First day’s conference rock star: Fareed Zakaria, whose act, polished though it may be, was still pretty good.

Meanwhile, here’s a cake in the shape of the state of Michigan. I didn’t eat any:

Back to work!

Yesterday I rolled out of my driveway at 6:20 a.m., worked all day in Lansing, drove back, picked up Kate at driving school for a timed-to-the-minute dash to an audition downtown, sat through that, tried to eat dinner at one place and couldn’t, found another place, ate, drove home, remembered her bike was still at the driving school, drove back there, loaded it up and came home, by which time it was 8:40 p.m.

After which, I was in no mood to blog.

So, a blow-off day. Open thread for those of you who feel a need. Some conversation-starters:

An indelible image of the president and a little boy touching his head.

Paul Fussell, RIP. A book of his essays on war, which I found remaindered or maybe in a used bookstore somewhere and now can’t even recall the title of, kept me rapt during a long-weekend camping trip years ago. Of course, I read “The Great War and Modern Memory” and his great, guilty pleasure, “Class,” as well as his ex-wife’s bitter-but-amusing memoir, “My Kitchen Wars.” All recommended.

A sweet little story about a sweet little girl in Detroit, who found a $100 bill and turned it in to her teacher, rather than keep it for herself. She’s been repaid many times for her basic honesty and decency, with this great OID detail:

The $100 bill Breanna found, by the way, turned out to be counterfeit, and was confiscated by the Secret Service.

Oh, and yours truly on state vaccination policy. We already allow parents to opt out of pediatric immunizations for just-don’t-want-to reasons, and now the legislature wants to excuse health-care workers from flu shots. Because a co-sponsor doesn’t like “mandatory things.” Oh.

Carry on!

I should leave this stuff to Roy, but I recently started reading Rod Dreher’s blog again. God knows why, because he often drives me nuts, but evidently I need a certain amount of that stuff in my daily run, and Lileks isn’t doing it anymore. Today, he takes on a wrenching New York magazine piece by Michael Wolff on the long, slow decline of his mother.

It was brutal, and I couldn’t get all the way through it. The headline was brilliant: “I love you, Mom.” Sub: “I also wish you were dead.” Sub-sub: “And I expect you do, too.” If you’ve already been through this, you know the way these things go — the pain, the suffering, the indignity and, worst of all, the towering, senseless expense — $17,000 per month in nursing care for Wolff’s mother, who hasn’t been able to walk, talk or take care of herself for a year and a half. He goes on about this and that at some length before announcing he’s planning a different exit strategy for himself, and he’s pretty blunt about it:

Not long after visiting my insurance man those few weeks ago, I sent an “eyes wide open” e-mail to my children, all in their twenties, saying this was a decision, to buy long-term-care insurance or not, they should be in on: When push came to shove, my care would be their logistical and financial problem; they needed to think about what they wanted me to do and, too, what I wanted them to do. But none of them responded—I suppose it was that kind of e-mail.

Anyway, after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Dreher reads this, and sniffs: “Appalling.” He goes on to lay out his own situation, with his father:

He is 77, and in poor health, though not suffering from dementia. He’s got a bad heart, and all kinds of aches and pains, the result of a rough-and-tumble country-boy life (e.g., he used to rodeo as a young man). He is in near-constant pain in his hip, and has to use a cane to get around. I don’t know when he has last felt good. You can’t believe the medicines the poor man has to take every day, just to maintain. He’s getting too feeble to do much more than sit in his chair.

And all I could think was: Do you have any idea how easy you have it? A father with “all kinds of aches and pains” who is still lucid and ambulatory? As these things go, that’s a blessing from heaven. When my parents died, I decided the measure of a good end of life was the brevity of the interval between creaky-but-taking-care-of-yourself, that is, perpendicular to the floor, and bedridden-and-entirely-dependent-on-others, i.e., parallel to it. For my mother, this interval was five years, for my father, about two weeks. If you can have a conversation with your parent? If you aren’t smelling their pee, or if they’re still in their own house? That is wealth beyond rubies, and when the crisis comes, if you have a lucid, kind and pragmatic medical team to advise you? You are even richer. Alan’s mom spent a few months in assisted living before pitching forward onto her noggin and raising a subdural hematoma that eventually proved fatal. This still required an ambulance ride to Toledo on Christmas Day so that another medical team could state the obvious and send her home to hospice, where she died a few days later.

