PBS reran a “Frontline” documentary on the 9/11 aftermath as part of its special programming this week. “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” is one for you armchair philosophers, or at least Jeff the Mild-Mannered. It’s “Frontline” and public broadcasting at its best, a deep dive into the big questions raised by that day, which all boil down to the biggest one: “Why, God?”

At two hours, it’s a long commitment, but the video online is broken into chapters, which lend themselves to watching in 15-minute chunks. But it takes at least two hours to do what “Frontline” does best, i.e., not settle. The throughlines are a handful of people who lost loved ones that day, and how they integrated the tragedy into their spiritual selves, how they were changed. One woman is still angry and bitter over the loss of her fiancé, and lost her faith over it. Another found it deepened. The climax of the piece comes when two opposing voices consider the most searing images of that day — the jumpers, of course. One says that if you want proof God is a fantasy, look at that, because surely no loving God would throw those innocent souls out the windows of a burning building to die that way. Another says that if you want proof of the divinity within ourselves, look at the people who jumped, holding hands, to give comfort to one another in the final seconds of life. The whole passage is set to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which was a bit much, but then again, if there’s ever been a time to use it, that’s the montage.

It all left me with the feeling that if we doubt that God is created in our image, here’s a nice bit of video evidence. I was struck by the remarks of a Lutheran minister who participated in the first healing service at Yankee Stadium, the one that featured clergy of all faiths, Christian and otherwise, even Islam, who joined hands to pray in a moment of spiritual solidarity. In the insanity of the aftermath, it could look, depending on your point of view, like everything from kum-ba-ya multiculti mush to a statement of our strength as a nation to something else. This particular minister got the something else — letters from his fellow Lutherans, calling him out for daring to stand on a stage with other religious leaders and present the dangerous heresy that they might be legitimate, too. They called for his collar.

It reminded me of the moment in my own newsroom, when a staffer offered an op-ed that said that very thing, more or less, a sentiment that would likely have gone over like gangbusters in Fort Wayne. The editor-in-chief put his foot down, however, and spiked it, earning the Strange New Respect Award from me, a moment that said, OK, this bullshit stops here. No Lutherans are flying planes into buildings, but if you can’t see the parallels with Islamist radicalism, I direct you to chapter 5 of “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.”

Watching those images of the interfaith service now, I’m heartened, the same way I was watching Jon Stewart’s post-9/11 monologue, where he said, “I grieve, but I do not despair.” We have better angels, and sometimes we get in touch with them.

Which seems a good turning point to the bloggage, because we start out with a bad fairy, from where else, Fox Sports! This is recommended, particularly for you Californians. I don’t get the point of the piece — seek out Asian students at USC who know nothing about football, because they’re such nose-to-the-grindstone types, bent on destroying grade curves everywhere, and get them to deliver highly accented wercomes to new Pac 10 members, Cororado and Utah. Is this funny? As the colleague who sent this to me noted:

I’m just dumbfounded. TV networks don’t just throw anything on the air. They discuss stories in meetings, they plan them and review them. Who on earth said let’s go target only Asians with a poor grasp of English, take advantage of that deficiency and then make fun of them on national television? Astounding.

Via Eric Zorn, yoga is annoying. Why? Well:

There are teachers and students who think flexibility is some kind of indication of how good a person you are. While we certainly hold tension, trauma and rigidity in our limbs and joints and muscles, there is no reason to imagine there’s some absolutely direct correlation between how well we can move and how functional or healthy our mind is. I seriously doubt that Albert Einstein or Susan Sontag had less flexible minds than, I don’t know, Rodney Yee. My point is, some physical limitations can be aided through the practice of yoga and some can’t and no one needs the increased pressure of someone telling them, every time they strain to get their heels on the floor in Downward Facing Dog, that this is because their mind is all screwed up.

So if your teacher tells you that we hold a lot of stuff in our hips and hamstrings and as we begin to let this stuff go and become our authentic selves we will be able to wrap our arms around ourselves eight times, look around the room. You will probably see a guy who can do that, while smiling, and I’ll bet that you will eventually hear from someone in the class about the time he flew into a rage and broke a car window.

And with that, I’m off to take advantage of a temporary break in the rain to get a bike ride in. Happy weekend, all.

It rained all day yesterday. Every time I checked the radar for an idea of when it might stop — the wind was blowing, so it should have been headed somewhere — it seemed the same little scrap of precipitation was more or less circling over southeast Michigan. Sometimes it would rain hard, sometimes it would just drip a little, but it never actually stopped.

So when Kate came home with her school-supply list, it seemed like a good time to hit Staples. As Staples go, ours is probably a bare-minimum footprint, tucked as it is into a pre-war urban neighborhood. Still, it has plenty of parking, although it’s rare to see more than a dozen cars there at a time. Not last night. No supply lists were mailed or posted online in advance of the school year; students show up on day one with a pen, and come home with a list. Which means that instead of shopping the sales in August, or spreading the purchase out over a couple of weeks here and there, every parent in the district is at Staples on the second evening of the school year. I saw more familiar faces than at the orientation meeting the previous night. And after all the binders, paper, pens and suchlike had been thrown in the cart, I confronted the big purchase — the graphing calculator. The least expensive of the three acceptable models was sold out. The second one was in stock, for a mere $125.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked the nice Staples guy who was helping me sort things out. I looked at the bulky package, and noted all the selling points — acceptable for use during the SAT/ACT! USB cord included! Carries you through algebra II, calculus and trigonometry! “Does it make coffee or something?”

