Because on a day like today, why the hell not?

Last night was the world premiere advance screening of “The Wars of Other Men,” a short film I worked on this past spring. It had to be downgraded from a world premiere to an advance screening because the film wasn’t, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right: Done.

The audience was kind and forgiving, however. The whole purpose of this project was to show we could do a credible short with significant CGI sequences on a micro-tiny budget, and those suckers take time, as James Cameron could tell you. So we were missing a few, but the ones that were in there were great. This is a sci-fi war movie, set in an alternate-history early 20th century, about a small rifle squad on a mission to destroy a weapons plant. When the first threat causes them to run for cover, and they look up to see a zeppelin passing by overhead, flashing signals on a primitive mechanical sign, everybody cheered. The miracle had happened.

The narrative may have been a little confusing for total newbies, as it was missing the climactic explosion. The image is still rendering somewhere in Livonia, I guess.

We shot most of it at the Packard Plant, which lends that certain siege-of-Stalingrad look, as the makers of “Transformers 3” could tell you; they’re over there right now. A friend drove by and said they’ve constructed a passenger-train car, sticking out of a second-floor window. Yeah, well — we were there first. And all our crew had to do was cover up a few zillion square feet of graffiti tags.

This wasn’t my story or script, but I worked on it, and one of the things we hashed over was how much antique language to include. There’s something about the 21st-century American tongue that can’t quite sell a phrase like “have a care with that,” at least not to my ear. All I can say is, there’s a reason so many period pieces about ancient Rome, or wherever, take the easy way out and make everyone British. It just sounds better. And that’s no rap against our actors — I thought Brad Pitt sounded ridiculous in “Troy,” too. But all in all, the biggest incongruity to me was when one of the female soldiers (alternate history, remember) smiled, and showed a distinctly modern set of incisors. Oh, well. No money in a micro-budget for dental prostheses.

Finally, a note about the theater. It was in the Redford, on the west side of Detroit, a grand old movie house lovingly restored:

There are stars in the ceiling — you can see one in the picture. They twinkle.

And, as always, it was very cool to make the turn off West Grand River and see this:

(When Alan sees this, he’s going to say, “Three Stooges festival? Awesome!”)

So, some quick bloggage before I run:

Speaking of movies, everyone is asking me is I’m going to see “Waiting for Superman,” and the answer is: Eventually, I guess. I know enough about the film to know I disagree with its central premise — that bad schools are the fault of bad teachers, and charter schools are The Answer. Charters are a Hail Mary pass for a problem that is far, far more complicated. One of our local school-board candidates, a former teacher himself, seems to understand this. He’s running for re-election, and posted this on his campaign blog. Briefly stated, but worth reading, I think.

Today is Jolene’s birthday. Happy birthday, Jolene.

The hits just keep on coming in the housing meltdown. Look for this to blow up big — I don’t see how it can’t.

As for me, I’m outta here. Have a great weekend, all.

My neighbor was carjacked yesterday, a few blocks from here, on the other side of the freeway. It’s the nature of our neighborhood that I didn’t recognize her talking head on the 11 p.m. news, didn’t recognize her common name, and only knew it was her when they flashed her distinctive vanity plate toward the end of the report. Ah, well.

What made this carjacking newsworthy, as opposed to all the others in the Naked City yesterday, was the fact the perps were pre-teens. Srsly. One was about 11 and the other about 12, and my neighbor said her first reaction, when they demanded her keys, was to tell them to run along. Then one showed the gun in his waistband, and life imitated “The Wire.” She said when they drove away in her big Escalade, they could hardly see over the wheel.

Without blaming the victim in any way whatsoever, this is why I would never drive an Escalade, or any other luxury SUV, without Kwame Kilpatrick’s security detail rolling on backup. Not in the stolen-car capital of North America. Just too tempting. Three or four years ago, their last Escalade was stripped of all four of its tires and wheels (replacement cost: about four grand) in their driveway, by one of those Nascar-type theft crews that can get the job done in the time it takes you to pour a cup of coffee. Nice ride, but not worth the trouble.

