Well, no wonder I have no comments yet today. Another glitch in the WP interface, I think. And I think I’m the glitch. Sorry.

I’m still catching up on this and that from my time away, and one has been the resurfacing of Edward Bodkin, aka the Mad Castrator of Huntington, Ind. His arrest 12 years ago in Dan Quayle’s hometown was said to have monkeywrenched a campaign event for Quayle himself, who was launching his own (very) short-lived presidential campaign around the same time and had to reschedule. It almost certainly would have been a distraction, to have an insane man-gelder competing for the limelight in Family Values City. The contrast would be too irresistible for the New York Times not to point out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You Fort Wayners remember Bodkin, and the 1999 case that hit the city like…well, like an extremely weird story, that’s what. Bodkin was arrested for castrating men. So he assaulted them? No, they underwent the procedure — on a kitchen table in Bodkin’s apartment, which appeared to be in a scuzzy roadside motel — willingly. While he videotaped the procedures, which he sold online. Oh, and he kept the testicles. In jars.

No wonder cops drink.

Anyway, this arrest drew the expected reaction — the morning-radio morons had fun with it, while the rest of us stood around and went wow and weird and whoa. It was left to my colleague Bob Caylor, who somehow hunted down a fetishist in Indianapolis who had the best set of guesses: Some of the “clients” may be transgender, but unable to afford the surgery, so they turn to a guy like Bodkin to either a) do whatever he can do; or better, b) leave them with a mess down there, which they can use to plead for Medicaid to finish it off and tidy things up. Or, the guy said, it’s possible they’re simply very strange body-modification types who have decided that in their true, real lives they are eunuchs, like the people who claim to be amputees, even though they have all their limbs and extremities, and set out to make it so.

I think he directed Bob toward a magazine for enthusiasts. Ball Club, maybe? Bob found some excerpts online that left him a little pale and shaky.

Long story short: Life makes for a very crazy salad of humanity, and Bodkin was one strange crouton.

Because the cops couldn’t get any victims to cooperate with a more traditional charge, prosecutors went for practicing medicine without a license, maxed him out at four years, went home and took a long, hot shower. Bodkin never responded to any pleas from journalists to discuss his fascinating hobby, and he more or less slipped beneath the waves of time.

Until he surfaced, in the comically named Wetumpka, Ala., charged with the very unfunny offense of possession of child pornography:

Sheriff’s officials said they confiscated pornographic materials from Bodkin’s Alabama home, along with devices used to perform castrations and photographs depicting human castration.

There was no immediate evidence he was up to his old tricks, but it suggests that, like your first love, you never really forget it.

Bodkin grew up on a farm, as I recall. After reading, years ago, Dian Hanson’s very cogent thoughts about how fetishes form, I imagine there’s a story there, but I doubt Bodkin will ever tell it.

Best he’s off the street more or less for good now. He’s 68, and the next prison he enters will likely kill him, one way or another.

So. How was your weekend? Ours was lazy enough, probably the last big one of the summer, as fall term at Wayne begins Wednesday and I have a day of orientation between now and then, and of course, Kate starts school the day after Labor Day. Before it slips away, however, I have to ask: Anyone been to a national park this year?

I ask because our original plan for summer vacation was a drive out to Yellowstone. Alan started looking in April for lodging availability in August. I expected it to be tight, but I didn’t expect to hear that every room, in every venue throughout the park, was booked for every night of the summer season. Every single one. I know Yellowstone is popular, but 100 percent? And then I read this, about scalpers dealing in Yosemite campsites, and wondered if there’s something else going on.

If you go to the No. 1 Google site for Yellowstone lodging reservations, you find this disclaimer:

US Park Lodging provides lodging and activity reservations both inside as well as in the gateway communities of the United States National Parks. US Park Lodging is not an authorized concessionaire of any National Park nor are we in any way affiliated with the National Park Service of the Federal Government.

The park’s own affiliate is something else entirely. The last time I visited Yellowstone was before the Bush administration, so who knows? Maybe this is yet another improvement by the Invisible Hand. Is something fishy going on?

Via Eric Zorn, a recent photo of Steve Jobs that suggests the end is drawing near some people — probably Windows users — are happy to have grim fun at others’ expense. Let’s hope he can live the rest of his life without reading Mitch Albom’s extra-stupid column about him.

And with that, Monday awaits. Enjoy it.

