Just wrote a long piece of something and threw it away. It was heedless, and I need to be more heedful. Google Alerts make finding something to be offended by way too easy, which is why I use them judiciously. I Googled my name the other day and found a hidden gem — a comment left on a blog three years ago that blamed me for the steep circulation slide suffered by my former employer during the nearly 20 years I worked there. That was good for a laff. I knew it was my fault, somehow. It wasn’t the industry-wide decline in all ink-on-paper news, or the idiot publisher’s plan to cut costs by severing the subscriptions of several thousand out-of-county readers, or anything else that went wrong in the long slow decline of newspaper journalism. Glad we’ve found a culprit.

I’m wondering why things haven’t stabilized or recovered in my absence. You people who still read it will have to answer that one. The last time I looked at it I got embarrassed. No wonder so many former employees fudge the details in their bios.

So you folks will have to fend for yourselves today. I can offer you a cheesecake recipe, which I bothered to type last night (oh, of course it’s everywhere on the web, but I didn’t know that until after I typed it) for e-mailing to Mindy, who was despairing at finding a recipe for a classic dry, dense cheesecake. I clipped this out of Esquire magazine around 1980 and have made it several times, but not for a while. Esquire contended it represents the Platonic ideal of cheesecake, and credits it to a famous New York City deli. Notes follow:

Lindy’s cheesecake

To serve, remove the top of the pan very carefully and cut into wedges.

Me again. Now I see why I haven’t made this lately. All that fussing with the crust! It’s a lot of work to make something everybody leaves on the plate, but you need it to keep the filling from running out the cracks in the springform. If I were doing this today, I’d scrap the pastry for graham-cracker.

I’d also forget that ridiculous 550-degree oven. Most home stoves don’t go that high, and you can get the same result — the nice brown top — at 400.

But this is a hell of a cheesecake. It’s the citrus zest. Enjoy, if you end up making it.

Bloggage? Just a little:

You learn something new ever day. Something I learned yesterday: The Presbyterian College sports teams are known as the Blue Hose. Good thing they’re Presbyterians and are genetically unable to see the humor possibilities.

My “Jersey Shore” nickname: The Rack. Fitting. Find your own. That site also has a Tiger Woods mistress generator. Here’s mine: Congrats, your Tiger Woods mistress is Melody O’Brian from Duluth, MN. She is a 19 year old business executive. You know she’s telling the truth because she knows about Tiger’s tattoo.

Best of luck to day to our own mild-mannered Jeff, having sinus surgery today and likely out for a while.

To work for me.

I love it when the New York Times introduces me to the rituals and stories of cultures I would otherwise never encounter. White people from Pittsburgh, for example. Today’s food-section piece on the local custom known as the cookie table was a series of delights, starting with finding out about the tradition in the first place. Pittsburgh brides celebrate their wedding not only with cake, but with a long table groaning with cookies, all makes and models, heavy on the ethnic varieties made only on special occasions, like pizzelles and lady locks. How could I have spent my whole life in the Midwest without knowing this? (Answer: Probably by never getting closer to Pittsburgh than the freeway exits.)

Many people have noted many times that the country is becoming increasingly homogenized, and they’re right. It’s nice, then, to read paragraphs like this:

No one knows for sure who started the tradition, or why it hasn’t exactly taken hold outside this region. Many people credit Italian and Eastern European immigrants who wanted to bring a bit of the Old Country to the big day in the New World. Given that many of them were already well practiced at laying out a Christmas spread, baking 8 to 10 times as many treats for a few hundred special friends and relatives may not have seemed like such a stretch.

But even amid the increasing professionalization of the wedding, with florists mimicking slick arrangements ripped from Martha Stewart’s magazines and wedding planners scheduling each event down to the minute, the descendants of those Pittsburgh settlers continue to haul their homemade cookies into the fanciest hotels and wedding venues around the city. For many families today, it would be bordering on sacrilege to do without the table.

