Long-time readers may remember that a decade ago (argh) I spent a year at the University of Michigan on a sabbatical journalism fellowship, and part of that experience was a week in Argentina. Buenos Aires, specifically.

Relax. I didn’t meet the Pope or anything.

But we did have one seminar, as a group, with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the men and women who were disappeared during the Dirty War of the 1970s. It was a difficult session, what with the awful personal stories and the long translations; a couple of our group were leaking tears by the end of it. During the question period, I asked whether any of them had gone to the church for help. They sat up. The church was a part of it!, they said. The military leaders considered themselves quite humane and sophisticated, because they offered their victims final absolution before they were taken up in the planes to be pushed out over the River Plate.

So when you tell me the new pope is an Argentine and a septuagenarian, my first question is, what did you do in the Dirty War, father?

As frequently happens, the answer isn’t simple or easy. Well, it’s not my church anymore. And I do wish him well. He sounds like he has a lot going for him.

I’m working on not caring about things I’m not required to care about. This is a start.

Not much bloggage today. Google Reader, adios.

I can’t wait to not see “Spring Breakers.” I hope Kate feels the same way.

Charlie LeDuff in a spot of bother. I predict it will blow over like a 20-minute shower.

This week feels 10 days long already. I hope yours is going swimmingly.

Got up early and headed down to the Motor City Casino and Hotel for the Detroit Policy Conference, put on by the regional chamber of commerce. You know how these things go: There’s an exhibitor space for sponsors. There’s coffee and bagels. There are skirted tables and name tags and a stage with a sectional seating arrangement, where the panelists will sit and be questioned.

(Oddity: In many ways, this was a 3/4-day version of the June Mackinac Policy Conference, also a regional chamber event. Same typography, same big-screen TVs, same coffee and bagels, same furniture. I assumed the Mackinac furniture was provided by the Grand Hotel, but it was exactly the same as today’s furniture, in all but color, making me wonder if the chamber’s event people actually have a furniture stash, and whether it comes over on the ferry. Today’s furniture was pure white. Nobody said anything that drew blood.)

And there was a “buzz board,” provided by one of the media sponsors. What is a buzz board? A new wrinkle at these events — an electronic screen that scrolls tweets from the audience using an agreed-upon hashtag. I cannot look at one without feeling an overwhelming sense of mischief. The last event I attended had one, and it was entirely automated; if the hashtag was correct, the tweet went into the stream. And so one guy tweeted: “My name is misspelled in the program.” Another said, “Anyone want to duck out early and get some beers?” The possibilities for bad behavior are almost limitless, particularly if the buzz board is behind the speaker.

The most interesting single detail: A young venture-capital executive speculated we’re only a few years away from commercial use of drone aircraft — small, helicopter-like deals that will enable, say, same-day deliveries from Amazon. They could land on your driveway, or some sort of community helipad. You could rent one for a few bucks to send a frozen casserole across town to your flu-bound mother-in-law.

There was also a keynote that painted a picture of a thriving downtown, complete with photos that would leave many suburbanites agog. People on the street! People gazing out floor-to-ceiling windows of tastefully decorated loft workspaces! STREET-LEVEL SHOPPING FOR NORMAL STUFF LIKE SWEATERS!!!!! That was the opening session. The closer said the city is
done for, stop dreaming. So you really can’t say the chamber doesn’t entertain an alternate viewpoint from time to time.

Bloggage? I have virtually none. Being on Twitter all day, I could only dimly perceive the outlines of this ridiculous Bob Woodward story. One word: Sheesh.

Limping into the weekend on insufficient sleep, I can only say: I hope yours is restful.

