Someone else liked that line from “There Will Be Blood,” too.

It’s funny how some news just doesn’t penetrate even a well-informed person’s orbit. Lately a neighbor feud in a downriver suburb has gone national, and, well. It’s really a perfect story in that it features a psycho, a dead mother, a dying little girl and the word “outpouring.” Stories like this always have to feature an outpouring, usually of “support,” frequently “love” and lots of cash.

Short version: Some time ago, a dispute broke out between the Petkov and Edward families, who live across Detroit Street from one another in Trenton. It appears to be over a child’s birthday party invitation that may or may not have been extended to one of the Petkov children, although a text message was involved, so I can’t really speak authoritatively about the nature of the insult. In my circle, text messages are not used for party invitations. Anyway, the Petkov clan began to nurture a grievance against the Edwards, and sometime in recent days social networking got involved.

One reason the Edward family may not have been as attentive as they could have been to their guest list is that the mother of the family, Laura, was dying of Huntington’s disease, and their daughter, Kathleen, also has the disease, the rarer, fast-moving juvenile variety. Laura died last year, at 24; Kathleen is 7. But they all still hate one another. So somehow the Petkov matriarch, name of Jennifer, thought the proper way to respond to all of this was to doctor a photo of Laura Edward to show her lying in the arms of a Grim Reaper-type skeleton, and to take one of Kathleen and make her face the skull in a skull-and-crossbones photo, and post all of this on her Facebook page. Which is when it became a story.

But it wasn’t just a story, it was a TV story, and not just a TV story but a Fox TV story, and not even the regular 10 p.m. Fox newscast, but the extra one they do at 11 p.m., which is called “the Edge” and is where they stick all the stories for people who find the 10 p.m. version too intellectually challenging. Here’s the story. It’s a hum-damn-dinger. Jennifer Petkov appears to be auditioning for a part on “Real Housewives of Downriver.” As entertainment for the mouth-breathing masses, it’s hard to beat.

But the reaction is where it gets interesting.

First, the Petkovs were targeted by 4chan, which I once saw described as “the scariest hive mind on the internet.” Their address was posted, their employers’ addresses and phone numbers, the whole works. A whole henhouse full of eggs has rained down on their house, enough unordered pizzas to feed 10 football teams. Jennifer’s husband lost his job. It really and truly sucks to be them.

As for Kathleen, inevitably described as “little Kathleen,” well, she won the lottery. This is where the outpouring comes in. A respectable five-figure sum was donated to her family. Other Huntington’s-affected families have gathered around her. And yesterday, she was driven in a stretch limousine to a toy store in Ann Arbor, where she was commanded to shop until she dropped, and she did, spending two grand of the outpouring, with the rest being donated to the children’s hospital at the University of Michigan.

Which I guess is supposed to sound like a happy ending, but all it makes me think is, we live in one fucked-up culture, folks. Never mind the lunatic Petkovs and their Facebook. Why does little Kathleen even know about this? What kind of parent allows their sick child to be photographed for television? Why does she even know about the insult? And while it’s admirable that 90 percent of the outpouring is going to charity, why is our response to every high-profile misfortune or offense to shower the offended with cash and prizes? This has bugged me ever since the Make-a-Wish Foundation came on the radar screen, which sounds like a good idea on paper, and I guess it is, but doesn’t anyone ever see the essential horror in telling a kid, “Hey, Bobby, because you have a fatal disease, you know what? YOU’RE GOING TO DISNEYLAND!”

(I once wrote some columns about a kid who was supposed to die of a fatal liver disorder. She went to Universal Studios, got to watch her favorite show taping, got to meet and have her picture taken with all the stars. Then she went home and didn’t die. Not only that, she was cured, more or less — a pharmaceutical company developed a synthetic enzyme that eliminated her symptoms and returned her to good health. Downside: The drug had an annual cost of $300,000 a year. The last column I wrote, her parents were miserable, because they believed she’d never be able to get medical insurance. They were probably right. But you know what that column got them? An outpouring. Not a big one, but it might have made their lives easier. I lost track of them after that. My guess is, the drug no longer costs $300,000, but who knows if the little girl, all grown up, has health insurance. She probably votes Republican.)