Bad news, which some of you mentioned yesterday in comments — my former colleague Mike Dooley died yesterday, from the sort of health collapse that comes after a life a reporter with an Irish name too often feels compelled to live. In what is perhaps a sad commentary on both contemporary journalism and certainly his last employer, his obit was thin and pallid and captured nothing of the man’s essence, which was robust and funny and unforgettable. Better to read excerpts from his popular column, Dooley Noted, which capture what it was like to sit with him at Henry’s, the bar across the street, and hear his stories. My favorite isn’t in there, about riding the press bus on the Dan Quayle 1988 veep campaign, and schooling the national media on the various smells wafting across the countryside. “They didn’t know bullshit from pigshit, Nall,” he roared at his usual volume, set at a time when newsrooms themselves roared with the white noise of phones, typewriters and teletype machines. “Can you believe it?”

Yes, I can. I also believe the story about the time he passed out drunk at a party, and someone used a Sharpie to draw a map of Ireland high on his bald dome, which he wore for several hours before discovering it. I never like to examine the mirror too closely while hungover, either.

Dooley had been failing for a while, and spent his final days at Parkview Hospital, where his friends and colleagues filled up his Facebook page with notes and stories and Godspeeds. I’m told he read them all, and enjoyed them very much.

And while we’re back home again, more news from the Hoosier State: Hank Stuever put me in his book. My former colleague Robin Yocum put me in his book. Tim Goeglein, if Amazon’s “search inside this book” is to be believed, did not. Damn! What’s a girl gotta do to get some credit up in this joint?

Yes, Tim has written his memoirs. I don’t think I’ll be reading them, or at least not buying them. This is why libraries were invented — to read books by people whose income you don’t want to support, but you still want to see what they have to say. Right? I did the 21st-century version of standing over the table at Border’s — first checked for my name, as well as any indication I might be appearing in a spectral, nameless form (“blogger” isn’t in there, either, and the only Nancy has the last name of Reagan). Then I flipped around via the Surprise Me function. It seems Tim’s mom took some classes at IPFW (that’s the Indiana U./Purdue branch campus in Fort Wayne), where professors described the American family as a tool of women’s oppression. He majored in journalism, because of his love for Ernie Pyle. And so on. (The Ernie Pyle school of journalism at IU has “ivy-covered walls,” I learned. Not plagiarism, just trite and unimaginative.) So what is this book’s cornerstone? Amazon copy:

Goeglein’s unique insider account of why he believes most of the 43rd president’s in-office decisions were made for the greater good, and how many of those decisions could serve as a blueprint for the emergence of a thoughtful, confident conservatism. From a fresh perspective, Goeglein gives behind-the-scenes accounts of key events during that historic two-term administration, reflecting on what was right and best about the Bush years. He was in Florida for the 2000 election recount, at the White House on 9/11, and watched Bush become a reluctant but effective wartime president.

An apologia for George Bush. Just what the world needs. Fie.

OK, some quick bloggage, and then I must fly:

Another horrifying story out of Mexico. It just never stops.

A typo — no, an editing mistake — on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Appalling. And etched in stone, literally.

A good weekend to all, especially Irene-dodgers.

Sorry for the nothing-so-far. The morning started busy, got busier, and as we’ve now passed the magic threshold of noon, it looks like we’ve officially put today in the Fail column.

Do I have anything to report? Not much. Do I have any tasty linkage to follow? I have a little:

Via J.C. Burns’ Twitter, the fabulous Oatmeal guides to grammar and usage. The one on “literally” made me laugh out loud. Literally.

So did this: The 10 most insulting things Anthony Bourdain has said about the Food Network. Bonus: Frank Bruni weighs in. Because this stuff is really important.

Oh, get OUT: Moammar Gadhafi had the hots for Condi Rice? That now makes two men who’ve admitted to that particular…can we call it a kink? Noooo. (I won’t tell you who the other one is. He might be reading this.)

And let that be the end of today, eh? We’ll try for better tomorrow.

This is my goal over the next four years, and foolhardy it may be: To get my daughter admitted to the University of Michigan. She doesn’t have to go there. But as I have told her since we moved here:

1) It’s the best education for the money that we are likely to have available to us; however,
2) If you can get into Michigan, you can get into a lot of other schools. We have money saved, and you’ll be able to get more elsewhere. All bridges will be crossed when we get to them. But for now, aim high. Aim for Ann Arbor.

So. Last year she took two courses that offered high-school credit. She got an A-plus in Spanish I, and a B-plus in Honors Algebra, missing the A by a whisker. Still, a very good start, I thought. Earlier this summer, a letter arrived, informing us that we could have those grades entered on her high school transcript as credit only, or grade and credit. I did what I always do with perplexing or disturbing mail — set it aside for the remainder of the summer.

