The news would be easier to keep up with if it would just stay put. The missing banker I keep referring to? He’s a local resident who disappeared from his office in Macomb County a month ago, an office found “in disarray,” one of those cop/journalist words no actual human being ever says. It was a Sunday night, too, so he was alone there, just another CEO banker burning the midnight oil at his flatlining bank. This, the bank’s precarious status, was seen as interesting, as were rumors of a gambling problem (denied by family). The usual barstool detectives weighed in. In my mind, the possibilities boiled down to two obvious ones — he drained the accounts and fled for a country with no extradition treaty, or else flung himself off a bridge.

When his corpse was found by duck hunters a few days ago, floating in the lake not far from his office, the bridge theory gained credence. The autopsy revealed …something. No blunt-force trauma, probably drowning. It’s hard to find evidence on a body that’s been in the water for a month. I know it’s his job, but the medical examiner had my sympathies.

The family said they wanted a second autopsy, their legal right if they were willing to pay, and they were — they have the means. So the body is turned over to the m.e. in Oakland County, and what’s this? Why, it’s a bullet hole in the base of the skull. Back into the water the sheriff’s department goes, and what’s this? Why, it’s a .38-caliber handgun belonging to the deceased, not six feet from where the body was found.

This story has officially outpaced the efforts of a small hyperlocal website to keep up with it, just when it becomes really interesting. This is why we still need newspapers, folks.

I don’t expect it will do much for Oakland-Macomb relations, either. The wound was detected, the sheriff said, using a “sophisticated X-ray machine” that spotted the bullet fragments, a machine the Macomb m.e. did not have. Way to rub it in, richer county. Also, the sheriff is running for county executive, and this is an October surprise he doesn’t need. Finally, it raises the obvious question: Who killed the banker? He or she has had a month head start on the forces of justice. I expect all of this is being discussed in newsroom meetings all over the metro. Well, as I said, we just don’t have the boots.

Fortunately for bloggers, however, today is rich in material. Bob Guccione died, I see. In Plano, Texas. What the hell was he doing down there? Seeking out the sun like a lizard, maybe? Or just looking for cheaper housing:

The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. A $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, “Caligula,” was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.

The government took chunks of his fortune. In 1985, the Internal Revenue Service demanded $45 million in back taxes. In 1992, he had to borrow $80 million for another tax bill. In 1986, after a scathing federal antipornography report, Penthouse was withdrawn from many newsstands and circulation revenues — a major source of income — fell sharply.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s as Internet pornography grew increasingly available. Mr. Guccione responded with more explicit sexual content that drove advertisers and vendors away, limiting many sales to pornographic bookstores.

…Mr. Guccione, who developed throat cancer in 1998, sold artworks, media properties and his Staatsburg estate as revenues dwindled and debts soared. Penthouse posted a $10 million loss in 2001, General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Penthouse International. Creditors foreclosed on the Guccione mansion, and he moved out in 2006.

I saw the skeleton of the Atlantic City casino when I was there to cover the Miss America pageant one year. It was stalled at the ironwork stage, and every beam was branded with the Penthouse key logo. It loomed over and beside and around a tiny, shabby little house, one of those infamous old cusses who simply will not sell at any price.

The story went that construction stalled when a libel judgment Guccione won against Larry Flynt — something like $75 million, the highest ever awarded at the time — was appealed and knocked down to something closer to $1.98. Now there was a story, unfolding in a Columbus courtroom in 1979. The paper still didn’t have its act together, and it was covered by the usual courthouse reporter with no great fanfare. Hunter Thompson could have gotten a book out of it. I remember going over to J.C. Burns’ mom’s apartment (she lived three doors down from my parents) to visit one night, and she was laughing over it so hard she had tears running down her face. Her comedic sense was obviously more developed than the metro editors at the Dispatch, and could see there was something hysterically funny about one pornographer suing another pornographer for damaging his reputation. At one point Guccione took the stand and wept over the offense done to “the woman I love,” Kathy Keeton, his life and business partner, who sat at the plaintiff’s table knitting throughout the trial.

I forget what the insult was. Probably one of Flynt’s aggressively stupid humor pieces, like the one about Jerry Falwell, memorialized in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” God knows what the jury was thinking, but the story went that the Gooch, flush with the anticipation of all that cash, decided to get in on the Atlantic City gambling boom when it was still young. Alas, it didn’t work out. Lots of stuff didn’t work out. Funny how rich men go crazy — a nuclear reactor? Eighty-two scientists? Imagine getting that job, telling your family: “We’re moving to New York to build a small reactor for a guy who publishes a skin magazine, family! Let’s get packing!”