It has been a long, exhausting week. I have no bloggage, but I have a full day ahead of me to do whatever I want. I think I’ll start with a shower and see what develops. Have a good weekend, all.

Well, this is very sad news. My former Columbus Dispatch colleague and friend Mike Harden died yesterday. Cancer of the throat and chest made quick work of him; he was only diagnosed in June. But he stayed in the traces until the end. “Semi-retired,” i.e., writing as often as Maureen Dowd does, he filed his last column on Sunday. It was about playing Scrabble with his daughter in his hospital room. A humor piece.

I always called Mike the best columnist you never heard of. A gifted writer and compassionate reporter, he was a throwback to an earlier era, before newspapers embarrassed themselves trying to be a “product” that you “use,” and were content to be something to read. He always told me the role model for his life’s work was Jim Bishop, another guy you’ve probably never heard of, but take my word for it — he used to be big. It’s the papers that got small.

Mike told stories, most often about other people, sometimes about himself. He could make anyone’s story interesting, and frequently noble. He wrote a piece about a day in the life of a neonatal intensive-care nurse that I used to read to writing students, although it frequently left me a little choked up, particularly the part about how the NICU staff handle the babies who are about to die. They’re taken from the warmers, disconnected from the tubes and monitors, held close and rocked by the nurses until the end comes. It’s the sort of killer detail a former Navy medic wouldn’t miss.

Vietnam is most likely where Mike honed the cynicism every newsman needs, and while he was capable of enormous empathy, he was never mawkish. He knew that the best way to tell a sad or sentimental story was just to tell it, that if the facts couldn’t speak for themselves or you had to pimp it up with bullshit rhetorical tricks to drag out a few sniffles, you were selling your readers short by insulting their intelligence. A musician and songwriter in his spare time, he had a lyricist’s way of getting to the point without too much dithering.

But he wasn’t all about dying preemies. He could be very funny, and wrote many one-liners I can quote to this day. On the subject of teaching his children about the birds and bees, he considered and rejected a textbook, because “trying to understand sex by reading a book is like trying to understand jazz by touring a saxophone factory.” And he wrote the single best description of what it’s like to write a newspaper column four or five days a week, one I’ve repeated more times than I can count. It was, he said, “like making love in a burning building — you get the idea it would have been so much more memorable if only there’d been more time and fewer fireman at the window.”

A column is basically a short essay, but once in a while he tried the longer form. He wrote a piece for Ohio magazine that remains the single best description of the Ohio State Fair I’ve ever read (granted, it’s not a mission many writers take on). And one of my absolute favorites was this one, “I Remember Woody,” which I dug up after…well, I’ll get to it in a moment.

It’s a marvel, this piece, published a month after Ohio State’s legendary football coach died. (Lest you think he took that long to work on it, I’m fairly sure this appeared in the paper’s now-defunct Sunday magazine, which had a three-week lead time, so it’s more likely he batted it out on the usual schedule, giving himself a day or two, tops. From its wonderful Western-movie open to its Scorsesean finale, it is the experience that every Central Ohioan had with Woody Hayes, carrying you through from childhood worship to adolescent scorn to adult reconciliation, and the reason I remembered it only recently was this companion piece, i.e., Mitch Albom’s blurtage on the death of Bo Schembechler in 2006.

You could almost make this a writing-class exercise: Two legends, two writers, two obits. Compare and contrast. For starters, this is a textbook lesson on the use and abuse of the first person, on economy of language, on organization and craft. Mike’s is half the length of Mitch’s and packs 10 times the punch. In Mike’s piece, every detail, every anecdote, is freighted with meaning and subtext, is visual — you can see the men, the armchair coaches, gathered around the Philco on football Saturdays, second-guessing their hero, see the crowd of student protestors jeering Woody during the nightmare spring of 1970. Whereas Mitch, as usual, mostly reminds us who had the magic access, and even with all that time spent at the great man’s elbow, he still couldn’t find a decent quote with a magnifying glass:

Bo was passionate about what he did. “Some of the finest people I know are football coaches,” he once told me. “They’re smart. They’re tough. Good thinkers. Hard workers. When I say I’m a football coach, I’m damn proud of the fact that I’m a football coach.”