But now the deadline for deciding is approaching, so I called her high school, figuring the counselors were back on the job by now, and sure enough, the phone was picked up by the person I needed to talk to. Explained what I just told you, and asked her opinion.

“Hmm, well, the thing you don’t want to do is take credit for one and grade and credit for the other,” she said. “That’s a red flag.” Noted. Grade and credit for both, then?

“Well, there’s that B-plus,” she said, as though I’d presented her with a dead mouse or something.

“It’s an honors algebra course,” I pointed out. “Accelerated math.”

“There will be many other factors determining whether she’ll get into Michigan,” she said. “But for now, you want to play it safe. We’ve had students with 4.0 averages not get in.” She advised credit-only. I put down the phone with a variety of emotions, but one swam to the surface first — eye-crossing anger. It just occurred to me what my poor, sweet, smart daughter will be up against to join the student body at my state’s premiere university four years hence. She’ll be angling for one of the spots available for kids who aren’t rich, who aren’t Olympic athletes, who contribute nothing special to the diversity profile, and who aren’t — a burr under my particular saddle, because they’re so thick on the ground hereabouts — a Topsiders-and-madras-shorts-wearing, entitled brat whose lawyer daddy is a legacy.

Four years stretch before me, years of applying the whip on the grades front, and winter months scouting the sorts of fascinating summer camps and volunteer opportunities that will make her stand out in this crowded field. All so my sole offspring can get a toehold into the middle class, a stratum her own parents are rapidly sliding to the edge of. All so she can maybe attend a university I had my own experience with a few years back, filled with undergraduates who didn’t have the sense to change out of flip-flops on a February day, among many other dullards. (This really happened. A girl stopped in front of me to adjust her backpack in the vestibule of a building. I looked down, and beheld her toenail polish. The temperature outside was in the low 30s. I asked her why she was wearing rubber sandals. Her answer: “Because my dorm is, like, really hot.”)

I’ve told this story before, about the UM women’s sport-redacted coach, who complained in one of our Wallace House seminars about her players, who stand like children before her, awaiting orders. “They have to be told when to warm up, when to cool down, what uniforms to wear, when to wash them. It’s like they’ve spent their entire life getting into the back seat and being driven to their appointments.” And they have. Their mothers and fathers have functioned as their personal assistants. They’re like the powerful men I know, whose jobs are so all-consuming they’ve come to rely on their wives to run every other aspect of their lives. One gets a weekly allowance. Srsly.

I don’t want to raise that kind of kid.

I told the counselor, “I’d rather she swing for the fences and miss a few than play it safe for the sake of a grade-point average.” She said playing it safe isn’t enough. You must swing for the fences and clear them, every time, to get into a top college.

Personally, I think she’s full of shit. But for now, credit only.

Perhaps you’re wondering where Kate wants to go to school. (Ha! Like that matters.) The only one she’s mentioned so far is UC/Berkeley, because she remembers Telegraph Avenue from our trip a few years back, and “it seems like a cool place.” Maybe if mom writes three best-sellers in the next four years, we can swing it.

OK, time to hop to the shower and embrace the day. A little bloggage:

Via Nancy Friedman, Hollywood clichés in infographic form. Funny.

That Mark Bittman can even figure out a way to improve spaghetti and meatballs. I think I’m going to try this one.

Neil Steinberg considers the new Michael Jordan Steak House in Chicago:

When you can get a fantastic steak three blocks from your office, why go elsewhere? This is not to ignore Chicago’s other fine steakhouses, in no particular order: Gibson’s, Chicago Cut, The Capital Grille, Smith & Wollensky, Ditka’s, Ruth’s Chris, Sullivan’s, Harry Caray’s, Chicago Chop House, Lawry’s — there are many more, but those are the ones off the top of my head, places that I have patronized.

I haven’t been to the new Michael Jordan Steak House that opened this week in the InterContinental, and frankly, as much as I love the hotel it’s in — my wife and I were married there — I don’t plan to go. You have to wonder at the savvy of somebody who could survey the Chicago restaurant scene and conclude: “What this city needs is another steakhouse!”

And I’m off.

Robert Samuelson doesn’t specifically lay the coming death of the “Statistical Abstract of the United States” at the feet of the Tea Party, but given the can’t-afford-it, sorry-we’re-poor attitude sweepin’ the nation, it’s probably a fair charge. For once, I agree with the other mustache I see regularly on the op-ed pages. This isn’t even penny-wise, much less pound foolish:

If you want to know something about America, there are few better places to start than the “Statistical Abstract of the United States.” Published annually by the Census Bureau, the Stat Abstract assembles about 1,400 tables describing our national condition. What share of children are immunized against measles, mumps and rubella? Answer: 92 percent. What state has the highest disposable per capita income? Answer: Connecticut, 33 percent above the national average. How big is the nation’s network of oil pipelines? Answer: 147,000 miles, about triple the length of the Interstate Highway System (46,751 miles).