Insurance is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Which is why it costs so much.

I once asked a local cop who’d done time on the car-theft task force what happens to all the stolen cars around here. Are they rolled into shipping containers and sent off to Moscow? Stripped in chop shops? Stacked on car carriers and taken out of Michigan entirely? Hardly. Most go a few miles into Detroit, where, depending on the thief’s skill and connections, they will be parked somewhere and ineptly hacked at, like a buffalo carcass on the prairie. Kids take the tires and wheels, because they’re easy to get off and you can roll them to the local shops that will buy them, no questions asked. Other thieves remove the air bags, the scrappers go underneath and saw off the catalytic converter, the electronics and sound system and so on find other buyers, and finally the carcass turns up crippled and worthless, maybe torched. A chop shop requires skilled labor, he said, and a network of buyers. Just as James Bond-style cat burglars were outnumbered by strong-arm home invaders, so too is the chop shop more a fixture of the movies than reality. Although they do exist, as our own J.C. Burns, whose 10-year-old Honda Civic disappeared from his Atlanta driveway a few years back, can tell you. Those are reliable, long-lived cars. Parts are valuable, and decade-old antitheft devices easily detoured.

So that was yesterday in my world. What about yours?

Which seems a good segue into the bloggage. In a dispatch from that other capital of criminal weirdness — South Florida — we meet a man who settled a grudge with a squirt bottle of Roundup:

In the front yard, Ewing gunned down flowers and bushes, the report stated. To get to the plants in the backyard, he filled water balloons with the weed killer and tossed them onto his neighbors property. Ewing estimated the landscaping damage to be about $250.

The victim owed him about $200, so it sounds like he got his money’s worth.

Have you ever watched a surgeon operate? I have. The first thing you notice is how all that “delicate hands of a surgeon” crap is just that. It’s more like stuffing a turkey, as this DetNews story on the life of a Motor City trauma surgeon points out:

Patton’s most important tool appears to be his right index finger. That digit acts as his probe, his periscope, his divining rod, his cork. He can remember on more than one occasion saving the life of a gunshot victim who arrived at the hospital in the back of a sedan. He simply plugged the hole with his finger.

“Feeling is believing,” Patton tells a glassy-eyed intern as he fishes around in a knife wound in the back of a man’s knee, trying to augur whether it’s damage to the vein or the artery.

Anything else? Doesn’t look like it. Now to hop to the shower — more office hours. Today I’m bringing a lunch.

There’s so much good bloggage today, and four hours of student meetings starting in about two hours and change, that today is a mixed grill, eh? You pick, you choose, you pay a la carte. OK? Let’s go:

Lately I’ve been intrigued by a number of “what can I do” charities or other efforts to do good. I’m charmed by people who, when faced with a need, don’t dither around and maybe flip a few bucks into a hat, but ask themselves, “What can I do?” And then do it. Like the Mower Gang, “renegade landscapers” who mow abandoned or neglected parks in Detroit, so kids can play. And Dan Savage and his “it gets better” video campaign, aimed at reassuring despairing gay and lesbian students that if they can just hang on a little while longer, life will improve. It sounded gimmicky to me until I watched a few of them, like Savage’s own, and now Tim Gunn’s. Such a simple act, but one of such generosity, too. I think lives are being saved.

What was I just saying about radio guys? Radio guys now run the Chicago Tribune, and:

There have been complaints about Mr. Michaels in the past, however. In 1995, Mr. Michaels and Jacor settled a suit brought by Liz Richards, a former talk show host in Florida who filed an E.E.O.C. complaint and a civil suit, saying she had been bitten on the neck by Mr. Michaels and that he walked through the office wearing a sexual device around his neck.

“They were like 14-year-old boys — no boundaries at all — but with money and power,” Ms. Richards said in an interview.