Now, for extra credit: One of these writers is paid $250,000 a year and won the Red Smith Award, the other considerably less. Take your best guess and pass your papers forward.

Well, I could go on all day. I won’t. But I will say this: In Mike’s piece, you can see his instinctive knowledge of what makes a truly compelling portrait — not just the light but the shadows. Beginning art students learn it’s the chiaroscuro that gives a drawing dimension. So in that spirit I’ll tell you Mike was imperfect as a writer and person. He could be a little windy and ponderous at times. He went through slumps. But newspapermen, unlike many other writers, have the obligation of daily deadlines, and the disadvantage of having their bad days on display to 200,000 readers, not crumpled in a wastebasket somewhere. However, day after day, column after column, he defied the conventional wisdom of contemporary editors: A story about an old lady? What does she do? She’s afraid of leaving her apartment because she lives in a bad neighborhood? What utility does that have for suburban readers? Mike’s business card could have been four words long: Good stories, well-told.

Now it’s his epitaph. Farewell, buddy. Take good notes.

I suppose Starbucks officially became a “mature” business when they started opening locations across the street from one another, but today’s story in the Wall Street Journal pretty much confirms it: They’re “improving” service by making the baristas work on no more than two drinks at a time, which will almost certainly mean longer lines. And you know customers will love this, because if there’s anything coffee drinkers are, it’s infinitely patient. Particularly at the morning rush.

I’d never heard the term “mature business” before my newspaper’s publisher used it during a meeting some years back. It refers to one that has reached the end of its growth curve — well-established, very likely fat and happy, but no longer growing in any significant way. The only way to increase profits in a mature business is to innovate or cut costs. In the newspaper business, which has been mature longer than Morley Safer, we innovated by larding the management level with assistant managing editors with more slashes in their title than there were discarded Starbucks cups in the trash cans, i.e. assistant managing editor/enterprise/trends/features/fashion. We were told there was an AME at the Philadelphia Inquirer whose job it was to read other publications all day, not to steal ideas but to just get that plugged-in feeling, so that s/he could be the newsroom oracle of the Zeitgeist. I never knew who this person was. Honk if you did.

We also cut costs. Relentlessly. One of my last acts as an employee was to steal a package of brass brads from the supply cubicle. It’s not like anyone used them, and there they were, the nice fat ones I couldn’t find at Office Depot. I figured it was the least I could do to thank them for all they’d done.

In other words, the A-team, the visionary bastards who built the newspaper industry, the Hearsts and Knights and the rest of them, had long since moved on, leaving the bean-counters in charge. I assume this is what’s happening at Starbucks, which probably, now that I think of it, has literal bean-counters on the payroll. The McDonald’s of dark-roast coffee needs to shoot itself in the foot, needs to move into its assistant-managing-editors-with-slashes period, evidently. This is how it does it. Good luck to you, Starbucks. This is why I order my triple espressos without any of that fancy shit, unless it’s a fourth shot of espresso. Because when I need my triple-e, I don’t want something with a pretty fern traced into the milk foam. Because I don’t want milk foam. I WANT COFFEE AND I WANT IT NOW.

Rescued Chilean miners: 11 down, 22 to go. I see a reality show spinoff in the future. “Survivor: Mineshaft,” maybe. One thing I don’t think I’ve seen in all the coverage: What sort of mine is this? Coal, ore, minerals? Does anyone know?

Coozledad’s bull, Llewd, was feeling poorly, seems better now. With pictures. Reading C’s accounts of treating the livestock at his vegetarian petting zoo always stirs the same reaction: 1) I miss my horse, followed by 2) I don’t miss my horse. What I miss: Riding him around and jumping fences. What I don’t miss: The staggering amount of work required to keep animals that size healthy, fed and confined. Llewd hurt his foot during his most recent escapade. Hurt foots require doctorin’, and you can’t put a bull in crossties and expect him to stand quietly, not with those horns. But such a cute face, and that poll just invites scratchin’. I send you a scratch from a long distance, Llewd.

