Welcome to Sunday morning, every newspaper fan’s biggest day. The morning stretches before you, with thousands and thousands of words to choose from. Here are the two that arrived at my house this week:

As you can see, the Freep took its 9/11 package pretty seriously. They’re doing this more often of late — making a magazine-style front page, with only one story, rather than the traditional layout. And for a day like Sunday, lots of papers did the same.

I gotta say, this photoillustration didn’t do much for me. Of the thousands of images to choose from — and you can see the other newspaper, above, for some lovely ones — they dig up the same old greatest hits and screen them over a flag, but OK, artistic choice, whatever. And as it turns out, the illustration is a perfect match for the copy. Anyone? Anyone?

How could we have possibly expected anything else? I knew you-know-who would have something to say about it; in the clever words of one of you on my Facebook page (Baldheaded Dork, I think), Mitch made his bones as the Grim Reaper’s toastmaster, and this was a very big banquet. But there were other people involved in this decision, to make this the most prominent story in the paper, to back it with the judgment of a dozen editors. Someone, many someones, read this and said, “Yep, this is what our readers want.”

I said the illustration perfectly captured the story. Mitch Albom’s column was a virtual cliché salad with a side of mush, served up with his standard tricks, italics, repetition and those dumb, one-sentence paragraphs he loves so much.

Like this.

And like this:

They are dead. He is dead. We are alive. We are changed.

They are dead.

You wish this anniversary could change that. You wish 10 years was some sort of MAGIC release date, that the murdered souls of Sept. 11 could return, their suffering ended, their incinerated bodies recreated from the dusty air of lower Manhattan and the rubble of the Pentagon and the muddy earth of a Pennsylvania field, allowed to pick up their lives wherever they were headed that morning, to the office, to the subway, to breakfast, to another city.

They are dead. That will never happen. Their children are teenagers now. Their teens are adults. They exist only in memories, in family stories, in photo albums and attic boxes and troubled dreams.

No roll call today will bring them back — not even one read by presidents and governors. No etching of their names in a memorial will re-animate them. They stand as the fallen.

What the hell is he talking about? I wish an anniversary could bring the dead to life? Sure, why not? I also wish I had a dog that didn’t poop or pee. I wish I had a money tree in my yard. I wish Ashley didn’t die. I wish I had some all-caps MAGIC I could call on, but most of all, I wish I had Mitch Albom’s job, which is to churn his MAGIC pot of hackneyed usage and faux-profundity once a week in the op-ed section of what was once a respected newspaper and is now just another heat ‘n’ serve from the Gannett kitchen.

I love some of these clauses — not even a roll call “read by presidents and governors” will bring them back. A better hack would have stopped at presidents. It’s the “and governors” that gives the line its comedy.

It so happens that all the columnists were called upon to contribute something, and no one, even the good ones, hit anything out of the park. But Mitch pegged the needle on the Smarm-o-Meter, once again, by observing that yes, yes, we have changed, and yet, life and love does, and always will, go on.

Because we weren’t sure about that before. You know, there was an attack on American soil, and maybe all life would have stopped, and taken the love with it.

This guy is paid $250,000 a year by the Freep, I’m told. For that sum, he is apparently not required to make a phone call to one of the dozens of smart people, many of them clergy, who would pick up for him, who might have offered a new perspective or original observation about this tragedy. He’s not required to say something that hasn’t been said a thousand times. He just phones this shit in, and collects the check.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this nonsense were confined to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and other more fitting holidays. But this was a profound national tragedy, and this is what he comes up with. I ask you.

Compare what he said with this brief passage from Bill Clinton’s speech at Shanksville, Pa. this weekend. That’s how you speak a simple message from the heart, people.

Ugh.

For a palate cleanser, I suggest you read Michael Heaton’s account of covering the story as a working reporter. Might be a little inside baseball for you civilians, but I enjoyed it. The hardhat gambit! Genius.

Or, you could read the final, definitive apology of the guy who started the “tourist guy” Photoshop hoax. He’s Hungarian, a nation that our own Alex often informs us has a distinct sense of humor. Let’s invade them, and fix that.

Since we were talking about it last week, whaddya know — a piece on graphing calculators.

This I present without comment.

And with that, I should wrap up and move out.

* Today’s headline explained.

PBS reran a “Frontline” documentary on the 9/11 aftermath as part of its special programming this week. “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” is one for you armchair philosophers, or at least Jeff the Mild-Mannered. It’s “Frontline” and public broadcasting at its best, a deep dive into the big questions raised by that day, which all boil down to the biggest one: “Why, God?”