Elsewhere in the food section was a piece on the southern “little layer cake,” the towering cakes turned out by little old ladies, constructed of not two or three layers, but a dozen or more, each one relatively thin. Alan grokked it immediately: “You get more frosting that way.” These are the cakes made for Fostoria cake stands like mine, I suspect, and while making one doesn’t really interest me, I’m fascinated to read about the technique involved, which requires a certain do-si-do with the oven and the frosting station — the cakes are iced while warm, and use boiled frosting, which is difficult to make. Kim Severson, the Times’ peerless food writer, finds the sorts of details that would shame the most skilled anthropologists:

…There are Lane cakes, made with an 1898 recipe named after Emma Rylander Lane of nearby Clayton, Ala., who called it her prize cake. The cake was a childhood favorite of President Carter, whose hometown of Plains, Ga., is a few hours’ drive from Clayton. Harper Lee, who grew up in Monroeville, Ala., mentioned Lane cake in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The Lane cake is made with lots of egg whites, the yolks reserved for a rich filling of ground pecans, coconut and raisins flavored with bourbon or local wine. That makes it something of an illicit treat here in dry Geneva County, which is thick with non-drinking Baptists, some of whom substitute grape juice.

Like many of these layer cakes, the Lane cake gets better with a little age. Some cooks still store theirs in a tin with cut apples, to keep it moist while the alcohol mellows and flavors meld.

Whenever I watch “Top Chef,” I’m always amazed at how many of these kitchen wizards, who can turn out sous vides and cat-vomit “foams” and other latter-day trends with such ease, confess they are utterly flummoxed when it comes to dessert and make these soggy fruit things atop some sort of wan pastry thing with a fancy Italian name. How hard is baking? Piece of cake. If you’ll permit me the foodie wordplay.

Bloggage? Oh, a little.

David Leonhardt’s column headline says it all: If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow. Really? People choose jobs based on whether they get health insurance? Really? My husband has been saying this for year; maybe he should be invited to a meeting in Washington, but let’s let Leonhardt state the obvious:

Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses.

This link between insurance and innovation isn’t relevant merely for the obvious reason that Congress is in the late stages of debating health reform. It is also relevant because the United States is suffering from an innovation deficit.

Nobody lives forever: God kills Oral Roberts for failing to raise more money.

I went looking for Pilot Joe last night on FlightAware, and found that contrary to his stated intention to fly to Chicago, his plane was actually en route to Alabama. Does Mrs. Pilot Joe know? Hey, Joe — pick up a little layer cake next time you’re there.

And with that, I’m away.

I’m going to miss the group of Wayne State students we have working for GrossePointeToday.com this term. They’re smart, energetic, capable, everything a hyperlocal website needs. What’s more, they’ve given me something every editor wants over time — improvement. It’s a pleasure to handle their copy.

Every so often people ask what I tell journalism students about their prospects for a career in journalism. Over time, I’ve developed a short speech. It goes like this: “I don’t know what your future holds for your chosen field. Recent events would suggest the outlook is grim. The very best of you will probably get work somewhere in journalism, but most of you won’t have it easy and some will strike out. Change your major while you still have time, but stay in this class to learn to be a better observer, a sharper questioner, a less credulous media consumer and a more careful writer. They are skills that will serve you in any field you choose.”

How does that sound? I can’t lie to them, but I believe what I tell them: Studying journalism will, if nothing else, make them better news consumers, and brother, we need those more than ever. Last night at the gym, I grabbed the last treadmill for a 20-minute speed-walk to nowhere, and found myself face-to-face with the TV tuned to Fox News. Glenn Beck was on, and even the closed-caption Glenn Beck is hard to take. G. Gordon Liddy was pimping gold during the commercial breaks, alternating with Beck pimping his book. I considered for a minute when the last time I heard gold touted as a serious investment option outside of the apocalypse-now media. The early ’80s, I guess, the time of runaway interest rates and dark mutterings in corners about Krugerrands vs. Maple Leafs. Which reminded me of a police report I saw recently, in which the officer noted the homeowner’s loss to thieves: One Rolex Oyster, several coogerands. I can say with authority that journalism has taught me to spell the South African gold coin correctly.

(Although I always have to check. Two Gs and one R, or the other way around?)