This was yesterday’s talker, although most of the talking was me, asking questions: Dog returns to life after vet allegedly euthanizes it. Such as, where was the dog in the interim between the shot and the attempt at burial? Doesn’t this vet use a stethoscope? What, the guy walked out with a “dead” Rottweiler in his arms through the waiting room?

I bought a sweater late last summer at the Gap, and when I put it on this week I noticed it has the new logo on the label, now the old label. What am I bid for a knee-length white cotton coat-style cardigan, worn maybe three times? In true Gap fashion, it is already starting to fall apart at the seams. P.S. I liked the new label. Who are these people who have all fucking day to complain about a logo on their Facebook pages? I have some student copy I can subcontract to you to edit, if you’re interested.

Which is what I need to do now. So have a swell one, all, and thank your lucky stars you’re not a Chilean miner. Imagine being the last guy out.

Reading the news these days — excuse me, consuming the news — requires a real strategy. It’s difficult, in a world flooded with links to more information than any human could possibly consume in a 24-hour day, to know which ones to click. Some reveal everything you need to know in the headline:

Home-built plane crashes in Livingston County

Do you really need to know anything more? I mean, y’know, sorry for the damage to the bright firmament of humanity, but…”home-built plane.” Yeah.

[Pause.]

Sorry. I was interrupted. Something hit the kitchen window hard a little while ago. I thought it might have been one of the million sticks that seem to rain out of a mature oak over the course of a season, but when I went outside to take the trash to the curb a few minutes later, there was a robin lying on its back in the driveway, eyes closed but still breathing. I stood around waiting to see if it was planning to die, but soon the eyes opened, so I went back inside, put on some gloves (West Nile) and rolled it onto its sternum, where it remained upright on its own power. Went back inside and poured another cup of coffee, read some more web and just went back out. No robin, and a runny bird poo in the place where it had been sitting. Fingers crossed it made its recovery and exited under its own steam and not in a cat’s mouth. Sometimes all you need is to be reoriented. Sky up, ground down? Check. Man, do I have a headache. Good luck, robin.

I have a mixed bag with wildlife, but I try to do my part. My next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne was a veritable Dr. Doolittle, however. I once saw her catch a wild raccoon with her bare hands, free it from the plastic grocery bag it was hopelessly entangled in, and release it without getting so much as a scratch. After which a bluebird perched on her shoulder and whistled a happy tune. One of the previous two sentences is untrue, but both are equally unlikely to happen. I guess that sort of confidence in handling animals comes from growing up in the country, with a grandfather who neutered his own barn cats. He kept a special tool for those occasions — an old overcoat with one sleeve sewed shut. He’d catch the half-grown toms (no small feat in itself) and stuff them face-down into the sleeve, which presented him with the target area and only two legs to contend with. Swipe, cut, squeeze, snip and release. It was over in a minute.

Horses are gelded more or less the same way, or were, before veterinary anesthetics. “As long as they keep moving afterward, they’re fine,” a grizzled old farmhand once told me. The probably spend the recovery time searching for their lost gonads. And then they forget they ever had them, and become useful to the human race again.

Testosterone may well be the engine of civilization, but in animal/human interactions, it just screws things up. Although it certainly makes for some entertaining entries on Coozledad’s blog.

Four hours of sleep last night. It’s one of those mornings where I suspect I’m actually dying. Better grab a shower. But before that? Some bloggage:

Whew, Dick Cheney, not looking so great. I’m sure his black heart will gurgle on for some time after the host has died; in fact, I’m sure the new host is being prepared now. Why do you think the College Republicans even exist?

“Worst Canadian Thanksgiving ever” — Jon Stewart + Carl Paladino = entertainment. It’s funny to see the Republicans at this time of year. “Men in Speedos,” i.e., a tiny fraction of the gay community, carrying on at a gay pride parade is gross. Photo of woman doin’ it with a horse? Hey, I think I’ll forward this to all my friends! Because I’m in construction!

