I’m glad to say I never worked for Gannett, the giant newspaper publisher, but Alan did, until the News was sold a few years ago. He would come home with stories, most of which must remain marital secrets. I know there are many Gannetoids out there who have their own, and now that the man who made Gannett what it was for so long has shuffled off this mortal coil, please feel free to share a few. RIP, Al Neuharth.

Neuharth is best-known as the founder of USA Today, but it’s safe to say he also presided over a period in which many of the nation’s newspapers, which at their best should be unique reflections of the community they serve, became so many heat-and-serves from the chain kitchen. He wasn’t all bad, certainly; his stupid three-dot columns provided hours of entertainment, and while he was absolutely correct in demanding Gannett’s newsrooms be racially and ethnically diverse places, some of the heavy-handed ways such directives were imposed didn’t make him, or the rest of his management team, any friends.

Take “mainstreaming,” a policy that — please correct the details, Gannetoids, if I get any wrong — dictated that stories contain a diversity of sources. On paper, a wonderful thing. In practice? I recall a journalism-review story about a Japanese-American woman in some Kansas tank town who was always being rung up by her local paper to get her reaction to this and that. She was quoted over and over, on everything from her opinion of a new park to changes in education policy. From there, the policy spread to encompass communities where the chain felt they might have circulation gains to make.

This led to some desperate moments in newsrooms, as reporters scrambled to find people with the correct address and ethnicity to quote and photograph. I remember hearing of one newsroom-wide message: I NEED A JEWISH PERSON TO REACT TO THE DEATH OF THE POPE. MACOMB COUNTY ONLY!!!! CAN ANYONE HELP??? There were stories of bushes being beaten for African-American deer hunters and ice fishermen. But my favorite story may be from a friend who once covered a July 4 parade in a working-class suburb so white they might as well have been at a Klan rally for all the diversity it had to offer. Suddenly, the photographer spotted a unicorn — a black family! On the other side of the street!

He cut through a marching band, getting to them. Good times.

From my time news-farming, I recall USA Today didn’t really deserve its reputation for shallowness. They had decent Washington coverage and even an above-average health desk, covering everything from exercise motivation to the FDA. But the jokes about deserving a Pulitzer for Best Investigative Paragraph will likely dog them until the paper goes the way of its founder.

So.

Alan and I were out to dinner when the cops in Boston — all the cops in Boston, plus a few more municipalities, it looked like — finally got their man. I woke up early and read the most reputable news accounts of the day, and didn’t come away any more enlightened. I was wrong about the common criminals stuff, but I think David Remnick nailed it with this elegant phrase:

… the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men.

That’s pretty close to perfect, and could describe any number of other victims of testosterone poisoning, including Tim McVeigh.

Finally, I’m sorry to report some more bad news among our commenting community: Brian Igo, who commented here under the handle “baldheadeddork,” died over the weekend. I knew he had been sick for a few months; he last posted something around the time of the Newtown massacre. We were connected via Facebook, and he posted very little there, other than very occasional updates. As I recall, his announcement of it came around the time Facebook started putting those stupid prompts in the text window:

Facebook asks, “How are you feeling, Brian?”

Well Facebook, since you asked, I recently found out I have Stage IV abdominal cancer, and today I learned I may have two years to live with chemo and 8-10 months without.

Anything else you want to know, asshole?

I gather, from subsequent updates, that he kept his sense of humor and grace to the end. Maybe, when J.C. gets back from his vacation, he can do one of his comment carve-outs, as he did for Ashley, Moe and Whitebeard. Then no more! Please!

Sorry to start your week off with a bummer, but it is Monday. Let’s hope the week improves.

Again, sorry for the no-show yesterday. I went to the Michigan SPJ awards, and you know how those things go. Woo. Actually, it was fairly dull, but Bridge got some stuff, and I got to lift a glass with my colleagues and eat rubber chicken. #winning

And then the skies opened, and it rained and rained and rained some more, until it stopped and started raining again. It’s raining now. Radar suggests I’m going to continue to do so for a while.

Well, wasn’t I complaining about how dry it’s been? I believe so. This is what happens when you complain. You get what you asked for.

But it was warm this morning before the rain came, so I went for a lunchtime bike ride. It was very windy, enough that I could actually feel the bike move in the gusts. It’s good to be back on two wheels, even for just a lunch hour.

Surgery is scheduled for May 2, so you’ll have me around a little longer than I previously thought. I’m sure that will be the week the spring will finally burst forth in all its delayed glory. I’ll spend it staring at the floor. Or the mattress. God, I hope they give me serious drugs.

What do we think of the bombing suspects? I think it’ll be interesting to see how long it will take to find them. Via Twitter, the Reddit people already found White Hat Guy in a separate photo — see him walking around the corner at the left side of the flame, minus his backpack, strangely unmoved by the spreading chaos. I guess it could be a fake, but I dunno — it’s what Tim McVeigh did.

