One for Peter and Deborah gets us started today, and sorry, but I think we’ve discussed this topic before. Anyway, this is the column that started my interest in Michael Graves. Reporting on a house isn’t exactly dramatic. But once you’ve owned real estate, once you’ve battled a contractor or struggled with an expensive problem with plumbing or drainage, you join a fraternity — the house-suffering — that encompasses people from all walks of life, and their problems become ones you can identify with. Dr. Sanford Snyderman and his wife, Joy, commissioned an up-and-coming Indianapolis-born architect named Michael Graves to build them a striking, avant-garde house in 1973, on a large parcel of land in what was then a newly awakening suburban area of Fort Wayne, Indiana. They lived there about 20 years before selling the property to a developer, and the house never was lived in again. Graves went on to become an architect of great renown, and a design-world household name — you’ve probably seen his work at Target. The house was torched in 2002, just as a restoration effort was struggling to get rolling. A photo of the house is at the link in the first line. I strongly suggest you take a look before reading. Oh, and yes, these are the parents of Dr. Nancy Snyderman, author and TV doctor. I heard somewhere that she had the central interior staircase — the one without railings of any sort — removed and warehoused, perhaps to be used in a future house of her own. Beware, Nancy! Beware!

August 2, 2002.

From the very beginning, the reporting on the Snyderman House raised more questions than it answered. For all the effusive praise for Michael Graves’ avant-garde design, as a reader I always wanted to know: So why isn’t anyone living there now?

From all accounts, Sanford and Joy Snyderman sold their 40-acre property to a developer in 1997, moved into a villaminium and abandoned the house to become a target for Aboite Township vandals, one of whom likely burned it to the ground earlier this week in a fire officials describe as suspicious in origin.

True, you can find architectural marvels in similar straits elsewhere in Allen County, but not many that are barely 30 years old and located in a booming, affluent suburb. Why didn’t another doctor and his wife, or some other well-to-do couple with a fondness for modern architecture, buy the place and make it their own?

Ask around, and the answer quickly becomes apparent.

“It wasn’t a physically comfortable house,” said Sanford Snyderman Jr., the Snydermans’ son. “It was hot in summer, cold in winter. The stucco cracked. The roof was flat, and never did drain well. Something was always going wrong with it.”

In other words, the Snyderman house was also a sucking money pit, a beautiful, tragic structure that virtually sprouted the sort of stories that turn homeowners’ hair white. When the Snydermans finally moved out, they had reached the end of their rope in coping with the house’s maddening quirks and design flaws.

At the same time, though, Joy Snyderman is quick to recall the million good times the family enjoyed in their one-of-a-kind home, which made a dramatic stage set for parties and entertaining.

“I remember we had a family reunion here, with maybe 30 people, and this water-gun fight going on from all the different levels and balconies. It was like a Fellini movie,” she said.

“Dramatic” is a word that comes up time and again when discussing the Snyderman house, in both the good and bad sense of the word.

It’s the preferred adjective for Graves’ edgy design, conceived in 1972, which featured exterior staircases and gridlike exterior steel beams, walls that extended above the roof line and cantilevered balconies. It’s also appropriate for the fights the Snydermans had with contractors who scratched their heads over Graves’ flights of design fancy.

“There were so many undecided elements that were resolved as the house was built,” Sanford said. “The house was a work in progress until it was finished.”

And then the real work began. The roof leaked almost from the beginning. The temperature fluctuated wildly from season to season. There was a depression near the exterior basement doors into which animals would fall and be unable to climb out, and one of the teenage boys’ daily chores was fishing out the frogs, snakes and raccoons they would find there in the morning.

“The house was wrapped in glass, and most of it was single-pane,” said Sanford. “So it was impossible to control the temperature. The balconies were stuccoed, and that stuff weighs as much as cement, so they started to sag after a while.” No one can really say whether the house’s problems were in its design or execution, but both Joy Snyderman and her son say the blame probably can be passed around.

“For the materials that existed and the expertise available at the time, the timing just wasn’t right,” said Sanford, recalling the endless battles with contractors and subcontractors, who struggled with Graves’ blueprints. “Everyone who worked on it blames someone else for the problems. Michael Graves is obviously a very talented and successful architect, and this was a very ambitious effort on his part. But I think his reach exceeded his grasp.”