At two hours, it’s a long commitment, but the video online is broken into chapters, which lend themselves to watching in 15-minute chunks. But it takes at least two hours to do what “Frontline” does best, i.e., not settle. The throughlines are a handful of people who lost loved ones that day, and how they integrated the tragedy into their spiritual selves, how they were changed. One woman is still angry and bitter over the loss of her fiancé, and lost her faith over it. Another found it deepened. The climax of the piece comes when two opposing voices consider the most searing images of that day — the jumpers, of course. One says that if you want proof God is a fantasy, look at that, because surely no loving God would throw those innocent souls out the windows of a burning building to die that way. Another says that if you want proof of the divinity within ourselves, look at the people who jumped, holding hands, to give comfort to one another in the final seconds of life. The whole passage is set to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which was a bit much, but then again, if there’s ever been a time to use it, that’s the montage.

It all left me with the feeling that if we doubt that God is created in our image, here’s a nice bit of video evidence. I was struck by the remarks of a Lutheran minister who participated in the first healing service at Yankee Stadium, the one that featured clergy of all faiths, Christian and otherwise, even Islam, who joined hands to pray in a moment of spiritual solidarity. In the insanity of the aftermath, it could look, depending on your point of view, like everything from kum-ba-ya multiculti mush to a statement of our strength as a nation to something else. This particular minister got the something else — letters from his fellow Lutherans, calling him out for daring to stand on a stage with other religious leaders and present the dangerous heresy that they might be legitimate, too. They called for his collar.

It reminded me of the moment in my own newsroom, when a staffer offered an op-ed that said that very thing, more or less, a sentiment that would likely have gone over like gangbusters in Fort Wayne. The editor-in-chief put his foot down, however, and spiked it, earning the Strange New Respect Award from me, a moment that said, OK, this bullshit stops here. No Lutherans are flying planes into buildings, but if you can’t see the parallels with Islamist radicalism, I direct you to chapter 5 of “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.”

Watching those images of the interfaith service now, I’m heartened, the same way I was watching Jon Stewart’s post-9/11 monologue, where he said, “I grieve, but I do not despair.” We have better angels, and sometimes we get in touch with them.

Which seems a good turning point to the bloggage, because we start out with a bad fairy, from where else, Fox Sports! This is recommended, particularly for you Californians. I don’t get the point of the piece — seek out Asian students at USC who know nothing about football, because they’re such nose-to-the-grindstone types, bent on destroying grade curves everywhere, and get them to deliver highly accented wercomes to new Pac 10 members, Cororado and Utah. Is this funny? As the colleague who sent this to me noted:

I’m just dumbfounded. TV networks don’t just throw anything on the air. They discuss stories in meetings, they plan them and review them. Who on earth said let’s go target only Asians with a poor grasp of English, take advantage of that deficiency and then make fun of them on national television? Astounding.

Via Eric Zorn, yoga is annoying. Why? Well:

There are teachers and students who think flexibility is some kind of indication of how good a person you are. While we certainly hold tension, trauma and rigidity in our limbs and joints and muscles, there is no reason to imagine there’s some absolutely direct correlation between how well we can move and how functional or healthy our mind is. I seriously doubt that Albert Einstein or Susan Sontag had less flexible minds than, I don’t know, Rodney Yee. My point is, some physical limitations can be aided through the practice of yoga and some can’t and no one needs the increased pressure of someone telling them, every time they strain to get their heels on the floor in Downward Facing Dog, that this is because their mind is all screwed up.

So if your teacher tells you that we hold a lot of stuff in our hips and hamstrings and as we begin to let this stuff go and become our authentic selves we will be able to wrap our arms around ourselves eight times, look around the room. You will probably see a guy who can do that, while smiling, and I’ll bet that you will eventually hear from someone in the class about the time he flew into a rage and broke a car window.

And with that, I’m off to take advantage of a temporary break in the rain to get a bike ride in. Happy weekend, all.

It rained all day yesterday. Every time I checked the radar for an idea of when it might stop — the wind was blowing, so it should have been headed somewhere — it seemed the same little scrap of precipitation was more or less circling over southeast Michigan. Sometimes it would rain hard, sometimes it would just drip a little, but it never actually stopped.

So when Kate came home with her school-supply list, it seemed like a good time to hit Staples. As Staples go, ours is probably a bare-minimum footprint, tucked as it is into a pre-war urban neighborhood. Still, it has plenty of parking, although it’s rare to see more than a dozen cars there at a time. Not last night. No supply lists were mailed or posted online in advance of the school year; students show up on day one with a pen, and come home with a list. Which means that instead of shopping the sales in August, or spreading the purchase out over a couple of weeks here and there, every parent in the district is at Staples on the second evening of the school year. I saw more familiar faces than at the orientation meeting the previous night. And after all the binders, paper, pens and suchlike had been thrown in the cart, I confronted the big purchase — the graphing calculator. The least expensive of the three acceptable models was sold out. The second one was in stock, for a mere $125.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked the nice Staples guy who was helping me sort things out. I looked at the bulky package, and noted all the selling points — acceptable for use during the SAT/ACT! USB cord included! Carries you through algebra II, calculus and trigonometry! “Does it make coffee or something?”