OIM: When bears attack! Something about this story smells. And it smells like chicken.

Shower, save me.

The weekend was pretty much perfect. Temperatures nudging 80, cerulean skies, the sort of string of lovely days that you always get in the fall, but not always on a weekend. So, as the previous entry should suggest, it seemed fitting to blow off a lot of chore-type stuff and enjoy it while we could. Sailing was Saturday. Yesterday was the housewarming party at the Frank Lloyd Wright house mentioned here a couple weeks back — it’s finally 99 percent done. I’m a friend of a friend of the owners, and came as his plus-one. No photos, at the hosts’ request, but you can still look at the ones at the Hour Detroit link (although the captions don’t always match the photos). It’s as lovely in person as in the pictures; I expect if they haven’t heard from a location scout already, they will soon — the place was born to be a movie set.

We walked over from my friend’s house in Palmer Woods, the grandest of the grand old neighborhoods in Detroit. Walking back alone — had to leave early — I was struck, for the millionth time, by how much money there was in this town, once upon a time. These Tudor-revival and Mission-style and midcentury-modern houses are now owned by buppies and gay men and others unafraid of urban-pioneer living, and there was much discussion of $1,400 monthly winter heating bills and other drawbacks to living in an 8,000-square-foot architectural masterpiece with leaky windows. But without them, that Wright house would still be sitting empty and falling to pieces. So a salute to all.

On the way back I passed a masterful pile identified as the Bishop’s House. The marker was unclear on whether it still is*, but did mention the many religious details of the construction, including a rooftop sculpture of the Archangel Michael battling Satan. Couldn’t see it.

* A quick Google reveals it is not. Whew. Houses like that are hard to justify, even for the One True, these days.

What else? Watched “Howl,” available On Demand. Liked it very much, which I gather from the reviews is not the default position. The story of Allen Ginsberg’s magnum opus (although I hold “Kaddish” in almost equally high esteem) is told in three threads — the trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges for publishing it, an interview with Ginsberg by an unseen interlocutor, and the first reading of the poem itself in 1955. It’s a long poem, and long stretches of it are illustrated with animations, and that seems to be everyone’s problem. They’re too literal, they’re not beautiful enough, whatever. I didn’t care. I found myself paying little attention to them; they might as well have been the iTunes visualizer, or the oscilloscope potheads rigged to their stereos back in my wild youth. I was thoroughly taken with the words, the music of which is strong enough to carry the sequences. I guess the filmmakers thought a black screen or the iTunes visualizer would be too much.

James Franco plays Ginsberg as a young man, and together with Kerouac and Cassady tiptoe up to the edge of Abercrombie & Fitch styling, but don’t quite cross over. For $6.99 on the cable bill, I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday night.

One of the duties I neglected this weekend was crafting something for this space that makes sense, or reads well, or has a point. Obviously. So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Living in Detroit, I guess I should know more about the Insane Clown Posse than I do, but honestly, that is one local act whose orbit simply does not intersect with mine in any way, shape or form. Which is good, because they’re pretty disgusting, the sort of rappers who make Eminem look like Leonard Bernstein. Still, it was simultaneously entertaining, appalling and amusing to read this piece in the Guardian about their true purpose in life:

All of which makes Violent J’s recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, Thy Unveiling, that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt.

Oh, but it gets better! Check out the lyrics:

ICP have just released their most audacious Christian song to date: Miracles. In it, they list God’s wonders that delight them each day:

Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs
Fuckin’ rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to
blow your brains.

The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? Yeah!

