You won’t last long in my business if you let the news of an average day get you down (she said, snapping the brim of her fedora, the one with the PRESS card sticking out of the hatband), but man, this one? Was a total downer:

CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. — Deanne Westbrook had tried everything to keep her husband, Ronald, in the house.

He was 72. Alzheimer’s had erased much of his talent for music and flying airplanes.

No one is sure how, in the frigid hours before dawn last Wednesday in this small north Georgia community near the Tennessee border, Mr. Westbrook ended up nearly three miles from home with a handful of other people’s mail, jiggling Joe Hendrix’s doorknob.

Mr. Hendrix, 34, stepped onto his porch with a Glock pistol in his hand and his fiancée inside on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. He fired four shots. One hit Mr. Westbrook in the chest.

Yes, another American has stood his ground, and bravely defended his home. You can read the rest of the story. Joe Hendrix feels really bad about what happened. It says he’s under investigation, but you don’t have to be much of a bettor to figure he won’t be charged with anything. This is Georgia, where gun ownership is a civic religion, and anyone who rattles your doorknob at 4 a.m. is asking to be ventilated.

I just keep coming back to what, precisely, goes through a man’s head when stuff happens — admittedly scary stuff — at 4 a.m. and there’s a loaded gun in the house. I’ve often told Alan that I would happily watch a thief take anything he might want from our house and wouldn’t feel the need to shoot anyone. If he moved on one of us, sure. But even a doorknob-rattle is only a doorknob-rattle, as long as the rattler stays on the other side of the door. More:

Sheriff Wilson said he wished Mr. Hendrix had just stayed inside. But he knows it was a tense situation.

“When you listen to the 911 calls, it’s evident to me that there was fear displayed at least by the female who lived there,” he said.

As Mr. Westbrook came around a corner of the house, Mr. Hendrix took his gun and repeatedly called for him to identify himself, he told the police. Then he fired the shots. Mr. Hendrix told investigators that Mr. Westbrook continued to approach him, so he fired the shot into his chest.

I guess fear is an unpredictable thing, but this is a 72-year-old man we’re talking about.

I don’t know how you hear a rattle at 4 a.m. and immediately think SERIAL KILLER COME TO DO ME HARM, but maybe I do. Maybe that’s the prevailing myth of the country at the moment. It’s the story we’re told in every crappy crime show and every lousy movie. I’m not much of a Michael Moore fan, but he sees things. The parts in “Bowling for Columbine” where he fingered media-generated fear as the motivation for all this strapping up? That was dead-on. Of course he screwed it up later in the movie, but he got that right.

So let’s move on. To Katie Couric, helping reverse the gains of medical science. Here’s the promo for a recent show on the HPV vaccine:

The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer … but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls? Meet a mom who claims her daughter died after getting the HPV vaccine, and hear all sides of the HPV vaccine controversy.

Love that weasel word: “Potentially.” More:

On the anti-vaccine side: Couric’s guests included a mother whose daughter died of undetermined causes 18 days after getting the vaccination; another mother and her daughter, who came down with a hodgepodge of symptoms that sound an awful lot like depression a few days after the vaccine; and Dr. Diane Harper, a skeptic of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s push to vaccinate all girls and who is careful to avoid obvious untruths but has been criticized for her involvement in the anti-vaccination movement. On the pro-vaccination side, Couric only hosted one guest, Dr. Mallika Marshall, a ratio that wildly underplays how dominant the pro-vaccination opinion is in the medical profession. Marshall was only given a few minutes to state that vaccines are safe and that the side effects mentioned by other guests were probably unrelated to the vaccine. Unfortunately, Couric and her producers allowed these facts to be totally overshadowed by the heartrending tales told by the two mothers.

I think we need something a little more fun. Lions examine a remote camera somewhere in Africa. Great pix.

And now, let’s get through to the weekend.

I remember, years ago, in search of a holiday column, I contacted a local Vietnam vets group to see if there were any families of POW/MIAs in the area. They directed me to a couple in Decatur, south of Fort Wayne. Just a few minutes into the interview, I knew this was a bad idea. I asked them to describe the circumstances of their son’s disappearance, and the mother said he’d been crossing a rain-swollen river with his platoon, stepped in a deep hole, floundered, went under and wasn’t seen again.