More will be revealed, as always. Let’s hope it’s revealed soon.

I have some bloggage, yes:

I love dogs as much as anyone, but even I can’t help but think this isn’t the greatest idea ever — a law to allow dogs in restaurants. Because what could possibly go wrong with a bunch of dogs on leashes around people carrying trays of hot food? Really.

Two pieces on fear, vis-a-vis Boston: Some perspective, from my friend Dave Jones, and a little scolding, from Gawker.

But that’s it, for now. Enjoy your weekend, all.

Good news, bad news about the ol’ peepers. Or peeper, in this case.

We know what’s causing my vision problems. I have a macular hole in one eye, and yes, that’s its actual medical name: Macular hole. It’s just one of those things that can happen as we, ahem, age, although I’d like it noted that I am still well short of the 60-year threshold when these things tend to appear. So anyway, I have this hole, and it needs to be repaired. Which means?

A DOCTOR IS GOING TO STICK A NEEDLE INTO MY EYEBALL AND SUCK ALL THE GOO OUT BEFORE REPLACING IT WITH A SALINE SOLUTION AND AN AIR BUBBLE. And yes, that is indeed what a vitrectomy is. So I guess that’s the bad news, although the ophthalmologist just shrugged; he does these all the time, mostly on people 20 years older than me, and they breeze through it.

The other bad news is, this will necessitate a break from blogging, because the worst part of all this will be the recovery — five to seven days spent in a face-down position 22 hours a day, so the air bubble stays at the back of my eyeball, providing a bandage of sorts that allows the macula to heal. They handed me this ridiculous pamphlet on the way out, showing me all the equipment I can rent for the recovery period. It’s mostly stuff that looks like a chair-massage outfit, with add-ons. “Visit with friends and family using the two-way mirror,” runs one photo caption, showing someone face down in the apparatus, conversing with someone across the room, using, yes, a two-way mirror.

I think I’ll try to get by with a doughnut pillow and my iPad.

I’m told I’ll feel fine, except for five days spent in more or less a plank position, followed by a few weeks of waiting for the bubble to be absorbed, when it’ll be “like looking through a goldfish bowl,” at least out of one eye. But I can drive, and hope to have a more or less normal summer.

As in so many things, the Burns family has come to my aid, only not J.C. this time, but brother Jim, who had retinal surgery a decade ago and did a comic about it. A dark comic, I guess. “Detached” — read it here.

But this won’t happen for a while, so we’re good. I have a feeling I may be figuring out a way to blog in facedown position before the end of it. And as always, we have to offer up two prayers. The American prayer: Thank God I have health insurance! And the karma prayer: Thank God it’s not cancer!

And I really am grateful. Because, as we so often say, it could be far, far worse. It’s just a little eye thing. Requiring a vitrectomy.

So, seeing as I was all tied up with my own personal things today, I don’t have much for you to read. We’re still waiting on news on the Boston bomber, of course. I didn’t spend much time cruising for news today, but I did see this: What is a pressure-cooker bomb and who makes them. (Gawker: They come in handy at the strangest times.)

This, however, was excellent: American daycare, American horror story. The New Republic. Good journalism.

And now I have to go read up about vitrectomies and all that can go wrong with them.

Well, I don’t know what there is to say today other than oh, this again.

There’s apparently a lot more to say, if you’re watching cable news. You know what I love best about C-SPAN? How, when they’re covering a big news event live, like a presidential inauguration or something similar? They shut up. They assume their audience have functional brains and don’t need to have every detail pointed out to them, nor do they need some eyewitness dragged in off the street to say that people were screaming, not when they can observe this fact by simply watching the video, the one that’s running without commentary.

Because they’re not stupid.

I really, really tire of Wolf Blitzer. Why is he always the first guy they go to in these breaking-news deals? He’s awful. So, change to MSNBC, and OMG, it’s Al Sharpton. He’s so freaky-looking since he lost all that weight. It transformed him into the original lollipop person, a giant head balancing over these narrow shoulders.

You wouldn’t think an event like this would need so much embellishment — the meaningless noting that yes, Boston calls itself “the Hub,” of the universe, yes. etc. There’s a subway, too — it’s called the T? I know why this happens. It’s the same reason people jabber through uncomfortable silences, but here’s a thought — let’s just let the silence happen. Sometimes silence is all you need to hear. Sometimes silence is far more eloquent.

We all know how the next 24 to 36 to 48 to 72 hours are going to go. Let’s let them happen. And let’s talk about it.

And if you don’t want to do that, here’s some Asian carp. You know, we’ve proven many times that when we want to make a species extinct, we can do it pretty easily. So why don’t we want to do it with this one?

Let’s mop up the blood.