…In four decades of reporting, I have grabbed it thousands of times to find a fact, tutor myself or answer a pressing question. Its figures are usually the start of a story, not the end. They suggest paths of inquiry, including the meaning and reliability of the statistics themselves (otherwise, they can mislead or tell false tales). The Stat Abstract has been a stalwart journalistic ally. With some interruptions, the government has published it since 1878.

No more. The Stat Abstract is headed for the chopping block. The 2012 edition, scheduled for publication later this year, will be the last, unless someone saves it.

If there’s one thing the 21st century has taught us thus far, it’s that the new coin of the realm is information. Facts. Data. Statistics. What can possibly be gained by this bonehead move? Of course, this isn’t specifically laid out in the Constitution, that divinely inspired document handed down by God Himself to the founding fathers, but criminy, people — do you WANT to live in ignorance? (Don’t answer that, Cooz. No, go ahead and answer it.)

I was living in Indiana during the 2000 census, which featured the long form. Remember that? It was sent to every 10 households or so, and was meant to be a really deep dive into the population, and asked a lot of questions that hadn’t been asked before. The idea was to get a sense of how people really lived — commuting times, square feet per person, how many gay and lesbian households really exist in the country. As a veteran letters-to-the-editor reader and occasional talk-radio listener, I can tell you that there were many who were not at all sanguine about this. Some people look at the sky and see chirping birds and happy trees waving their branches around. Others see black helicopters.

Why are we doing this? What is to be gained by making us dumber? I thought this was telling:

When she learned that the Stat Abstract was threatened, Alesia McManus, library director at Howard Community College in Columbia, started a Facebook page and launched a petition dedicated to reversing the decision. “If the library were on fire, this would be the reference book I would try and save first,” said one response.

Burning the library — that’s a good analogy. Write about that, Bob Greene, you moron.

See what you’ve done, Bob Samuelson? You’ve gotten my dander up. Michael Gerson, you are next:

…the heroes of the Tea Party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats. “If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry,” argues Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek/Daily Beast, “understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.” A recent New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza contends that Bachmann has been influenced by a variety of theocratic thinkers who have preached Christian holy war.

As befits a shadowy religious sect, its followers go under a variety of names: Reconstructionists. Theonomists. The New Apostolic Reformation. Republicans. All apparently share a belief, in Goldberg’s words, that “Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions.”

The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of sharia law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any New Yorker subscriber. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth. The followers of R.J. Rushdoony produce more books than converts.

Oh, very droll. If only I had a Lexis/Nexis account, perhaps I could look up a little Christian alarmism about, say, our current president. Or any of the recent presidents who have called themselves Democrats. Or a few edifying pamphlets about how “outcome-based education” is a secular-humanist plot to brainwash our children, this from the same people who pushed No Child Left Behind and its test mania into the nation’s schools. It so happens I read the Lizza story that Gerson sneers at. I didn’t dwell on the holy war passages, because I was so amazed at this part:

Bachmann’s comment about slavery was not a gaffe. It is, as she would say, a world view. In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with Eidsmoe, her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.

Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”

African slaves brought to America, he argues, were essentially lucky: “Africa, like any other pagan country, was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures.” Echoing Eidsmoe, Wilkins also approvingly cites Lee’s insistence that abolition could not come until “the sanctifying effects of Christianity” had time “to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”

I’m growing weary of tolerating people with crazy-ass ideas. Why is it so wrong to point them out?

This is what happens when a lawn service arrives to cut your neighbor’s grass at 8 a.m. You wake up cranky. As it’s growing late, let’s just go to bloggage and let me get a little work done:

NYT: Why won’t Michelle Rhee talk to USA Today? Because she’s mad at them, that’s why!

I love this, more from the WashPost: Take two chapters of Epictetus and call me in the morning — a new kind of therapist. I think Jeff would like this lady.

Finally, some liberal propaganda about Apple, and a deft point:

So, who is (Steve Jobs)? He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3”, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

Facts? What are those?

It’s taken a while, but I’ve come to terms with the fact photography just isn’t my strong suit. But a good model can cover for a multitude of sins:

Ah, that U.P. sky — wide, clear, humidity-free. Just what the doctor ordered. Especially at sunset:

Behold the Seney National Wildlife Refuge. A CCC project. You know, government make-work welfare-state drudgery. Never created a thing of value, ever. Just look at all that nothingness. Wouldn’t a nice theme park look good there?