My old buddy Frank Byrne posted this on his Facebook yesterday. I was there the night it was taken:

Frank’s on the left. He’s a doctor, although today he runs a hospital in Madison, Wis. I don’t remember who, exactly, brought C. Everett Koop to Fort Wayne that night, but I’m sure it was a fundraiser of some sort. Koop spoke at the Scottish Rite auditorium and Frank, a pulmonologist, introduced him. It was very moving, that introduction; Frank said Koop was not only his role model, but a personal hero. He explained how Koop had accepted the job of surgeon general and seemed to be one thing — an anti-abortion conservative in the Reagan-revolution mode, with a strain of weirdness (the uniform, the facial hair) — but turned out to be something else entirely. A doctor. A real doctor, who put his patients first and didn’t care what the tobacco industry thought he should say about their product line.

What’s more, when it became evident that HIV/AIDS was an epidemic, and was killing people, he also stepped up, and did something else remarkable. He supervised the production of a pamphlet called “Understanding AIDS” that explained exactly how the virus was transmitted, using terms like anal sex and intravenous drug use and sharing needles. Politically, he was right in line with the man who appointed him, but when the time came, he was a doctor first and foremost.

Koop died this week, after 96 years of what I suspect was extremely clean living. The obituary has more, but I think that picture says an awful lot about him — the three-piece suit, the bow tie, the bulldog expression. Doctors are frequently eccentric dressers, I’ve noticed.

Oh, and the guy on the right? Mike Mirro. If you’re ever in Fort Wayne and feel a pain in your chest, and wake up to see that face looking down at you, rest assured you are in very good hands. Maybe the best.

I have to get up early in the morning to go to an all-day policy conference, so let’s keep this short. I have some good bloggage today, anyway.

How big heads became a part of college-basketball culture. A fun read about something I’ve never heard of. And it all started with Michael Jackson.

My alma mater has been known for its fine photojournalists for some time, and I’m glad to see the tradition is continuing, although nothing about this photo essay is easy to look at. (Jeff? I’m afraid it will be just another day at the office for you.) Subject: Domestic violence. Remarkable photos.

Ezra Klein, who rarely has a shortage of smart things to say, said something particularly smart the other day, in connection with the Chinese hacking scandal.

The Chinese, he wrote, are hacking “everything and everybody” in search of something they know must exist somewhere:

The Chinese look at Washington, and they think there must be some document somewhere, some flowchart saved on a computer in the basement of some think tank, that lays it all out. Because in China, there would be. In China, someone would be in charge. There would be a plan somewhere. It would probably last for many years. It would be at least partially followed. But that’s not how it works in Washington.

What the Chinese hackers are looking for is the great myth of Washington, what I call the myth of scheming. You see it all over. If you’ve been watching the series “House of Cards” on Netflix, it’s all about the myth of scheming. Things happen because the Rep. Frank Underwood has planned for them to happen. And when they don’t happen, it’s because someone has counterplanned against him.

This is why it’s always interesting to read the news, if you ask me. Someone is always getting tripped up by their preconceived notions, by projecting their issues onto someone else’s. It’s why you can’t really understand a place until you’ve lived there, often for many years. Chaos is real; sometimes it reigns.

The Chinese put on an Olympics that required one of these flowcharts — many of them, I expect — and it worked spectacularly. Like everyone who’s figured something out, they think they have the single best answer to how to do it, and if someone else wants to duplicate their success, they’re doing the same thing.

It’s why I loved “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s account of the Iraqi Green Zone, so much. Every specific example of American ineptitude was such a forehead-slapper of grim comic wonder. Sure, let’s redraw Baghdad traffic patterns according to some master plan from Maryland. Let’s take Iraq’s ancient, analog stock exchange, which relies heavily on pieces of paper passed hand to hand, and computerize it. What’s more, let’s all live in a heavily fortified district where job one is staving off homesickness — so let’s make our Muslim domestic staff cook and serve pork barbecue for all these Texans.

Of course all these things will work! They worked in Maryland, and on Wall Street, and in Dallas, didn’t they?

A friend of mine, a sportswriter, said that if he had been running the 9/11 project for al-Qaeda, he’d have hit four NFL stadiums on 9/9. If you want to seriously freak out Americans, he said, hit them at play. Hit them in the heartland. Hit them at a football game. But Arabs have a thing for buildings, so they hit some buildings in two cities large groups of Americans don’t like.