It does not. It just costs an arm and a leg. The priciest option — the one with the color screen — was $150. So the Texas Instruments TI-84 it was, and no, they didn’t have any pink ones. I’m told the cost will drop to $109.99 after mail-in rebates, which I am so totally getting. The cashier asked if I’d like to make a donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Detroit, which will use the money for school supplies. Oh, hell yes. I can’t imagine being a parent in that city, with all the mountains you must climb just to get your children an education, confronting the news that now your high-schooler needs a $100 calculator to take geometry. Take my money, please.

At least I’m enrolled in the rewards program.

In a college TV production class, we were required to write and perform in a 30-second commercial for a product of our choosing. Mine was a Casio four-function hand-held calculator. My selling point was that you don’t need a square-root key to balance your checkbook. “It adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides — what more do you need?” I got an A.

Amusing detail from the product listing in the Staples circular: Among the classes the TI-84 is suitable for? “English/Language Arts.” Ha ha ha ha ha.

A big teaching chore awaits me today, so here goes with the bloggage:

A Texas wildfire on the march. A YouTube video, but taken with a tripod. As irritating as all-day rain can be, the alternative can be far worse. Actually, whenever I see the meteorological contrasts our country is capable of, I think about the day, which I expect to see in my lifetime, when the southwest finally stops hemming and hawing and makes its case for a transcontinental water pipeline to bring some H2O from chill, overcast and soggy Michigan to sunny, warm Arizona. That’s the day I start pouring sugar into bulldozer gas tanks.

While we’re at YouTube, a friend posted this clip from “2001: A Space Odyssey” today — Hal’s death scene. I’d forgotten how moving it is. Hal was voiced by one of the actors from the Stratford Shakespeare company, and if you want to know how to make a computer voice emotional without changing its machine-like quality by one iota, well, there’s your scene. I don’t know how he does it, but I guess that’s why he’s the pro.

And while we’re still on YouTube, this was served as a “related” video to the fire clip — a Pomeranian puppy, howling. We aren’t amusing ourselves to death, we’re drowning in Cute.

At the goading of some of you, who were discussing it in comments, I turned on the GOP debate last night. Good. GOD. A nation of more than 300 million, a vulnerable president, and this is the alternative? Was that a cheer I heard when the Texas death penalty was mentioned? Who are you people?

Via Mitch Harper in the Fort, a look at Southtown Mall in that city, late, unlamented, but one of the city’s fabulous ruins, for a time. I forgot about that Orange Julius.

Finally, for a good cry, this, the eternal mystery of the human heart.

And I think that’s it. I can smell weekend in the air — can you?

We had a whack Labor Day weekend — Friday’s and Saturday’s temperatures were in the high 90s, and by Monday, they’d fallen 40 degrees, which sort of ruined my plans to spend summer’s final day at the pool, listening to the traditional last-day DJ set. Oh, well. Kate and I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” on one of the steamy days, because sometimes you just need the extra kick only movie-theater air conditioning can provide.

I was delighted to be delighted by the film, which was great fun and surprisingly moving and aw hell MONKEYS ON THE RAMPAGE OOK OOK OOK. I’m sorry trailers nowadays have to give away the whole damn movie, because it would have been wonderful to have the big battle scene take you by surprise, but no. Everyone who’s even seen a TV ad knows it happens on the Golden Gate Bridge. The CGI effects are wonderful, with some liberties taken. Here’s an actual chimp:

Here’s the digital chimp, Caesar, from the film:

As you can see, the unstable pharmaceutical substance that gives the ape species its super intelligence also gives it standard-issue human eyes. Eyes were the secret of E.T., too, although I hated that movie and would happily have subjected the little extraterrestrial to a full government interrogation. Chimpanzees I can identify with. But it’ll take more than eyes to make me fall.

Anyway, “Rise” needed a subtitle: The radicalization of a young primate, say, or a sexier poster line: Abu Ghraib, with even more hair than Khalid Sheik Muhammed. The apes rise for very good reasons, and the battle on the bridge would be commemorated in heroic sculpture once the new ape society is in place, but we have to leave something for the sequel.

Yesterday was the first day of school around here, and the weather stayed cool, segueing into the sort of overcast and chill rain today that includes everything but the Goodyear blimp flying a banner: IT’S OVER, FOLKS. I’m not entirely devastated by it; there’s always a point at which you’re ready to start wearing long pants again. I did buy a pair of new Teva sandals on late-season clearance, and I love them so it would be nice if I could continue showing my toes for a few more weeks. So let’s jump to the bloggage, showing our toes all the while:

Jim at Sweet Juniper took the kids to Sleeping Bear Dunes this summer, and had trouble making the climb. Fortunately, he gave us an account of the experience. Funny.