When it’s not swallowing 700-foot freighters, Lake Superior likes to loaf around on nice summer days, impersonating the Caribbean:

So peaceful, so pleasant. And on that particular day, not even very cold. Wide, blue, placid. And, probably 20 feet out, damn cold. But beautiful.

And that will be the end of the vacation slide show, and much of the vacation narrative. We didn’t do much. We drove over the bridge, saw some old boats and old friends in Hessel, turned west, arrived at the Green Cottage, aka John and Sam’s ancestral family estate (Sam’s, actually), opened “A Storm of Swords” and barely moved for a week. It was a week in literary disappointments. Me, that I did little else but read yet another goddamn George R.R. Martin fantasy epic, got through hundreds and hundreds of pages, in fact, and still have only 70 percent of it under my belt. And now I have to read the rest of the goddamn things, because I’m committed. I have to find out who Jon Snow’s mother was. I have to see what happens when the dragons reach Westeros. Winter is still coming, and I want to get a feeling for it. And if you tell me that after 12 million pages, all those questions are still unanswered, I need to hunt Martin down and shake that extra middle initial out of him.

As for Alan, he fished the Fox River, which you Hemingway fans know is the one in the Nick Adams stories, and yes, I know the author says it’s the Two Hearted, but it’s not. The one you walk to from the train station in Seney is the Fox. But “Two Hearted” is a far more poetic and literary name than Fox, so he switched them, and let’s let that be the end of it, shall we? Anyway, Alan fished the Fox, or one of the branches. It was about as wide as our bathtub, and no deeper. He caught some fish. They were good fish. He turned them all loose.

And it was nice being in that part of the U.P., which is new to me. I like the look of those old farms, those triumphs of hope over experience, as the growing season is short and the soil is poor. About all anyone raises is hay and beef, not even alfalfa, and I don’t know how you keep a herd growing on grass hay, but I guess they do it in the west all the time, don’t they? Sam’s family place — she’s the fourth generation to own it — used to be a pea farm. They grew seed stock for gardeners, and on maps, it’s still called the Pea Farm, even though peas haven’t been grown there in decades. There’s an orchard, and we made applesauce one day with the early-ripening specimens. Everyone up there has a few apple trees, and besides the obvious reasons to grow apples, there’s the one they didn’t teach you in the Johnny Appleseed unit in school — hard cider for long winters.

Because that’s what the U.P. specializes in. However, I’m glad we got there for a week of its very lovely summer. There was a bald eagle roosting on the point over the lakefront (Big Manistique) on Sam’s property. I assume that means we made it all the way to Real America.

So, I’m glad last week’s retreads seem to have gone over well. I was well and truly off the grid, and had difficulty reading them myself, with half-bar service and the dreaded Edge data network. But I did read all the comments, very…slowly. One…by…one. It was a lesson on what constitutes urgent communication. News was that which was covered by NPR, and little else. So I missed the Kardashian nuptials and anything else that was deemed newsworthy by bloggers and the like. Although someone sent me this, about Rick Perry, and that’s pretty amusing. Beyond that, I don’t have much, and it’s Monday. And you know what that means.

It’s good to be back with all you peeps. Let’s see what the rest of August may hold, shall we?

Eh, a weak one to end Wayback Week, but this one took me back to how pathetic public-sector crime is in the Fort. Penny ante. Small-time. Itty-bitty crooks. Something you can’t say about Detroit, ever.

November 13, 2001

If you’re going to sin, sin big.

Not having the sort of personal relationship with God that many others do, I can’t say whether he grades on the curve. But I do, and there’s something about some of our latest public scandals that is not only troubling, but pathetic. One can feel outrage for an audaciously dishonest public servant. One can feel only contempt for small-time crooks.

At the moment, it’s the great city-county parking garage scandal that’s in the news. Allen County Sheriff Jim Herman disciplined 25 employees of his office for participating in what early news reports called a “ticket-swap scheme.”

You hear this, and you think someone was making traffic tickets go away, which, while hardly the sort of civic scandal that makes jaws drop, at least sounds like something worth doing. The last traffic ticket I got carried a fine of $170, a lot of money where I come from.

But no, these weren’t traffic tickets. They weren’t even moving violations. They weren’t even parking tickets in the sense that we all understand them. They were parking-garage tickets.

It worked like this: First-shift workers parked in the garage. Second-shift workers parked in the garage. As the second-shifters came on duty, they gave their tickets to first-shift employees as they left. The first shift got to leave and pay for only a few minutes of parking; the second shift got away clean because when the attendants left work for the day they raised the gates, effectively making the garage free for everyone.