My point vis-a-vis Dreher being: If you could read that essay and still find the writer’s honestly stated vow to not inflict that on his own children “appalling,” well, I need to stop reading this sort of bullshit, because life is too short.

And I don’t need to remind you who we have to thank for setting common sense back a few more decades, do I? (She-Who!!!) Wolff, again:

I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end.

The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they’re going. The single greatest pressure on health care is the disproportionate resources devoted to the elderly, to not just the old, but to the old old, and yet no one says what all old children of old parents know: This is not just wrongheaded but steals the life from everyone involved.

And that is not appalling at all. It’s just the truth.

I’m not really in as bad a mood as I might seem to be. My advance medical directives are pretty clear. They say, “…and I understand these actions may result in my death.” Ego te absolvo.

While we’re there, another good read from NYMag, not so grim: An account of George Romney’s run for president in 1968 and, along the way, the beginning of the end of moderate Republicanism. My fellow Michiganders probably know all this well, but I was a mere girl then, and I didn’t know all the details, many of which are both sad and funny, as this story about the start of Romney’s campaign, in fall 1967, with a tour of ghettos in 17 cities, where the candidate talked about civil rights. That was, shall we say, a message that fell on deaf ears:

In Watts one day, Romney and Lenore were sitting in the back of a sedan, being chauffeured to the airport by a local driver, with Romney’s bodyguard riding shotgun. According to a story that circulated all through the campaign, Romney leaned forward: “Say, what is that word they keep saying to me? I don’t understand, it begins with an M…” The driver and the bodyguard racked their brains as Romney tried to pronounce it, working his western consonants around an inner-city accent. Then the driver straightened up and said, “Governor, I think what they’re saying is”—and here he let his voice get kind of ghetto—“mo’fucka.” And then, because Romney was legendarily a Mormon and these vulgarities may have been somewhat beyond him, the driver clarified: “Motherfucker, sir.” And Romney sank back into his seat, like a part of the car that had been mechanically retracted.

Wow.

A great Bridge yesterday if you’re interested in the ins and outs of municipal finance, addressing the burning issue — yes! I went there! — of fire service. In some ways, firefighters are like dentists, victims of their own success at upgrading building codes and preaching prevention. Fewer fires are being fought — half as many in 2010 as there were in 1977 — but you still need a force down in the firehouse. The question is what kind, and how do you train and work them? You can hit the main Bridge link in this paragraph, or the individual stories in the RSS feed over there on the right rail.

Eye candy: Classic children’s literature as minimalist posters.

Finally, how the Hawaiian authorities gave the birther-curious Arizona secretary of state a taste of his own medicine. Hilarious. (And hey, it appears to have worked.)

Happy Wednesday to you.

Do you and your partner squabble over what to watch on TV in the evenings (assuming you’re so inclined; of course I spend my evenings reading great literature, and thinking deep thoughts)? I ask because I’m trying to sample the first few minutes of “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” and my husband just referred to TLC as “the hillbilly channel.”

I take offense! The L clearly stands for “learning.” And I am learning about American gypsies.

And these people are some serious hillbilly gypsies.

As a reporter, your only connection with gypsies is the semi-annual press releases issued by the police department, about traveling home-improvement scams — old women who get only half their house painted (or painted with watery paint that disappears after a single rain), people who get their wallets lifted when someone comes inside for “interior measurements,” the usual. So it’s a little odd to see a show about people who make their living by buying a load of asphalt in the morning, and go door to door throughout the day, trying to sell it. Somewhere this must work, but man, these aren’t my people. I keep yelling at the screen to slam the door and call the Better Business Bureau.

They certainly do favor a ridiculous style of wedding dress. Tonight they’re making some poor pregnant teenager drag 75 pounds of satin, tulle and Swarovski crystals around Nowhere, W.Va., and all to be married in a tiny church, followed by a reception at what looks like a VFW hall.

And that will be our dose of reality TV for the night, the week, and most likely the month, if not the rest of the year. America is such a freak show; no wonder we’re on top of the world.

Another work-at-home day, but not so much bloggage today. But a little, both rants of a sort:

First, Gin and Tacos on that magical threshold beyond which an American plutocrat cannot fail. In this case, it’s Jamie Dimon:

I guess that whole “maximizing shareholder value” thing, the Commandment that has done more to turn this country into Dogpatch than anything else in the last three decades, doesn’t apply when it comes to doling out money at the top.