That’s a contention that bothers Matt Kelty, the local architect who led efforts to buy and restore the house in the last two years. Graves’ design was “beyond the ability of most home contractors to carry out,” he said. “The roofing material was put down by a carpet contractor.”

But architecture is both a creative and a practical art form; a designer’s vision has to be reconciled with what is physically possible to build. At what point, if he or she fails to do so, does a design get called a failure, and did the Snyderman house qualify? (After all, the family had to install an additional furnace just to get the master bedroom temperature above 70 degrees, and air conditioning was “an afterthought,” in Sanford’s opinion.) Kelty doesn’t think so.

“I believe (Graves) achieved not just a living structure but a profoundly beautiful one,” he said. “It’s a piece of art that functioned as a house for more than 20 years.”

The Snydermans themselves are less enthusiastic, although perfectly happy with the role the house played in their lives in that time.

“Michael Graves grew up in Indiana, and he knew what you could do here,” said Joy. “It should never have had a flat roof, not in this climate.” Plus, the house was located in woods, and the roof collected leaves and other natural detritus that clogged its drains. If they weren’t cleaned regularly, as often as every few days, water damage followed. Freezing-and-thawing cycles took their toll wherever the water penetrated.

At this point, most homeowners might wonder why the Snydermans didn’t burn the place down themselves, collect the insurance and go build a nice Colonial somewhere. To understand, it helps to know that the family never saw the house the way most of us see our own, as a piggy bank you can live in. Rather, Joy sees her time there as an adventure, a rich collection of experiences – both good and bad – that are, after all, a part of life.

“I would rather have grabbed the brass ring than not,” she said. “I’m 75 now, and at my age you don’t want to live with regrets. We had wonderful times there that we could not have had anywhere else.”

Sanford agrees (although his philosophical outlook is tempered by the fact he served as the house’s chief handyman for years). He also points out that, due to the escalation of property values in Aboite during the time the Snydermans owned it, they were still able to make a profit on the sale of the land, even with a problem house on it.

One of the house’s features was a 20-foot-long mural painted by Graves, and Sanford, an artist himself, was his apprentice. Where else could he have had such an experience? (The mural was removed and now resides at the Indianapolis Art Center, in Graves’ hometown.)

Joy said her son pointed out that many of architecture’s innovations rose from its failures – “like the flying buttress.” Someone had to own the failures, and at least theirs was beautiful.

As for Sanford, “I’m just glad my parents are under a roof that sheds water now.”

Well, at least it’s a beautiful boat.

So this is what’s going to happen next week:

A few days back, a regular reader and sometime commenter who goes by the name of Mr. Mark sent me an email after I’d mentioned a column I wrote back in the day. He said he had a pretty big file of my old newspaper columns, which he’d saved when he was reading me in the paper (or on the paper’s website) at the dawn of the decade — roughly 2001-2003, when I left on a sabbatical fellowship. What’s more, it was all in .doc format.

Generally speaking, I despise 90 percent of what I write, especially the stuff I wrote for the paper, because…well, a lot of reasons. Mostly I’m just sick of newspaper columns in general, with their calcified structure: Open with anecdote, tie it to larger point, state your position, respectfully acknowledge opposition, regretfully disagree, finish, hit the bar. (That’s the columnists lucky enough to have freedom to state a point of view, I should add, a fast-shrinking group. Lots of editors think columnists should basically be feature writers who get a picture with their byline, and shrink from the personal pronoun. “Who cares what you think? Who made you such an authority?” they might ask at the Christmas party, to which the writer might reply, you did.)

I wasn’t immune to this. Once you learn it, it’s easy, like outlining a romantic comedy. The fact others find it difficult doesn’t make it a rare and valuable skill (unless you’re Mitch Albom), only an obscure one. But never mind that.

When I was writing my column, I only had to go through my own work product once a year, at contest time. A detail I recall from a many-years-past, great WashPost profile of the author of “Mandingo” was that he refused to self-edit in any way. “Do you expect me to return to my own vomit?” he would ask his son, who did the chore instead. I totally get that. Totally. It was agonizing, and going through this file kept by Mark wasn’t that much easier, but what the hell, it came at the right time. In lieu of new material while I’m on vacation, how about some really old material that’s still new to most of you — five of my old newspaper columns?