Don’t let Joe Nocera’s column about the loss of middle ground in Washington make you think you’ve read it all before. There’s some good detail here:

“This is not a collegial body anymore,” (Rep. Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee) said. “It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That’s what Congress has come to.”

Alan and I went to Windsor for dinner one night last summer, and it was sorta meh. Windsor used to have a thriving restaurant scene, I’m told, and U.S. visitors came often to its Italian, Chinese and other districts. Now that you need a passport and a tolerance for potential border searches, business has fallen significantly. Yet another 9/11 story, this on the explosion of the border-control industry in our region. It was a good decade to wear a badge, apparently. One day, perhaps we naked apes will rise in revolt.

And with that, I must skedaddle. Holiday weeks mean extra work.

For a few days now, I’ve been tossing links into a pile for a 9/11 anniversary post, probably with an opening paragraph about how much I hate anniversary journalism, but they’re getting so numerous I’m wondering if it isn’t time to jump the gun a bit.

We all have our 9/11 memories, ideas and conclusions, and I’m sure people will share them in comments. But when I look back, and look forward a bit, the overarching theme that stays with me is this: Crazy Talk.

When I was culling my old columns for wayback week, I winced at my post-9/11 thoughts, and winced further, thinking of some of the things others I knew or read said at the time. It was such a jarring event, so unsettling to virtually everyone, that I’ve come to grant blanket amnesty for whatever came out of your mouth or keyboard from September 11 through, say, December 31, 2001. Nearly four months should be time enough to come to our senses, from freaked-out Maureen Dowd (who nearly collapsed in a puddle of anxiety, and shared every word with her suffering readers) to the far worse “warbloggers,” people like James Lileks and his “give me the gun, show me the cave” snarling about going mano-a-mano with Osama bin Laden. Ego te absolvo. Go and sin no more.

Of course, most people didn’t get the second part, and 9/11 became the precipitating event for the culture war to really ramp up, to go from a series of skirmishes to a full-out take-no-prisoners scorched-earth campaign, or, as the now-retired blogger the Poor Man called it, the War on Straw.

One of the battles was over what was the correct response to the events, and I have to admit this: When the cable networks all stopped showing the video of the planes hitting the towers, on some mutually agreed-upon idea that to do so was too painful for those who’d lost loved ones in the event, I was disappointed. I couldn’t watch that enough. I still can’t. The images were so astounding they achieved a terrible beauty. But you couldn’t say so, then. Someone was always policing the conversations for wrongthink, and would scold you. On their stupid warblog.

I worked my way through New York magazine’s special issue, “The Encyclopedia of 9/11,” over several hours the other day when I was down at Wayne. Its bite-size bits were convenient for reading between students, and conveyed the same slide-show effect memory has.

But it wasn’t until I read this piece, by Stanford English professor Terry Castle, about remarks made in the aftermath by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, that I said, yep.

You probably don’t remember this minor detail — I didn’t — but here’s what Stockhausen said at a music festival in Germany a few days after 9/11:

The events of 9/11, he’d enthused, were “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” Things had gone from bad to worse to incendiary when, like Batman’s Joker, he warmed to his theme: “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying; just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing.”

A crazy thing to say, no doubt. I’m not even entirely sure what he meant by it. Castle goes a little deeper, and comes up with a very Stanford-English-seminar sort of explanation:

At Stanford, I often teach a course on Gothic fiction. …In eighteenth-century aesthetics, the Sublime was anything that by its size, strength, or the danger it posed to human life produced instinctive terror and awe. Certain natural objects, philosophers like Kant maintained, were necessarily sublime: erupting volcanoes, tempests, huge waterfalls, ferocious beasts, racing floods, swiftly enveloping darkness, and so on. But man-made phenomena could also be sublime: ancient ruins, grim fortresses, the interiors of great cathedrals, colossal towers, pitch-black dungeons, and the like.

The theory held that when sublime objects were contemplated from a position of safety—when, say, one saw a volcanic eruption from a great distance, or even just read a description of one—the results could be thrilling and pleasurable. Unmediated sublimity terrorized, yes, but representations of sublimity produced excitement, a monster-rush of euphoria. The point was not lost on eighteenth-century Gothic novelists; like disaster filmmakers today, they realized that, skillfully packaged, things otherwise dread-inspiring could be a source of perverse yet intoxicating delight.

Castle goes on to say that when she teaches this course, she sometimes shows slides of paintings in this tradition, interspersed with photos from the World Trade Center, similarities that couldn’t be more obvious.