It does not. It just costs an arm and a leg. The priciest option — the one with the color screen — was $150. So the Texas Instruments TI-84 it was, and no, they didn’t have any pink ones. I’m told the cost will drop to $109.99 after mail-in rebates, which I am so totally getting. The cashier asked if I’d like to make a donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Detroit, which will use the money for school supplies. Oh, hell yes. I can’t imagine being a parent in that city, with all the mountains you must climb just to get your children an education, confronting the news that now your high-schooler needs a $100 calculator to take geometry. Take my money, please.

At least I’m enrolled in the rewards program.

In a college TV production class, we were required to write and perform in a 30-second commercial for a product of our choosing. Mine was a Casio four-function hand-held calculator. My selling point was that you don’t need a square-root key to balance your checkbook. “It adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides — what more do you need?” I got an A.

Amusing detail from the product listing in the Staples circular: Among the classes the TI-84 is suitable for? “English/Language Arts.” Ha ha ha ha ha.

A big teaching chore awaits me today, so here goes with the bloggage:

A Texas wildfire on the march. A YouTube video, but taken with a tripod. As irritating as all-day rain can be, the alternative can be far worse. Actually, whenever I see the meteorological contrasts our country is capable of, I think about the day, which I expect to see in my lifetime, when the southwest finally stops hemming and hawing and makes its case for a transcontinental water pipeline to bring some H2O from chill, overcast and soggy Michigan to sunny, warm Arizona. That’s the day I start pouring sugar into bulldozer gas tanks.

While we’re at YouTube, a friend posted this clip from “2001: A Space Odyssey” today — Hal’s death scene. I’d forgotten how moving it is. Hal was voiced by one of the actors from the Stratford Shakespeare company, and if you want to know how to make a computer voice emotional without changing its machine-like quality by one iota, well, there’s your scene. I don’t know how he does it, but I guess that’s why he’s the pro.

And while we’re still on YouTube, this was served as a “related” video to the fire clip — a Pomeranian puppy, howling. We aren’t amusing ourselves to death, we’re drowning in Cute.

At the goading of some of you, who were discussing it in comments, I turned on the GOP debate last night. Good. GOD. A nation of more than 300 million, a vulnerable president, and this is the alternative? Was that a cheer I heard when the Texas death penalty was mentioned? Who are you people?

Via Mitch Harper in the Fort, a look at Southtown Mall in that city, late, unlamented, but one of the city’s fabulous ruins, for a time. I forgot about that Orange Julius.

Finally, for a good cry, this, the eternal mystery of the human heart.

And I think that’s it. I can smell weekend in the air — can you?

We had a whack Labor Day weekend — Friday’s and Saturday’s temperatures were in the high 90s, and by Monday, they’d fallen 40 degrees, which sort of ruined my plans to spend summer’s final day at the pool, listening to the traditional last-day DJ set. Oh, well. Kate and I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” on one of the steamy days, because sometimes you just need the extra kick only movie-theater air conditioning can provide.

I was delighted to be delighted by the film, which was great fun and surprisingly moving and aw hell MONKEYS ON THE RAMPAGE OOK OOK OOK. I’m sorry trailers nowadays have to give away the whole damn movie, because it would have been wonderful to have the big battle scene take you by surprise, but no. Everyone who’s even seen a TV ad knows it happens on the Golden Gate Bridge. The CGI effects are wonderful, with some liberties taken. Here’s an actual chimp:

Here’s the digital chimp, Caesar, from the film:

As you can see, the unstable pharmaceutical substance that gives the ape species its super intelligence also gives it standard-issue human eyes. Eyes were the secret of E.T., too, although I hated that movie and would happily have subjected the little extraterrestrial to a full government interrogation. Chimpanzees I can identify with. But it’ll take more than eyes to make me fall.

Anyway, “Rise” needed a subtitle: The radicalization of a young primate, say, or a sexier poster line: Abu Ghraib, with even more hair than Khalid Sheik Muhammed. The apes rise for very good reasons, and the battle on the bridge would be commemorated in heroic sculpture once the new ape society is in place, but we have to leave something for the sequel.

Yesterday was the first day of school around here, and the weather stayed cool, segueing into the sort of overcast and chill rain today that includes everything but the Goodyear blimp flying a banner: IT’S OVER, FOLKS. I’m not entirely devastated by it; there’s always a point at which you’re ready to start wearing long pants again. I did buy a pair of new Teva sandals on late-season clearance, and I love them so it would be nice if I could continue showing my toes for a few more weeks. So let’s jump to the bloggage, showing our toes all the while:

Jim at Sweet Juniper took the kids to Sleeping Bear Dunes this summer, and had trouble making the climb. Fortunately, he gave us an account of the experience. Funny.