I know, I know: Curb your enthusiasm!

I’ll run them Monday through Friday next week, and they’re all loaded up, ready to go with WordPress’ scheduling feature set to release them at 12:05 a.m. (In fact, I’m writing this a few days early, so I can check out that very feature and fix it, if need be.) I’ve put notes on them explaining background when necessary, and you’re free to talk about them or, as usual, whatever else you want, in comments. I’ll read them all when I have internet access, which will be intermittently through the week.

I guess this brings up matters of copyright, and I have thunk on that a bit. I’ve decided to plunge ahead and use them without permission, mainly because, a) I’m busy this week and don’t want to call or write the new publisher and get ensnared in what likely will be a knee-jerk “no;” b) while I assume the purchase price of the paper included its archive, I can’t be sure; and c) it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. That’ll have to do. In any event, I’ll note here that the next five days of material probably belongs to The News-Sentinel, an Ogden Newspapers property of Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’m sure if the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates thought they could squeeze a nickel out of my decade-old work, they’d have done it by now.

So. Have a great week, all. I’ll be in and out, most likely, but I’m warned to expect half-a-bar cell coverage and very little 3G, and besides, I need a break. I’m concentrating on reading, writing something other than this and seeing all the Upper Peninsula has to offer. I hope it’s not snow. Enjoy the wayback machine, and I’ll be back on the 22nd.

I’ve had the iPad long enough to have made my way through three e-books, so I feel qualified to assess the experience, at least at a first-impression level. (The fact two of them were “A Game of Thrones” and “A Clash of Kings” is the reason the total isn’t much bigger. More on that in a minute.)

A friend of mine who’s a little further down this road said, when I expressed reservations at ever joining the Kindle generation, “You will,” which to my ears sounded like me talking to vinyl holdouts in the late ’80s, complaining about CDs. The wave of the future sweeps all before it, and while there will always be a place in the world for ink on paper, and I’m sure there will be some Brooklyn-hipster retro book movement down the road (they’ll call themselves “codexers”), e-books are here to stay. Which is fine, but to a far greater extent than CDs, they’ll change the experience of reading.

Unless you’re the sort of audiophile who really notices the difference between analog and digital recording — and I wasn’t, at least not at first — the prime selling point for CDs was convenience. They were smaller. They didn’t wear out, at least not quickly. They didn’t need to be flipped halfway through. You could have a party, and if someone pogoed too hard, they didn’t skip all over the place. Multi-disk changers meant you could load up an evening’s worth of music, press play and forget about it.

I don’t quite see the same argument for e-books. A Kindler I know who travels often says it’s a nice way to carry an armload of magazines onto a plane, and mentions the added value of being useful for the sort of books you want to leaf through or even read, but not necessarily buy in hardcover. The trendy non-fiction read of the month, say, or something dirty. An author here in Detroit says her erotica-penning colleagues are enjoying a renaissance via Kindle, as you no longer have to hold something with a whip on the cover while reading your lunch hour away on a park bench.

But as to the claim that ebooks will declutter your house? No, thanks. I love all my books, and only fail to love them at moving time. As I’m not likely to be moving again until I’m carried out feet-first, it won’t be my problem.

There are some advantages, though. Last month, I set up an interview with an author whose book was being published that day. Available electronically? Yes. Money in the Amazon account? Yes. (And thanks for that, all of you Kickback Lounge shoppers!) Click, click, and there it is. About as fast as it took you to read that last sentence. It takes just a few seconds. So great, more instant gratification for a nation swimming in it. There’s that.

Your comfort with the reading experience will depend on how you read, and that’s where my problems come in. Take George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, for instance, the first two volumes I mentioned above. Every one is the size of a cinder block, and features nine million characters. Each volume features endpaper maps, and appendices that lay out all the families, clans and alliances between them all. I’m only at the end of the second book, and I can already see the series developing Harry Potter’s Disease — the sort of overwriting authors do, and editors permit, when a franchise has become so popular that fans clamor for more, more, more. (I haven’t read Harry Potter, but people whose opinion I respect say that each subsequent volume was more bloated than the last, and knowing some HP fans, I can see how it happened. They are black holes of need.)