Lots of people said crazy things after 9/11, but lots of people said things that were simply difficult to hear. Barbara Kingsolver, for one, who spoke of jingoism and censorship, and no longer being able to regard an American flag with “unambiguous pride.” And then there was the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who refused to get out of bed to look at what was visible from her apartment window that day, at least not until the second tower collapsed, infamously said later, “I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.” Not crazy, but self-consciously provocative in such an oozily gross way it still grates.

Who remembers the widely circulated email — or maybe it was an article somewhere — about the best way to stop another in-progress hijacking? Carry a can of Spam or other tinned pork, and throw it at the jihadis, who would quail before it like Kryptonite. And speaking of email forwards, how about the endless, witless urban legends people were always passing along? Ten (or five, or six, or 22) NYC firefighters were found safe in the rubble, because they’d been driving a sturdy American-made, gas-guzzling SUV. Some other guy surfed the rubble down from the 100th floor and lived to tell about it. (That one is actually in the New York compilation. Very thinly based on fact, that one.) How many times did you get sent a picture of the towers rebuilt in the shape of a thrusting middle finger, or the slide show of photos set to Enya music? It got to where my email was as much a curse as boon. I stood in line behind a woman in the checkout line at Target — doing my duty, shopping for the economy — who wanted to discuss in maddening detail with the clerks the fact 911 is also the emergency number, and isn’t that just fascinating? I actually stopped reading U.S. news sources for a week or two, preferring to stick to comparatively sober Europeans, an early advantage of the internet.

Did anyone save any of this electronic ephemera? Someone must have. I don’t know if I’d like to revisit it, not yet, but it might be interesting to view the scar.

What about you? I could scarcely take my eyes off the TV for days. Our digital cable was installed that afternoon, which necessitated the cable guy disconnecting me for about 45 minutes, and I nearly went nuts. When he hooked up the new box and the news reappeared on the screen, I said, “Thank God.” The guy looked a little quizzical, then glanced back at the screen. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Crazy, huh?” It wasn’t much longer before Ashleigh Banfield freaked out while questioning a city official: “Are there bombs in the sewers?!? We’re getting reports there may be bombs in the sewers!”

I guess the cable guy was right.

As it turned out, there were no bombs in the sewers, nor truck bombs on Illinois interstates, nor poison in municipal water supplies. Al Qaeda never attacked Chicago, or Los Angeles, or Disney World. All those warbloggers never got to swing their hammers. Osama bin Laden turned out to be Brer Rabbit, and we dove into the briar patch after him.

Ultimately, when I think of that day I think of the last words so many of its victims were able to say, the people on United 93, the people calling home from the floors above the fire, leaving messages that would be received after they’d died. One of the rare, perhaps the only, Peggy Noonan column I ever liked made the simple observation that when people know they’re doomed, they don’t waste their final moments calling their exes or horrible bosses or estranged family members to tell them how much the caller always despised them. Rather, they call their friends and families to say the same words they’d said only hours before, in many cases: I love you.

The other day I was driving somewhere, and heard Scott Simon read parts of this obituary for Jack Layton, a Canadian politician known for his contrariness. He died of cancer in August, and this was the last thing he told his countrymen, in a final letter released after his death:

“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

Not so crazy in the end, I guess.

A few final links:

Hank Stuever rounds up some — but not all — of the TV observances.

The memorial at Ground Zero, now nearing completion.

Finally, if you have WSJ access, what if the disaster had happened a decade later? You’d never get off Facebook.

Have a good week, all.

What, your gourmet nut market doesn’t feature a Jacko impersonator? Move to Detroit.

Is there a curse more cruel than a blank page and a blinking cursor? (Well, duh — cancer, pestilence, ungrateful children.) My mind feels as empty as a bucket at the moment, my concerns few and my resources close at hand (coffee). I moved out to the living room to write because Ruby’s here, posing. For a while she held the stretched-out-low-ears-up position, a relaxed rabbit yoga favorite. But then I came into the room and FEAR RUN PREDATORS, but she stuck around, washed herself for a bit, binkied on the couch and did the Watership Down stretch, so I guess she’s feeling pretty good today.

