night from his vacation in the American west, regarding the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. Dateline Willcox, Ariz.:

Actually, live TV happened all the time in the 1950s and 1960s. Even black and white microwave live shots date to the early 60s. But what happened in the case of Oswald was that they had a pool b/w big old RCA studio camera, a remote truck, and a hardwired, literally, big ol’ cabled connection to ‘telco’–AT&T, just like for a baseball game. Expensive, but to Dallas stations this was a big deal.

That video fascinates me because its so crisp and so clear in its black and whiteness and Dan Rather, Robert MacNeil, Bob Schieffer and so on were so young.

He’s my go-to authority on all television matters. He told me once about the day Mike Wallace came in to our college station, WOUB, for an interview, back in the day when sets were two chairs in front of a lattice screen and a ficus tree. J.C. was running one of the studio cameras. Even then, in the mid-’70s, Wallace looked impossibly wizened and old and not at all like the “60 Minutes” hero. Wallace took his seat and started directing the floor director on how to adjust the lights — bring this one down, that one up, the other one around. J.C., watching through the camera, said it was amazing: “He became ‘Mike Wallace’ right before our eyes.” Years later, he pointed out to me how every new season of “Sex and the City” took the lighting lower and lower (on a lateral plane, not in intensity), until it seemed the gals were living in a world lit only by footlights. Does wonder for female faces of a certain age.

And finally, if you didn’t follow the comments yesterday, please don’t miss Gene Weingarten’s take on the Henry Allen career K.O. It is wise and funny and dead-on, and shows why Weingarten is not a writer to underestimate, either, although I doubt he’ll punch anyone in his final act:

The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. (Obligatory mature qualification: I of course decry any breakdown in comity and collegiality and civil discourse in the workplace, and urge all young people to maintain decorum and respect others, to be tolerant of opposing viewpoints, to seek compromise, and to not punch each other out in spit-flying scrums.)

Still, hooray. Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions — a situation thought of as “creative tension” and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new “revenue streams,” ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.

There’s more, and you should read it. Bonus: A couple of excerpts from Allen’s peerless journalism, which I neglected yesterday.

UPDATE: Hank weighs in, and considers the gay-insult angle.

Getting back to the election: On my errands the other day, I passed a traffic island in a busy intersection. It sprouted two candidates’ yard signs. Specifically: Abdalla Awwad and Karen Wojcik. When you get depressed about the future, reflect on that little miracle, impossible or at least highly unlikely in Don Draper’s day — an Arab-American and a Polish-American woman, running for municipal seats in a blue-collar suburb deep in the heartland. Although — drumroll — both lost. (Trumpet wah-wah.)

I suppose yesterday’s polling will be spun as a sharp rebuke, or perhaps a warning shot, or maybe even a repudiation of Obama Nation. We’ll see. I don’t know enough about Virginia or New Jersey politics to say one way or another; the NY-23 race is far more interesting, the importation of an out-of-district carpetbagger to oppose a Republican nominee thought to be insufficiently conservative. They can run their party however they want, but so much for all that gassing about why Democrats won’t let pro-life members of their party address their conventions, etc. Make the tent smaller! That’s the ticket. Actually, this is the ticket:

NY-23 is solidly Republican but not especially conservative (it voted for Barack Obama last year), and Hoffman was a relatively uncharismatic candidate with poor command of the local issues.

Carpetbaggers are a hard sell. Although they do bring lots of media attention to their backers. Do I have lipstick on my teeth? No, Sarah, lovely as always.

I have nothing to say about that, either, because Jon Stewart said it all here. Drag your slider to the 2/3 mark, and don’t miss the Beck Test.

And now I have to call some of those folks in that opening tweet. The winner for my local judicial race is a young guy with not a lot of name recognition. But he stopped by my house three times and several times when I was out and about, I’d see him on his lonely shoe-leather quest to ring every doorbell in town. It’s true what they say, folks: It’s all local.

First, the crossword puzzle. Then phone calls.

I have to say something about Henry Allen, a journalism story that’s mostly staying in journalism circles and probably that’s where it belongs, because it has no greater import or anything. I mention it mainly because I always wanted to work for or with Allen, a legendary writer and editor at the Washington Post, whose career ended abruptly last Friday when he scuffled with a writer who was chapping his ass. He literally went down swinging, and while I can’t condone punching one’s colleagues, I can certainly understand the urge to do so, and given that no one was hurt, let’s chalk it up to a final glimpse at a certain Front Page standard of newsroom behavior and leave it at that.