Question everything. Especially yourself.

Ken Burns is capable of getting on my last nerve, but he has some very smart things to say about story here, which sort of pertains to what I just said, but also doesn’t. Video link, but worth your time, at least if you’re a storyteller.

And with that, I guess the bloggage is under way.

An interesting discussion of the Manti Te’o case, from the journalism-ethics angle. Via IU’s school of journalism.

Something about Marissa Mayer bugs me at a Hatha-hate level, but it’s been interesting to see the reaction to her no-more-work-from-home edict at Yahoo. Farhad Manjoo is utterly opposed, as the headline makes clear. As someone who does both — working one day in Lansing, the rest at home — I see the advantages of both arrangements. And I think the closest to the truth is the person who said, and I’m sorry I can’t remember who it was, that if you want your employees to innovate, they should work together. If you want productivity, they get more accomplished at home.

Now to get something accomplished. At home. It will likely be snow-blowing, however.

I wish I had more ideas these days. I feel like every day is about what’s on TV or some other crap, but that seems to be the nature of this winter, or this part of it. Long hours, short days, you know the drill.

So I’m taking a couple of days off. Photo posts only until the well refills. In the meantime, some Twitter-y bloggage:

Karen Francisco is an editorial writer at the other paper in Fort Wayne, the one I didn’t work for — the Journal Gazette. No education writer in town, or maybe the state, has been doing the sort of reporting she’s been doing on the education reforms taking place in Indiana, and it’s too bad they’re running on the op-ed pages, because they should be out front. This particular piece, on a particularly bone-chilling charter-school operation in Fort Wayne, is worth your time no matter where you live, because this is the latest thing in for-profit education, and may well be coming to a neighborhood near you. (Bonus fun fact: This school is two blocks from my old house. It’s safe to say the Sprig-man lifted his leg on every bush in that picture.)

Just in case you weren’t depressed enough by the last bag of Dorito’s you ate, this NYT magazine story will bring you down even more, because guess what? It’s way worse than you thought.

Have a good rest of the week, all.

This is winter break, one of Grosse Pointe’s two sadistically scheduled week-long second-semester vacations. Of course, all of Kate’s friends are on a beach or a ski slope. Bored to tears, she made arrangements to spend the evening at a recording studio where she sometimes helps out, in downtown Detroit. I agreed to this on the grounds of a) personal initiative in affirmatively treating boredom; and b) empathy for her plight. As soon as she rolled out of the driveway it started to snow, the light, dry, fluffy kind that brings no moisture to the land but enslickens every roadway it lands on. It’s the sort of snow that led to that mile-long pileup on I-75. It’s the trickiest to drive in, because it looks like nothing, but isn’t.

So now I get to sit here gnawing my cuticles until she comes home. Did I mention every single streetlight on the freeway between here and there is out? Did I mention the surface-street route home would take her through the worst of the ghetto prairie, and that the road is pitted with tire-flattening hazards, like abandoned railroad crossings that would shame the Third World, not to mention potholes like you wouldn’t believe?

Did I mention I’m the worst parent in the world? What was I thinking? It’s like I sent her out for milk and bread beyond the compound walls in “The Walking Dead.”

When does this anxiety stop, by the way? How old do they have to be? Don’t answer. I already know.

(Update: She arrived home safe and sound an hour later. To my immense relief.)

With that transition to children in peril, let me jump right to the bloggage. You’re going to want to listen to this, part one of a two-parter, “This American Life” and its deep embed at Harper High School in Chicago. You can download it as a podcast or listen at the website, however you like. But you’re going to want to listen to it. It’s chilling, a look at a high school where 29 students were shot last year (three died) and violence in the surrounding neighborhood is so intense that kids don’t even choose to belong to gangs — the very fact of life in the area imposes gang membership on you, depending on what side of what street you live on. It’s shudder-worthy, but very important, journalism.