“And they’re carrying him as missing in action?” I asked, incredulous.

“His body was never found,” she explained. So they kept holding out hope that someday, somehow, he’d be coming home.

We talked a little more, I excused myself and left. Those poor people, I thought, driving home. But surely they know he’s dead. Surely. Where else would he be?

I didn’t know then, and only recently learned, of the governmental flim-flam known as the MIA. Rick Perlstein:

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, US policy became pretty much to ignore them ― part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. Then, one day in the first spring of Richard Nixon’s presidency, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the existence of from 500 to 1,300 of what he termed “POW/MIA’s.” Those three letters — “MIA” — are familiar to us now. The term, however, was a new, Nixonian invention. It had used to be that downed fliers not confirmed as actual prisoners used to be classified not as “Missing in Action” but “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” The new designation was a propaganda scam. It let the Pentagon and State Department and White House refer to these 1,300 (later “1,400”) as if they were, every one of them, actual prisoners, even though every one of them was almost certainly dead. “Hundreds of American wives, children, and parents continue to live in a tragic state of uncertainty caused by the lack of information concerning the fate of their loved ones,” Secretary Laird said. That was part of an attempt to manipulate international opinion to frame the North Vietnamese Communists (against whom, of course, America was prosecuting an illegal and undeclared air war against civilians) as uniquely cruel, even though fewer men were taken prisoner or went missing in Vietnam than in any previous American war. (From 1965 through 1969, they were tortured, at least if you believe American prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were tortured; the techniques were essentially the same.)

Isn’t that appalling? I keep thinking of that poor couple sitting in their little house in Indiana, holding out hope that their baby, gone 15 years by that point, might still be alive, somewhere halfway around the world.

Dunno why I’m leading with that today. It just popped up in one of my feeds and it reminded me of Mr. and Mrs. Sad Hoosier. It’s not a day for me to be sad — I am making a Christmas miracle happen for a pregnant friend who is off in lonely Arizona, craving a particular brand of artisanal jalapeño/cherry salsa available only around here. I saw it on the shelf at the market Saturday and picked up two jars. Her only instruction will be to pay it forward, somehow. I suppose, if the salsa disagrees with her fetus, she may pay it forward literally. If you’re in the desert southwest and a beautiful brunette with a slight baby bump presses a jar of it in your hand, be not afraid! It’s just your own Christmas miracle.

And I also renewed my passport. For the next two or three weeks, I will be unable to leave the United States. Be advised, just in case you were going to surprise me with a trip to Paris or something.

Meanwhile, we have some bloggage:

There was a great “Fresh Air” on the so-called personhood movement a few days back, and today, the great Dahlia Lithwick weighs in:

So pause for a moment with me to ponder what it means that some of the greatest civil rights battles of our era are being fought to extend personhood into the weeks prior to viability and the years after incorporation? What does it mean for actual human “personhood”—as well as for reproductive rights and corporate control—that, if the far right succeeds in stretching these two legal fictions to their illogical extremes, American “personhood” will begin at conception, diminish somewhat at birth, and regain its force upon incorporation?

Good questions.

As you may know, a federal judge ruled today that Detroit’s bankruptcy can go forward, which means — well, it means a lot of things, but the biggest is that pensions for public workers are not, as previously believed (and the state constitution says), untouchable. Lots of states have similar constitutions. We’ll see how that goes.

It’s Wednesday already? It is. I hope yours is good.

What a fun Thanksgiving it will be at the Cheneys. Mary and Liz feuding, mom and dad taking the only side that matters — the one that plants the family flag in the U.S. Senate — and a lot of furious glances over the cranberry sauce, I’d wager.

I hesitate to draw conclusions from the sketchy information we have now. A Facebook post, a one-paragaph statement and a floundering political campaign. Maybe the Cheneys are like battling pundits on a cable yak show, yelling at one another until the red light goes off, at which point they grab a drink together and laugh about bread and circuses. Or maybe both daughters are chips off the old block. One worked for her father’s election, knowing exactly what the national platform was. Another sat at dad’s other hand, and is now trying to gain a Senate seat, while a good case can be made that she’s a carpetbagger.