We might expect that the shareholders would be inclined to save money rather than spend it, and certainly to avoid rewarding people who perform so poorly. But a stockholders’ meeting is little more than a boys’ club operating under the pretext of a transparent process of corporate governance. The kind of heavy-hitting institutional shareholders who decide these votes – mutual fund managers, fellow banking executives, and so on – are either in Dimon’s position or expect to be there someday if they can make it to the other side of the shark tank. Perhaps getting to the top, into a position like Dimon’s, is so difficult and unpleasant that the people who manage to do it feel entitled to endless compensation to make it all seem worth it.

And here’s Angry Black Bitch on just another day in the Missouri legislature, which this week honored native son Rush Limbaugh:

Limbaugh arrived with 40 state troopers (did my tax dollars pay for that?) and was smuggled into the Capitol where Republican lawmakers and their staff greeted him much like North Koreans used to greet Kim Jung Il…and then Limbaugh was honored at an invitation only ceremony on the House floor that was closed to the public.

The other day at work we were looking at the current electoral-vote breakdown for the November election, and someone remarked that calling Missouri a toss-up is wishful thinking in the extreme. It’s as much a part of the modern confederacy as Mississippi. Looks like it.

With that, the hour grows late and bed beckons me. I hope I dream of anything but gypsies, Jamie Dimon or the sex tourist from Cape Girardeau. A good Thursday to all.

What a glorious day. Just perfect, pretty much start to finish. I’d planned to get up early for a dawn bike ride, but suffered a 90-minute bout of insomnia after an already late bedtime, so that was down the tubes. But I got away for an hour or so at lunch, and ran errands on two wheels. Stopped at the pet store — the best pet store in Michigan, for my money — for rabbit food, and visited with the baby buns in their big bin. The lady said they have a Flemish giant that they turn loose for exercise, and sometimes he jumps in with the babies. This would be an alarming sight to see, especially for the babies — the sky darkening with something roughly rabbit shaped, and then a bun the size of Spriggy landing in their midst. No wonder they looked so nervous.

Then, to the library to pay overdue fines and look for something for our next family movie night. “High Fidelity” is checked out. Grr. Then down to the ATM for some dolla-dolla-bills-y’all, and back home, not even all that sweaty. I like my Lansing days for the rediscovered joys of officemates and lunch out, and I like my work-at-home days for the bike rides and the chance to get laundry done between phone calls.

Amid all the glory of listening to the birds chirp, and making those phone calls, that was pretty much my day, until Alan pulled into the driveway in this:

Alas, it shipped without the Italian supermodel. But it did have a sunroof, and yesterday was our 19th wedding anniversary, so off we rolled down Lake Shore for an ice cream sundae, and that’s all the fun you can really have when your anniversary falls on a Tuesday, but no matter.

Being online and connected all day, I did collect some bloggage worth your time, however:

One from moi, on one of those crazy urban-farm ideas here in Detroit, only this one has spinach and fish. Hit the link and keep me employed.

My old Columbus Dispatch colleague Julia Keller is leaving the Chicago Tribune to teach at my alma mater. She’s a West Virginia girl, so she’ll enjoy being more or less back home. Almost almost heaven, as we never said in southeast Ohio.

If I read Mark Souder’s stupid column right, he’s mad at Dick Lugar for speaking the truth on election night because it was “ungracious” and slavery and how can you be bipartisan unless you’re partisan first, huh? I consider the day this twit got caught with his weenis in the wrong place proof of a loving and merciful God. Certainly one with a sense of humor.

While we’re on the subject of religious hysterics, a great Charles Pierce piece on the crazy Catholic school whose baseball team refused to play one with a girl on it.

General Motors cancelled a $10 million ad buy with Facebook. Why? Because nobody clicks their ads. Ha.

A note from Kim, of our commenting crew, who is today a job creator. A hirer, anyway:

I have a couple of job opportunities and am wondering if you know of folks either in the NN.C sphere or elsewhere who might be interested. They are in Wilmington, NC and Columbia, SC – my company recently closed on groups of stations in both markets (they were separate deals) and I am at the point of immediately hiring for NC to start up an online-only daily driven by radio. SC will be later this summer. I am looking for a managing editor for both places, and a cops/courts reporter for NC.