…A woman who used to work at the Tribune Company in a senior position, but did not want to be identified because she now worked at another media company in Chicago, said that Mr. Michaels and Marc Chase, who was brought in to run Tribune Interactive, had a loud conversation on an open balcony above a work area about the sexual suitability of various employees.

But also:

In an effort to shake up (WGN, the Trib’s radio station), the management jettisoned a sports talk show at night and installed someone with no radio experience, Jim Laski, an Illinois politician who had been convicted of a felony.

Steve Cochran, a longtime midday host who has said he was dismissed as he was walking out of the bathroom this summer, said the changes seemed aimed at destroying WGN.

“This was supposed to be their comfort zone, what they were good at, and they have ruined a radio station that has had an 80-year relationship with its listeners,” he said.

“This is a collection of carnival workers who are only looking after their friends, giving jobs to their buddies. Blagojevich is on trial and you bring in a politician who has done time in jail?”

Oh my is that a good read for anyone who once loved the Trib. I think Bob Greene left too soon. He might have been president of the company by now.

Put yourself in Sarah Palin’s shoe’s: Her chief enforcer speak’s.

Fascinating: The Islamification of Mariah Carey photos. I like the one where she appears to be taken over by the Cat Blob.

Finally, while there’s no way I can improve on Roy’s witty description of this story, about the firemen who let a family’s house burn to the ground because they hadn’t paid their annual $75 fire-service fee — i.e., the Ayn Rand Hook & Ladder Company — I guess this is the world, libertarian-style. All heretofore public services, fire protection, schools, what-have-you, are now available cafeteria-style. Feel lucky, punk? Then you don’t need a fire company or police department. And so on. I expect these arrangements will continue; it makes perfect sense for a cash-strapped municipality. Remembering what it used to be when it was widely accepted that, for instance, a well-educated populace was a benefit to all citizens, whether they had children in public schools or not, and that a working fire company was of great benefit not only when your own house was on fire but when your neighbor’s was as well — all I can say is, I will miss it.

When Fort Wayne was aggressively annexing its unincorporated suburbs, the newspapers would regularly publish nitwit, whiny letters to the editor from people who claimed they’d “chosen” township life because they wanted to be “free” of city concerns. The fact the township was filled with subdivisions and hard by a city of several hundred thousand, that it provided them not only with their jobs but with all the other things people like cities for — arts and entertainment and pro sports and good shopping and decent restaurants and proximity to well-maintained freeways — never seemed to occur to them. To these folks, they were livin’ the minimal-government life, and expected to pay the discount price for it. My colleagues and I would occasionally chuckle over these screeds, and I developed a retort: Move to Mongo, Mongo being a remote outpost that would satisfy all their freedom needs without asking much in return.

I guess sooner or later, we’ll all move to Mongo.

Off to Diversity U. See y’all tomorrow.

I need to check out the right-wing Catholic blogs more often. Otherwise, it might have been even longer before I learned that Joseph Sobran, an embarrassing oddity for the ultraconservative commentariat, died late last week, succumbing to kidney failure and what sounds like a cascade of other health problems brought on by him being such a p.o.s.

You’ve probably never heard of him. I’ve only heard of him because my newspaper carried his column, one of the relative few that ran him at his peak and the tiny handful that hung on after Sobran broke with William F. Buckley Jr. and was fired by the National Review. It was bad enough that we bought his phoned-in paleoconservative dreck when he was respectable, but after Buckley called him out for praising an unapologetically racist magazine, and Sobran retaliated by saying his mentor was a tool of the Podhoretz clan and more concerned with getting seated at the right dinner parties up there in Jew York, well, he crossed the line into embarrassment.