Labor Day weekend, the end of summer. We’ll get another month of shirtsleeve weather, maybe two, but school starts Tuesday and a new schedule will take over the house. I’m googling “new ideas for school lunches” and otherwise meandering around the internet in search of inspiration, which I am not finding. I did find this, however:

May I just say how tiresome I find the Gannett YourCityNameHere.MomsLikeMe.com section? I vividly remember early motherhood, how isolated and unsure I felt, how much I wished my best friend lived next door, and I suppose that audience is a fat pigeon waiting to be plucked, a sheep ripe for fleecing, but please. A section like this on a newspaper’s website automatically drains 50 IQ points from everything that comes in contact with it. MomsLikeMe are always feeling outrage over something stupid, like a T-shirt. For a while I was clipping particularly dumb MomsLikeMe copy, hoping to get a column or essay out of it, until I found the research too tiresome and depressing. When they’re not expressing outrage over T-shirts, MomsLikeMe are looking for lessons in disaster. The stupidest reaction piece to any breaking-news story is the “experts advise on how to talk to your kids about what just happened” angle; it makes steam toot out my ears in comical cartoon fashion. I wonder if the abandoned draft of that piece still sits in my Google Docs…why hey, it does! Started and abandoned in the summer of 2009, here’s how it went:

It’s been a bad year for teen drivers in metro Detroit. Early this summer, five young people died when their car was hit by a train. Just a month or two later, a car being driven at an insane speed entered a subdivision, lost control and hit a brick welcome sign with enough force to fold the car almost 90 degrees and kill all three occupants, ages 19, 17 and 19.

The first story had everything — a teen driving with a suspended license, a 14-year-old victim who’d just been scolded by her mother, eyewitnesses, even a security-cam video of the incident. The second was nearly as vivid; the speeding car clipped a riding lawn mower in the instant before the crash. You’d think a newspaper staff would have all it could handle just reporting the bare facts, but when I looked at the Detroit Free Press website on day three of the train-crash story, there was something more, a “refer line” to a related story.

Is crash a teachable moment? beckoned a link. After the second accident, a similar come-on: Local parent says her “heart is just breaking” over this news.

Not so long ago, these would have been links to a sort of hand-wringing sidebar that seeks to make sense of the senseless, in which an “expert” from a local university or hospital advises parents on how to discuss the tragedy with teen drivers, or some such earnest mush. For a while, “reader service” was all the rage among newspaper editors, and it was thought this kind of carbuncle hanging off a big story would help the bad news go down easier.

But it’s a different world in newspapers today. Both links took me to something even worse than advice from a pediatrician: A “moms like me” website.

With modern families scattered coast to coast, the internet provides the support your mother used to, before she retired to a golf course in Scottsdale. Today’s moms have it so much easier, free to turn on Nick Jr. and sit with their laptops in an electronic coffee klatch with her girlfriends, wherever they may be. The mom sites — city-dot-momslikeme.com is the Gannett brand, but there are others — are looking to cut the contemporary mother out of the newspaper-readership herd and heap her with lots of specialized content. Or, as Indianapolis Star editor Dennis Ryerson wrote in 2007, announcing Indianapolis’ mom-site debut:

“Moms represent a critical user group with huge buying power and a longing for outside contacts and advice. They lead incredibly busy lives and want information that is easy to access, full of utility and as warm and refreshing as their own children. IndyMoms.com focuses on three main elements: social networking, calendars, and photos, lots of photos of children having fun. It’s a living, breathing site where moms meet each other and set their own agenda.”

So far, so good. As a former newspaper journalist myself, I can hardly argue with any publisher wanting to find a new way to make a little money in this dying game. But as a reader, I resent it when I click the second link, the “heart is just breaking” one, and read this:

“talking about being a safe driver, yes, yes, but there were more passengers killed than drivers, so it seems we need to moreso focus on talking about keeping yourself from being an unintentional victim of someone else’s bad judgement, and that is harder. I dunno why I started this thread… check, I know, my heart is just breaking and I had to say something but I just don’t know what to say”

Those earnest sidebars about how to talk to your kids about 9/11 suddenly seem positively Pulitzer-worthy.

—–

2011 me again: Eh, a good start, but I’m not sure where I wanted to go with it. To say MomsLikeMe sux? That’s a blogger’s job nowadays, so here you go. Funny how Ryerson said moms lead “incredibly busy lives.” To read a MomsLikeMe site, you’d think all they had to do was sit around reloading their browsers and pasting dumb Facebook statuses. MomsLikeMe, take your kids to the park — you’ll be a happier mom, and so will your kids.

And now look what happened — I got some inspiration. Nothing like coffee, a rabbit and the Gannett Corp. to give the morning a push.

I guess I’ll take Labor Day off with the rest of the proletariat, so look for me again on Tuesday. A little bloggage before I go? Sure:

I have but a single rabbit, but Coozledad’s vegetarian petting zoo is far more populated. Hello, Skinnerbox.

Uncle Sam puts on his suin’ pants. I’d say it’s about time, but I’m sure someone will figure out a way to spin this as detrimental to the financial industry at this critical juncture in the economic crisis.

A week in the red tent: A year of Biblical womanhood, taken literally.

With that, I wish you a fine weekend. See you Tuesday.

Our local NPR affiliate carries a show called Soundcheck, and on my drive home yesterday I caught a feature called the Soundcheck Smackdown, which on most days sounds like the arguments between the record-store clerks in “High Fidelity,” only not as funny.