In West Michigan much of this weekend, where we saw…

…the wild swans of Muskegon:

And one unlucky one:

It was terribly cold, and I stayed mostly off the Internet. But there was this one story, which I think you all will just loooove, becaus so many of you are gardeners, and know how high the stakes are.

Let’s have a good Monday, because that’s pretty much it for me. See you tomorrow.

An all-bloggage day today. I have some photos to dump, so I can delete them from my phone. They actually pertain to a few recent topics. Like? Hair care:

Yes, yet another sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-niche of the shampoo market. Shampoo and conditioner is like snack food — there’s always a new brand extension. I found Mixed Chicks in this section at Target:

The other day I came downstairs and found this lying on the windowsill. Like a turd:

It’s a greeting card. For someone you don’t like, I guess.

Here’s a good animation: Watch the nation get fat, over the last 25 years. I wish I could pause this thing and figure out when Indiana briefly backslid toward thinness, then marched on to Fat City.

Goobing Detroit — tracking the decline of city neighborhoods via the street-view scenes of two search engines, in 2009 and 2012.

If you’re watching “Mad Men,” but not reading T-Lo’s Mad Style dissections of the costumes, you’re not watching “Mad Men.” They’re long — part one and part two, here — and sometimes find things that I’m not entirely sure were put in the scene on purpose, but they’re always worth a read.

The other day I had to ask one of my columnists the other day if she intended to use “awesome” twice in one paragraph. Instead of awesome is for her, and a lot of others.

Oh, sweet weekend. You were here much sooner than I thought, but here you are.

Many many years ago, when I was a mere infant, it seems, a columnist for my paper took offense at Hillary Clinton’s oft-used African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” This has always, always seemed to me to be a simple, even banal, bit of common sense. We look out for one another and especially for children. You don’t learn every single thing from your parents; no family is an island. We all watch a movie about it every year at Christmastime. D’ya know me, Bert? My mouth’s bleedin’!

Anyway, this writer wrote a column with the headline “The village won’t raise my kid,” and oh, the love poured in, fists shaking at that non-cookie baker, Hillary Clinton. Parents raise children, not villages! And so on.

Again, I never understood why this was seen as some big deal. Hillary wasn’t advocating for institutional care or re-education camps or anything else, only decent schools and health care and a functional society that looks after its most helpless members. But my mind doesn’t work the way some do.

Gail Collins recently wrote a column about a chapter in history I knew nothing about — the attempt, by Walter Mondale, to pass a national program of preschool education.

Mondale’s Comprehensive Child Development Act was a bipartisan bill, which passed 63 to 17 in the Senate. It was an entitlement, and, if it had become law, it would have been one entitlement for little children in a world where most of the money goes to the elderly.

…The destruction of his bill was one of the earliest victories of the new right. “The federal government should not be in the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological ideal of great importance,” Pat Buchanan once told me. He was working at the White House when the bill reached Nixon’s desk, and he helped write the veto message. He spoke about this achievement with great pride.

This is preschool we’re talking about. Preschool.

I don’t follow political news as obsessively as some people do, but this story did catch my eye, about an MSNBC personality who said much the same thing. Headline: “Why caring for children is not just a parent’s job.” Fightin’ words!

Of course, common sense tells us we do this every day — entrust our children to others. Relatives, babysitters, scoutmasters, etc. The headline said not just a parent’s job, not not ever. But that didn’t stop the backlash; Rich Lowry’s response is typical, and typically dumb:

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

I just sprained by eyeballs, rolling them. Does everything have to be culture war? Can’t we agree on anything as simple as “kids should be looked after by everyone.” You’d think.

Well, let’s hop to the bloggage and I’ll watch “Southland.”

I’m growing weary of the Roger Ebert stories, but a few gems are still coming down the sluice. This one, by the author of the story that Ebert “hated, hated, hated, hated, hated,” is pretty good.

For you “Mad Men” fans, the complete quips of Roger Sterling.

Bedtime approaches. Let’s have a good Thursday.

Monday is usually my Lansing day, but this week it was Tuesday. Ate lunch with some economists (story planning), at which I learned that economists know the proper plural to “equilibrium” (equilibria).

With the lunch, and the commute, and all the rest of it, it made for a 12-hour day, however, after which all I really wanted to do was pour a glass of wine, grill hot dogs for me and the kid, then have another glass of wine and watch “Top of the Lake.”

However, I have some bloggage you might like:

I’ve been neglecting the work plugs, so please, click and give ’em some love — Bridge had a nice package on guns in Michigan today. You can start with the mainbar here, and click through to the sidebars. Don’t miss this one, though, about a gun-shop owner who’s found himself a frequent theft target.

Also, I’m now the editor of a new sub-section of Bridge, a Sunday commentary section we’re calling Brunch with Bridge. The first two are on the state’s most precious natural resource, H2O.