Don’t let Joe Nocera’s column about the loss of middle ground in Washington make you think you’ve read it all before. There’s some good detail here:

“This is not a collegial body anymore,” (Rep. Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee) said. “It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That’s what Congress has come to.”

Alan and I went to Windsor for dinner one night last summer, and it was sorta meh. Windsor used to have a thriving restaurant scene, I’m told, and U.S. visitors came often to its Italian, Chinese and other districts. Now that you need a passport and a tolerance for potential border searches, business has fallen significantly. Yet another 9/11 story, this on the explosion of the border-control industry in our region. It was a good decade to wear a badge, apparently. One day, perhaps we naked apes will rise in revolt.

And with that, I must skedaddle. Holiday weeks mean extra work.

For a few days now, I’ve been tossing links into a pile for a 9/11 anniversary post, probably with an opening paragraph about how much I hate anniversary journalism, but they’re getting so numerous I’m wondering if it isn’t time to jump the gun a bit.

We all have our 9/11 memories, ideas and conclusions, and I’m sure people will share them in comments. But when I look back, and look forward a bit, the overarching theme that stays with me is this: Crazy Talk.

When I was culling my old columns for wayback week, I winced at my post-9/11 thoughts, and winced further, thinking of some of the things others I knew or read said at the time. It was such a jarring event, so unsettling to virtually everyone, that I’ve come to grant blanket amnesty for whatever came out of your mouth or keyboard from September 11 through, say, December 31, 2001. Nearly four months should be time enough to come to our senses, from freaked-out Maureen Dowd (who nearly collapsed in a puddle of anxiety, and shared every word with her suffering readers) to the far worse “warbloggers,” people like James Lileks and his “give me the gun, show me the cave” snarling about going mano-a-mano with Osama bin Laden. Ego te absolvo. Go and sin no more.

Of course, most people didn’t get the second part, and 9/11 became the precipitating event for the culture war to really ramp up, to go from a series of skirmishes to a full-out take-no-prisoners scorched-earth campaign, or, as the now-retired blogger the Poor Man called it, the War on Straw.

One of the battles was over what was the correct response to the events, and I have to admit this: When the cable networks all stopped showing the video of the planes hitting the towers, on some mutually agreed-upon idea that to do so was too painful for those who’d lost loved ones in the event, I was disappointed. I couldn’t watch that enough. I still can’t. The images were so astounding they achieved a terrible beauty. But you couldn’t say so, then. Someone was always policing the conversations for wrongthink, and would scold you. On their stupid warblog.

I worked my way through New York magazine’s special issue, “The Encyclopedia of 9/11,” over several hours the other day when I was down at Wayne. Its bite-size bits were convenient for reading between students, and conveyed the same slide-show effect memory has.

But it wasn’t until I read this piece, by Stanford English professor Terry Castle, about remarks made in the aftermath by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, that I said, yep.

You probably don’t remember this minor detail — I didn’t — but here’s what Stockhausen said at a music festival in Germany a few days after 9/11:

The events of 9/11, he’d enthused, were “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” Things had gone from bad to worse to incendiary when, like Batman’s Joker, he warmed to his theme: “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying; just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing.”

A crazy thing to say, no doubt. I’m not even entirely sure what he meant by it. Castle goes a little deeper, and comes up with a very Stanford-English-seminar sort of explanation:

At Stanford, I often teach a course on Gothic fiction. …In eighteenth-century aesthetics, the Sublime was anything that by its size, strength, or the danger it posed to human life produced instinctive terror and awe. Certain natural objects, philosophers like Kant maintained, were necessarily sublime: erupting volcanoes, tempests, huge waterfalls, ferocious beasts, racing floods, swiftly enveloping darkness, and so on. But man-made phenomena could also be sublime: ancient ruins, grim fortresses, the interiors of great cathedrals, colossal towers, pitch-black dungeons, and the like.

The theory held that when sublime objects were contemplated from a position of safety—when, say, one saw a volcanic eruption from a great distance, or even just read a description of one—the results could be thrilling and pleasurable. Unmediated sublimity terrorized, yes, but representations of sublimity produced excitement, a monster-rush of euphoria. The point was not lost on eighteenth-century Gothic novelists; like disaster filmmakers today, they realized that, skillfully packaged, things otherwise dread-inspiring could be a source of perverse yet intoxicating delight.

Castle goes on to say that when she teaches this course, she sometimes shows slides of paintings in this tradition, interspersed with photos from the World Trade Center, similarities that couldn’t be more obvious.

Lots of people said crazy things after 9/11, but lots of people said things that were simply difficult to hear. Barbara Kingsolver, for one, who spoke of jingoism and censorship, and no longer being able to regard an American flag with “unambiguous pride.” And then there was the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who refused to get out of bed to look at what was visible from her apartment window that day, at least not until the second tower collapsed, infamously said later, “I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.” Not crazy, but self-consciously provocative in such an oozily gross way it still grates.