An old-fashioned hey-Martha from the Columbus Dispatch, HT to Jeff, on scooter drivers behaving badly:

Taylor used humor to good effect in her latest scooter-speed warning letter to residents of Seton Square North: “A number of our scooter drivers are guilty of reckless scooter operation (did I really just have to write that sentence?).”

She is not alone in her concern. Other property managers, nursing-home administrators and doctors say they stress safe driving to keep mobility-scooter and power-wheelchair operators from gouging walls, knocking over medicine carts and running into pedestrians.

“I have, honestly, had times where I’ve had to say, ‘You can no longer use the scooter here,’  ” said Debbie Cassel, executive director at Trillium Place on the Northwest Side.

I read Grantland pretty religiously during the Jerry Sandusky thing, then fell out of it for a while. I hesitate to post this because I fear it will lead to a daylong Prospero tirade of pronouncements and YouTube links no one will click, but what the hell: An essay about the Black Keys that takes a few twists here and there and ends up making some valid points about music these days:

When I said earlier that indie has failed rock and roll, this is what I meant: Indie bands haven’t done enough to compete. The status quo in indie rock these days is to make records aimed directly at upper-middle-class college graduates living in big cities. Only a small handful of indie bands attempt to reach listeners who aren’t already on the team; even the really good records reside firmly in a familiar wheelhouse of tastefully arty and historically proven “college rock” aesthetics and attitudes that mean nothing to the outside world. The distance is also geographic: If you want to see most indie bands play live, it helps if you reside in New York City or Los Angeles, because the bands probably live there, too. Otherwise, you have to hope that your city — and by “your city,” I mean a city within a couple hundred miles of where you live — is one of the 15 to 20 stops on the band’s tour.

If you happen to be part of the audience that rock music used to cater to — if you work an unsexy job in an unsexy town in an unsexy part of the country — you’re not really invited to the party anymore. Which is OK, because there’s still a form of rock music that’s made for you, it’s just not called rock music — it’s called country. One of the best-selling country records of the last few years is Eric Church’s Chief, and one of that record’s biggest songs is “Springsteen,” which is about the ability of rock music to signify the most crucial moments of a person’s life. When was the last time a rock song talked about that? Chief is precisely the sort of heartland rock record that people like Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Bob Seger made into a viable commercial genre in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s not that people stopped wanting records like that; rock bands just lost interest in making them.

That might be a little too what’s-your-point for you, but I liked it. Although not the part where one of the Keys referred to Akron, Ohio as a “small town.” WTF? Two hundred thousand people counts as a small town these days? I had no idea.

Do not recline your seat on an airplane. That is all.

Good Wednesdays, all.

The weekend’s movies included “A Late Quartet,” which intrigued me with the trailer and sold me with the cast — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken. Plus, for a $4.99 rental via iTunes, it’s hard to go wrong.

And the film, while not perfect, was good enough. Too long by a tad, a little too much blah-blah, but these are people who deal with their problems via blah-blah, so hey, verisimilitude. It’s the story of a long-running, successful string quartet at a crisis point when their eldest member, the cellist, gets a Parkinson’s diagnosis. Artists are easy to caricature onscreen, but these people weren’t, and maybe one of the reasons I liked this is, I felt fully immersed in the classical-strings part of professional musicianship. They have money, but not a ton of it; they work very hard; they get on one another’s nerves. A lot like your job, maybe.

Kate’s bass teacher had an upright for sale for some time, a nice instrument he’d rescued and put a lot of work into restoring. Priced around $5,000, it was too rich for us, but at one point a concert player from Boston was interested, and sent a friend from the Detroit symphony to take it for a test-drive. The Bostonian passed, and decided to spend that sum on a bow instead. A $5,000 bow! I remember thinking at the time, but in this film you watch one of the characters build one from scratch, driving to a horse farm to buy hair imported from Siberia, and well — a $5,000 bow seems pretty reasonable.

If it floats by your on-demand menu, I think you’ll like it. Roger did.