A good case can be made that even if the family is tearing itself apart? Where’s the harm.

So, how was your Monday. I had an MRI. No, I don’t know what it turned up, if anything. The technician just runs the machine and burns the CD. I concentrated on holding as still as possible, breathing deeply and thinking about nothing. I’ve always envied people who can do that — think about nothing. I’d love to have a deeper relationship with yoga, but I can barely concentrate on the breathing, let alone the chakras. I did OK on the MRI, though. Maybe that’s my relaxation workout — the MRI.

Ugh, I’m tired. A few notes, though:

More on the Cheneys, from Slate.

A TV news station calls for viewer pictures of Sunday’s bad weather. A viewer submits one, and it’s posted. Not only is the tornado a fake, so is the UFO and Bigfoot.

And that’s it for me. Good Tuesday.

One of the reasons for extended lameness in this space is my job. For better or worse, I’m a reporter again, and I have to be careful what I opine about in public. My bosses are quite indulgent, but on most local subjects I have to hold my fire other than an occasional isn’t-this-interesting.

Probably the highest-profile interesting — in the Chinese-curse sense of the word — story these days is the Detroit bankruptcy, specifically how it applies to the Detroit Institute of Arts. For those who need background: In an unusual arrangement, the collection of the DIA is actually owned by the city of Detroit. As the city is in bankruptcy, and a bankruptcy requires the listing of assets and obligations, the art is theoretically on the table for liquidation to pay the city’s billions in debt.

Now. From the beginning, all concerned have said that is not their intent to put paintings on the market to pay pensions, but you don’t have to be an art lover to see the Sophie’s choice offered here — cutting pensions to 78-year-old former file clerks vs. looting the museum to pay the bills. I doubt the governor, who appointed the emergency manager, wants to go down in state history as the guy who wrecked a great American cultural institution. Those file clerks will eventually die and stop collecting their pensions, but a closed DIA would loom over Woodward Avenue forever, maybe with the bolts that used to hold Rodin’s Thinker protruding, growing rust by the day. Even for a pro-business Republican, the idea of a once-great working-class city’s treasure being sold to Russian oligarchs and hedge-fund douchebags would likely be a bridge too far.

And for those who might say, “Can’t they just sell some art? Like some stuff from the basement, or a couple of the really valuable pieces?” The answer is no. Selling so much as an ashtray for any purpose other than to buy more art is forbidden under the rules of the museum’s professional organization, the name of which I can’t recall. It’s one they enforce strictly, and breaking it would mean ejection, which would mean the DIA could no longer host exhibits from other institutions, among other sanctions. More to the point, it would endanger the tri-county tax millage that now provides the DIA with its operating budget. Officials in two of those counties have explicitly said that if art is sold, the tax dollars stop. That is a far bigger threat.

In recent weeks, the tune has changed. Someone close to the emergency manager leaked a story to a friendly conservative columnist, claiming the EM “wants $500 million” from the DIA. That story has laid on the table like a rotten oyster for a while now, and finally, today, there seemed to be a response.

The judge has approached the deep-pocketed foundations in the region and asked them to get out their checkbooks:

The federal judge mediating Detroit’s bankruptcy is exploring whether regional and national foundations could create a fund that would protect the Detroit Institute of Arts’ city-owned collection by helping to support retiree pensions, multiple sources told The Detroit News.

Near the end of a Nov. 5 meeting lasting more than three hours, Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen offered what one participant called a “very carefully worded” concept that fell short of asking the nine foundations — including Kresge, Hudson-Webber, Mott, Knight and the Ford Foundation of New York — for commitments to support a plan. Rosen did not cite a specific amount, but participants said it could approach $500 million.

“The number is what’s in question,” said a participant, who asked not to be identified because the talks are confidential. “What does it take to pull this off, to satisfy everybody around the table? And what’s the time frame – 20 years, 25 years? It’s a creative solution to this thing.”