And then there was “Caligula,” proof Guccione, like all pornographers, also sought the holy grail of respectability — a dirty movie that would keep ’em in their seats after they got what they came for. (Or came what they got for. Whatever.) It didn’t turn out that way, and is generally acknowledged as one of the world’s most expensive all-time stinkers. A few of us saw it one night, in some down-at-the-heels art-movie house in Columbus. There’s a scene where a female character masturbates by pedaling some sort of exercise bicycle that propelled a wheel of feathers that hit her in the happy place. It raised some question in my mind about the technology available in ancient Rome for such a thing, but oh well. I really can’t do better than this archival Time magazine piece on the fiasco, which contains gem after gem after gem:

Where (original screenwriter Gore) Vidal was liberal with sex scenes, Brass has been profligate: there are enough orgies to satisfy even Guccione, and phalluses in all sizes decorate walls, dinner plates and nearly everything else—with naked girls taking up the spaces in between. “To the Romans,” notes (star Malcolm) McDowell, “sex was like driving a car.”

Poor Malcolm McDowell. He later said the movie served as a lesson in the career dangers of doing nudity early in one’s career; you become the guy who can always be counted on to “take his kit off.”

Well, then. There’s so much good bloggage today, all of it from the NYT, which is sort of a carnival of Grim today:

In Indiana, Baron Hill could well be going down for daring to state heresy: Climate change is real:

A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.

“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

Blackwater will likely get away with it. With everything.

Does your kid play football? Check his helmet to see if it’s “certified” by a group consisting of helmet manufacturers. Yes, your kid can get a concussion from the Invisible Hand.

Well, I’m thoroughly propagandized. Off to Wayne State.

Good lord, how does this happen? Up at 7 a.m., make lunch for my kid, slurp coffee, post story on other site, pimp it out via social media, slurp more coffee, check schedule for today (haircut ‘n’ color, office hours), realize I have eight minutes to update my beloved little blog. Where I actually have some readers.

Sigh.

Well, I don’t think I need much more than eight minutes today, because what I really want to talk about is Mrs. Clarence Thomas, Ginni to her pals, and her — what’s the word? — gall. Unmitigated gall. Or maybe recklessness, calling Anita Hill at 7 a.m. on a Saturday to leave one of those passive-aggressive phone messages we’ve all gotten from time to time. A few things I find interesting about it:

1) The time stamp. You don’t call someone’s office at that hour expecting to get a human on the other end. She meant to leave a message. I guess she did.

2) Nineteen years later, she wants to “extend an olive branch,” she said in a confirming statement to the New York Times. The original story that went up last night said she wants to “get passed what happened,” later corrected to “past” without the (sic), so it’s possible it was the Times’ error, although I think not. Pointing this out is just mean, one of my infamous snarky comments, I hasten to add.

3) Although. She wants to “reach across the airwaves and the years?” What the hell does that mean?

4) TBogg may be on to something when he joked that “breakfastinis” were involved with this. I wouldn’t be surprised.

5) Her husband looks like he’s been living on a diet of church-basement casseroles for 20 years. Just sayin’.

6) The best single comment I’ve read on this is Scott Lemieux’s:

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that Ginni Thomas has been pickled for so long in the winger echo chamber that she seemed to take for granted that everyone, including the woman her husband treated inappropriately, would share her conviction that her husband was a victim subject to some kind of gross injustice.

Now you all add your own. My eight minutes is up. Have a great day, all.

Remember what I said last week about stories you don’t need to read past the headline? For this one, I stopped reading after the first paragraph. I didn’t want anything to ruin the picture in my head:

SEATTLE, Wash. – A mountain goat that fatally gored a hiker, then stood over the man and stared at people trying to help, had shown aggressive behavior in the past, Olympic National Park officials said Monday.

You know? I just don’t want to know any more.

Hello, Tuesday. The goat story isn’t even the highlight of the news roundup, which I’m hoping bodes well for the rest of the week. Although you never know. I need to get to the gymnasium at some point today; my architecture of my knees feels like a collection of loose scrap, and if I don’t tighten up everything around them, I’m one slip on the ice away from a torn ACL, or worse. Still might be. I wish I knew what I ever did to my knees to offend them so; it’s not like I played football or acted in porn movies* or anything. Even my high-heel days were fairly short, as these things go. I have always been clumsy, however — I was still getting skinned knees as recently as, oh, a month ago.

* A former editor of mine once interviewed John Holmes. He said he couldn’t stay in porno forever: “It’s like pro football — the knees are the first things to go.”