But I’m at the point in “A Clash of Kings” where, if I were a reader of ink on paper, I’d be flipping ahead, skimming battle scenes, blowing off interior monologues and, of course, checking all those family trees, but I don’t, because I’m afraid of losing my place. (Yes, there’s a bookmarking system. I don’t like it.) At this point, in the final chapters, I feel like I’m driving a snowplow through 10 inches of slush.

On the other hand, I search for a living, and I’ve developed my eye for keywords. I like having a search function so, if I can remember a character’s name and its odd spelling — and I do remember, and they’re all odd — I can easily find his or her first appearance if I want to recheck something. I like that. And I like the fact I can read a 1,000-page novel in a slim little case the size of a file folder.

When I go on vacation next week, I’m taking “Just Kids” and “Djibouti” in analog form, and “A Storm of Swords” on the iPad. I’ll tell you how it works out.

So, bloggage:

Rick Perry says he wants to be president? Gee, I wonder what he’ll decide. Stop teasing and get it over with, a’ready.

Meanwhile, you’re not paying enough attention to Sarah! She will not be ignored!

And with that, I must run. Be good, all.

UPDATE: Oops, almost forgot! The heartbreak of cleavage wrinkles. The New York Times is ON IT.

I gotta tell ya, ever since I saw the trailer for “The Help,” I have been cringing at the thought this movie would be every bit as excruciating as the preview suggests. Yes, a movie about how a plucky white girl in early-’60s Mississippi empowers the black domestic class by putting on cateye glasses and telling their story:

Skeeter (the plucky one) gets a job as a newspaper cleaning-advice columnist, but when she asks Aibileen for some tips, she realizes that the real story lies in the emotional lives of black women who virtually raise their white employers’ children, but who are treated by those same families as unfit to share a kitchen utensil, much less political or economic power. “You is kind, you is smart and you is impo’tant,” Aibileen repeatedly intones to her young white charge.

I gather “The Help” has been a book-club and best-selling sensation since its publication. I haven’t read it, so I suppose it would be wrong to judge, but just from the capsule plot summaries, it sounds fairly excruciating. Does Skeeter also teach her town’s domestics to dance? No?

The Times’ critic isn’t impressed, except by Viola Davis, who could class up a clown car. She’s so good, I fear she’s in danger of becoming a 21st-century distaff Sidney Poitier, but fingers crossed she still has a comedy or three in her. Has anyone read this book? Am I being unfair? I is not an impo’tant critic, but still.

Ah, the heat has finally broken. We can lay our heads against autumn’s cool cheek this morning, although just for a bit. It’s still summer, and I intend to enjoy it, if I can ever get my work done.

Which I’d best do. Fortunately, some bloggage:

Via Jeff the Mild-Mannered, a Guardian look at the psychology of looting. Pretty clearheaded:

How can you despise culture but still want the flatscreen TV from the bookies? Alex Hiller, a marketing and consumer expert at Nottingham Business School, points out that there is no conflict between anomie and consumption: “If you look at Baudrillard and other people writing in sociology about consumption, it’s a falsification of social life. Adverts promote a fantasy land. Consumerism relies upon people feeling disconnected from the world.”

My community has a library millage on the ballot this November. So: Useful things to remember about librarians.

Oh, wow, look: Tina Brown’s being “provocative” again! I’m so totally provoked.

And I hate to bug out of here with such a weak, phoned-in offering, but I have a lot to do in two days, and I’d best get to it.

Question: Are riots so often sparked by police action because a) a situation is simmering anyway, and the police, already in place to keep things in control, don’t have to go very far to reach the edge? or b) cops are easily provoked by “law and order” edicts to abuse power? or c) some combination of the two?

I’m going with C. Let me hasten to add that I’m opposed to riots of all sorts, and the trendy common usage of describing them as “uprisings” gets on my nerves, unless you’re talking about rigid authoritarian states. That said, the 1967 Detroit riots were an obvious pushback against an iron-fisted and institutionally racist police department. (But it’s still not an uprising.) The precipitating incident, as everyone knows, was a raid on an after-hours bar in a black neighborhood. The Stonewall riots were started by a police raid on a gay bar. Many of us remember the police riot of 1968 Chicago, during the Democratic convention. The London riots, continuing as we speak, began after police shot a young man resisting arrest.

The problem is, whatever the precipitating incident, it’s swiftly overrun by looting and the appearance of a sort of rioting professional, young men with high testosterone levels and no place to express it; a mob scene becomes a big mosh pit, only more dangerous and with tear gas, billyclubs and fire.