Who remembers the widely circulated email — or maybe it was an article somewhere — about the best way to stop another in-progress hijacking? Carry a can of Spam or other tinned pork, and throw it at the jihadis, who would quail before it like Kryptonite. And speaking of email forwards, how about the endless, witless urban legends people were always passing along? Ten (or five, or six, or 22) NYC firefighters were found safe in the rubble, because they’d been driving a sturdy American-made, gas-guzzling SUV. Some other guy surfed the rubble down from the 100th floor and lived to tell about it. (That one is actually in the New York compilation. Very thinly based on fact, that one.) How many times did you get sent a picture of the towers rebuilt in the shape of a thrusting middle finger, or the slide show of photos set to Enya music? It got to where my email was as much a curse as boon. I stood in line behind a woman in the checkout line at Target — doing my duty, shopping for the economy — who wanted to discuss in maddening detail with the clerks the fact 911 is also the emergency number, and isn’t that just fascinating? I actually stopped reading U.S. news sources for a week or two, preferring to stick to comparatively sober Europeans, an early advantage of the internet.

Did anyone save any of this electronic ephemera? Someone must have. I don’t know if I’d like to revisit it, not yet, but it might be interesting to view the scar.

What about you? I could scarcely take my eyes off the TV for days. Our digital cable was installed that afternoon, which necessitated the cable guy disconnecting me for about 45 minutes, and I nearly went nuts. When he hooked up the new box and the news reappeared on the screen, I said, “Thank God.” The guy looked a little quizzical, then glanced back at the screen. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Crazy, huh?” It wasn’t much longer before Ashleigh Banfield freaked out while questioning a city official: “Are there bombs in the sewers?!? We’re getting reports there may be bombs in the sewers!”

I guess the cable guy was right.

As it turned out, there were no bombs in the sewers, nor truck bombs on Illinois interstates, nor poison in municipal water supplies. Al Qaeda never attacked Chicago, or Los Angeles, or Disney World. All those warbloggers never got to swing their hammers. Osama bin Laden turned out to be Brer Rabbit, and we dove into the briar patch after him.

Ultimately, when I think of that day I think of the last words so many of its victims were able to say, the people on United 93, the people calling home from the floors above the fire, leaving messages that would be received after they’d died. One of the rare, perhaps the only, Peggy Noonan column I ever liked made the simple observation that when people know they’re doomed, they don’t waste their final moments calling their exes or horrible bosses or estranged family members to tell them how much the caller always despised them. Rather, they call their friends and families to say the same words they’d said only hours before, in many cases: I love you.

The other day I was driving somewhere, and heard Scott Simon read parts of this obituary for Jack Layton, a Canadian politician known for his contrariness. He died of cancer in August, and this was the last thing he told his countrymen, in a final letter released after his death:

“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

Not so crazy in the end, I guess.

A few final links:

Hank Stuever rounds up some — but not all — of the TV observances.

The memorial at Ground Zero, now nearing completion.

Finally, if you have WSJ access, what if the disaster had happened a decade later? You’d never get off Facebook.

Have a good week, all.

Our local NPR affiliate carries a show called Soundcheck, and on my drive home yesterday I caught a feature called the Soundcheck Smackdown, which on most days sounds like the arguments between the record-store clerks in “High Fidelity,” only not as funny.

Yesterday’s discussion was over the most influential figure in popular music in the last quarter-century. The host nominated Steve Jobs. Most of the rest of the free world disagreed. I noted many of the comments were yet more of the Steve Jobs hate that some have been expressing since the Apple CEO stepped down from his position, presumably to await the fate coming for us all.

A couple stipulations here: Y’all know I’m a Mac girl. I don’t revere Jobs in any way, although I do respect him. I’m on record as saying, “It’s an operating system, not a religion,” despite how many people want to treat it as such. My loyalty to Macs goes back to when I bought my first computer in 1994, and learned that formatting a floppy in the Windows OS would require a series of commands including colons, backslashes and the like. In the Mac, I’d get a window that said, “This appears to be an unformatted disk. Would you like to format it?” Sold. I knew, when I handed over my credit card, that I was paying a steep premium for that ease of use, but I was a total dolt with MS-DOS, and I knew that if the curtain of Windows was ever pulled back — and it often was, with that generation of PCs — I’d be powerless.

In subsequent years, both systems have improved immensely. But I like my Macs, and will remain a customer. They speak my language.

During those years, I occasionally come across someone who will remark, “Oh, you have one of those toy computers,” when they see the apple on the case. “When are you going to buy a real one?” I sometimes ask them if they’d buy a car you had to raise the hood on several times a week, just to get it started. A computer is a tool I use to do my work. I don’t want to spend time fixing my tools.

But man, ever since Jobs announced his exit from the company’s top office, the vitriol. Much of it has been in comment sections and hence, not credible, but you have to wonder about a person who would cheer the impending death of someone because that person made a product they disapproved of — that wasn’t poison gas or electric chairs.

I’ve been particularly interested in Jobs’ patents, a story that splashed in the big papers the day after his announcement, which I have to figure was planted by Apple. To be frank, I don’t know if I’d like to work for him — while an undeniable nurturer of creativity, he also had the sort of micromanaging style that has always made me nuts. That said, he had enough creative people who would die for him that I imagine he kept it under control when he had to.