Finally, someone — can’t remember who — already noticed a language anachronism edging into “Mad Men,” that most obsessively policed environment, or so we’ve heard. First, Joanie told someone “it is what it is,” a phrase I’d bet a paycheck hadn’t been invented in 1966. Then, this week, a character requested an “impactful” ad. Say whu-? That neologism is so fresh it’s still in diapers. Matt Weiner? You aren’t all you think you are.

Hope Wednesday is as nice as Tuesday was.

Folks, I went to a city council meeting tonight and now would happily drive spikes in my eyes rather than stare at my laptop another minute. I’d like to get up early-early and get a bike ride in. So let’s do an all-bloggage Tuesday, eh?

Via 4dbirds, Germans express puzzlement that such a religious country as ours opposes health care for all. They don’t know us very well, do they?

How John just-an-umpire-callin’-them-strikes-and-balls Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United case. Foul!

T-Lo look at Cathy Cambridge. And look and look and look, because she looks fabulous. Off to bed.

We were killing time before going out to dinner the other night, and caught at bit of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony/concert on HBO (read: lotsa profanity). The speeches — both the introductions and the acceptances — went on ridiculously too long, but what are you going to do? It’s a hall of fame; if ever there was a time to run on at the mouth, that’s the time.

There were about a million archival clips, one of which included the Famous Flames, James Brown’s band. Three background vocalists were taking turns at the mic, dancing between ooh-wahs. I was reminded of one of the Original Kings of Comedy bits, where we are told the difference between ol’-skool R&B and hip-hop: Five guys/one microphone vs. 20 guys, and everybody gets a microphone.

Anyway, everybody getting inducted was missing a member, one way or another. A couple of the Faces were dead, and I guess Rod Stewart had better things to do, like maybe put finishing touches on his next collection of crap. Axl Rose stood up the rest of Guns ‘n Roses, but Slash was there. Alan theorized that all that hair is actually part of the leather top hat, that it’s actually stapled to the lining.

Maybe actually stapled to his head. From what I recall of Slash, he probably lost feeling in that extremity long ago.

How was your weekend? Mine was pretty good. Kate’s last jazz concert of the season. They played this, although a different arrangement. I’m going to miss this program, and not for the Wednesday-night me-time. She worked with some excellent musicians and learned a lot, and it washed out, in price, to about $4.50 per hour of instruction. On the other hand, I should probably spend Wednesday evenings at the gym for a while.

Found this on Sunday morning, Edmund White’s recollection of attending Cranbrook a few years ahead of Mitt Romney. I’m telling you, this story will have a peculiar sort of legs for a while, I think; for every “oh, pfft, boys will be boys” there will be at least one person who, like Alex remarked over the weekend, is glad this sort of bullshit is getting the attention it deserves. White:

I already knew I was gay by the time I got to Cranbrook, and I looked forward to this all-male environment. In vain. The school placed the boys in individual rooms in order to cut down on buggery. Kids were run ragged with endless sports practices that consumed the entire afternoon. There were only two brief fifteen-minute periods during the day when boys were allowed to smoke (with their parents’ permission) and to socialize. I did manage to seduce two or three fellow students while at Cranbrook, but only after Casanova-like strategies, whereas I’d heard that some prep schools in the East were real bordellos. I’ve written a novel, “A Boy’s Own Story,” based on my experiences at Cranbook.

I was friends with two writers while at Cranbrook, both of them resolutely straight though strangely tolerant of my “tendencies.” One was Thomas McGuane, who turned out to be a talented novelist and a real Montana rancher and cowboy, a man who’s had movie-star lovers (Margot Kidder and Elizabeth Ashley) and who’s now married to Jimmy Buffett’s sister; he’s said in print that he knew I was gay in school and thought it was “funny.” The other one was Raymond Sokolov, who became a preëminent film and later food critic, who’s lived in Paris and worked for Newsweek, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and whose wife is on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum.

Thomas McGuane again. I recall interviews in which he told stories about his own problems at Cranbrook, something about copying some Rimbaud poems and submitting them to a clueless teacher as his own, then getting them handed back with D’s and F’s scrawled across them. For all this hoop-de-do about the best and brightest, the place seems — or seemed, then — to be a breeding ground for gentlemen’s-C students from the upper classes.

Or maybe psychopaths.

Since we’ve already skipped to the bloggage, then:

Incorrect headline, shocking story nonetheless. What sort of criminals are we breeding these days?