Yesterday’s discussion was over the most influential figure in popular music in the last quarter-century. The host nominated Steve Jobs. Most of the rest of the free world disagreed. I noted many of the comments were yet more of the Steve Jobs hate that some have been expressing since the Apple CEO stepped down from his position, presumably to await the fate coming for us all.

A couple stipulations here: Y’all know I’m a Mac girl. I don’t revere Jobs in any way, although I do respect him. I’m on record as saying, “It’s an operating system, not a religion,” despite how many people want to treat it as such. My loyalty to Macs goes back to when I bought my first computer in 1994, and learned that formatting a floppy in the Windows OS would require a series of commands including colons, backslashes and the like. In the Mac, I’d get a window that said, “This appears to be an unformatted disk. Would you like to format it?” Sold. I knew, when I handed over my credit card, that I was paying a steep premium for that ease of use, but I was a total dolt with MS-DOS, and I knew that if the curtain of Windows was ever pulled back — and it often was, with that generation of PCs — I’d be powerless.

In subsequent years, both systems have improved immensely. But I like my Macs, and will remain a customer. They speak my language.

During those years, I occasionally come across someone who will remark, “Oh, you have one of those toy computers,” when they see the apple on the case. “When are you going to buy a real one?” I sometimes ask them if they’d buy a car you had to raise the hood on several times a week, just to get it started. A computer is a tool I use to do my work. I don’t want to spend time fixing my tools.

But man, ever since Jobs announced his exit from the company’s top office, the vitriol. Much of it has been in comment sections and hence, not credible, but you have to wonder about a person who would cheer the impending death of someone because that person made a product they disapproved of — that wasn’t poison gas or electric chairs.

I’ve been particularly interested in Jobs’ patents, a story that splashed in the big papers the day after his announcement, which I have to figure was planted by Apple. To be frank, I don’t know if I’d like to work for him — while an undeniable nurturer of creativity, he also had the sort of micromanaging style that has always made me nuts. That said, he had enough creative people who would die for him that I imagine he kept it under control when he had to.

What a late start today. Sorry, I’m down at Wayne, meeting with my students and writing in between. So this blog by Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money strikes a chord, about the financial bind too many college students find themselves in today:

I graduated from college in 1982, in the middle of what would turn out to be the worst post-WWII recession until the current mess. But I had no debt, because I went to an excellent public university that charged very low tuition. This, I realize in retrospect, made a huge difference in regard to my psychic as well as economic health. A few years later I went to a top state law school for not exactly free, but for a low enough price that I could earn the total cost of tuition from summer jobs. Today if I had done exactly the same thing I would be graduating with easily six figures of non-dischargeable educational debt at 7.5% interest.

A couple weeks ago, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice now running the state’s Department of Human Services was the human face on a policy change that ripped the food-stamp rug out from under thousands of Michigan college students who had previously qualified for same. In a staggering Marie Antoinette moment, she said those students should “get a part-time job, like I did,” if they had trouble putting food on the table. I meet my students at this urban university, and I am stunned and awed by the challenges they’re juggling to go to school. Part-time job? Most of them are working at least two, and many are full-time workers who wedge classes in around the edges, along with family responsibilities and many others that would, or should, shame a woman who could say such a thing. Never mind financial aid — these young people work harder than I ever did in school. “Get a part-time job?” Why not get a clue instead.

OK, I need a palate-cleanser. I see Mary threw those krazy Kardashian girls into the mix, here if you missed it. The Kardashian Kollection of — underwear, I guess — is for Sears. Yes, they spell it with a K, just like Khloe and Kourtney and Kim. Never underestimate the power of hustling white trash, I always say. Here’s Tom & Lorenzo on one of Kim’s grocery-shopping outfits. (Does she always have her makeup applied with an airbrush? I need to do some research on these girls.)

And with that, I’d best get rolling.

Today is the first day of classes at Wayne State, which means day one of Nance’s Open House, in which I encourage all my public-affairs reporting students to stop by, meet their online instructor face to face, get briefed on my expectations and so on. In the past, this means I would see three or four students today, two tomorrow, and over the next fortnight receive emails from the rest, offering excuses why they couldn’t make it, and promises they’ll be there next week, etc.

However, in a move designed to curb class-shopping, everyone has to be in-and-committed by next week, so maybe it’ll be different this time. We’ll see. I head off to campus in an hour with my stack of student questionnaires, my class list and a hopeful heart. This summer I had three interns and watched them show actual improvement over the course of the term, so who knows? Maybe I can teach them something.

In keeping with the calendar, it’s overcast and dreary. I will probably forget my OneCard and drop my laptop in a puddle. Transitions are hard.