From the beginning, it’s been hard to avoid noting the discomfort of suburbanites, who usually watch Detroit’s agony the way they watch an old disaster movie at 1 a.m. — i.e., through half-closed eyes — suddenly bolt upright on the couch and shriek, SELL THE VAN GOGH? OVER MY DEAD BODY!!!! The foundations are the byproduct of generations-old family and corporate fortunes, many of which made their dollars here in the near-ruined city. Asking for this is a way of saying, OK, let’s see how much the big private money cares about this.

Here’s another thing I think I can note without fear of retribution: The national coverage of Detroit has been a mixed bag, but mainly an argument for the perils of parachute journalism. From Anthony Bourdain to 60 Minutes to this bit of libertarian troll-baiting, it’s been an instructive lesson for all: Outside eyes are valuable, but seldom see everything. Or even most things. And sometimes, not much of anything.

Lots of bloggage today, so let’s get to it:

I think a good lesson to take away from Grantland’s piece on Brian Holloway’s house is to be wary of any story that spreads primarily via social media. Holloway’s story, about how a gang of teenagers took over his empty vacation home and trashed it, turns out to be not the whole story. And not by a long shot. Read the whole thing, but here’s an insightful passage from low in the piece:

For all serious men, the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the Internet has opened up a widening gap between parents and their children. And while it’s easy and alluringly postmodern to slough all this off and say that all times in American history are the same as other times in American history, I wonder if there are really many among us who do not worry about what happens when one generation’s message to the next gets blocked off by that dirty cloud kicked up by our information addictions. Holloway’s mantra of discipline and accountability has resonated with thousands of frustrated parents who wax nostalgic for the days when kids could be disciplined in the old-fashioned way. To them, the photos of kids dancing on tables, the accounts of the damage, and Brian Holloway’s tough, militaristic rhetoric confirmed what they had always suspected: Kids were up to no damn good on that Internet.

(That’s especially recommended for Jeff the mild-mannered.)

The Nashville Tennessean digs up an old double homicide. The prose is lightly Albomed, but it’s still a pretty good read about how Stringbean and Estelle Akeman were murdered on their idyllic country property in 1973. Moral: If you carry lots of cash, don’t let everybody know.

Details on an interesting building renovation in Detroit, of an old apartment building heavily damaged by fire five years ago:

The building’s interior must be almost entirely rebuilt off of the rough framing. Developers are taking the opportunity to install some interesting features:
· Added partial penthouse floor with five additional apartments
· Twenty-seven geothermal wells for heating/air conditioning
· Roof deck for resident use
· Rainwater cisterns, which will provide water for flushing toilets
· Rooftop solar panels to aid with hot water
· Soundproof band-practice room in the former boiler room

What interests me most are the rainwater cisterns. Remember, Michigan is one of the wettest states in the nation. But conservation of potable supplies is always smart.

#AskJPM! This is hilarious.

Finally, a WashPost multi-parter on how an alleged small business operator gamed the federal system into millions in federal contracts. Great long form work.

Should we close with a dog picture? Here’s Wendy, having been shoved off my legs, keeping dibs on her seat and giving me the big sad dog eyes:

Have a swell weekend, all. I’ll be raking me some leaves.

On Sunday, trying to distract myself from the throbbing in my knee, I dialed up “How to Survive a Plague” on my iPad. A history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, aka ACT-UP, it first got on my nerves. My patience for ShakyCam is growing short these days, and apparently no one in the ACT-UP publicity crew owned a tripod.

But that was a quibble, and soon I was absorbed into the bad old years again, the mid-’80s, when gay men were falling ill and at first we didn’t know why, and then we did. And knowing didn’t make it better; there wasn’t a cure, there was barely a treatment and the incubation period was so long — it seemed if you’d been gay and sexually active for any length of time, you were doomed.

And one by one, they were. I lost two close friends, several more in the outer friendship circles. First they lost weight, then came the pneumonia or the Kaposi’s sarcoma, then came the spiral. “How to Survive a Plague” brought it all back, with the overlay of the birth of ACT-UP, which was pretty far from Columbus, Ohio at the time. They, as much as anyone, brought the anger the community was feeling into America’s living rooms, mainly through their outrageous protests. They carried giant condoms up the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They called Jesse Helms “that pig in the Senate.” They were rude and confrontational and made over-the-top demands. They insisted the FDA had drugs that could save them, but was holding back, or not trying to modify the agency’s long timeline for approval.