London calling: From the Big Picture blog, a lot of pictures from ground level. Note the evacuation of the pet store — hamsters and guinea pigs and rats being taken to a safe place. When the one great scorer comes to write against our species, I hope he devotes a chapter to our stewardship, for good or ill, of others. (Species, that is.)

The hour, it grows late. Let’s skip on to the bloggage:

From the LATimes, a great interview with one of my favorites, Buck Henry:

Then there’s the pop culture echo chamber in film and TV; everything is a reference to something else, as if it’s embarrassing to be authentic.

That’s the horror of it. The great films were generic to themselves. I see it as the Conan O’Brien effect. He’s like the senior in your college class who always knows how to make a joke about whatever it is you say or read, until it becomes an end in itself. College kids 50 or more years ago wanted to become Hemingway. Thirty years ago they wanted to come here and write a series that would make them incredibly rich. [Now] the highest possibility is to work for a late-night talk show and maybe even become [a host] themselves. All these Harvard guys who just want to make late-night jokes about the culture.

The stock cliché shot of trouble on Wall Street — brokers with hands on their faces.

Angelina Jolie is, we all know, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Based on the evidence of this photo, would you still like to see her naked? I think this is what a certain type of beauty — the worldwide-superstar kind, when a living human being is seen by others almost entirely via pixels or other manipulated image — requires: Good bones, but basically, a blank canvas. I’m struck by the color of her skin, and yeah, yeah, skin cancer premature aging blah blah blah, but I’ve never seen a pallor quite that pallid on a person who wasn’t clinically dead. Her arms and legs look like pipe cleaners, but the dress fits her the way it would a model, which is to say, she’s a walking hanger. And of course she still has that great jawline and mouth.

Everything the male gaze would want in a woman can be added by the makeup, wardrobe or special-effects departments, or in post-production. What was it Norma Desmond said? We didn’t need words, we had faces! That’s good, because that’s what she has.

Contrast with Christina Ricci, an actor who’s been far plumper in the past. She’s very thin in this picture, but it’s that last five or 10 pounds that keeps her on the right side of wowza.

Where are the editors, chapter a billion: The Detroit News asked L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland county executive who was never snowed by Kwame Kilpatrick’s bullshit, to review the latter’s new memoir, published this week. He writes:

There’s not a page that doesn’t reference Kilpatrick’s personal relationship with his “spirit,” or his “creator,” or his “petition to God” — all the way to the last page where he “surrenders to God’s will.” I thought I had picked up by mistake Pope Benedict’s autobiography.

A funny line, but “by mistake” belongs at the end of the sentence. Word order is very important in comedy: Take my wife. Please. I guess “I thought I’d mistakenly picked up Pope Benedict’s autobiography” might have worked, but “by mistake” is a phrase that goes on the end of sentences, like a little apology caboose. “I picked up your coffee by mistake,” not “I picked up by mistake your coffee.” Am I the only one who hears this stuff? Hello, is this thing on?

Ai-yi-yi, what a week. Better get it moving.

Years after seeing its wonderful, flippy trailer, I finally got to see “Teeth” this weekend, on IFC’s free on-demand channel. It’s a horror movie about a girl with vagina dentata, i.e, a real mouth down there. Great premise, imperfect execution.

I think it was a pacing problem — there are four distinct wham-o scenes in which young Dawn O’Keefe’s snapper gets to show what it’s capable of, but after the first, it’s kinda downhill. OK, so it bites, and bites hard. What are you going to do with that? We discover it only does so when it’s not being treated with respect — a little feminist twist on things that I appreciated, but I wanted to see more possibilities explored. Give a girl a biting vagina, and I expect her to be deployed as a CIA sex-assassin by the third act. Although, from the look on her face in the final shot, it’s not far away.

And when that is the high point of your weekend? Seeing a movie about a girl with a toothy vagina? That’s when you know you’re middle-aged.

This was the other one:

“Lord, you are the source of every good thing,” Mr. Perry said, as he bowed his head, closed his eyes and leaned into a microphone at Reliant Stadium here. “You are our only hope, and we stand before you today in awe of your power and in gratitude for your blessings, and humility for our sins. Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness.”