And now it’s time to go. Editing copy put me behind, and now I’m off to the gym and various holiday/maternal obligations. Lucky for me I got a whole extra hour of sleep today and Alan made coffee so strong I’m risking v-fib. Today’s question: How much of your formal education have you left behind in your life?

Saturday night we had a party to attend, the cast/wrap thang for the 48 Hour Film Project International Shootout. The party was basically 10 miles due east west [D'oh! Thanks, Beb] of my house, which means you either take the southerly indirect route via freeway or the northerly indirect route via freeway or the direct route via surface streets on the storied Eight Mile Road. You know which one we took.

Alan drove, leaving me free to soak in the spectacular ugly-loveliness of Detroit’s northern border from the passenger seat. I saw a sign I’d never noticed before: Eastpointe: Gateway to Macomb County, which you may have to live here to fully appreciate. Imagine: Scranton: The Flower of East-Central Pennsylvania, and you’re getting close. Eastpointe changed its name in the ’90s. It used to be East Detroit, and I guess they thought maybe an upgrade would help boost its fortunes. Didn’t work. It’s still the gateway to Macomb County.

But the Eastpointe border is only the beginning of the fun, because soon you’re passing Hot Wheel City, a rim shop with garish neon and a perpetual Open sign in the window. When we passed going home after midnight it was still on, and while I’m not sure you could buy a set of spinners at midnight on a Saturday night, I wouldn’t bet against it. People take automotive accessories seriously here.

Zoom, zoom and you pass two women’s health centers, not quite across the street from one another. I assume they’re abortion clinics, because there’s usually an old woman standing out front, a bloody fetus poster propped on her walker. It seems of a piece with the general scuzziness of Eight Mile, which is anchored by liquor stores, strip clubs and no-tell motels. The abortion clinic is only the last stop on the sad journey.

But that’s not all. The thoroughfare also carries high-tension electric wires down its median strip, and one of them is decorated for the holidays. Srsly. Draped along its exoskeleton is a long rope of white lights, along with a sign from the power company, wishing happy holidays. It’s about as pathetic and ugly as it sounds, but it’s entirely in keeping with the mood of the drive. You can’t help but smile.

Then you’re at the Coliseum, Detroit’s “award-winning gentlemen’s club.” Don’t click that link; the Flash will induce seizures. But if you’re wondering what awards the Coliseum can claim, I’ll lay them out for you: Best Topless Bar 2006 (Real Detroit Weekly), Club World Award “Best Lighting System” (Exotic Dancer magazine) and so on. “No cover for union members,” one of the pop-ups lures, but I don’t know if that’s all the time, or just for the Amber Lynn shows. “Must present proof,” anyway. Solidarity forever!

But it’s not all neon and breast implants. There are dozens of homely office buildings along the way, every other one wearing a For Sale or Lease sign and the distinct whiff of abandonment. Oh, what will become of us? When I moved here the first crazy visionaries were suggesting the city be converted to farms, an idea that sounded preposterous. No more. A series of urban villages surrounded by cropland and an outer ring of affluence — that’s what we’re heading toward.

And suddenly we are upon the Booby Trap, and guess what that is. “LIKE CHEERS, ONLY TOPLESS,” as the sign says. If we are upon the Booby Trap that means the state fairgrounds are not far behind, and it’s time to turn left, which means you get into the right lane. We have a brief squabble over this — it’s not a true Michigan left, but it’s close, and Alan disagrees on how we should execute. I’m right, of course. Left onto Woodward, and we’re practically there.

Woodward — now that’s a book. Don’t have time now.

The party was fun. It’s been a long time since I’ve been introduced to Milla Jovovich’s stand-in, attending as the date of Robert DeNiro’s stand-in. The theme was “now we eat pie,” so I brought three. You know what the secret to great apple pie is? A little lemon zest grated into the filling.

So, bloggage? Maybe:

I’d like to watch the Geminids meteor shower one night this week, but the blanket of gray has descended upon our little Eden, and I’m thinking it’s not going to work. Enjoy, desert dwellers.

Joe Lieberman is a jerk. But you knew that.