When you’re done helping keep me employed, you might enjoy this David Simon yarn about an old joke from “The Wire,” featuring a Baltimore Orioles pitcher recently lost to us.

Sorry Michigan didn’t make it in Monday night’s championship game. I did my part, by ignoring it entirely; any interest in my part in any sporting team is the kiss of death.

I hear the game was pretty good, though. Maybe next year.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

Before anyone gets twisty knickers, let me begin by stipulating that Roger Ebert was a fine, fine man and deserved a glorious funeral fully celebrating his amazing life. But I keep coming back to this essential conflict. Ebert, on March 1 of this year:

I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable.

Roger Ebert’s funeral was Monday at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.

It so happens his statement pretty much describes me, although I wouldn’t go with the “lock, stock and barrel” part. My morals and values were shaped by my Catholic upbringing, but I can no longer say with confidence there’s a God watching over us all. I, too, stop short of atheism, because it requires the same certainty. If anyone asks, I say I’m a hopeful agnostic who welcomes a sign from on high, as long as it falls short of Job’s. Well short.

This is what I have always called cultural Catholicism, which is like secular Judaism — yes to the Seder, no to the synagogue. Catholics and Jews have suffered historic prejudice, and this may be why people can shed the belief, but keep the tribalism. Whatever. I don’t go to church anymore, ask very little from it and admire the good works the church still does, bringing God to some truly godforsaken places.

But when I made inquiries about having Kate baptized in the One True, I was presented with a series of conditions — membership in a congregation, my marriage affirmed by the priest, and only then would the original sin be expunged from her baby soul’s criminal record.

And I considered this and decided, you know, I don’t even believe this stuff anymore. And that was that. Guilt dogged me into bringing her back for a while when she was around 2 or 3, and still, the flame could not be coaxed to grow. And then the Scandal broke, and it was game over.

I still feel Jesus out there from time to time, but I don’t mistake it for religion.

So Roger Ebert’s funeral was yesterday. I asked the internet, via Twitter, how a man who wrote, “I cannot believe in God” qualified for a cathedral sendoff, and the best answer I got was, “because he was a member.” He certainly lived a life many Catholics would find admirable, full of kindness and charity and love and joy. But every Mass that is celebrated contains the profession of faith, the Nicene Creed, which begins with these lines:

We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and all that is seen and unseen.

Ebert also said this, about death, in a blog entry after his disfigurement:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear…I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

Those must have been some very strange prayers Monday, for the soul that animated Ebert’s life and consciousness, and especially the Nicene Creed, which ends:

We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.

I hope someone had enough of a sense of humor to add, “Or, y’know, whatever.”

And if you’re wondering why I can’t turn my head to this mild inconsistency, this is what was going on in the Archdiocese of Detroit yesterday:

A Detroit professor and legal adviser to the Vatican says Catholics who promote gay marriage should not try to receive holy Communion, a key part of Catholic identity.

And the archbishop of Detroit, Allen Vigneron, said Sunday that Catholics who receive Communion while advocating gay marriage would “logically bring shame for a double-dealing that is not unlike perjury.”

Never ever ever ever ever going back.

Neil Steinberg attended the funeral, and asked much the same question:

Mass was officiated by a trio of priests — Monsignor Daniel Mayall, parish pastor of Holy Name, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, St. Sabina’s firebrand and the Rev. John F. Costello, special assistant to the president of Loyola University, who delivered a homily that showed off his Jesuit training by explaining — without ever drawing attention to the fact he was explaining — a question perhaps on the mind of many: how Chicago’s most famous agnostic and public doubter of all doctrines ended up being delivered up to heaven at the city’s preeminent Catholic cathedral.

The answer: He found God — well, a version of God, Costello said, “a new God, one of ironic compassion, of overpowering generosity, of racial love” — at the movie theater.

Change of subject!

I think I may have mentioned, Kate’s bass teacher, Dan Pliskow, is well into his 70s and a wealth of information about jazz history in this very jazzy city. He played in the house band at the Playboy Club for a time in the early ’60s. He recently started uploading his vast photo archive to the Internet, and I asked if he had any Bunny pictures. He did:

Click to enlarge, gents. But he also had this in the file:

Speaking of Catholic priests. When the club opened, it was announced that the Bunnies would work for no base wage, tips only. The unions responded by picketing the club during its preview run, and a few malcontents slashed tires and convertible tops of visiting guests. They didn’t screw around. Although you should spare no tears for the Bunnies, who earned dolla dolla bills, y’all, for as long as they could tolerate the heels, the smoke and the mobsters.

Everyone always looks at the boobs in those outfits. I think what makes them is the cuffs and collar.

Sorry for no update yesterday. We were invited to a “Mad Men” party and it ran through my blogging time. And so the week begins.

I was as surprised as he was. Nice camouflage.