When I lived in Indiana, these folks were always insisting that I honor and respect their faith, nay, their “deeply held” faith. Find the word “deeply” in an American newspaper, and nine times out of 10, “religious” follows it. And for the most part, I did. When a carload of Christian college students was involved in a terrible crash and credited prayer with saving their lives, I put it in the story (mentioning seat belts and air bags in the next paragraph). Their respect for the way I think public life should be conducted would be radically different, I suspect. But this bullshit just tears it. May I see the hands of everyone who believes Rick Perry would be crying out for God’s forgiveness under a McCain/Palin administration? Yes, thank you, it’s as I suspected.

I’ve never been comfortable with the Bill Maher approach to religion; the world is a confusing and difficult place, and people take comfort where they can. But unlike the president, I know a preening bully when I see one. Rick Perry, you’re on notice:

As usual, Roger Ebert is on the beam.

In other news at this hour, a squirrel just spent a few minutes walking around on the skylight directly over my head, allowing me a rare look at the underside of a squirrel. It was a male, if you’re interested. I mention this only to note that it’s hard to stay too pissed about anything on a fine summer morning when breakfast included blueberries and peaches.

And today is Monday, which means (groan). So skedaddle I must, and I will see you soon. But a bit of bloggage first:

When I heard the follow-up to the Chrysler Super Bowl commercial would be the gospel choir featured therein doing their own cover of “Lose Yourself,” I ain’t gonna lie: I groaned. But the video is out, and it’s not terrible, nor is the cover. Such a distinctive-looking town; you can see all the Hollywood DPs who have been coming and going here for the last few years have loved it so.

I guess I have to read this Michele Bachmann profile in the New Yorker. It’ll arrive in dead-tree form about the time we’re heading north — think I’ll save it for the long drive.

And oh, hell, why not: Because we all need a little bunny in our lives, the daily bunny. Not to be confused the daily otter.

OK, now I’m leaving. See you tomorrow.

OK, now I’ve seen everything (or, rather, Hank Stuever has): There’s now a competitive league for beard-growing:

“Whisker Wars” starts tonight on IFC, and even though I get that channel on cable, I’m not convinced this is exactly appointment TV yet. But who can resist, really? A whole subculture of men whose activities are not only of no or little interest to women, it actively repels them? You could almost compare them to homosexuals, but every smart girl has a gay boyfriend, and some are even sexually attracted to them. Whereas if a competitive bearder even came near me with one of those waist-length things, I’d run away as fast as possible. And I bet you would, too.

Oh, but what am I saying? There’s a match for every sock in the world; you just have to look at bit harder, is all. My youth was a big era for facial hair. My male confederates had beards and moustaches of all shapes and sizes. One of my favorite boyfriends had a splendid moustache, in fact, although I doubt he still does, as one day we all woke up and they were called “pornstaches,” a cruel jape, because as every man with a weak chin eventually discovers, facial hair can cover a multitude of sins, and sometimes that sin is an upper lip that is too thin, too stiff, too something, and a moustache can salvage it.

(There was a TV personality of my youth, fella named Bob Braun. A friend of mine, a hilarious and dead-on mimic, could conjure him out of the air just by pulling down and fortifying his upper lip. Bob Braun could have used a moustache.)

The facial hair of my yout’, however, was generally not something to be fussed with. Trimmed, yes. Groomed, certainly. But it was either there or it wasn’t. (With a few exceptions, like the aforementioned Joe Namath and his famous Fu Manchu.) These latter-day beards, with their fanciful trimming? No. Show me a man who grooms it like this, and I’ll show you a real asshole.

Alan had a beard, long before I met him. He looked like a young Bob Seger. My dad grew one in his young manhood, and it came in all gray and white. The other guys called him Frostypuss, so he shaved and never ventured forth again. But it strikes me the real problem with beards is, they invite stroking by their owners. It’s very hard to stroke one’s own chin without looking like a total douche. In fact, the very gesture of chin-stroking, the phrase itself, is shorthand for someone who talks too much and rarely proposes action of any value, but rather, thinks the whole room needs to do some supplemental reading before we revisit the topic at a later date.

At which point the room rolls its eyes and makes the jackoff gesture.