If you paid absolutely no attention to any of this when it was happening in 1993, I’ll try to make this tie together with what we were talking about yesterday. Because while it’s no doubt way too generous to call Sobran crazy, he was one of those right-wing shitheads who took radical and offensive positions in part, I am sure, because he just liked being reviled, and was somehow able to make the revulsion read — in his own mind, anyway — as resentment for a brave truth-speaker. Such as? Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. William Shakespeare was a fraud. The Clintons were white trash. And the Jews were indirectly responsible for 9/11, by shaping U.S. Middle East policy to favor Israel. And so on. The last time I looked him up, he was referring to Barack Obama as “our mulatto president.” Classy.

After his cashiering from polite salons, he was free to do things like give speeches to the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denial group. He spent a lot of time in this keynoter claiming he has no animus for Jews. As for what Hitler did, well…

Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don’t read German, so I can’t assess the documentary evidence; I don’t know chemistry, so I can’t discuss Zyklon-B; I don’t understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, “Holocaust denial” is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that’s proof enough.

…Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it’s safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today’s mainstream press.

If the president says he was born in Hawaii, I take him at his word. After all, I wasn’t there.

Sobran’s passing was barely noted in respectable conservative journals, ignored by the blogosphere, and, as I mentioned before, acknowledged sadly by right-wing Catholics. Apparently Sobran considered himself a faithful and devoted servant of the Roman church, albeit twice-divorced and not enough of an expert on chemistry to formally acknowledge the slaughter of 6 million of God’s chosen people. I think even they were embarrassed by him.

I wonder what his last days were like. Where did he get his money? How did he live? In such cases, it’s useful to remember that there’s a very good chance he spoke to groups like the Institute for Historical Review because their checks cleared. (Boy, there’s a short film ready to be made, eh? “The Old Conservative in Exile.” Shiny suits, pilled cuffs and dandruff just play better on the big screen.)

Whew. I need a palate cleanser. How about a feature borrowed from Zorn, Fine lines?

Add the butter. One of the many reasons that restaurant food often tastes better than the stuff we make at home is that restaurant cooks do not know your cardiologist and have no real interest in your long-term enjoyment of life. They cook for this moment and for the fleeting feeling of delicious transcendence they can offer a diner. Next time, you can use less. This first time, add all four tablespoons.
– Sam Sifton on a pork ragu

Our symphony orchestra is on strike. Gloomy Gusses here think its death is inevitable, that a world-class orchestra is simply something we can no longer afford:

There are lots of numbers here, like there are in just about any labor dispute. But, at base, there are only two metrics that truly matter in the first DSO walkout since 1987 — changing consumer demand and the 21.3 percent decline in Michigan’s median income between 2000 and 2009.

That nation-leading collapse, a sickening number for the ripple effect it delivers to everything from home values and wage levels to public tax revenues and, yes, support for the local orchestra, goes further than just about anything else in describing what’s happening to the DSO. It’s also what will affect public and private institutions, businesses and communities, here for years to come.

Orchestra musicians can walk picket lines for the next year and it won’t change the fact that the economic profile of their geographic home has changed dramatically, if not irreversibly, in ways that peers in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco simply haven’t seen and probably won’t.

As much as it pains me to say, that’s probably true. Although it was also true during the Depression, and the DSO hung on then. With help. You know how Francis Ford Coppola got his middle name? Well, his daddy was a flutist in the Detroit Symphony in the 1930s, and never forgot the group’s sugar daddy, whose financial support kept the place afloat. It could still happen.

Let’s close with a bookend, then. I have work to do:

“If a guy is anti-Semitic and no one is listening, is he still anti-Semitic?” — Paul Shaffer

Happy Tuesday, all.

I need to do a limited skinback here. I’ve been mulling something over since Hank brought it up in comments last Thursday, when we discussed the strange case of Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan assistant attorney general waging a one-man war against Chris Armstrong, the gay student-body president at the University of Michigan. Hank said:

Someone I know, a high-functioning autistic man who would certainly know what he’s talking about in this regard, looked at the Shirvell interview and immediately diagnosed a fellow high-functioning autistic man. It’s what happens, he says, when the rigidity and obsessive behavior fails to find an appropriate outlet.