The punch line: Those employees already have free parking available to them, but it’s a whole two blocks away.

There is only one reaction available to a story like this: “Sin big!”

At this point we must pause to note they don’t call it public service for nothing. Particularly in Allen County, city and county employees accept salaries far lower than those paid a similar job in the private sector. As compensation, they have available a number of options.

They can use their time in publicly supported jobs to build a vast array of contacts in the local power structure, then dive into private-sector consultancy or some other, more lucrative career; they can build a variety of unique skills that others will pay more for; or they can simply console themselves with the fat benefits and Veterans Day holidays and greater job security not available to the non-apparatchiks working elsewhere.

A few years ago, a township trustee was indicted in office for funneling public money to his private pocket. When the details of the kickback scheme were released, you could feel only pity for this man, who flushed his good name away for a sum that after four years barely reached the low five figures.

“It’s like he’s short on his house payment, so he takes $60,” a reporter remarked at the time, sadly.

Sin big! Linda Tripp didn’t do anything explicitly illegal, if you discount perhaps her taping of Monica Lewinsky, but you had to admire her moxie once all the beans spilled. She knew what a federal job is worth, and she hung onto hers with everything she had, even while it became evident she wasn’t doing much of anything for a salary that topped (wheeze!) $90,000 a year, plus a paid holiday on Veterans Day. No hostile Clinton administration could knock her loose.

Public servants, if larceny is on your mind, do it well. Give us a reason to hate you. Open an offshore bank account, grow a mustache suitable for Snidely Whiplash-style twirling, don’t cover your face during the perp walk. Hold it high and sneer.

And take the free parking you’re offered. It’s the cheap stuff that gets you.

A specialty of mine: Take some beloved community event — like the running of the Olympic torch through town — and shit all over it. But nearly a decade later, I remain appalled by how thoroughly corporate money and the accompanying shotcallers have seeped into every crack of public life, as well as how meekly we acquiesce to it.

January 9, 2002

Clear-eyed observers of the Olympic Games – as opposed to those misting up over a plucky-skater-who-overcomes-cancer story on NBC – have noted with a mixture of respect and admiration just how ruthlessly the International Olympic Committee guards its copyrights.

Dressed not in colorful uniforms but business suits, the IOC’s lawyers have taken down violators ranging from the Gay Olympics (now renamed the Gay Games) to any number of Greek-owned diners that had the cheek to call upon their own cultural landmarks and paint the word “Olympic” on the front window. It’s enough to make you think the lawyers should stand on the risers and receive medals for Best Cease-and-Desist Order.

It isn’t news that the Olympics have become a parade of corporate logos, and that the keepers of those logos pay dearly for the privilege of attaching them to the prestige of the Olympic Games. But it isn’t widely known just how far down the line the marketing efforts go, and how carefully the logos are pampered, lest any CEO feel he’s not getting his full measure of reflected Olympic glory.

Take last week’s appearance of the Olympic flame in Fort Wayne. From start to finish, it was a bonanza of feel-good words and, especially, images, most of which contained the logos of the flame tour’s two major sponsors – Chevrolet and Coca-Cola. Why was Linda Jackson chosen to carry the torch and not one of the other news anchors? Because WKJG-TV is an NBC affiliate, and NBC carries the Games, that’s why.

But many in the city might not be aware of how much those sponsorships weighed in the months-long planning process. For instance, you might have wondered why the torch run didn’t include a pass by Memorial Coliseum, which is, after all, the main venue for winter sports in Fort Wayne.

Look no further than the sign out front, and the logo thereon: Pepsi.

Coliseum General Manager Randy Brown said he was directly told the coliseum was out as a possible host for the flame, “because we are a Pepsi building.”

Joan Goldner, who headed the local committee that organized the torch run, said Brown “mis-remembered” any conversation in which he was told that. But another committee member confirmed the coliseum was counted out for exactly that reason, among others. Coca-Cola didn’t do the vetoing – it was the local committee, taking into consideration sponsors’ wishes.

“Way early on, I thought maybe we could skate the flame around the rink at the coliseum,” Goldner said, adding that she thought it would make a photogenic image promoting the Winter Games. But the scoreboard over the ice features a Pepsi logo, too. The idea was never pursued, in part for that reason.

“We had a very tight time schedule,” she said. But, “we had to be very careful who we asked for money. We couldn’t ask a Ford dealer. We could not have Pizza Hut as a major contributor,” because Pizza Hut pours Pepsi exclusively in its restaurants. “We could not include direct competitors to the national sponsors.”

However, she added, “I doubt if we would have been able to do (a skating leg on coliseum ice) because of timing.”