What a late start today. Sorry, I’m down at Wayne, meeting with my students and writing in between. So this blog by Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money strikes a chord, about the financial bind too many college students find themselves in today:

I graduated from college in 1982, in the middle of what would turn out to be the worst post-WWII recession until the current mess. But I had no debt, because I went to an excellent public university that charged very low tuition. This, I realize in retrospect, made a huge difference in regard to my psychic as well as economic health. A few years later I went to a top state law school for not exactly free, but for a low enough price that I could earn the total cost of tuition from summer jobs. Today if I had done exactly the same thing I would be graduating with easily six figures of non-dischargeable educational debt at 7.5% interest.

A couple weeks ago, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice now running the state’s Department of Human Services was the human face on a policy change that ripped the food-stamp rug out from under thousands of Michigan college students who had previously qualified for same. In a staggering Marie Antoinette moment, she said those students should “get a part-time job, like I did,” if they had trouble putting food on the table. I meet my students at this urban university, and I am stunned and awed by the challenges they’re juggling to go to school. Part-time job? Most of them are working at least two, and many are full-time workers who wedge classes in around the edges, along with family responsibilities and many others that would, or should, shame a woman who could say such a thing. Never mind financial aid — these young people work harder than I ever did in school. “Get a part-time job?” Why not get a clue instead.

OK, I need a palate-cleanser. I see Mary threw those krazy Kardashian girls into the mix, here if you missed it. The Kardashian Kollection of — underwear, I guess — is for Sears. Yes, they spell it with a K, just like Khloe and Kourtney and Kim. Never underestimate the power of hustling white trash, I always say. Here’s Tom & Lorenzo on one of Kim’s grocery-shopping outfits. (Does she always have her makeup applied with an airbrush? I need to do some research on these girls.)

And with that, I’d best get rolling.

Today is the first day of classes at Wayne State, which means day one of Nance’s Open House, in which I encourage all my public-affairs reporting students to stop by, meet their online instructor face to face, get briefed on my expectations and so on. In the past, this means I would see three or four students today, two tomorrow, and over the next fortnight receive emails from the rest, offering excuses why they couldn’t make it, and promises they’ll be there next week, etc.

However, in a move designed to curb class-shopping, everyone has to be in-and-committed by next week, so maybe it’ll be different this time. We’ll see. I head off to campus in an hour with my stack of student questionnaires, my class list and a hopeful heart. This summer I had three interns and watched them show actual improvement over the course of the term, so who knows? Maybe I can teach them something.

In keeping with the calendar, it’s overcast and dreary. I will probably forget my OneCard and drop my laptop in a puddle. Transitions are hard.

So with little time to spare, let’s hop, bunny-like, to the bloggage:

Dahlia Lithwick on the Cheney memoir:

Who knows why Cheney wants to keep relitigating torture in the face of a factual record that has concluded for the thousandth time that it is neither effective nor legal. Maybe it’s good for his book sales. All I know is that when almost everyone with any expertise in the matter, and any knowledge of the torture program (up to and including Matthew Alexander and John McCain) says that it hurts more than it helps, Cheney starts to sound a little like the crazy lady in the attic.

Detroit — and many other cities — gets an abysmal score for pedestrian-friendliness. The duh passage:

Metro Detroit isn’t unusual. Many developed areas across the country, especially in high-growth suburbs, feature multi-lane roads with shopping centers and housing developments nearby, but no easy way to walk or bike from one area to another.

This has been my No. 1 complaint about newer suburbs since I was old enough to swing my leg over a bicycle, and it’s sort of appalling it’s only now that it’s being discussed. If developers are going to profit enormously by converting farmland to suburbs, platting worm-bundle street plans leading off former country section roads, and not have a simple paved bike or walking/running trail running between subdivisions, they should share in all the misery that comes with getting from one to another via something other than a motor vehicle. Not that they’re likely to lie awake nights under their million-thread-count sheets fretting about it.

Speaking of suburbia, if you didn’t see this yesterday via comments, how Bill O’Reilly used his own local police as muscle in his domestic dispute. As I think Coozledad remarked, the most depressing thing about this is how readily the cops go along with it. You’d think they’d know better.

With that, I’d best get moving. Onward to the temple of learning!

Well, no wonder I have no comments yet today. Another glitch in the WP interface, I think. And I think I’m the glitch. Sorry.

I’m still catching up on this and that from my time away, and one has been the resurfacing of Edward Bodkin, aka the Mad Castrator of Huntington, Ind. His arrest 12 years ago in Dan Quayle’s hometown was said to have monkeywrenched a campaign event for Quayle himself, who was launching his own (very) short-lived presidential campaign around the same time and had to reschedule. It almost certainly would have been a distraction, to have an insane man-gelder competing for the limelight in Family Values City. The contrast would be too irresistible for the New York Times not to point out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You Fort Wayners remember Bodkin, and the 1999 case that hit the city like…well, like an extremely weird story, that’s what. Bodkin was arrested for castrating men. So he assaulted them? No, they underwent the procedure — on a kitchen table in Bodkin’s apartment, which appeared to be in a scuzzy roadside motel — willingly. While he videotaped the procedures, which he sold online. Oh, and he kept the testicles. In jars.