I’ve watched the video a couple of times since then, and I think he’s right. There’s something about Shirvell that’s not quite all there; he seems to have no idea why what he’s doing is at all inappropriate. (It’s hard to judge a person’s demeanor in one of these on-camera interviews, which do not favor amateurs — you sit in a chair, staring into a camera lens while Anderson Cooper yaks in your ear. You have no conventional feedback to tell you how you’re coming across; if you’re lucky you might get a monitor, but not always.) Turning to the wisdom of the crowd, i.e., Googling “‘andrew shirvell’ + asperger OR autism” turns up many other armchair psychiatrists who recognize the same traits they live with every day in a colleague or loved one with this condition. It’s good enough for me. While by no means excusing Shirvell’s behavior, it’s safe to say that outraged umbrage and gaydar jokes here are uncalled-for, and I apologize. Shirvell, meanwhile, has decided this is an excellent time to take a leave of absence. Wise move.

However, I’d like to use this as a jumping-off point for a subject that’s interested me for years — how we deal with, or don’t deal with, mental impairments/illness/less-than-normal brain functioning in our society.

When I was a columnist I wrote a bit about mental health, and I always liked to bat this balloon around with my sources, asking them how we draw the line between eccentric and crazy. “Not very well” was their answer, in a phrase. They often spoke of the frustration of dealing with, say, the very religious family of a schizophrenic patient, who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand things like brain chemistry and psychotropic drugs and 72-hour commitments, but had a very easy explanation in “demonic possession.” Sometimes a person’s symptoms fit very nicely into a particular culture’s drawer, and it takes a while before anyone figures out they have a person on their hands who needs help and support, not reinforcement.

I have no idea at all what sort of family or community Shirvell comes from, but it’s entirely possible that among his tribe, this is normal behavior, even admirable. It’s funny how the internet has made a certain sort of obsession — and what is a blog called Name of Person I Hate Watch but an obsession — not just acceptable but normal. And if people you hang with hate the same people you do, it becomes noble, a cause. And soon no one questions whether Andrew is getting a little too engaged in the cause, he’s just a man with admirable energy and focus.

Maybe we should all undergo a periodic life audit by a panel of friendly strangers with board-certified Common Sense ™. They’d go over a few key documents in our lives, we’d submit to a short interview, and two weeks later the report comes in the mail: Nice work on cutting back on your drinking and increasing your exercise, but you’re starting to become a bore about your vegetarian diet. Watch that.

And so another weekend vanishes in the rear-view mirror. I spent most of it in the kitchen. I’m experimenting with a new food this week — quinoa.

“May I have a pound of kee-no-ah?” I asked the girl at the store.

“I have some keen-wa right here,” she said, handing over a bag. Nicely played. So far I’m finding the Aztec’s magic grain interesting. Yesterday — cold bean salad with cherry tomatoes, mixed greens and quinoa. Today: Fried quinoa in the style of rice. I’ll keep you posted.

Bloggage: When you get to be my age, you’ve already been puzzled by at least half a million success stories, but the one that’s bugging me at the moment is that of Kathleen Parker, who always struck me as the ultimate media chameleon, one of those women who scored the “conservative” slot on op-ed pages back when female columnists were all Ellen Goodman clones, and then switched sides during the Bush meltdown, thereby earning the Strange New Respect award, and — funny how often this happens — a goddamn Pulitzer Prize, and if that isn’t a testament to how slim the pickings have gotten in the op-ed stable, I don’t know what is. Her column always struck me as content-free, I-was-just-thinkin’ culture-war musings on whatever was on the cover of Newsweek in any given month. But she had one thing working for her, something she’s always been willing to trade on. She’s very pretty. An early version of her website had a collection of photos of her, all taken at the same session, a little brainy pin-up gallery of Kathleen with her head cocked, Kathleen leaning her head on her hand and smiling, Kathleen twirling her reading glasses, etc. She once wrote that her mother died when she was very young and her father remarried something like four or five times, thereby confirming another of my long-distance armchair psychological diagnoses — another woman who, like Dr. Laura, could never get dad’s attention, so she grew up to be a men’s-rights advocate and good little defender of traditional gender roles. I may well be full of shit, and if so feel free to tell me so.