So with little time to spare, let’s hop, bunny-like, to the bloggage:

Dahlia Lithwick on the Cheney memoir:

Who knows why Cheney wants to keep relitigating torture in the face of a factual record that has concluded for the thousandth time that it is neither effective nor legal. Maybe it’s good for his book sales. All I know is that when almost everyone with any expertise in the matter, and any knowledge of the torture program (up to and including Matthew Alexander and John McCain) says that it hurts more than it helps, Cheney starts to sound a little like the crazy lady in the attic.

Detroit — and many other cities — gets an abysmal score for pedestrian-friendliness. The duh passage:

Metro Detroit isn’t unusual. Many developed areas across the country, especially in high-growth suburbs, feature multi-lane roads with shopping centers and housing developments nearby, but no easy way to walk or bike from one area to another.

This has been my No. 1 complaint about newer suburbs since I was old enough to swing my leg over a bicycle, and it’s sort of appalling it’s only now that it’s being discussed. If developers are going to profit enormously by converting farmland to suburbs, platting worm-bundle street plans leading off former country section roads, and not have a simple paved bike or walking/running trail running between subdivisions, they should share in all the misery that comes with getting from one to another via something other than a motor vehicle. Not that they’re likely to lie awake nights under their million-thread-count sheets fretting about it.

Speaking of suburbia, if you didn’t see this yesterday via comments, how Bill O’Reilly used his own local police as muscle in his domestic dispute. As I think Coozledad remarked, the most depressing thing about this is how readily the cops go along with it. You’d think they’d know better.

With that, I’d best get moving. Onward to the temple of learning!

After two years of owning a pet rabbit, I can report they are…inscrutable. Or maybe too scrutable. All I know is that after 24 months of direct observation and regular interaction with us, Ruby remains a puzzle. I can’t figure out what she’s thinking, other than FEAR RUN PREDATORS.

Work or live with animals for a while, and you swiftly learn that discussions of their intelligence is limited by the arrogance of human primates. No, a rabbit can’t invent a malaria vaccine or discuss the works of Marcel Proust, but she can hear an acorn drop three blocks away and react accordingly FEAR RUN PREDATORS. An animal that is tasty eatin’ for everything with teeth and talons eventually evolves defenses to deal with it, and a lagomorph’s are well known — prodigious breeding, fast runnin’. And those amazing senses.

Our wonderful, departed Jack Russell could be an exhausting pet. Anything could set him off on a tirade of barking, and I yelled “shut up” so often I sometimes wondered if my neighborhood nickname was The Screamer. We’d had him for years before one day we were riding in the car, and he was occupying his usual place — back feet on the back seat, front feet on the console, leaning up against both of our elbows, which were keeping him from climbing into the front. He would ride this way for miles, especially if there was food in the front seat, which there was — we’d stopped for dinner, and I’d carried out a doggie bag of pasta with Italian sausage. I’d given him a little and was leaning forward to get him another nibble when Alan said, “Did you feel that? Feel his chest.” I did; it was noticeably hotter than it had been just a few seconds earlier. “I never knew he could glow red that quickly,” Alan remarked. That rapid infusion of blood to power the muscles to make the leap after the prey — whether a mouse, a rat or a slice of sausage — is something we all do, but not as quickly as terriers.

That’s what interests me about animals, and why I tolerate one like Ruby, who, to be frank, doesn’t begin to fill the dog’s shoes. But I enjoy watching her climb to the top of the sofa and stand on her back feet, sniffing the air. I like to watch her do her binky dance in the morning. I like to take her outside to loaf around in her outdoor pen, where she cocks her head and listens to the squirrels and birds. And then I put her inside, adjust the shade and cover and go back in the house, knowing that when I go back to get her in late afternoon, even though I will put her in a clean cage with fresh food and delicious romaine lettuce, she will run from me, because FEAR RUN PREDATORS. It’s her nature — she really can’t help it.

Tuesday. Another lovely day — summer is leaving on a high note. But work still awaits. So, a little bloggage?

I’m sorry, but who could possibly be this stupid? Ahem:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing a new challenge: He’s having trouble raising money from some Jewish donors who mistakenly believe one of his opponents, Michele Bachmann, is Jewish.

Some Jewish donors are telling fund-raisers for Romney, a Mormon, that while they like him, they’d rather open their wallets for the “Jewish candidate,” who they don’t realize is actually a Lutheran, The Post has learned.

“It’s a real problem,” one Romney fund-raiser said. “We’re working very hard in the Jewish community because of Obama’s Israel problem. This was surprising.”

I’d estimate I save at least 80 percent of my email, maybe more. I’ve never, ever understood the “inbox zero” movement, but maybe one of you can explain it. Evidently my strategy isn’t the one to emulate. But it is mine.

OK, time to prep for various teaching-related duties. Sorry for short shrift, but that’s how I roll.