There’s a scene from a protest where a pharmaceutical company was invaded, an executive summoned forth, and a man hectors him at length: “You have my blood on your hands,” he shouts, and even now, knowing how absolutely justified ACT-UP was in their anger, this seems a bit much. Science has its own timeline. It doesn’t always match yours.

But there are other moments that bring the loss home — an ad executive talking about why we so want to blame people for mistakes they make while “being human.” That they have sex they shouldn’t, swallow drugs they shouldn’t, misbehave in ways that make the rest of us say, “See, it is your fault, after all.” When there is not a single one of us who isn’t guilty of being human. When we all misbehave, at least sometimes.

A lot of the ACT-UP protests set the tone for stuff I quickly grew tired of — the red ribbons, the quilts, all that awareness-raising. But it helped to be reminded, yet again, of what spawned it all, the incandescent anger felt by a community that found itself dwindling, young men dying at 26, 30, 42, the prime of their lives, and almost no one seemed to care.

In other words, Jesse Helms was a pig in the Senate. The Catholic church was preposterously wrong to suggest that condom use would lead to more cases, not fewer. ACT-UP’s tactics you can argue with. But they were right. The times cried out for a furious response. We all should have been acting up. I’m glad they did. Silence did equal death, in the movement’s famous T-shirt. They stood for life.

We haven’t discussed the shooting last Friday at the Los Angeles airport, at least not much. A publication I can’t quite get a handle on, nsfwcorp.com, which has a strange paywall system, is alone in pointing out how loud the anti-TSA clamor has been from both the left and the right, and how perfectly the LAX shooter seemed to be dancing to their drumbeat. I read their story today, but it’s back behind the paywall, and so alas.

What does everyone think? Or am I the only one. I fly infrequently enough that I don’t share in the anger, but it does seem like overkill — the scan, the shoeless shuffle, all of it. There must be a better way to do airport security.

Not much bloggage today, but a good Bridge package drops that might be of interest outside Michigan, about legacy costs for retiree pensions and health care that cities are simply not prepared to meet. Part one is here. It’s happening everywhere, maybe in your town, too.

Otherwise, the week is coming to its denouement. Knee feels better, and let’s hope it continues to do so.

I don’t know whether to be cheered or depressed by the Richie Incognito/Jonathan Martin story. On the one hand: How disgusting, that Incognito, this hulking goon, could have gotten away with bullying his teammate for so long:

Martin, a classics major who attended Stanford and is the son of two Harvard graduates, left the Dolphins last week after an episode in the cafeteria in which teammates stood as Martin sat, the last in a string of perceived slights. Incognito, a 30-year-old veteran with a reputation for dirty play and a history of rough behavior, was suspended indefinitely by the Dolphins late Sunday while the team and the league investigated the matter.

Their unfolding saga is forcing the National Football League to uncomfortably turn its gaze toward locker room culture and start defining the gray areas between good-natured pranks and hurtful bullying.

The story’s your basic train wreck, how two linemen, one intelligent and sensitive and one nasty and cruel, ran into one another in the locker room and everywhere else.

Incognito — what a name — resembles, in so many ways, every significant bully I’ve ever known. Stupid, brutal, user of dumb hashtags:

“Enough is enough,” he wrote to ESPN’s Adam Schefter in one (tweet). “If you or any of the agents you sound off for have a problem with me, you know where to find me. #BRINGIT.”

So all of that’s depressing, even though there’s a certain dog-bites-man element to learning that the super-macho NFL has a bullying problem. What’s heartening is that somewhere along the line, this sort of thing became unacceptable. And that sportswriters are now writing things like this:

Own it. Even now, even after the extent of Incognito’s viciousness has been revealed through voice mails and texts to Martin, there are NFL personnel people telling reporters, like Sports Illustrated’s Jim Trotter, that it’s a man’s game and Martin failed to handle it like a man. According to these unnamed men, Martin should have manned up and handled the situation face-to-face, with his fists if necessary.