Anyway, speaking of puzzling success stories? Parker Spitzer, complete with a wet kiss for the launch by none other than Howie Kurtz. Break a leg, Katie.

Related, the disarray at CNN, from New York magazine:

“They do not recognize a reality that Fox and MSNBC recognize,” says a former senior CNN staffer. “You have to be real showmen and hook into America, which is blue collar and angry. The CNN culture is still very strange. You walk into that building, you think you’re the Jesuits and you’re protecting a certain legacy. They still look at Fox as a carnival—not Fox as a brilliant marketing entity. It’s weird. They’re decades into it, and they’ll protect it to the end.”

Finally I leave you with a recipe. Someone asked me for it and I copied it down, so I’ll share it with you. Never like to waste a good transcription:

This is from the Junior League’s Centennial Cookbook, and don’t draw any conclusions from that — I am as far from a Junior Leaguer as they come, but the book came to the newsroom a few years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find some of those skinny blondes could actually cook.

Anyway, this comes together pretty fast, and it’s one recipe where I don’t mind letting someone else do the prep work — butternut squash are such a pain to peel and dice, I generally buy them already prepped at Trader Joe’s.

Curried butternut apple soup

Puree the soup with an immersion blender. Season and serve with a dollop of cream, if you like. Note: This soup improves with keeping. Prepare a day or two in advance if time allows.

Happy soup! It’s going to be soup weather for sure this week.

I’m sorry I’m going to miss this.

A few odds and ends on a morning when I just can’t think. (In my column-writin’ days, I called this Items in Search of a Column. Blast from the past!) So here goes:

When you pop the cap for the filler pipe on the Chevy Volt, guess what you see:

That’s the plug, if your monitor is lousy. I don’t have high hopes for this car. I think $40,000 is way too high a price for anyone but a tiny niche to take a chance on radical automotive technology; in some ways, I think they’d have had more luck with the Cadillac version of the Volt, unveiled as a fairly daffy concept at the auto show a couple years ago — the Converj. I could see young rich guys looking for a way to one-up their pious Prius-driving friends, and with Cadillac-branded Detroit iron, no less, and the raw numbers reflected in that group are probably about the same as those willing to pay 40 grand for a Chevy compact.

However, when it comes to selling anything to anyone, it’s been widely demonstrated that I don’t know shit. Forty thousand is the bleeding-edge price, and presumably it will fall over time. Everybody I know here leases; in the nearly six years we’ve been here, some of them are driving their third vehicle, while I’m still tooling around in my 2003 Passat wagon. (I got the pink slip, daddy.) Lessees don’t look at sticker prices. The car is very cool, too. This one was parked outside the TED conference and available for a long examination, and I’ll admit I was smitten, but I don’t know how much of that was being charmed by the Volt badge with the little lightning bolt.

The woman from GM said they’ll start rolling out in November in the West and South, but won’t be sold around here until the snow melts. That is an ominous statement, don’t you think? Well, fingers crossed. One question I haven’t see answered: Assuming you use car like it’s designed to be used, for short hops around town, recharging it every night in your garage — how much will it bump your electricity bill? I forgot to ask the spokesbrain.

Today’s OID story, from the police blotter: Two jagoffs steal a Meals on Wheels truck, which they then use as a decoy to assault an elderly couple, and hijack their car. This town. I swear.

OIM (Only in Macomb): Yet another Münchausen-by-proxy lunatic, this one working it for cash. Mom shaves boy’s head, drugs his applesauce and tells everyone he has leukemia. Which, as this cases usually go, works until it doesn’t. Charges pending.