Tiger Woods is spending Christmas in Sweden? Nothing like a little Scandinavian bleakness to underline a tragic situation, eh?

Why I can’t take the HuffPo seriously.

Off to take on Monday.

This is what the precipitation map looked like all day yesterday:

I’m sorry this isn’t the animated version, so you could see the way those cotton-ball areas of snow park themselves over certain coastal stretches and stay and stay and stay. Some of you non-Midwesterners may not be acquainted with what we call “lake effect” snow, but that’s it, right there. It’s why western Michigan driveways and parking lots need three-foot day-glo sticks along their edges to guide the plows, like they have in ski-resort towns. It’s why the east side of Cleveland can get heaps of snow while the west side doesn’t. (Or maybe it’s the other way around. Borden?) It’s why snow in Buffalo and Erie can be nearly apocalyptic. It’s why, coming home from Milwaukee to Indiana, you can be all, like, what a beautiful day for a drive, round the southern end of Lake Michigan and suddenly realize it’s going to be a blizzard clear to South Bend.

Cold air races across rising warmer air from a large body of water and bingo-bango, precipitation. Lake-effect snowfall is a wash for lake levels, as it represents only a temporary relocation of water, and all melts back into the lake in spring. Last year, we had a snowy winter that came from storms moving south-to-north, and that was a good thing for the 21st-century Saudi Arabia of H2O. All ur waters are belong to us.

If you’re interested, western Michigan got 13 inches yesterday. We have the lightest dusting, not even enough to sweep, much less shovel.

Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice. That’s our state motto. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

Maybe not in January.

So much for fifth-grade civics. How was your day? It’s Friday, traditionally my Exhale Day, although there won’t be much exhaling today — I’m meeting a student later to cut some video, and tonight it’s the middle-school Christmas dance, known hereabouts as “the winter formal,” although it’s not. Girls must wear dresses and boys, ties. But it will require a Getting Ready pre-party, and I gather we’re hosting. So I’d best pull up my socks and get it in gear. Some bloggage? Oh, why not:

I’m not nearly as well-traveled as you might think, and certainly less than I’d like to be. For instance, I’ve only been to Los Angeles once, but the city has stayed with me. The hills and canyons were so strange to a flatlander like me; I found it fascinating how you could be in an unmistakably urban area one minute, take a right turn and two lefts, and be in some cleft in the hills that felt entirely off the map. Ever since, I’ve wanted to live somewhere that strange. And while the Grosse Pointes are hardly L.A., Detroit offers enough strangeness and off-the-map feel for years of exploration.

All of which leads to a couple of Sweet Juniper bonbons, in which Jim and the kids find the country in the city and also the prairie.

All that talk of cutout cookies yesterday prompted Lex to send along instructions for making your own mad gingerbread men.

Tiger Woods nude photos? As one of my FB friends says, he needs to start talking, and the words he needs to say are SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY.

Via Fark, the headline I never got to write: Snowball the overweight hedgehog is running and swimming his way back to health

Costco awaits. Have a good weekend.

With the approach of the holiday season comes my annual consideration, dandled through the idle moments of December, right down to the wire, and inevitably discarded, i.e.,

Should I make a buche de noel this year?

Or, put another way, should this be the year I go to no small trouble to craft a rolled sponge cake cut and decorated to resemble a fallen log in the forest, complete with marzipan mushrooms carved by hand and smudged with cocoa so as to look authentically “dirty,” etc.?

It’s not part of my cultural heritage, although I suppose, living in an area first settled by the French, I could claim it as a local-history exercise. I generally avoid it on more practical grounds, seeing that our family is small and one-third of it got her palate from her father’s side of the family and has a default setting of ew, gross on all new foods. One of these years, but likely not this one.

I write a sentence like that and think, you might not be here next year. Do you want to pass into the next world and stand before whatever gatekeeper is there and say, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, tops among them, I never made a buche de noel?” No, but then, I’d never put a non-existent buche de noel in the top 10, or even the top 100. Rather, my hesitance has more to do with another lesson learned: That the more trouble you go to for food, the more disappointed you’re likely to be.