You know — like a man.

Seriously, though, did these men’s men read the things Incognito reportedly said to Martin? Don’t we encourage people not to deal with the deranged, to let the professionals handle it? Does anyone believe Incognito would be cowed by a confrontation?

To blame Martin is to ignore reality and uphold the twisted norms of the misguided subculture that allowed this type of environment to persist and — dare we say — thrive. It’s also a willful refusal to connect the threat of violence to the reality of our gun-soaked, disrespect-me-and-pay-the-price ethos that has people like Aaron Hernandez sitting in jail.

So. Good knee news, bad knee news: The joint is enormously improved. I can walk with one crutch, and a cane would be even better. Slowly, up and down the block Wendy and I go, but we go. The bad news? My family practitioner thinks I have ACL damage — “it feels loose,” he said, after manipulating it into several positions, a couple of which made me wince, a couple more that didn’t. So, you veterans of the knee wars know where it goes from here. MRI next week, a visit with the orthopedist, and then we discuss our options, if there are any. Just keeping you posted.

Is it only Wednesday? How is that possible?

So, yesterday I spent mostly in bed, swallowing ibuprofen, changing ice packs and making phone calls. Which means little to report. Knee is still an open issue; I see the doc today.

But one of the things I ran across was this terribly sad story about Newtown, Conn., one year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary. It’s not just sad in “The Sweet Hereafter” sense, but also in the peculiar American custom of how we divide the money raised to compensate victims of a crime like this. I promise you, if all you take away from this is the difference between “the 26,” “the 12″ and “the two,” it’s worth your time.

Theres also this, by John Carlisle, a Freep column worthy of his grittier Metro Times roots, about a community of squatters trying to create a utopia in one of the very worst — seriously, among a city packed with awful neighborhoods, this one is a top-fiver — neighborhoods in Detroit.

Otherwise? Open thread. I must now limp to the kitchen and make some coffee.

Now that the weather’s turned chilly, Wendy has turned into a lapdog. Nothing makes her happier than being permitted to jump up and make herself comfortable on a lap, outstretched legs or — this is a me-only privilege — stretched way out on my belly, with her nose tucked under my chin. It’s so cute you’d die. And sometimes it’s comical, as when I went out to call Alan for dinner Sunday and found him in his recliner, dog in place, her chin on his chest, both looking peaceful and cozy, except one was snoring and the other just looking sort of content.

I’ll let you figure which was which.

I love it. Spriggy never was up for snuggling. He always had to be unencumbered and ready to spring into action, just in case someone rang the doorbell.

So it was a dog-on-lap sort of weekend — cold and blustery on Saturday, autumn chill Sunday. The crap-reduction project continues apace, although most of the crap reduced this weekend was soap scum. I let the cleaning lady go, and am back to doing it myself for the first time in more than a year. New miracle product: Barkeeper’s Friend. The liquid kind. It KILLS soap scum.

But I got a few bags carried out, did some Swiffin’, put some sweaters into the get-outta-here pile. Rowed 4,200 meters on the erg Sunday. Saw “Cloud Atlas,” which seemed far, far longer (and was). And then Sunday afternoon brought the news of Lou Reed’s death. I knew to wait for Roy Edroso’s take, and of all that I read, it’s the best. Five tight paragraphs — the world’s blatherers could take a lesson.

Bloggage? I has it:

There was a homicide at a bank drive-through on Friday, the victim trapped in his hot-pink BMW with the “ask me about my grandchildren” front license plate. I offer it mainly for the chilling photo of the bullet-starred window and this quote, from a witness who heard the shots and immediately dropped to the ground: “I grew up on the northwest side of town,” he said. “It’s a natural reaction.”

What was the thief after? He didn’t jack the car, or even rob the victim, who was an older man known to rarely carry more than $20 or $30 at at ime.

Speaking of chilling, another homicide from last week, this one near Boston, a 14-year-old alleged to have killed his math teacher with a knife, and get this for a killer detail:

WCVB-TV, an ABC affiliate, citing unidentified sources, reported that the suspect killed Ms. Ritzer with a box cutter and then went to the movies, seeing Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.”