I don’t know how I missed it the first time around. A new phrase for your economical fashion vocabulary: Pop of color. Google returns 21 million hits. Twenty-one million fashionistas can’t be wrong. (Excise fashionista from your toolbox at the same time. Very dumb word that replaced a perfect one — clotheshorse.)

With that, I’m commencing the weekend. My work week starts on Sundays anyway, so today is Nance Day. Enjoy yours. I think I’m headed to the farmer’s market to buy a brussels-sprout sword.

So it seems an assistant attorney general in my very own state has started a personal jihad against the student body president at the University of Michigan. The assistant AG, Andrew Shirvell, blogs as “Concerned Michigan Alumnus,” believes Chris Armstrong is a dangerous radical, and has started a website — Chris Armstrong Watch — to serve as his public platform. There, he posts Perez Hilton-style Photoshopped pictures of Armstrong, screen grabs of Facebook postings between Armstrong and his friends, and other up-to-the-minute evidence of what he believes is wrongdoing, much of it IN CAPS or with the standard antique journo-speak (OUTRAGE ALERT, or BOMBSHELL). He has protested outside Armstrong’s house. Two nights ago, he went on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN to, essentially, rave that Armstrong is SO DANGEROUS, SO SHAMEFUL to the state’s elite university, that he must be STOPPED.

However, it was difficult to hear what Shirvell was saying, because my Over the Rainbow Home Gaydar Alert System wouldn’t stop wailing. I need to get that checked.

Yes, friends, that’s what this is all about: Chris Armstrong is the first “openly gay,” as they say, student-body president, and Shirvell simply can’t get over this. He is going to flush his career right down the toilet over, essentially, a student-council election at his alma mater.

Although who knows? Michigan’s outgoing attorney general, Mike Cox, went on Cooper’s show last night to defend his staffer (to be sure, one of hundreds) and his right to act like an ass, as well as to wash his hands of handing down any discipline whatsoever. His hands are tied, he said, by this little thing called the First Amendment. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Cox’s performance was sort of smirky. Cox is a smirky guy, something voters saw through last month when they crushed his hopes of being the next governor; he finished third in the primary. His attitude last night was that of a man already cleaning out his office and looking forward to a lucrative spell in the private sector. What could he do, really? he shrugged. As though if his assistant were gay, and were conducting a similar campaign against some young conservative, he wouldn’t have been fired for conduct-unbecoming months ago.

I know something about the First Amendment, and I know something about being the target of a crazy man with a website. And while what Shirvell is writing is certainly protected, I’d say going to Armstrong’s house to wave a sign around crosses a line for someone purporting to represent the people of this state. Unless Cox is gunning for a job with the Thomas More Law Center, it’s a no-brainer. Fire this douche, please.

And just in case you think harassment based on sexual orientation is no biggie, it is. Very sad story at that link. What a couple of monsters, but having presumably been fed a steady diet of riotous teen comedies where guys broadcast other guys’ bedroom activities via webcam, maybe they expected a different outcome.

TEDxDetroit was, contrary to all my fears, a pretty good show, mixing a certain amount of business porn (innovate or die! now playing at a PowerPoint near you!) with inspirational change stories with slam poetry with music with everything else. I’m still cogitating on what was said, and will likely blog on at least some of it in the future. However, I do wonder what it must be like to be a presenter at these things, looking out at your audience:

To be absolutely accurate, I took this just before the first presentation, but the behavior didn’t change much — at any given moment, a large portion of the audience was twittering, e-mailing or doing who-knows-what on their portable devices, and to be sure, this behavior was encouraged, and I did some of it myself. Still. Imagine looking out from the stage and seeing a room full of people, half of whom have their faces lit from below and are paying you only a portion of their attention. This would drive me insane. It’s why I decided, at the last minute, to leave my laptop home. Be here now, I thought. And mostly I was. But not entirely. This is a curse of our age.