I first encountered Allen, then a superstar of the Style section, when I took a two-day writing workshop very early in my career. It was a strange trip — a hot weekend in late May. My salad-days starter car didn’t have air-conditioning, and I drove from Columbus to Champaign, Ill. with the windows down, wearing a pair of bib overalls with a bikini top for maximum air circulation. It was a long trip, and I arrived windblown and looking crazy, at least if I’m to judge from the looks the desk clerk at the hotel gave me. Things went further downhill when I realized I’d packed all my career clothes but not my career shoes, and had to attend the workshop and networking sessions in jeans and a T-shirt. A few of the young reporters stayed up late the first night, drinking wine in the courtyard of the hotel, asked by management several times to keep it down. (“It’s that girl with the overalls and bikini,” someone undoubtedly said.)

Allen’s seminar was the following day, and what I mainly remember about it was that I fell in love. He quoted a colleague at the Post: “I want to write stories people can dance to,” and I got it immediately. The guy next to me didn’t — I could tell by the look on his face — but I committed the phrase to memory, and use it from time to time when I’m teaching young writers. Prose, even journalistic prose, has rhythm and mood and recognizing it is very much like having an ear for music. It’s hard to teach that quality, but show me someone who understands the phrase — writing you can dance to — and I know I can work with him or her.

From then on, I mainly just sat there and made dreamy eyes at my new hero. He made fun of AP leads and talked about the drive in from the airport, and afterward, I came up to gush. He said he had a book coming out, and could he send me a copy? Who, me? Um, sure…. “Fool’s Mercy” arrived at my apartment a few weeks later, with a note, “Please, run to your library and demand it be taken off the shelves.”

(Recalling that note, I wonder who might be the source of this Amazon reader review, penned by A Customer: “This is a novel that has taken the art of shaping the reader’s worldview and raised it to the level of physical intervention. By that I mean that Mr. Allen has discovered techniques of using English syntax to alter synaptic relationships within the brain itself, possibly permanently. He may have gone deeper, as well, functioning as the analog of a computer hacker as he cracks the DNA code and blithely rearranges the human genome with untold consequences for generations to come. Were this novel some outre exercise in modernist befuddlement, the danger would be minimal, but Mr. Allen’s darkest motives are masked by a brisk yet poignant thriller populated with haunting personalities. As such, it may pose the severest test the First Amendment has faced since the founding of our republic — a book that is what the law calls ‘an attractive nuisance,’ but a nuisance on the level of Jacob-Kreutzfeld syndrome, the human equivalent of “mad cow” disease. It should not only be banned, but all of its known readers should be rounded up like cattle and incarcerated pending central-nervous-system biopsies. Meanwhile, it remains available to an unwary citizenry from Dryad Books, of 15 Sherman Ave., Takoma Park, Md. 20912.” I have a sneaking suspicion.)

I still take “Fool’s Mercy” off the shelf from time to time, to soak in his graceful prose style. Is it a great thriller? Probably not enough plot, and characters a bit too three-dimensional. But there are some wonderful descriptions, and, well, it was sent to me personally by the author. Those books are always special.

The story linked above said Allen, a 68-year-old former Marine and Vietnam vet, was moved to violence by the reaction of a reporter whose error-ridden “charticle” he was criticizing:

(Allen) gave pretty much the same sharp-elbowed spiel to both Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Hesse responded by asking for the story back so that she could iron out some of the wrinkles.

Roig-Franzia responded by saying, “Henry, don’t be such a cocksucker.”

Boom.

Oh, well. As is noted in the story, this is a new era in journalism. Chicago Sun-Times writers don’t pee off the ledges into the river anymore, either. It doesn’t mean we can’t miss the good ol’ days, at least a little.

Enjoy retirement, Henry. Write another novel. I’ll buy it. And I’ll still pay any price to hear whatever writing advice you might give at another University of Illinois workshop.

So. Up until 2 a.m. last night, but with an E-day school holiday, got to sleep clear until 8. They say you can count the hours of sleep Roger Penske gets on one hand, and that he is master of the power nap. He’ll announce, “I’m going to grab 40 minutes,” put his head down, fall asleep immediately and awaken 39 minutes and 59 seconds later.

My role model.

My other role model is Elmore Leonard. What does it say about me when my role models are old men? Vigorous old men, but still. The next thing you know, I’ll be asking for a Viagra prescription.