Fair enough. But just the fact the Pepsi sign out front played a part in the planning ought to tell us something not only about the torch run but also about the Olympics themselves. Companies bask in the reflected glory of the Olympic flame because of what it claims to represent – healthy competition that transcends the dirty business of politics. We expect competitors from countries that don’t get along to ascend to a higher level at the Olympics.

Basking in reflected glory, though, is only that. The keepers of the flame might want to consider just what is going on in its penumbra.

The entire state of Indiana wasn’t as crazy about former Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight as some would lead you to believe, but enough of it was that a made-for-ESPN movie about him required the efforts of features, sports and li’l ol’ me. My assignment is explained in the first paragraph. My only editing change: I replaced the dashed-out obscenities with the real thing.

March 8, 2002

As the person assigned to examine “A Season on the Brink” from the unaffiliated, uncaring, not-particularly-interested-in-basketball perspective, I hate to bring this up, but I have to: 



Is Indiana a state of child abusers? 



One has to wonder, after two hours of watching Brian Dennehy as IU legend Bob Knight, spraying spittle in his players’ faces and calling them 

fucking pussies and worse, all while the entire state of Indiana looks on and smiles benevolently and says, why, he reminds me of my dad, doesn’t he remind you of your dad? 

Or maybe not.

Like all movies, “A Season on the Brink” isn’t an accurate representation of Indiana. A stock shot repeated throughout: The camera tracks through a wintry, rural landscape, cold and forbidding. The sun is as remote as an unkept promise; a solitary cow gazes uncomprehendingly at the camera. Far in the distance, a boy shoots at the netless hoop nailed to the side of the barn. 



If you ever took a film-criticism course, you know what this stuff is called: subtext. And the subtext is, Indiana is a lonely, cold place that only comes alive in winter, in gymnasiums brought to a boil by Hoosier Hysteria. In this Siberian landscape, this tyrant called Bob Knight found his true calling — abusing others — and a willing audience of enablers, i.e., us. 



The film isn’t an accurate representation of Knight, either. While there are several brief scenes of his players’ parents offering testimonials to what a great guy he is, that side of him — the rigorous teacher, the brilliant analyst, the philanthropist who refused to self-promote — is barely evident.

Because this is a movie, and because this is a movie that will “break new ground” with its depiction of non-premium-channel profanity in prime time, what we mainly see are rants. 

Knight got off easy on that point, too. Dennehy is a big, powerful man, but he’s also a journeyman actor with supreme control of his instrument. Having watched videos and heard recordings of Knight out of control over the years, I can report that Dennehy rarely goes there. He yells. He swears. But that screeching edge of hysteria that Knight so often crossed — the kind that shrinks the soul of even someone watching on television — is seen only in the final credits, when we see a montage of Actual Knight Moments.



And the rants, as performed by Dennehy, aren’t the ones that got him into hot water. Because the movie focuses on just one season, we don’t see him facing off with a guy in a restaurant, or flinging a vase at the wall over a 64-year-old woman’s head, or illustrating his point that his players are shit by producing the real article, smeared on toilet paper from his own recent visit to the bathroom. 



No, the Knight we see in “A Season on the Brink” is just one born too late, a Parris Island drill instructor staking out one of the last bastions of real manhood, although the new age of wussiness is drawing closer, populated by “dorks from the chemistry department” and professors — with advanced degrees! — wanting to watch one of his precious practices. “You know what B.S. stands for?” he crows as they file out. “Bullshit. And M.S. stands for More of the Same. Ph.D. is for Piled Higher and Deeper!” So much for that famous respect for academics.



What’s more, we’re given several looks at his tender-bear side with his son, Patrick. He makes supper for Pat, asks after his studies and high-school basketball play, and practically tucks him in at night. “Dad, if I’d been born a girl you’d probably have shoved me back in,” Patrick teases. “Yeah, I probably would,” Dad joshes back. 



After screening “A Season on the Brink,” I spent a bit of time with an odd, double-sided book by Rich Wolfe. On one side: “Knightmares: The Dark Side of Bobby Knight from Those Who Knew Him Best.” Flip the book over, and the cover is “Good Knight: The Good Side of Bobby Knight from Those Who Knew Him Best.” The unintended joke — that even those “who knew him best” can’t agree on whether the guy is good or bad — seems to fly right over the publisher’s head.

A glance at the text, however, reveals the obvious answer: He’s both. 