Boy, am I in need of a vacation, or what? Which, by the way, I will soon be taking. We’re heading north in a week, and I will be away from the internet for most of that time. I might have asked J.C. to maybe fill in here while I’m gone, but as it turns out, that’s who we’ll be visiting. There may be supplemental material, however, and comments will be open all week. You all are so good at playing amongst yourselves. We’ll see.

Bloggage! Let’s get to it!

Minister of Culture Michael Heaton on why August is the month of bad decisions:

The bad decisions of August also include the impulse road trip. You and a college friend are sitting around talking about Crazy Bob from your fraternity. Next thing you know you are on the road to Kalamazoo, where Bob lives, for a surprise visit. At his house you find only his mother, an old and broken woman who informs you that Bob killed his wife with a ball-peen hammer and then set himself on fire. Always call first.

We’ve already got one embedded video already today, so you’ll have to follow the link to YouTube for this one: That stock-trading talking baby confronts his losses.

Wow. The Cat Scan Tumblr. Wow.

Hurry, vacation. But first, lots of work to do. Have a great weekend.

A former colleague of mine flagged this story on Facebook — from the Philadelphia Daily News, about the ruination of NFL Films, the production arm that made the “America’s Game” series, which you might not watch, but you almost certainly know.

I have zero interest in football and an above-average interest in filmmaking, and even I can see the genius of the classic, ol’ skool NFL Films oeuvre — its irony-free presentation of games with portentous narration and tympani-and-brass orchestral scores, which can make any given Sunday into a clash of gladiators that will be sung in song for centuries. I haven’t watched them all, but I’ve watched enough to know that their signature is as distinctive as Miles Davis’ trumpet playing or Martin Scorsese’s camera technique. Which of course means the new guys have to be brought in to screw it all up.

The story is about how new leadership did just that:

“The thing that has always set NFL Films apart, the thing that has been its trademark, is the slow spiral in the air,” said Comcast SportsNet’s Ray Didinger, an Emmy-winning producer and writer at Films for 9 years before leaving in 2008. “One shot lasting 45 seconds. The ball leaving the quarterback’s hands and being caught. That was the kind of stuff that made NFL Films great and helped make the league so popular. That was their signature.

“But you’ve got these guys [at NFL Network] now with ADD, they’re watching that ball spinning and they’re saying, ‘OK, let’s catch it already. Go, go, go. Catch the ball, will ya.’

“The term that we used to get kicked back at us from time to time was, ‘dinosaur television.’ They’d say, ‘That stuff is dated. Been done before. People have seen it. We’re going to change the way football is presented on television.'”

The usual litany of complaints followed, and you can see how it happened — NFL Films operated without a thought to cost-containment, so someone sold the owners on a plan to save money, etc. (The fact NFL Films was, as Sports Illustrated called it, one of the most effective propaganda organizations in the world, instrumental in building the league into a powerhouse — eh, who can put a dollar figure on that, right?) Then someone else came in, and wondered about those 45-second slow spirals, and the rest is infamy.

It made me think, though. A number of petty annoyances have been piling up — and when that happens, I tend to get a little testy. I’m also aware that some have accused me of being ranty lately, so I want to be sensitive to that. But still, I have to ask:

Is every company in the goddamn world broken?

Two weeks ago, we tried to watch a movie on demand on cable. It froze. (Pause.) Repeatedly. (Pause.) Throughout. (Pause.) Playback. I tried to call Comcast that night. We are experiencing high call volumes at this time, and customer wait times are longer than usual. If the matter is not urgent, please call back at a later time.

I called back on Monday to ask for a credit on my bill. We are experiencing high call volumes at this time, and customer wait times are longer than usual. If the matter is not urgent, please call back at a later time. Tried again Tuesday. We are experiencing high call volumes at this time, and customer wait times are longer than usual. If the matter is not urgent, please call back at a later time.

Forgot about it for a few days, tried again. Guess what? And so on.

If I were posting this on Twitter, I would hashtag it #firstworldproblems. Still. I pay a fortune to this stupid company every month; is it so much to expect a non-Soviet customer-service experience?

(I just tried it again. Huzzah! An operator credited my account $4.99, “as a courtesy,” not because the service I paid for wasn’t delivered. Here, pleb, have a few shekels.)

Meanwhile, if you’d like to watch a classic of the NFL Films genre on your very own computer, try America’s Game: 1968 New York Jets, featuring Joe Namath’s Fu Manchu mustache, the Heidi game and narration by Alec Baldwin.