The internet moves so fast these days you probably already know about the Ohio House candidate revealed over the weekend as having once been a Nazi re-enactor. (Yes, a Republican. I was as astonished as you were.) What you may not know is that in the Six Degrees of Separation Department, I once spent a weekend at this man’s ancestral summer home. His sister was friends with a friend of mine, and she impulsively invited us all up to their place on Devil’s Lake one Friday. It was a pretty gauzy weekend, but I remember enough to report that there were no, repeat no, Waffen SS uniforms in plain view. I do know they were pretty darn rich, which enables a lot of bad behavior and, far more important, an ability to wall yourself off in a world of people just like you, where no one says, “You know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, and if we do, maybe we shouldn’t take pictures of ourselves wearing these uniforms.” Actually, this characteristic is not confined to the rich. Which is why I will never run for elected office.

Which is just a short sidestep to bigotry in general, in particular Carl Paladino’s, who doesn’t want his children “brainwashed” into thinking it’s OK to be gay. Hmm. All I have to say is, “Rabbi? Is it too much to ask you to take your Bluetooth receiver out of your ear when meeting a gubernatorial candidate?”

Finally, via MMJeff, a Daily Howler worth considering:

For decades, your public discourse has been scripted by skillful players—and by their skilled, clownish messaging. We have drowned in ludicrous statements on policy matters; we have drowned in ludicrous statements about targeted public officials. (If we lower the tax rates, we get higher revenues! The Clintons are serial murderers!) And no matter how stupid these messages got, the “press corps” agreed not to notice. Endlessly, Limbaugh got a pass. So did Chris Matthews, during the many years when he worked for plutocrat masters. (No one did more to send Bush to the White House. But for years after that, Joan Walsh had to keep kissing his keister, the better to get on TV!)

Better get moving. Manic Monday now segues into Terrible Tuesday. I want to work less, or at the very least, be paid more. Is that so much to ask?

Because on a day like today, why the hell not?

Last night was the world premiere advance screening of “The Wars of Other Men,” a short film I worked on this past spring. It had to be downgraded from a world premiere to an advance screening because the film wasn’t, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right: Done.

The audience was kind and forgiving, however. The whole purpose of this project was to show we could do a credible short with significant CGI sequences on a micro-tiny budget, and those suckers take time, as James Cameron could tell you. So we were missing a few, but the ones that were in there were great. This is a sci-fi war movie, set in an alternate-history early 20th century, about a small rifle squad on a mission to destroy a weapons plant. When the first threat causes them to run for cover, and they look up to see a zeppelin passing by overhead, flashing signals on a primitive mechanical sign, everybody cheered. The miracle had happened.

The narrative may have been a little confusing for total newbies, as it was missing the climactic explosion. The image is still rendering somewhere in Livonia, I guess.

We shot most of it at the Packard Plant, which lends that certain siege-of-Stalingrad look, as the makers of “Transformers 3” could tell you; they’re over there right now. A friend drove by and said they’ve constructed a passenger-train car, sticking out of a second-floor window. Yeah, well — we were there first. And all our crew had to do was cover up a few zillion square feet of graffiti tags.

This wasn’t my story or script, but I worked on it, and one of the things we hashed over was how much antique language to include. There’s something about the 21st-century American tongue that can’t quite sell a phrase like “have a care with that,” at least not to my ear. All I can say is, there’s a reason so many period pieces about ancient Rome, or wherever, take the easy way out and make everyone British. It just sounds better. And that’s no rap against our actors — I thought Brad Pitt sounded ridiculous in “Troy,” too. But all in all, the biggest incongruity to me was when one of the female soldiers (alternate history, remember) smiled, and showed a distinctly modern set of incisors. Oh, well. No money in a micro-budget for dental prostheses.

Finally, a note about the theater. It was in the Redford, on the west side of Detroit, a grand old movie house lovingly restored:

There are stars in the ceiling — you can see one in the picture. They twinkle.

And, as always, it was very cool to make the turn off West Grand River and see this:

(When Alan sees this, he’s going to say, “Three Stooges festival? Awesome!”)

So, some quick bloggage before I run:

Speaking of movies, everyone is asking me is I’m going to see “Waiting for Superman,” and the answer is: Eventually, I guess. I know enough about the film to know I disagree with its central premise — that bad schools are the fault of bad teachers, and charter schools are The Answer. Charters are a Hail Mary pass for a problem that is far, far more complicated. One of our local school-board candidates, a former teacher himself, seems to understand this. He’s running for re-election, and posted this on his campaign blog. Briefly stated, but worth reading, I think.