John Feinstein, who wrote “A Season on the Brink,” sums it up best when he said (in the “Knightmares” half of the book), “Bob Knight is three things, without any debate: one of the greatest coaches ever, a guy who cares as much about academics as athletics in a time when that’s very rare, and a guy who never broke an NCAA rule. But the fourth thing is: He’s a self-righteous guy who thinks he can do no wrong and has a double standard for behavior. You behave one way toward me — respectfully, never rude, always show me respect and loyalty, but I don’t have to return any of that to you because I’m Bob Knight and you’re not.”



It really is as simple as that. “A Season on the Brink,” the movie, doesn’t get there in two hours. I suggest you try the book.

I wrote this when my editor-in-chief retired. I hope it captured the nature of our sometimes-prickly relationship. Anyway, I don’t think he said he liked it, so I assume he took it the way he took most of my work. Ah, well. His retirement party in the cafeteria was one of my favorite episodes, too late and too radioactive to make this column: In his parting remarks he figured out a way to slice the legs out from under the chainsaw-wielding cost-cutter who was pushing him out the door, using a neat bit of corporate jujitsu that I will always admire him for: “I’ve been telling people that if I have one piece of advice for them at the end of my career, the most important thing I’ve learned, it’s to always consider the opinions of others. Because they frequently have great ideas you never would have thought of. When our new publisher came to town, and we had our first meeting, I told her I was getting close to retirement, but I had a number of projects I wanted to finish first. She said, ‘Why don’t you leave now instead?’ And I thought, if I really believe what I just said about considering others’ opinions, I needed to do so. And so I thought, That’s a really good idea…” The look on her face suggested she’d just swallowed a turd. I had to dig my fingernails into my palms to keep from guffawing. Good times, good times.

January 31, 2003

Late in my mother’s life, when she was leaving us behind but hadn’t yet said her final goodbyes, my brother and sister and I noticed a rather alarming phenomenon. “I have to get back,” she’d say after we’d had her out of her room at the nursing home for a while. “My break’s over, and my supervisor will be looking for me.”

How awful, we remarked to one another, that after a life fully lived, one that spanned the Depression and World War II and the moon landing, one with a husband and children and grandchildren and dogs, with ice cream and roast beef and salted peanuts, after all that, when she left us behind, she went to work. At Ohio Bell.

“If I spend my last days on earth talking about Joe Weiler, it will be proof of something,” I told my sister. “Maybe that if there is a God, he has one sick sense of humor.”

Joe Weiler retires today, leaving The News-Sentinel after 20 years. Eighteen of those years I worked in the same newsroom, a distinction only a handful of people here can claim. We’ve worked with Joe through his mustache period, a successful weight loss, three cars, the Halloween party where he wore a purple Mohawk wig, the death of his beloved Dalmatian and the famous story about arguing the paper’s editorial stance on school desegregation with Ian Rolland while both were stark-naked in the YMCA locker room.

I was struck, reading the story about his retirement that sketched out the high points of his tenure here, how much it sounded like an obituary, but that’s what retirements are – a funeral where the corpse stands upright and cuts the cake. Like a funeral, only your good traits are remembered. The worst thing anyone will say about you is you had a bad memory for names or you were always getting your car stuck in the snow.

I hasten to add I’m not here to tell unflattering stories about Joe. (That’s Ian Rolland’s job, snicker snicker.) I only want to talk a little bit about how we know the people we work with, why we remember them, and why, maybe, they haunt us in our last days, the way that ghostly supervisor haunted my mother.

The workplace – an office, anyway – is like a perpetual date. We think we know one another after a few dinners-and-a-movie, but of course we don’t. We leave home behind and step into our workplace persona, which may be Funny Guy, Office Mother, Efficient Robot or Executioner. The only clues to our real life are the ones we willingly offer: family photos on a desk, a bumper sticker on a car in the parking lot, the stories we tell around the coffeepot.

At work, unlike any other area in our lives, we can be almost entirely self-invented. We write the script of an endless movie starring ourselves: The Receptionist No One Appreciated, The Secret Life of Tech Services, and that famous documentary, Payroll: What They Know About You, You Can’t Even Imagine.

Everyone else in the office is watching our movie, perhaps coming away with a message different from the one the director intended. And we’re all one another’s supporting players; in one, we’re the sympathetic friend, in another, the villain. Sometimes both.

Joe and I were both, to each other and to others. There were days I wished he’d go join the Merchant Marine, others – swear, Joe – when I admired him, and I know he feels the same way about me, perhaps without the admiration. Oh, I could tell you some stories, flattering and otherwise, but they wouldn’t mean anything to you. They’re for his colleagues, co-stars of The Joe Weiler Story: The Fort Wayne Years.

As for whether I’d watch it again in 2039, ask me then. I’m hoping there’ll be something better on cable.