Fort Wayne peeps: Joseph Paul Franklin is set to be executed in a few weeks, whom the world mainly knows as the would-be assassin of Larry Flynt, but you locals remember as doing the same to Vernon Jordan in your fair city. And yeah, he did it:

He now regrets shooting Jordan. Although a federal jury acquitted him of shooting Jordan, Franklin admits he, indeed, shot the civil rights leader. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him now,” he said.

Finally, the holidays are coming, which means Mitch Albom is in fundraising mode, and writing self-promoting columns about it. This latest one is very strange, detailing an event that will honor retiring Tigers manager Jim Leyland and Judge Damon Keith of the federal bench, who are white and black, respectively, and the event is called “Detroit Legacies: In Black and White.” Hmm, OK. And why should you buy a ticket?

Tickets are just $40, and everyone attending will be given an autographed copy of my new novel, “The First Phone Call from Heaven,” a small way for me to thank my city.

And this blog, my friends, offered free and digitally autographed with my very own name, is a small way to thank you. Let’s have a good week.

It takes all kinds, but for me? Small towns have always given me hives. I’m happy to drive through them and stop at the local antique store or whatever, but to live in one? Not for me. I need a decent library, a movie theater where I can see something first-run, a bookstore or two and — very important — a surprise around the corner once in a while.

So it’s always bugged me how small towns always have the benefit of this chin-chucking, patronizing and completely false presumption of innocence. Looks like Michael Schaeffer agrees with me:

Last Sunday, a New York Times reporter visited Maryville, Missouri to report on the existence of a grave threat to the town’s bucolic, Real-America essence: “Ever since The Kansas City Star ran a long article last Sunday raising new questions about the Nodaway County prosecutor’s decision to drop charges against a 17-year-old football player accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, the simplicity of small-town life here has been complicated by a storm of negative attention.”

Leaving aside the dubious victimology—poor Maryville, battered so cruelly by the dark-hearted Kansas City media and their relentless “negative attention”—the paragraph also represents a great big logical problem for anyone who read the Star story, or even the 20-odd inches of stellar Times copy that followed the clunky lede: The whole point of a story of rape allegations dismissed by a political-prosecutorial complex intimately connected to an accused assaulter’s state-legislative relative is that… Maryville never featured any of that simplicity in the first place!

It’d be easy to beat up on a reporter who was tasked with following a competitor’s story and slipped into cliché. In fact, the reductio ad Rockwell is a common tic of journalistic visits to small towns, especially those put on the map by infamy. And it’s one that really ought to stop. Decades of culture wars have left us with a set of social rules where it is largely OK for rural types to slander their citified co-citizens (cf. Sarah Palin, small-town mayor and “Real America” stalwart) but where urbanites can’t dis the country folks without being deemed elitist (cf. Barack Obama, Chicagoite and “cling” apologizer).

Oh, yeahhh. Small towns, we are frequently told, are wonderful places to raise children — as though no one in a large city ever successfully launched their offspring into the world. They’re close, loving and supportive — something no urban neighborhood is possibly capable of. Everyone knows your business? That’s love, child, love and concern. Spare me. Srsly.

So, was it necessary to kick off the blog with such rancor? Yes, so I could properly contrast it with this OID story, about as OID as they come, really — a carjacking, a “good Samaritan” in pursuit, a shootout and a second carjacking, all in the neighborhood of one of my bike routes this summer:

A good Samaritan who chased down a carjacking suspect on the city’s east side Thursday morning ended up being seriously wounded in a gunfight with the suspect after the stolen vehicle was ditched into a canal of the Detroit River.

Sharlonda Buckman, a 2013 Michiganian of the Year and chief executive officer of Detroit Parent Network, stopped about 8 a.m. Thursday at a BP gas station on the 10700 block of East Jefferson Avenue to buy some aspirin when she said an armed man forced her from her 2011 Chevrolet Traverse.

…Three men nearby witnessed the carjacking and came to Buckman’s aid, with two giving chase to the suspect. Police say one unnamed man, who was driving a 2009 blue Ford Focus, shot at the suspect with his licensed firearm after the suspect let the SUV sink into a Detroit River embankment near the Edison Boat Club.