For laziness, for stating-of-the-obvious, for sheer unadulterated yeah bitchez I gets paid for this, it’s hard to beat Mitch Albom this week. I just don’t have the energy to take it apart. Sorry.

Monday! Another week awaits! Let’s kill it, eh?

Like many of you, I read the Mitt Romney-at-Cranbrook story this morning and had it on my mind pretty much all day. It was good food for thought, with so many interesting angles to consider. If I’d been in an old movie, it would have been one of those scenes where an angel sits on one shoulder and a devil on the other, hissing in opposite ears:

Angel: He was in high school. Remember high school? Do YOU want to be judged for something you did in high school?

Angel: Don’t be ridiculous. Name Redacted was a little punk. He’s probably living in a Florida trailer park. He certainly wasn’t Harvard material. Much less Bain Capital.

And so on. At one point, I forwarded it to my Bridge colleagues, and one replied with a towering rant about triviality in news coverage that made steam come out the vents of my laptop. He made many good points. And yet, I cannot lie: I am a woman, and a frustrated novelist, and I find these stories fascinating. I think of how many American families would sell kidneys to send their children to elite schools like Cranbrook, only to find that, once the parents drive away, they’re as brutal and awful in their own way as the worst gladiator academies in Detroit. I think of young Mitt, who must have cast a very long shadow there as the son of the governor and an ex-automotive CEO — believe me, this is the closest thing to royalty in Michigan — using his position to smirk and lead bathroom jihads against a gay kid who dared to bleach his hair and style it in a way others found offensive.

On the other hand? It was 1965. That’s what gay kids had to put up with then, what many of them still have to put up with. It’s why we had the Stonewall riots and a thousand smaller rebellions, in living rooms and offices and over dinner tables. It’s why gay people have been loudly banging open closet doors for decades now, demanding to be taken seriously and treated with respect. But to ask the people of 1965 to act as though it’s 2012 is as foolish as demanding Christopher Columbus land in Hispaniola with the attitudes of a late-20th-century college president.

For months, I’ve been reading about Romney, from sources around the political spectrum, trying to gather an informed picture of the man. I’m reminded of something Paul Helmke, the former GOP mayor of Fort Wayne, said about Evan Bayh, whom he faced in the U.S. Senate race many years ago. He said you got the impression, talking to Bayh, that if you peeled back the skin of his face, you’d see wires and LEDs blinking inside — that he was more a robot than a human being. This exhaustive piece in Slate tracking his shifting position on abortion is, I fear, the man in a few thousand words: He’ll say anything to get elected.

As it happens, there was a significant event in Romney’s Cranbrook-era past that pertains here, as well — his brother-in-law’s sister died after an illegal abortion in 1963, which along with his own mother’s pragmatic ideas about the subject, appear to have informed Romney’s opinions early on. But today, it’s all about balancing votes on a scale. Who is this man? I wish I knew.

We can’t change what we did 50 years ago, but we do have control over how we talk about it today, and that’s all I’m left with now. Romney gave a weasel apology about “pranks” that “might have gone too far.”

“Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” Romney said in a live radio interview with Fox News Channel personality Brian Kilmeade. Romney added: “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize.”

Yet another missed opportunity to prove what sort of man he really is. He stood by quietly when he allowed conservative groups to drive out a gay aide a few days ago. He could have made it his Sister Souljah moment, but didn’t. What could he have said today? Maybe this:

“I’ve recently been reminded that I was a bully in high school, and picked on one boy in particular.” (The story mentions another boy, and a teacher as well, but let’s not be petty.) “I wonder how many of us would like to live with the consequences of our high-school behavior for the rest of our lives. While the incident isn’t indelibly imprinted in my memory, others remember a consistent picture of events, and I will take their word I did what they say I did. I’ll only add that 50 years covers a lot of time not just in my life, but in that of the country. I’m sure gay students at Cranbrook today have it a lot easier, and for that I’m grateful. I’m certainly sorry I was part of the problem then. I’d like to be part of the solution now.”

(I just made that up. I’m sure a professional speechwriter could improve it.)