I’m veering dangerously close to a Bob Greene column he trotted out every six months or so, the sparkling wit of “never travel for food.” Greene liked to say — and say and say and say — that if someone told you the pizza was better in the next county, the pizza would inevitably be awful. I disagree because that’s a self-evidently stupid contention. The food is better in Paris than in Detroit. It may or may not be worth the enormous expense to go there and find that out for yourself, but it doesn’t make it any less true. (The food is probably better in Indianapolis than in Detroit. With very few exceptions, this is the worst restaurant city in North America, and the next person who tells me to visit Lafayette Coney Island is going to get the high hat from me, because I did that — once — and feel fortunate to have escaped with my stomach lining intact.)

I have found, however, that the best food is the easiest food, and the more difficult the preparation gets, the more likely it will disappoint. This is why I don’t brine turkeys and will never, ever deep-fry one. The best food is a perfectly ripe raspberry plucked from the bush and popped into your mouth, and it goes downhill from there, but you get the idea. The Italians have it right — the best ingredients, minimally messed with. Winter is a time for cooking, certainly. The raspberry bush is rattling its bare branches in a frigid breeze as we speak. But I don’t think it’s time for a buche de noel just yet.

What’s your pain in the ass holiday food preparation? Lately I’ve been looking at a recipe in last December’s Gourmet, for Christmas cookies. Sanding sugar in vivid colors is called for. I’m starting to waver.

No bloggage today but this. Some people have to learn lessons the hard way:

Alexi Dohnal arrived at the East Bank Club for a facial, changed into a spa robe and placed $140,000 worth of jewelry in a locker. When she returned, she found the lock cut and her jewelry gone.

Don’t worry, the jewelry is insured. Still, she’s “disheartened” and “depressed.” Poor bunny rabbit.

Off to the gym.

I’ve been so discombobulated of late I lost the thread of the Tiger Woods story. Last I checked, we were talking about an essentially nice guy who’d stepped into it by “having affairs” outside his marriage.

Yesterday afternoon I finally had a minute to hit Gawker, which sent me to Deadspin, the sports blog, where I discovered that the story is now about a sexual compulsive with a bottomless appetite for strange, whose “lover” is actually his pimp/personal assistant, netting major bucks for stocking his larder, not actually cooking the food. By the time I reached the part with the porn star, I started thinking that the precipitating incident in all this may well not have been a National Enquirer dispatch, but a closed-door session between a grim physician and Mrs. Woods, followed by a prescription for embarrassing drugs.

So yeah, I have to agree with Eric Zorn, who surmises that the reason Woods didn’t get out in front of this story is because there’s no getting in front of an avalanche of sewage, that the best — only — strategy is to take shelter under a rock, wait for it to pass and see what’s left of his image in six months.

And since I was in a sewage-y state of mind, I also foolishly followed the link Brian provided yesterday, to that Lisa Schiffren bilge in the American Thinker, which seeks to tie Woods to Barack Obama. Because why? They’re both successful and…what else do they have in common? I can’t imagine.

And because by then my nose was starting to get numb to the smell, I stupidly started reading the comments on the piece, and, well, that’s not something I can recommend. But I will remind you that Lisa Schiffren is not some fringe crank but Dan Quayle’s former speechwriter and a more or less respected member of the right-wing commentariat. If you can imagine Dee Dee Myers someday writing for the Symbionese Liberation Army newsletter, that’s the equivalent.

Ick! Let’s go for a palate cleanser, shall we? Two photo stories on hunting should do the trick. The first, from the NYT, on the Inuit of Greenland, all in black and white for those of you who are squeamish about seal blood. The other, from the Irish Times, on the Waterford Hunt, which goes after fox. No dead foxes in this one, because as all fox hunters know, a dead fox isn’t the point of a fox hunt. It’s galloping and jumping and drinking from stirrup cups and hound music, a sample of which is included in the audio portion of the slide show. Turn your speakers up — recommended for fans of Ireland, horses, hounds and the countryside, and who isn’t included in that group?

With that, I’ve opened the tavern and thrown sex, race and blood on the table. Surely we can have a lively discussion about that. I’m off to do the crossword and catch up on some reading.