I put good Samaritan in quotes because it’s pretty obvious this situation, bad as it was, only worsened when the guys in the Focus came to her aid. And after the good guy and the bad guy exchanged gunfire? The bad guy stole the good guy’s car, too.

The Freep’s story had the better headline: Detroit police: Man carjacks woman, sinks SUV, shoots witness

Granted: Not an often small-town occurrence. But it makes the big-city papers more interesting.

Well, here we are at the end of the week. It’s looking up, now that I’ve met a new eye doctor who is going to carve that cataract out of my eye and — he says — improve my vision significantly. What joy. I tell you, if you’d told me on New Year’s Day that my 2013 would contain a chilly spring, a lovely summer and two eye surgeries, I’m not sure what I’d have said. But I guess I’ll get through it. Not much of 2013 left.

Just two bits of bloggage left, then:

Ezra Klein on Obamacare chutzpah.

And Coozledad posted this in yesterday’s comments, but it bears repeating, as a North Carolina party hack explains just what the voter ID law there is all about.

I can’t keep up with all these stupid aggregators lately. BuzzFeed, HuffPost (yes, not entirely an aggregator) and the most irritating of all, Upworthy. I couldn’t quite figure Upworthy for a while — it’s hard to give anything focused attention in the age of Nobody Reads Anything — but eventually it bored through my inattention. It’s a prissy little pass-along deal, which its homepage banner makes clear: Things that matter. Pass ‘em on. The person who always sends you Elizabeth Warren fanboy/girl stuff probably found a lot of it on Upworthy.

Anyway, Upworthy recently ran a…cute feature about Detroit’s bankruptcy. It’s not journalism, but more of a nothingburger illustrated with funny, funny GIFs. Way up at the top of the page, note the credit: “made possible by the AFL-CIO.” I don’t have anything against the AFL-CIO, but what this post is peddling is the Maddow version of why Detroit went bankrupt, which involves a) an eeeevil Republican governor; b) revenue sharing; and of course, c) the emergency manager, who is known in this world as the “local dictator.”

It’s not a fact-free version, but it is enormously lacking context, as well as a lot of other facts. But this is common; even among people who do read stuff, they are increasingly likely to like only their own media, who feed them this stuff. The right wing has their own version of why Detroit happened, and it boils down to a) Dumbocrats; b) Coleman Young and c) Dumbocrats.

So I’m grateful to Jeff Wattrick at Deadline Detroit, who put up a counterpoint to Upworthy, also with funny funny GIFs, that’s just as lively and fun to read, only is a lot closer to the whole truth.

And isn’t Upworthy. So there’s that.

I hate to link to Steinberg two days in a row, but I liked his sane take on the recent news that Jews were headed for extinction — at least the secular-leaning Jews most of us know:

So recognizing my own bias, why care? It isn’t as if there is an intrinsic need for a small Jewish minority to question mainstream beliefs anymore. We set the example, now exit the stage, to join the Shakers. Other faiths will step up. The Muslims are doing a fine job as the new minority American faith on deck, and they can complain about crosses in the public way as loudly as Jews did. Societies now has gays to test how much it really believe in tolerance of fractional minorities.

And there will always be some Jews. A core of Jewishness, kept alive by the hermetically sealed world of the Ultra-Orthodox and the Hasidim. Their society is designed to endure—that’s where the whole non-change thing comes in. Sure, we smirk at them for the black hats and wigs and 17th century traditions. But they know that if you swap your heavy black coat for a smart Calvin Klein jacket, you’re halfway a Unitarian. As long they exist, there will be a steady stream of secular Jews dribbling away from them, like the tail of a comet.

Mighty level-headed, I’d say.

Very different, but equally worth your time, is this startling obit for Erin R. Wagman:

Erin Wagman, also known as Erin Borgmann, died of acute alcohol poisoning on October 19, 2013 in Rapid City. She was 42 years old. She died alone.

A writer’s first job is to tell the truth. Someone did.

I think the fall is sapping my energy. It was cold, honestly cold, this morning and I’m not sure I’ve entirely recovered. We’ll see about tomorrow.