As you can imagine, yesterday was in the crazy-busy, and today will be the same. With that heedless extra hour of sleep I had to cut something, and today it was: Gym. Haven’t done that in a while. (Where’s my medal?) But if I’m ever going to learn Russian I have to give my homework the respect it deserves, and today I have to write 10 sentences, using the genitive singular. I’m inspired because I watched a Russian-language movie Friday night, one of the few truly indolent me-times I get in the week, and I understood more of it than I thought I would. It’s like I’m trembling on the brink of another leap in understanding, and I want to nurture it along.

The film? “The Italian,” or, as imdb.com insists on transliteration, “Italianetz.” Worth your time, even with subtitles.

One of these days it’ll be you folks I cut loose. Don’t assume I’ve been kidnapped or anything.

One brief item of bloggage: Eric Zorn finds the new GOP in North Carolina. Cooze, is this one of your neighbors?

Halloween went swimmingly. The air was nippy but not too, the leaves crunchy and abundant, and once again, I overbought. I used to buy 10 bags of candy. This year, I bought…I forget how many, but it was way more than 10. I blanched a moment when the total came up on the register, more than $50, but promptly rationalized that money spent making children happy on a candy-centered holiday is worth double karma points.

Many tourists this year. I don’t care at all, not even a little. We’ve now settled into a groove — lawn chair on the porch, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on the box, wineglass in the hand, magnanimity in the heart. I missed Spriggy this year; he was always my companion on Halloween, watching from the other side of the storm door, barking less as the years went by. I imagine this stabbing in the heart will lessen as the gulf between us widens, but never go away entirely.

I want another dog. But now I have a rabbit. No dogs yet.

(I wonder about the compatibility of cats and bunnies. The one story I heard about them was told to me by one of those guys you meet from time to time; he either sells you pot or fixes your appliances or is your friend’s cousin. Lives out in the country, has a mullet and keeps strange animals as pets — ferrets and snakes and exotic lizards, and somehow they all get along. This guy had a rabbit and a cat, and said they fought exactly once: “That rabbit grabbed that cat with his front feet, and started poundin’ on him with ’em big thumpers in back, man.” The cat left the bunny alone after that.)

The Obamas had a Halloween party, we’re told. I learned this from Google Trends, which had “michelle obama catwoman” high in the mix. She did? Get OUT, I thought, and raced for photos, but she was no sexy kitten, more like a hip suburban mom taking the opportunity to give herself a smoky eye. Well, you could hardly expect her to put on the black rubber suit (links thanks to Jolene) on the steps of the White House, but it does sound as though they made an effort to put on a pretty good Halloween party for the local kiddies. I’m sure the press releases are going out to the perpetual opposition — blah blah wasteful blah blah demonic blah blah recession, etc. I say, hey, Halloween! I’m for it.

Another week begins, and I can hardly get excited about it, except for E-Day, of course. The race known as NY-23 sailed under my radar until only recently, and that’s one to watch. Sarah Palin’s been a player in that one, probably because she believes so strongly in the people’s right to choose their representatives free of outside influence — in fact, a representative free of inside encumbrances, like residency in the district he allegedly represents.

We’ll see how that one turns out; I’m genuinely interested. It won’t be the embarrassment of Alan “What state am I in?” Keyes in Illinois — in fact, would-be Rep. Carpetbagger is polling pretty far out front — but it’ll make election night worth tuning in for.

Around here, it’s all about municipal races, and I am in a foul mood. I am in a slate-wiping mood. I am in a What Michigan Needs is Not YOU mood. Unfortunately, I can’t vote in any of those races. But the one to watch will be Proposal D in Detroit, which is a grassroots effort to make the city council actually representative of the city by changing it from an all-at large body to one elected by district. Instead of the usual crew of idiots, it will be a different crew of perhaps-less-idiotic idiots. That’s about the best the D can hope for, but who knows? Maybe a new crew of idiots will help. All I know is, the line on the campaign mailer that means the least to me right now is the one detailing how many decades of residence one has. Roots are fine, but the grand old traditions — of business, of politics — are part of what got us into this mess. New thinking, stat.

So, some bloggage? Sure.

Hank Stuever had a good weekend, with lots of good pub for “Tinsel.” The best place for an all-links roundup is his own blog, Tonsil. Bonus: His piece on Bravo, the morality-reality channel, in the WashPost this weekend.

Speaking of Sarah, wouldn’t you love to get a robocall from her, urging you to “vote for Sarah’s values?” Which ones would those be, Sarah?

And now it’s time to hop to it, quick like a bunny. Who is probably chewing something as we speak.