No wonder cops drink.

Anyway, this arrest drew the expected reaction — the morning-radio morons had fun with it, while the rest of us stood around and went wow and weird and whoa. It was left to my colleague Bob Caylor, who somehow hunted down a fetishist in Indianapolis who had the best set of guesses: Some of the “clients” may be transgender, but unable to afford the surgery, so they turn to a guy like Bodkin to either a) do whatever he can do; or better, b) leave them with a mess down there, which they can use to plead for Medicaid to finish it off and tidy things up. Or, the guy said, it’s possible they’re simply very strange body-modification types who have decided that in their true, real lives they are eunuchs, like the people who claim to be amputees, even though they have all their limbs and extremities, and set out to make it so.

I think he directed Bob toward a magazine for enthusiasts. Ball Club, maybe? Bob found some excerpts online that left him a little pale and shaky.

Long story short: Life makes for a very crazy salad of humanity, and Bodkin was one strange crouton.

Because the cops couldn’t get any victims to cooperate with a more traditional charge, prosecutors went for practicing medicine without a license, maxed him out at four years, went home and took a long, hot shower. Bodkin never responded to any pleas from journalists to discuss his fascinating hobby, and he more or less slipped beneath the waves of time.

Until he surfaced, in the comically named Wetumpka, Ala., charged with the very unfunny offense of possession of child pornography:

Sheriff’s officials said they confiscated pornographic materials from Bodkin’s Alabama home, along with devices used to perform castrations and photographs depicting human castration.

There was no immediate evidence he was up to his old tricks, but it suggests that, like your first love, you never really forget it.

Bodkin grew up on a farm, as I recall. After reading, years ago, Dian Hanson’s very cogent thoughts about how fetishes form, I imagine there’s a story there, but I doubt Bodkin will ever tell it.

Best he’s off the street more or less for good now. He’s 68, and the next prison he enters will likely kill him, one way or another.

So. How was your weekend? Ours was lazy enough, probably the last big one of the summer, as fall term at Wayne begins Wednesday and I have a day of orientation between now and then, and of course, Kate starts school the day after Labor Day. Before it slips away, however, I have to ask: Anyone been to a national park this year?

I ask because our original plan for summer vacation was a drive out to Yellowstone. Alan started looking in April for lodging availability in August. I expected it to be tight, but I didn’t expect to hear that every room, in every venue throughout the park, was booked for every night of the summer season. Every single one. I know Yellowstone is popular, but 100 percent? And then I read this, about scalpers dealing in Yosemite campsites, and wondered if there’s something else going on.

If you go to the No. 1 Google site for Yellowstone lodging reservations, you find this disclaimer:

US Park Lodging provides lodging and activity reservations both inside as well as in the gateway communities of the United States National Parks. US Park Lodging is not an authorized concessionaire of any National Park nor are we in any way affiliated with the National Park Service of the Federal Government.

The park’s own affiliate is something else entirely. The last time I visited Yellowstone was before the Bush administration, so who knows? Maybe this is yet another improvement by the Invisible Hand. Is something fishy going on?

Via Eric Zorn, a recent photo of Steve Jobs that suggests the end is drawing near some people — probably Windows users — are happy to have grim fun at others’ expense. Let’s hope he can live the rest of his life without reading Mitch Albom’s extra-stupid column about him.

And with that, Monday awaits. Enjoy it.

Bad news, which some of you mentioned yesterday in comments — my former colleague Mike Dooley died yesterday, from the sort of health collapse that comes after a life a reporter with an Irish name too often feels compelled to live. In what is perhaps a sad commentary on both contemporary journalism and certainly his last employer, his obit was thin and pallid and captured nothing of the man’s essence, which was robust and funny and unforgettable. Better to read excerpts from his popular column, Dooley Noted, which capture what it was like to sit with him at Henry’s, the bar across the street, and hear his stories. My favorite isn’t in there, about riding the press bus on the Dan Quayle 1988 veep campaign, and schooling the national media on the various smells wafting across the countryside. “They didn’t know bullshit from pigshit, Nall,” he roared at his usual volume, set at a time when newsrooms themselves roared with the white noise of phones, typewriters and teletype machines. “Can you believe it?”

Yes, I can. I also believe the story about the time he passed out drunk at a party, and someone used a Sharpie to draw a map of Ireland high on his bald dome, which he wore for several hours before discovering it. I never like to examine the mirror too closely while hungover, either.

Dooley had been failing for a while, and spent his final days at Parkview Hospital, where his friends and colleagues filled up his Facebook page with notes and stories and Godspeeds. I’m told he read them all, and enjoyed them very much.

And while we’re back home again, more news from the Hoosier State: Hank Stuever put me in his book. My former colleague Robin Yocum put me in his book. Tim Goeglein, if Amazon’s “search inside this book” is to be believed, did not. Damn! What’s a girl gotta do to get some credit up in this joint?