I wish I had a more exciting report from my weekend, but eh. I spent much of Saturday feeling overall punky, not bad enough to be sick-sick but not good enough to do anything other than watch an iTunes movie and watch the snow fly outside the window. Didn’t even make it to the market.

Let’s hope for a better week ahead. In the meantime, some bloggage:

Because of the New York Times’ publication schedule, everyone was reading and commenting on the magazine cover story last week, but I didn’t read it until Sunday. It’s about the GOP’s continuing inability to hear what the world keeps trying to tell it. Here’s an account of a focus group in Columbus, Ohio:

When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

Anderson concluded the group on a somewhat beseeching note. “Let’s talk about Republicans,” she said. “What if anything could they do to earn your vote?”

A self-identified anti-abortion, “very conservative” 27-year-old Obama voter named Gretchen replied: “Don’t be so right wing! You know, on abortion, they’re so out there. That all-or-nothing type of thing, that’s the way Romney came across. And you know, come up with ways to compromise.”

“What would be the sign to you that the Republican Party is moving in the right direction?” Anderson asked them.

“Maybe actually pass something?” suggested a 28-year-old schoolteacher named Courtney, who also identified herself as conservative.

I know lots of Republicans who think gridlock is good, because it stops the Democrats from their onward march toward Marxism. Hmm.

The best story you’ll read about the end of the Jeopardy Teen Tournament. Olive long-sleeve!

We have black squirrels in Grosse Pointe. I’d like to send a delegation to Olney, Ill., so we can have a fully integrated squirrel civil-rights movement. And I’d like this guy to write a new song about it:

Take me there, I want to see the squirrels / Yeah, take me there, I hear they’re white as South Sea pearls…

Sooner or later Gawker will find this, but you heard it here first.

I gotta tell you, friends, this foundering cruise ship story is simply irre-freakin’-sistible. Bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico, just 150 miles from land, in a floating hotel with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets, little food and more than 4,000 fellow inmates? Kafka died too early. We now know what hell is.

I’m sure some of you are cruisers and some of you are happy cruisers. I’ve been tempted. I’ve heard many stories from friends returning home, all red-nosed and overfed, rapturous from a few days’ sailing. Every so often I mention it to Alan, and rarely get more than six words out before he throws in a few of his own, including claustrophobia, norovirus, drunken assholes and floating petri dish.

And when he puts it that way? It’s hard to argue.

Yet every year, cruisers cruise on. I remarked on Facebook that in a just world, this fate would befall the National Review cruise, the Kid Rock cruise or maybe a clothing-optional one. I don’t think it would be possible to entertain the United States more broadly and thoroughly than by putting Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, John Podhoretz, James Lileks et al afloat in a crippled liner far from a friendly port — or maybe just off the coast of Havana. (MOVIE IDEA!!!!!) And from what I’ve read of the Kid Rock cruise (sold out this year, sorry), no one could really tell the difference.

I heard this afternoon they were within sight of land when the tow cable broke. That’s the point I would put a floatie around my waist, wave goodbye, hold my nose, jump overboard and start swimming. Or at the very least, lower a lifeboat.

OK, moving on: My employer, the Center for Michigan, is in the homestretch of a year-long effort to boost funding in our state for early-childhood education. We’ve written about it exhaustively, and things are looking up, as Gov. Rick Snyder and others are backing a $130 million cash influx for the program that serves low- to moderate-income families with young children. So I was fascinated to read this Gail Collins column, pegged of course to President Obama’s call for more preschool in SOTU, about what happened when Walter Mondale tried to do the same thing in 1971:

Mondale’s Comprehensive Child Development Act was a bipartisan bill, which passed 63 to 17 in the Senate. It was an entitlement, and, if it had become law, it would have been one entitlement for little children in a world where most of the money goes to the elderly.

“We came up with a lot of proposals, but the one we were most excited about was early childhood education. Everything we learned firmed up the view this really works,” said Mondale.