I don’t know if any of you had a chance to read J.C.’s rant yesterday, on his blog, about the public self-scourging news executives are given to these days. In particular, this passage set him off:

Tom Rosenstiel and others pointed out [that] those journalists and news organizations that don’t drop the pose of lecturer and learn how to genuinely engage the audience will be lost.

The pose of lecturer!? Perhaps you’re confusing that with, uh, reporting the news.

We’ve all known one of those people who’s inclined to be apologetic — takes all the blame, defers all credit to others, calls herself no great beauty, calls himself only half-bright. And sooner or later, we all discover there’s a very fine line between self-effacement and cringing, just as there’s one between bold confidence and Donald Trump. I think John found it in the news executives who fret over “lecture-based journalism.” I can’t remember where I first heard that expression, of “old” reporting as a lecture and “new” reporting as a conversation, but it was a few years ago, and I think it was from none other than Jimmy Lileks, who only took a few more years to allow comments on his own blog. Heh. Indeed.

But that’s not important. The idea is that somehow journalists aren’t really journalists until they engage readers in “the conversation” and stop “lecturing.” Well, OK. I mean, I get it. But I think, in getting it, too many editors and publishers are forgetting about professionalism.

I swear, I don’t think for even a minute that I’m a screenwriter, but of late I’ve been in a screenwriting state of mind, and have rediscovered John August’s fine, fine screenwriting blog. Yesterday he had an item about a startup company called Scripped, prompted by an interview with one of its founders, who seemed to be saying that the problem with screenwriting today is that the people who do it make too much money, and the way to fix this “problem” is to make free screenwriting software available to all, and open it up to real-time “collaboration” with other users who fancy themselves the next Richard LaGravenese. Sunil Rajaraman says:

Two problems are solved with web-based screenwriting software. The first is collaboration. Many of the scripts of the films we see in movie theaters have undergone dozens of rewrites before they make it to the screen. For example, for the original of Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck put the screenplay together with more anecdotal stories about South Boston and friends they grew up with. Characters were eliminated from the screenplay and it underwent a very detailed rewriting process. Who knows how many writers had their hands on that screenplay before it was made — and it eventually won an Oscar. Collaboration is made easier with web-based software…. That goes for people collaborating across different locations. Let’s say you are working with writers in China or India and you are here in the U.S. Scripped makes it easier to share drafts, track real-time changes and so forth.

The second problem online software solves is access to writers. If you give the software away for free — it is very cheap to provide the software — you can attract all sorts of talent that would have otherwise not been interested in screenwriting. All of a sudden, they are looking for free screenwriting software on Google. A plethora of options are available. By creating access to more writers, the software becomes a mechanism to aggregate talent.

I don’t know much about screenwriting. I took two university classes, wrote one feature-length screenplay for one class and rewrote it for the other. I’ve written four short scripts for which no one will ever give me an Oscar. I’m at work on another feature-length piece, which faces the usual overwhelming odds of even being read, much less produced. I’ve never earned a dime from it. It’s strictly a hobby that I do to give me and my friends something to goof around with. But if everything I know can be carried in a very small basket, I must know more than Sunil Rajamaran, who apparently raised venture capital based on the idea that the cost of screenwriting software is somehow a major discouragement to people who might otherwise be inclined to try it. I paid $49 for my copy of Final Draft, the industry-standard software. Granted, that was at steep university discount, with further markdowns for a coming new version, but even today, full retail is only $200. Apple’s word processor, Pages, contains a screenplay template and, as August points out, you can write a script on anything from MS Word to a typewriter.

What’s more, August further points out, the “Good Will Hunting” story is untrue, and even if it were, what’s the revelation? That many people get their hands on a script under consideration? You don’t say. Writing is rewriting? Stop the presses. It’s not uncommon for a script headed for production to be rewritten a dozen times or more. I learned this from reading the New Yorker, not as a secret handed down by the faculty mandarins at the University of Michigan. Sometimes a rewrite improves a script; other times it ruins it. My rewrite professor liked to pass out early drafts of “The Truman Show,” when the story was set in New York City and Truman was a greasy creep who jerked off in public. By the time the cameras rolled, it was set in Seaside, Florida, and starred Jim Carrey as a sunny charmer. Hooray for Hollywood.