OK, we’ve gone on too long. Any bloggage?

Via Eric Zorn, how wealthy divorcing women justify asking for $46,000 a month in child support.

Journalism inside baseball, but might be of interest to others: When is it appropriate to state the race of a criminal suspect in a story? For what it’s worth, I generally follow the Society of Professional Journalists standard: When it’s a key part of a detailed description of a suspect at large, yes. When it’s part of a too-general or vague description, no. So, to use the example from the story, this would be a yes: “The suspect was described as a white, between 19 and 24 years old, around 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 180 pounds. He had short blond hair and tattoos on both arms, according to police reports.” A no would be “a black man of medium height and build, wearing blue jeans.” One of our competitors goes for the sneakier variety of racism: “The 16-year-old was released to his 32-year-old mother.”

Oh, if only: The governor of New Jersey talks back to his party’s nut wing.

And while we’re briefly on the topic of editing, see Kim’s comment from late yesterday, about outsourced copy desks.

And now I gotta go. I can almost taste the weekend. Hope you can, too.

Again! I swear I published this at 10:30 a.m. Apologies. Maybe it’s a bug, or maybe the bug is me.

The city of Pontiac closed its police department forever this week — no money. Policing the unfortunate city was turned over to the county sheriff’s department, and I hope they go with God on this one, because Pontiac is a pretty rough town, and they may need divine intervention to make it work.

Meanwhile, I visited the home page of my former employer this morning, and saw the cops were driving the hostage rescue vehicle around for National Night Out festivities last night. The website being a p.o.s. I can’t link, but it just so happens I have a photo of that vehicle which I took way back in 2003, during a flood:

As you can see, its high clearance makes an excellent flood-navigation vehicle, although most often, you see it in this situation:

Hey, kids! Ever want to see the inside of a real tank?

The city of Defiance, Ohio, has one of these, too — we saw it in the Halloween parade. I think it was the year they were talking about closing the city’s swimming pools for lack of funds, but I’m not sure.

Do any of you Hoosiers know if this thing has ever been used to rescue a hostage, or is it just trundled around as a gas-guzzling vehicle of diplomacy, like an armored limousine?

I’ve been covering city governments long enough to know that the money for these items rarely comes from the general fund. Homeland Security likes to sprinkle dollars around the hinterlands from time to time, in the event al-Qaeda ever targets northwest Ohio. And never count out a hungry police chief when it comes to finding grant money or weak spots in the armaments of the county treasury. Remember, Fort Wayners, when the Ku Klux Klan rallied at the courthouse in the ’90s? It was a greenmail dream come true for every badge in both city and county. The courthouse, as courthouses tend to do, sits smack in the middle of town, but it’s a county building, so you had two forces elbowing for the right to be on the front lines. The sheriff’s department got to be the primary perimeter around their building, and they turned out in riot helmets and shields so new you could almost see the ghosts of the price tags on them. The city protected the area around the courthouse, and I think the entire force was there, likely on overtime. So few people actually showed up, the police-to-rallier ratio was about 3-to-1. But nothing bad happened, so every penny was defensible. Right?

Ah, it was the ’90s. We had so much, then. Riot shields, functional police departments, rising property values. The good ol’ days.

I still count the column I wrote about that rally among my favorites. Couldn’t find it today at gunpoint. Newspaper columns, like the good times, aren’t made to last.

Folks, the coffee ain’t working today. Let’s pop down to the bloggage, shall we?

Bradley Cooper speaks French, Mila Kunis speaks Russian. The translated title of her movie, “Friends With Benefits?” “Sex Friendship.” Some things just don’t translate. Did I ever tell you about my friend in Paris, who sent me the titles for the porn listings in the local weekly? American porn producers favor dirty versions of existing movie titles (“Pumping Irene”), whilethe French go for a more clinical approach. One, as I recall, used a verb that means “to break in” or “to enter with violence,” for a title that ran, “I’m breaking into you sans Vaseline.” Ick.

The big tree Morgan Freeman finds a letter under in “The Shawshank Redemption” was torn asunder by a storm this week, prompting a wire-service story. Best reader comment? Ooh, you gave the ending away!!! How long are spoiler alerts required for a movie made in 1994?

And that’s all I have today. Off to drink more coffee.