Yes, Tim has written his memoirs. I don’t think I’ll be reading them, or at least not buying them. This is why libraries were invented — to read books by people whose income you don’t want to support, but you still want to see what they have to say. Right? I did the 21st-century version of standing over the table at Border’s — first checked for my name, as well as any indication I might be appearing in a spectral, nameless form (“blogger” isn’t in there, either, and the only Nancy has the last name of Reagan). Then I flipped around via the Surprise Me function. It seems Tim’s mom took some classes at IPFW (that’s the Indiana U./Purdue branch campus in Fort Wayne), where professors described the American family as a tool of women’s oppression. He majored in journalism, because of his love for Ernie Pyle. And so on. (The Ernie Pyle school of journalism at IU has “ivy-covered walls,” I learned. Not plagiarism, just trite and unimaginative.) So what is this book’s cornerstone? Amazon copy:

Goeglein’s unique insider account of why he believes most of the 43rd president’s in-office decisions were made for the greater good, and how many of those decisions could serve as a blueprint for the emergence of a thoughtful, confident conservatism. From a fresh perspective, Goeglein gives behind-the-scenes accounts of key events during that historic two-term administration, reflecting on what was right and best about the Bush years. He was in Florida for the 2000 election recount, at the White House on 9/11, and watched Bush become a reluctant but effective wartime president.

An apologia for George Bush. Just what the world needs. Fie.

OK, some quick bloggage, and then I must fly:

Another horrifying story out of Mexico. It just never stops.

A typo — no, an editing mistake — on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Appalling. And etched in stone, literally.

A good weekend to all, especially Irene-dodgers.

Robert Samuelson doesn’t specifically lay the coming death of the “Statistical Abstract of the United States” at the feet of the Tea Party, but given the can’t-afford-it, sorry-we’re-poor attitude sweepin’ the nation, it’s probably a fair charge. For once, I agree with the other mustache I see regularly on the op-ed pages. This isn’t even penny-wise, much less pound foolish:

If you want to know something about America, there are few better places to start than the “Statistical Abstract of the United States.” Published annually by the Census Bureau, the Stat Abstract assembles about 1,400 tables describing our national condition. What share of children are immunized against measles, mumps and rubella? Answer: 92 percent. What state has the highest disposable per capita income? Answer: Connecticut, 33 percent above the national average. How big is the nation’s network of oil pipelines? Answer: 147,000 miles, about triple the length of the Interstate Highway System (46,751 miles).

…In four decades of reporting, I have grabbed it thousands of times to find a fact, tutor myself or answer a pressing question. Its figures are usually the start of a story, not the end. They suggest paths of inquiry, including the meaning and reliability of the statistics themselves (otherwise, they can mislead or tell false tales). The Stat Abstract has been a stalwart journalistic ally. With some interruptions, the government has published it since 1878.

No more. The Stat Abstract is headed for the chopping block. The 2012 edition, scheduled for publication later this year, will be the last, unless someone saves it.

If there’s one thing the 21st century has taught us thus far, it’s that the new coin of the realm is information. Facts. Data. Statistics. What can possibly be gained by this bonehead move? Of course, this isn’t specifically laid out in the Constitution, that divinely inspired document handed down by God Himself to the founding fathers, but criminy, people — do you WANT to live in ignorance? (Don’t answer that, Cooz. No, go ahead and answer it.)

I was living in Indiana during the 2000 census, which featured the long form. Remember that? It was sent to every 10 households or so, and was meant to be a really deep dive into the population, and asked a lot of questions that hadn’t been asked before. The idea was to get a sense of how people really lived — commuting times, square feet per person, how many gay and lesbian households really exist in the country. As a veteran letters-to-the-editor reader and occasional talk-radio listener, I can tell you that there were many who were not at all sanguine about this. Some people look at the sky and see chirping birds and happy trees waving their branches around. Others see black helicopters.

Why are we doing this? What is to be gained by making us dumber? I thought this was telling:

When she learned that the Stat Abstract was threatened, Alesia McManus, library director at Howard Community College in Columbia, started a Facebook page and launched a petition dedicated to reversing the decision. “If the library were on fire, this would be the reference book I would try and save first,” said one response.

Burning the library — that’s a good analogy. Write about that, Bob Greene, you moron.

See what you’ve done, Bob Samuelson? You’ve gotten my dander up. Michael Gerson, you are next:

…the heroes of the Tea Party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats. “If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry,” argues Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek/Daily Beast, “understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.” A recent New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza contends that Bachmann has been influenced by a variety of theocratic thinkers who have preached Christian holy war.

As befits a shadowy religious sect, its followers go under a variety of names: Reconstructionists. Theonomists. The New Apostolic Reformation. Republicans. All apparently share a belief, in Goldberg’s words, that “Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions.”

The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of sharia law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any New Yorker subscriber. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth. The followers of R.J. Rushdoony produce more books than converts.

Oh, very droll. If only I had a Lexis/Nexis account, perhaps I could look up a little Christian alarmism about, say, our current president. Or any of the recent presidents who have called themselves Democrats. Or a few edifying pamphlets about how “outcome-based education” is a secular-humanist plot to brainwash our children, this from the same people who pushed No Child Left Behind and its test mania into the nation’s schools. It so happens I read the Lizza story that Gerson sneers at. I didn’t dwell on the holy war passages, because I was so amazed at this part:

Bachmann’s comment about slavery was not a gaffe. It is, as she would say, a world view. In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with Eidsmoe, her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.

Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”

African slaves brought to America, he argues, were essentially lucky: “Africa, like any other pagan country, was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures.” Echoing Eidsmoe, Wilkins also approvingly cites Lee’s insistence that abolition could not come until “the sanctifying effects of Christianity” had time “to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”

I’m growing weary of tolerating people with crazy-ass ideas. Why is it so wrong to point them out?

This is what happens when a lawn service arrives to cut your neighbor’s grass at 8 a.m. You wake up cranky. As it’s growing late, let’s just go to bloggage and let me get a little work done:

NYT: Why won’t Michelle Rhee talk to USA Today? Because she’s mad at them, that’s why!

I love this, more from the WashPost: Take two chapters of Epictetus and call me in the morning — a new kind of therapist. I think Jeff would like this lady.

Finally, some liberal propaganda about Apple, and a deft point:

So, who is (Steve Jobs)? He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3”, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

Facts? What are those?

I’ve had the iPad long enough to have made my way through three e-books, so I feel qualified to assess the experience, at least at a first-impression level. (The fact two of them were “A Game of Thrones” and “A Clash of Kings” is the reason the total isn’t much bigger. More on that in a minute.)

A friend of mine who’s a little further down this road said, when I expressed reservations at ever joining the Kindle generation, “You will,” which to my ears sounded like me talking to vinyl holdouts in the late ’80s, complaining about CDs. The wave of the future sweeps all before it, and while there will always be a place in the world for ink on paper, and I’m sure there will be some Brooklyn-hipster retro book movement down the road (they’ll call themselves “codexers”), e-books are here to stay. Which is fine, but to a far greater extent than CDs, they’ll change the experience of reading.

Unless you’re the sort of audiophile who really notices the difference between analog and digital recording — and I wasn’t, at least not at first — the prime selling point for CDs was convenience. They were smaller. They didn’t wear out, at least not quickly. They didn’t need to be flipped halfway through. You could have a party, and if someone pogoed too hard, they didn’t skip all over the place. Multi-disk changers meant you could load up an evening’s worth of music, press play and forget about it.

I don’t quite see the same argument for e-books. A Kindler I know who travels often says it’s a nice way to carry an armload of magazines onto a plane, and mentions the added value of being useful for the sort of books you want to leaf through or even read, but not necessarily buy in hardcover. The trendy non-fiction read of the month, say, or something dirty. An author here in Detroit says her erotica-penning colleagues are enjoying a renaissance via Kindle, as you no longer have to hold something with a whip on the cover while reading your lunch hour away on a park bench.

But as to the claim that ebooks will declutter your house? No, thanks. I love all my books, and only fail to love them at moving time. As I’m not likely to be moving again until I’m carried out feet-first, it won’t be my problem.

There are some advantages, though. Last month, I set up an interview with an author whose book was being published that day. Available electronically? Yes. Money in the Amazon account? Yes. (And thanks for that, all of you Kickback Lounge shoppers!) Click, click, and there it is. About as fast as it took you to read that last sentence. It takes just a few seconds. So great, more instant gratification for a nation swimming in it. There’s that.

Your comfort with the reading experience will depend on how you read, and that’s where my problems come in. Take George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, for instance, the first two volumes I mentioned above. Every one is the size of a cinder block, and features nine million characters. Each volume features endpaper maps, and appendices that lay out all the families, clans and alliances between them all. I’m only at the end of the second book, and I can already see the series developing Harry Potter’s Disease — the sort of overwriting authors do, and editors permit, when a franchise has become so popular that fans clamor for more, more, more. (I haven’t read Harry Potter, but people whose opinion I respect say that each subsequent volume was more bloated than the last, and knowing some HP fans, I can see how it happened. They are black holes of need.)

But I’m at the point in “A Clash of Kings” where, if I were a reader of ink on paper, I’d be flipping ahead, skimming battle scenes, blowing off interior monologues and, of course, checking all those family trees, but I don’t, because I’m afraid of losing my place. (Yes, there’s a bookmarking system. I don’t like it.) At this point, in the final chapters, I feel like I’m driving a snowplow through 10 inches of slush.

On the other hand, I search for a living, and I’ve developed my eye for keywords. I like having a search function so, if I can remember a character’s name and its odd spelling — and I do remember, and they’re all odd — I can easily find his or her first appearance if I want to recheck something. I like that. And I like the fact I can read a 1,000-page novel in a slim little case the size of a file folder.

When I go on vacation next week, I’m taking “Just Kids” and “Djibouti” in analog form, and “A Storm of Swords” on the iPad. I’ll tell you how it works out.

So, bloggage:

Rick Perry says he wants to be president? Gee, I wonder what he’ll decide. Stop teasing and get it over with, a’ready.

Meanwhile, you’re not paying enough attention to Sarah! She will not be ignored!

And with that, I must run. Be good, all.

UPDATE: Oops, almost forgot! The heartbreak of cleavage wrinkles. The New York Times is ON IT.