If I sound a bit scattered, I am. Big news this week on the hyperlocal front — besides the missing banker whose body was found yesterday, it’s high election season. Oddly enough, I have yet to see a single TV ad for our governor’s race, much less anything else. I know this constitutes a blessing, but it is sort of strange. It must be because the big races around here are mostly pretty lopsided, and the local ones are still competitive but unlikely to spend on campaign commercials. Tonight I’m going to a candidate forum, for the school-board seat up for grabs. Should be a packed house; people care about schools around here, and at least one of the candidates has been so understated I still know practically nothing about her, so it’s one of those civic-duty things. I don’t expect scrapping — this being Preppyville — but I’m hoping for some spirited disagreement falling short of your average Detroit school-board meeting, where they frequently yell and sometimes throw things.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, eh? There’s so much good stuff here, all in cryptic, short teasers to encourage curious clickers:

Lawyers! Watch this. Everybody else, too.

When you ask Coozledad to give his bull a skritch on your behalf, he delivers.

If this guy were running for anything around here, I’d totally vote for him. Meet Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High party.

People think they have this town figured out. No one has this town figured out.

Just what America needs: A new way to lose your house to Wall Street.

Ready to take up my pickax and get to work.

We saw “The Social Network” this weekend. It was very fine, even if it did give the idea that all the women at Harvard — and Stanford, for that matter — exist mainly to simmer, occasionally leaping to a boil during frenzied bouts of speed-sex in restaurant bathroom stalls. But that’s a quibble. On the whole, very fine, a movie about a modern business with a theme as old as humanity itself, i.e., what is the nature of human connection?

And while I understand that the film is not entirely factual, I can’t even get too upset about whatever wrong ideas people take away from it, about the company or its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve been wondering what it takes to bug an internet company. Have you ever had a complaint with one? Facebook, Google, one of those? Have you ever tried to get a human being on the phone? Hell, have you ever tried to find a phone number? I guess now we know what it takes — make an expensive movie about them. How comforting.

But because all y’all are smarter than I am, can someone out there with some business experience explain the business model of Facebook? Because while I don’t doubt that Zuckerberg is a billionaire, I don’t understand how. Where is Facebook’s cash flow? I don’t pay for Facebook. I don’t see anything more than a rare ad or sponsored link, all for crap like acai-berry weight-loss solutions and so forth. So what, exactly, makes this company worth so much? Where does the money come from?

I am a business moron, but the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the dark side of the internet economy has been enormously helpful in answering this simple question, which I suspect is this: Nothing is free, and your payment is your information:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

You know how every time you have to submit your e-mail, you get that cross-my-heart statement about how your e-mail information is secure? “We never sell your e-mail address,” etc.? I’ve come to think of this as one of those soul-brother handshakes jerkoffs liked to give you in the ’70s. We all cool? No, I don’t think so.

I really hope the WSJ wins a Pulitzer for this project. I don’t think most people have any idea how much of their information is out there, being bought and sold on the internet. Some of it is pretty disturbing. Ever hear of “web scraping?” No? Well, then:

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

The story went on to describe the distress of one of the scraped, who had described his problems with depression under a pseudonym, but linked back to his personal blog, which used his real name. Think of all the ways insurance companies have tried to deny health insurance to people who might actually need it someday. Ask yourself if you think any are above a tactic like this. Yeah, I thought so.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little Ted Kaczynski. A friend of ours, a member of our little filmmaking crew who went to Vegas with us last spring, recently had her debit card disabled. She’d paid for some coffee with it at Starbucks next to the Golden Nugget back in April, and last week was presented with a $2,000 charge from that very same coffee shop. Obviously a data theft. Obviously she won’t have to pay $2,000. Obviously it will be handled by her bank, but don’t you wonder, once that stuff is out there, what else is out there? I’ve been thinking for a while of going to an all-cash lifestyle, seeing if it will change my spending patterns, maybe write a story about it and pitch it around. For someone who normally carries about 17 cents in my pocket at any given time, it might be an eye-opener. Certainly it would shield me from at least some data theft. Mark Zuckerberg, I’m not so sure about.

By the way, there’s an error on my Wikipedia page. It isn’t mine, as I’ve had nothing to do with my Wikipedia entry other than glance at it, note the error, and go somewhere more interesting. It appeared during the Goeglein Affair, and I have no idea who wrote it. Actually, now that I look at it, it has a couple of errors. I think I’ll leave them there. If someone’s going to trade in my information for profit, I might as well leave some bad stuff out there, too.

Now I must run. Breaking news on the hyperlocal beat — a missing banker was finally found floating yesterday — and anyway, Monday is always crazed. Later.

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

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

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

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

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

But the reaction is where it gets interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home-built plane crashes in Livingston County

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

[Pause.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shower, save me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? Yeah!

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

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

Finally, via MMJeff, a Daily Howler worth considering:

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

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