The destruction of his bill was one of the earliest victories of the new right. “The federal government should not be in the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological ideal of great importance,” Pat Buchanan once told me. He was working at the White House when the bill reached Nixon’s desk, and he helped write the veto message. He spoke about this achievement with great pride.

I don’t want to break my three-paragraph rule, but this is one worth reading all the way through.

Here’s Jonathan Chait on a possible, but admittedly far-fetched, way the president’s plan could happen.

Continuing their march off the cliff, the Oakland County GOP — that would be the one in the big, dense-packed, affluent county northwest of here — bring in their big Lincoln Day speaker: Donald Trump.

Finally, because it’s the weekend, the most awesome goat video ever: Goats yellling like people. I laffed until my mascara ran.

Happy Friday all, and happy weekend.

I do apologize for flaking last night. I had an evening thing, followed by a drinks-with-someone-I-haven’t-seen-in-a-while thing, and by the time I got home it wasn’t going to happen. However, I had a great time catching up with my buddy, and so. I walked in the house in time to turn on the TV and see the most important news of the night — the crowning of Banana Joe as Best in Show at Westminster.

Sorry, I don’t do States of the Union; if I wanted to listen to speeches that long I’d move to Cuba. The next day’s news will give me the highlights and bullet points and spare me the million applause breaks. However, I do see that the Nuge was there, as promised, and from the photos, it looks like he wore one of his best outfits. I remember reading some Bush 43 hagiography about how deeply respectful the man was about the White House, because he enforced a suit-and-tie dress code in the West Wing, and conservatives believe in proper attire at dignified occasions and blah blah blah. I’ll be remembering Ted Nugent in his Wranglers the next time I hear that one.

Speaking of which, every time he opens his mouth, someone digs up the I-pooped-my-pants-to-avoid-the-draft interview. It’s been a long time since I read the relevant passages, and I did the other day. I don’t understand why it took me so long to see it, but this is obvious bullshit. I’ll bet anyone $50 that he had a pilonidal cyst, like Rush Limbaugh.

So, Richard Lugar made his first speech since leaving office. I don’t think anyone will be surprised by any part of it, although I’m sure the usual suspects will do their RINO RINO RINO ululations:

Republican opposition to the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska as President Obama’s secretary of defense is “another example of the politicization of national security policy,” Lugar said.

Hagel’s “main transgression is that he is a Republican who has questioned policies that are sacred among most conservative senators,” Lugar said. “These include whether the surge in Iraq was worth the lives lost, whether the current high levels of defense expenditures make strategic sense, whether nuclear forces can be reduced further and whether there are non-military options in dealing with Iran.”

Some conservatives “regard his independent thinking as political blasphemy for which he should not be rewarded,” Lugar said.

Hoo-boy, them’s fighting words. Well, Richard Lugar need fight no more.

How about a change of tone? An amusing blog item I stumbled across today, via Nancy Friedman, contains a roundup of amusing neologisms, including “despertainment,” “dwell time” and “fart patio,” the latter a bit from “Portlandia” (clip within). I’m not the world’s biggest Portlandia fan, but having had raw food inflicted upon me within the past year, I thought this sketch was pretty dead-on, and the fart patio idea is genius.

Finally, whenever one grows envious of the New York City intellectual life (and in this case, its extension into New England), read this review of Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel, look at your ordinary partner sitting there scratching his or her belly, and count your blessings. It is Valentine’s Day, after all.

As I was out and about last evening, a SOTU open thread.

Unless, of course, you’d like to catch up on some of Coozledad’s back numbers:

So a couple of years ago, we moved an old iron bedframe from the “guest bedroom” upstairs into my studio downstairs. The studio has a large woodstove that will heat most of the house on the coldest of days if you are willing to forgo about half your normal intake of breathable air. The problem with antique iron beds is they have all been previously owned by powerfuckers or jackknifed by large cornfed women during a home childbirth. My wife and I were denied the opportunity to even try and shred it because it was already the goddamn bridge at San Luis Rey.

And then it takes a turn! Read.

We’ll see if Wednesday goes better.