But this idea, that collaborating with other Scripped users in China or India is the key to your successful career, touches on something else I found through August’s site, and wraps up with what the news executives are saying, too — the difference between professional and amateur. August posts the text of a lecture he gave three years ago on the subject. It’s long, but it’s worth reading, because he makes a powerful distinction between the two, to wit:

When we say “professional,” I think what we’re really talking about is “professionalism,” which is this whole bundle of expectations about how a person is supposed to act.

Exactly. It’s not about whether you get paid. It’s about whether to take your work seriously enough to hold yourself to a certain set of standards. He points out the key difference between people who care enough to give a crap and those who don’t, in this passage:

When would you choose to be an amateur? Well, probably the moments in which you obviously suck, either because you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re just not very good at it. Or at least in the moments when people are criticizing you. You’d say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m only an amateur.”

You’re basically saying, “Don’t judge me.”

And here’s where this indirect proof falls apart: People will always judge you. You can’t control that. You can’t control what scale they’re going to judge you on, or which criteria are most important.

Exactly. For years, journalists who have been following the top “citizen journalists” have noted this difference. Say one screws up, gets pinned to the wall on a mistake or undisclosed conflict or whatever. Sooner or later, they try to wriggle out by throwing up their hands and saying, “Hey, I don’t get paid for this. I’m just a blogger.” They essentially undercut their own status, while at the same time asserting their right to be both outsiders and insiders. Read my reporting, but don’t hold it to your bullshit MSM standards, because I’m an amateur. They can assert whatever they want. But a professional shouldn’t do that. (I say this fully aware that I’ve done it myself.)

So I guess I’d join with J.C. in telling the news executives of the world to stop worrying so much about changing the lecture to a conversation, and just do your damn jobs. Take pride in them. Man up. Listen to feedback, consider it carefully, but stop cowering under it.

I’ve gone on way, way too long on this. This piece could use a rewrite, I see now. But I have to take a shower and get some work done. If you’ve come this far, how about a punchline?

Don’t judge me. I’m an amateur.

The film challenge came right on time, and was pretty simple: The end of the world. Free-choice genre, no prop or dialogue, only a story about the end of the world. You can see why this would make a Detroit crew feel they were halfway there:

Yes, it’s our old friend the Packard plant. But how can you not use it? If you needed a vast, already-dressed set suitable for the end of the world, duh. So we went there for a few shots.

Our main character is a teenage girl reduced to scavenging the ruined, depopulated city. She lives in a hovel. Our art department constructed one in the basement of another building, a former printing plant converted to lofts and performance spaces. Fortunately, the basement retains that “Silence of the Lambs” feel. I went down there as they were building her pallet:

God, these people are good. (The art department.) It was simultaneously post-apocalyptic and human. That light over the pallet felt precisely like weak winter sun coming through a skylight. It’s such a pleasure to work with people who are good at what they do. Like our makeup guy, Dan Phillips:

Dan used to be an autoworker. Took the buyout, went to makeup school, and is now working pretty often on the many productions going on here. He has some good stories. That’s Robert Young III, in his cameo role as Vacant Lot Corpse, showing off Dan’s handiwork. Photo by Connie Mangilin, another producer.

The film? Haven’t seen the final cut yet. I’ll keep you posted. This is the point in the process where I get crabby and it’s best that I keep my distance. Otherwise I might be striding around the office like a tyrant, channeling my inner newspaper cuss. One of our news editors in Fort Wayne would, when the desk fell behind, call out in his rich southern accent, “People! We ain’t puttin’ up a shuttle here!” I don’t think that would be helpful.

I’m not helping out much here, either. I commend to you today some words by our own J.C. Burns, who has beheld one too many grovels by broken-down, dispirited news executives, and has something to say to both the executives and the bored-bored-bored news consumers they allegedly serve.

I’m off to encounter Busy Monday.

Our theme: “the end of the world.” Suzanne dresses a set.