Today is Jolene’s birthday. Happy birthday, Jolene.

The hits just keep on coming in the housing meltdown. Look for this to blow up big — I don’t see how it can’t.

As for me, I’m outta here. Have a great weekend, all.

My neighbor was carjacked yesterday, a few blocks from here, on the other side of the freeway. It’s the nature of our neighborhood that I didn’t recognize her talking head on the 11 p.m. news, didn’t recognize her common name, and only knew it was her when they flashed her distinctive vanity plate toward the end of the report. Ah, well.

What made this carjacking newsworthy, as opposed to all the others in the Naked City yesterday, was the fact the perps were pre-teens. Srsly. One was about 11 and the other about 12, and my neighbor said her first reaction, when they demanded her keys, was to tell them to run along. Then one showed the gun in his waistband, and life imitated “The Wire.” She said when they drove away in her big Escalade, they could hardly see over the wheel.

Without blaming the victim in any way whatsoever, this is why I would never drive an Escalade, or any other luxury SUV, without Kwame Kilpatrick’s security detail rolling on backup. Not in the stolen-car capital of North America. Just too tempting. Three or four years ago, their last Escalade was stripped of all four of its tires and wheels (replacement cost: about four grand) in their driveway, by one of those Nascar-type theft crews that can get the job done in the time it takes you to pour a cup of coffee. Nice ride, but not worth the trouble.

Insurance is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Which is why it costs so much.

I once asked a local cop who’d done time on the car-theft task force what happens to all the stolen cars around here. Are they rolled into shipping containers and sent off to Moscow? Stripped in chop shops? Stacked on car carriers and taken out of Michigan entirely? Hardly. Most go a few miles into Detroit, where, depending on the thief’s skill and connections, they will be parked somewhere and ineptly hacked at, like a buffalo carcass on the prairie. Kids take the tires and wheels, because they’re easy to get off and you can roll them to the local shops that will buy them, no questions asked. Other thieves remove the air bags, the scrappers go underneath and saw off the catalytic converter, the electronics and sound system and so on find other buyers, and finally the carcass turns up crippled and worthless, maybe torched. A chop shop requires skilled labor, he said, and a network of buyers. Just as James Bond-style cat burglars were outnumbered by strong-arm home invaders, so too is the chop shop more a fixture of the movies than reality. Although they do exist, as our own J.C. Burns, whose 10-year-old Honda Civic disappeared from his Atlanta driveway a few years back, can tell you. Those are reliable, long-lived cars. Parts are valuable, and decade-old antitheft devices easily detoured.

So that was yesterday in my world. What about yours?

Which seems a good segue into the bloggage. In a dispatch from that other capital of criminal weirdness — South Florida — we meet a man who settled a grudge with a squirt bottle of Roundup:

In the front yard, Ewing gunned down flowers and bushes, the report stated. To get to the plants in the backyard, he filled water balloons with the weed killer and tossed them onto his neighbors property. Ewing estimated the landscaping damage to be about $250.

The victim owed him about $200, so it sounds like he got his money’s worth.

Have you ever watched a surgeon operate? I have. The first thing you notice is how all that “delicate hands of a surgeon” crap is just that. It’s more like stuffing a turkey, as this DetNews story on the life of a Motor City trauma surgeon points out:

Patton’s most important tool appears to be his right index finger. That digit acts as his probe, his periscope, his divining rod, his cork. He can remember on more than one occasion saving the life of a gunshot victim who arrived at the hospital in the back of a sedan. He simply plugged the hole with his finger.

“Feeling is believing,” Patton tells a glassy-eyed intern as he fishes around in a knife wound in the back of a man’s knee, trying to augur whether it’s damage to the vein or the artery.

Anything else? Doesn’t look like it. Now to hop to the shower — more office hours. Today I’m bringing a lunch.