So, bloggage? Sure. Here’s a Laura Lippman column that touches on the theme, tangentially — about how she hated covering politics and looked for the more human angles to bigger stories:

After five years on the news side, I moved to features. Even there, I wasn’t drawn to the more glamorous assignments. Asked — forced — to write about then-Gov. Parris Glendening during his re-election campaign in 1998, I focused almost entirely on his blushing problem. Asked — forced — to cover the mayor’s race in 1999, I observed that mayoral candidate Martin O’Malley had a frat-boy smile; I don’t think he ever smiled in my presence again. I liked interviewing writers, but other famous people left me cold. Too polished, too practiced.

Good one.

A truly glorious takedown of Jonah Goldberg, pegged to his stupid Pulitzer resume-padding but timeless in its detail:

I just opened “The Tyranny of Cliche” to a random page. It is the start of Chapter 9, “Slippery Slope,” and it begins with quotations from Hume, Lincoln and T.S. Eliot. Then we’re treated to the prose of Mr. Jonah Goldberg, who is here to share his presentation on “slippery slopes.” It reads very much like a high school student’s essay assignment:

Ultimately slippery slope arguments are a mixed bag. They are useful as a way to reinforce good dogma, but they are also used to reinforce bad dogma. Similarly they can scare us away from bad policies and good policies alike. There are good slippery slope arguments and bad ones for good ends and bad ends.

Bad dogma!

Finally, I leave you with an easy, Facebook-y smile, one of those Buzzfeed things you can pass on to your friends: How to evolve your views on gay marriage.

Happy weekend, all.

I’m still reading the blowback on Obama’s gay-marriage proclamation, an activity not made any easier by the consumption of three beers. I guess this is a watershed moment, one of those where some people step forward and others don’t, but we trust they’ll catch up. What I don’t understand are the people who keep crowing that the North Carolina vote was SO lopsided, so this means it’s totally wrong. As though, if we’d put interracial marriage on the ballot in the same state in 1963, it would have passed by a similar margin.

What do we all think? I’ll have more in the morning? Right now, I just want to read.

Although Roy has his usual pithy, amusing roundup of the freaks, which you are encouraged to enjoy.

I have to say: When I heard Maurice Sendak was dead this morning, I didn’t think about him. I thought about baby Kate, sitting on my lap as I read her “Where the Wild Things Are.” When we got to the part about them roaring their terrible roars and showing their terrible claws, she would hold up her wee baby paws and hook her wee baby fingers into claws, and say raar.

My little wild thing. Gone for years, but still always with me.

Eighty-three years is a pretty good measure for a life. You can’t say he didn’t do a lot with it.

Same with Richard Lugar, but it’s all over now, baby blue. I’m avoiding most of the coverage, because I know sooner or later, someone will parrot the right-wing bumper sticker: Thank you for your service, but it’s time for you to go. Yeesh.

People ask me if the Democrats have a chance against Mourdock. Honestly, I don’t know. Someone here does, so let the rest of us know.

Looks like the North Carolina gay-marriage thing went down (snerk) too. This is bad news, but not the worst news. I feel, more than ever, that this issue is over, and what we’re seeing now is just the final skirmishes. But never say never.

A funny piece on a great idea by Eric Zorn, proposing a new journalism award – the Rumpelstiltskin, for spinning gold out of crap, or, to put it more clearly, doing a great job with an old, old story assignment:

Nothing awakens Chicago’s eager young reporters to the grim realities of the life they’ve chosen like their second Saint Patrick’s Day parade, when they realize there will be another parade every March until they retire and unless they get one of those glamorous overseas assignments that don’t exist any longer they will probably be out there covering it. Yet some skilled practitioners can actually make each parade sound interesting. There’s no Pulitzer for a gift like that, but there could be a Rumpy.

I’d nominate my current colleague Ron, who was given the unfortunate assignment of covering the Three Rivers Festival in Fort Wayne one year. Every day, he found a new way to cover the same old shit. My favorite was a story about the frog-jumping contest, written in the form of a letter to PETA. It was hilarious, and of course 82 percent of everyone who read it missed the point, which tells you everything you need to know about your average newspaper reader. They wrote forests full of letters condemning Ron for diming out the poor frog-jumpers, etc. But it was a rare week when it was more fun to read the stories in the paper than actually attend the stupid events, and he deserves a Rumpy.

Or maybe that’s just me.

What a story: The double agent who derailed the next attack.

I’m gonna watch some more Rachel, and set this for posting early tomorrow morning. We’ll take up the struggle tomorrow, eh?

Have a good one.