And now I have to hit the shower for Thursday office hours. I leave you with an essay by David Byrne, musician and artist, who recently biked around our fair city while in town on a movie project. His observations of Detroit are more accurate and clear-headed than that of many professional journalists. However, I don’t think he needs the day job. Byrne was a surprise guest at a street fair in front of the Detroit newspapers a couple weeks ago, something the publishing company puts on to benefit the United Way. Probably heard the music from his hotel and biked over to see what’s what. Curiosity — it’s a good thing. Then last night, Alan e-mailed me from the office to say he was walking up to the third-floor newsroom when a man walking down stuck out his hand for a shake. It was Jesse Jackson. He must shake hands involuntarily.

Finally, RIP Tony Curtis. Everybody’s talking about “Some Like it Hot,” but for my money, his best work was as Sidney Falco in “Sweet Smell of Success.” YMMV, but that is one great movie.

Shower-bound. Have a great day.

First, some housekeeping: No conventional blog entry tomorrow, but probably something — I’m attending TEDxDetroit all day, and my usual blogging time will be colonized by…something inspiring, I hope. I will admit to skepticism about this event, and fear an all-day pep rally, but what the hell, I guess if it is, no one’s holding me hostage or anything. I expect the hall will be wired and wi-fi’d to a fare-thee-well, so that we can tweet and status-update and blog and all the rest of it. In any event, I’ll have my laptop and will be ready to mojo something, should it become necessary. I’ll also be operating on about five hours of sleep. Better pack some business cards, so I can introduce myself if words fail.

Regarding pep rallies: The wife of a friend worked in sales, for a radio station. Let me stipulate upfront that while I know many of our readers are radio people, or were, my brief time in radio convinced me it was the worst business on earth, or maybe second to sex slavery. Certainly it was the weirdest. I was always meeting someone who gave me hope, followed by 10 social outcasts, weirdos, nitwit provocateurs or other oddballs, who would make me despair. I remind you that both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, before they were loathsome public figures, were just regular old radio guys, and no doubt fit right in at whatever station employed them. Certainly I met many less-talented or less-ambitious versions of both, and I was only a dabbler. So, that said, my friend’s wife said her station’s main competition started each day with a meeting of the sales-department staff, and that it was always styled as a pep rally.

“They have to clap and cheer every sale, and then they end with a chant: KILL MAGIC! KILL MAGIC!” she said, Magic (or “Majic”) being the station she worked for. I guess the bosses saw it as motivational; they were all men, and this sort of display was imported directly from the locker room or team huddle. I can tell you right now, being asked to participate in a Two Minutes Hate like that would be a dealbreaker. I refer you to observations about the radio business, above. (Public radio being the exception, although nowhere near as much as they’d like to think.)

Did you know that you have to apply to attend a TED conference? Srsly. That right there almost put me off. The original TED requires an invitation and a $6,000 ticket, in fact. Local TED only wanted my Twitter handle, “three links to help us learn more about you,” and a voluntary contribution of $21. Apparently there is a waiting list, so I can say I was at least more desirable as an audience member than someone, although my guess is, knowing a member of the organizing committee didn’t hurt one li’l bit.

Anyway, we’ll see. But since pickings are already slim, let’s skip to the bloggage.

And the MacArthur goes to…Mr. Laura Lippman (and at least occasional reader and once-or-twice commenter here at NN.C). I still get fewer than 1,000 unique visits a day, but as I like to tell people, they’re the right ones. Congratulations, David Simon. If I ever get to Baltimore or New Orleans, YOU are buying.

(I bet Mr. Lippman gets bombarded with invitations to TED conferences.)

In other TED news, today is the 50th anniversary of Ted Williams’ last game. In another month, it will be the 50th anniversary of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike’s first and last baseball essay, but maybe the finest one ever written. Charles McGrath pays tribute. Essay here.

Richard Reeves: The Tea Party has it backward.

And now, with papers to grade and stuff to post, I’m off to…pour some more coffee.