There’s so much good bloggage today, and four hours of student meetings starting in about two hours and change, that today is a mixed grill, eh? You pick, you choose, you pay a la carte. OK? Let’s go:

Lately I’ve been intrigued by a number of “what can I do” charities or other efforts to do good. I’m charmed by people who, when faced with a need, don’t dither around and maybe flip a few bucks into a hat, but ask themselves, “What can I do?” And then do it. Like the Mower Gang, “renegade landscapers” who mow abandoned or neglected parks in Detroit, so kids can play. And Dan Savage and his “it gets better” video campaign, aimed at reassuring despairing gay and lesbian students that if they can just hang on a little while longer, life will improve. It sounded gimmicky to me until I watched a few of them, like Savage’s own, and now Tim Gunn’s. Such a simple act, but one of such generosity, too. I think lives are being saved.

What was I just saying about radio guys? Radio guys now run the Chicago Tribune, and:

There have been complaints about Mr. Michaels in the past, however. In 1995, Mr. Michaels and Jacor settled a suit brought by Liz Richards, a former talk show host in Florida who filed an E.E.O.C. complaint and a civil suit, saying she had been bitten on the neck by Mr. Michaels and that he walked through the office wearing a sexual device around his neck.

“They were like 14-year-old boys — no boundaries at all — but with money and power,” Ms. Richards said in an interview.

…A woman who used to work at the Tribune Company in a senior position, but did not want to be identified because she now worked at another media company in Chicago, said that Mr. Michaels and Marc Chase, who was brought in to run Tribune Interactive, had a loud conversation on an open balcony above a work area about the sexual suitability of various employees.

But also:

In an effort to shake up (WGN, the Trib’s radio station), the management jettisoned a sports talk show at night and installed someone with no radio experience, Jim Laski, an Illinois politician who had been convicted of a felony.

Steve Cochran, a longtime midday host who has said he was dismissed as he was walking out of the bathroom this summer, said the changes seemed aimed at destroying WGN.

“This was supposed to be their comfort zone, what they were good at, and they have ruined a radio station that has had an 80-year relationship with its listeners,” he said.

“This is a collection of carnival workers who are only looking after their friends, giving jobs to their buddies. Blagojevich is on trial and you bring in a politician who has done time in jail?”

Oh my is that a good read for anyone who once loved the Trib. I think Bob Greene left too soon. He might have been president of the company by now.

Put yourself in Sarah Palin’s shoe’s: Her chief enforcer speak’s.

Fascinating: The Islamification of Mariah Carey photos. I like the one where she appears to be taken over by the Cat Blob.

Finally, while there’s no way I can improve on Roy’s witty description of this story, about the firemen who let a family’s house burn to the ground because they hadn’t paid their annual $75 fire-service fee — i.e., the Ayn Rand Hook & Ladder Company — I guess this is the world, libertarian-style. All heretofore public services, fire protection, schools, what-have-you, are now available cafeteria-style. Feel lucky, punk? Then you don’t need a fire company or police department. And so on. I expect these arrangements will continue; it makes perfect sense for a cash-strapped municipality. Remembering what it used to be when it was widely accepted that, for instance, a well-educated populace was a benefit to all citizens, whether they had children in public schools or not, and that a working fire company was of great benefit not only when your own house was on fire but when your neighbor’s was as well — all I can say is, I will miss it.

When Fort Wayne was aggressively annexing its unincorporated suburbs, the newspapers would regularly publish nitwit, whiny letters to the editor from people who claimed they’d “chosen” township life because they wanted to be “free” of city concerns. The fact the township was filled with subdivisions and hard by a city of several hundred thousand, that it provided them not only with their jobs but with all the other things people like cities for — arts and entertainment and pro sports and good shopping and decent restaurants and proximity to well-maintained freeways — never seemed to occur to them. To these folks, they were livin’ the minimal-government life, and expected to pay the discount price for it. My colleagues and I would occasionally chuckle over these screeds, and I developed a retort: Move to Mongo, Mongo being a remote outpost that would satisfy all their freedom needs without asking much in return.

I guess sooner or later, we’ll all move to Mongo.

Off to Diversity U. See y’all tomorrow.