Remember what I said last week about stories you don’t need to read past the headline? For this one, I stopped reading after the first paragraph. I didn’t want anything to ruin the picture in my head:

SEATTLE, Wash. – A mountain goat that fatally gored a hiker, then stood over the man and stared at people trying to help, had shown aggressive behavior in the past, Olympic National Park officials said Monday.

You know? I just don’t want to know any more.

Hello, Tuesday. The goat story isn’t even the highlight of the news roundup, which I’m hoping bodes well for the rest of the week. Although you never know. I need to get to the gymnasium at some point today; my architecture of my knees feels like a collection of loose scrap, and if I don’t tighten up everything around them, I’m one slip on the ice away from a torn ACL, or worse. Still might be. I wish I knew what I ever did to my knees to offend them so; it’s not like I played football or acted in porn movies* or anything. Even my high-heel days were fairly short, as these things go. I have always been clumsy, however — I was still getting skinned knees as recently as, oh, a month ago.

* A former editor of mine once interviewed John Holmes. He said he couldn’t stay in porno forever: “It’s like pro football — the knees are the first things to go.”

If I sound a bit scattered, I am. Big news this week on the hyperlocal front — besides the missing banker whose body was found yesterday, it’s high election season. Oddly enough, I have yet to see a single TV ad for our governor’s race, much less anything else. I know this constitutes a blessing, but it is sort of strange. It must be because the big races around here are mostly pretty lopsided, and the local ones are still competitive but unlikely to spend on campaign commercials. Tonight I’m going to a candidate forum, for the school-board seat up for grabs. Should be a packed house; people care about schools around here, and at least one of the candidates has been so understated I still know practically nothing about her, so it’s one of those civic-duty things. I don’t expect scrapping — this being Preppyville — but I’m hoping for some spirited disagreement falling short of your average Detroit school-board meeting, where they frequently yell and sometimes throw things.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, eh? There’s so much good stuff here, all in cryptic, short teasers to encourage curious clickers:

Lawyers! Watch this. Everybody else, too.

When you ask Coozledad to give his bull a skritch on your behalf, he delivers.

If this guy were running for anything around here, I’d totally vote for him. Meet Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High party.

People think they have this town figured out. No one has this town figured out.

Just what America needs: A new way to lose your house to Wall Street.

Ready to take up my pickax and get to work.

We saw “The Social Network” this weekend. It was very fine, even if it did give the idea that all the women at Harvard — and Stanford, for that matter — exist mainly to simmer, occasionally leaping to a boil during frenzied bouts of speed-sex in restaurant bathroom stalls. But that’s a quibble. On the whole, very fine, a movie about a modern business with a theme as old as humanity itself, i.e., what is the nature of human connection?

And while I understand that the film is not entirely factual, I can’t even get too upset about whatever wrong ideas people take away from it, about the company or its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve been wondering what it takes to bug an internet company. Have you ever had a complaint with one? Facebook, Google, one of those? Have you ever tried to get a human being on the phone? Hell, have you ever tried to find a phone number? I guess now we know what it takes — make an expensive movie about them. How comforting.

But because all y’all are smarter than I am, can someone out there with some business experience explain the business model of Facebook? Because while I don’t doubt that Zuckerberg is a billionaire, I don’t understand how. Where is Facebook’s cash flow? I don’t pay for Facebook. I don’t see anything more than a rare ad or sponsored link, all for crap like acai-berry weight-loss solutions and so forth. So what, exactly, makes this company worth so much? Where does the money come from?

I am a business moron, but the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the dark side of the internet economy has been enormously helpful in answering this simple question, which I suspect is this: Nothing is free, and your payment is your information:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

You know how every time you have to submit your e-mail, you get that cross-my-heart statement about how your e-mail information is secure? “We never sell your e-mail address,” etc.? I’ve come to think of this as one of those soul-brother handshakes jerkoffs liked to give you in the ’70s. We all cool? No, I don’t think so.

I really hope the WSJ wins a Pulitzer for this project. I don’t think most people have any idea how much of their information is out there, being bought and sold on the internet. Some of it is pretty disturbing. Ever hear of “web scraping?” No? Well, then:

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

The story went on to describe the distress of one of the scraped, who had described his problems with depression under a pseudonym, but linked back to his personal blog, which used his real name. Think of all the ways insurance companies have tried to deny health insurance to people who might actually need it someday. Ask yourself if you think any are above a tactic like this. Yeah, I thought so.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little Ted Kaczynski. A friend of ours, a member of our little filmmaking crew who went to Vegas with us last spring, recently had her debit card disabled. She’d paid for some coffee with it at Starbucks next to the Golden Nugget back in April, and last week was presented with a $2,000 charge from that very same coffee shop. Obviously a data theft. Obviously she won’t have to pay $2,000. Obviously it will be handled by her bank, but don’t you wonder, once that stuff is out there, what else is out there? I’ve been thinking for a while of going to an all-cash lifestyle, seeing if it will change my spending patterns, maybe write a story about it and pitch it around. For someone who normally carries about 17 cents in my pocket at any given time, it might be an eye-opener. Certainly it would shield me from at least some data theft. Mark Zuckerberg, I’m not so sure about.

By the way, there’s an error on my Wikipedia page. It isn’t mine, as I’ve had nothing to do with my Wikipedia entry other than glance at it, note the error, and go somewhere more interesting. It appeared during the Goeglein Affair, and I have no idea who wrote it. Actually, now that I look at it, it has a couple of errors. I think I’ll leave them there. If someone’s going to trade in my information for profit, I might as well leave some bad stuff out there, too.

Now I must run. Breaking news on the hyperlocal beat — a missing banker was finally found floating yesterday — and anyway, Monday is always crazed. Later.

It’s funny how some news just doesn’t penetrate even a well-informed person’s orbit. Lately a neighbor feud in a downriver suburb has gone national, and, well. It’s really a perfect story in that it features a psycho, a dead mother, a dying little girl and the word “outpouring.” Stories like this always have to feature an outpouring, usually of “support,” frequently “love” and lots of cash.

Short version: Some time ago, a dispute broke out between the Petkov and Edward families, who live across Detroit Street from one another in Trenton. It appears to be over a child’s birthday party invitation that may or may not have been extended to one of the Petkov children, although a text message was involved, so I can’t really speak authoritatively about the nature of the insult. In my circle, text messages are not used for party invitations. Anyway, the Petkov clan began to nurture a grievance against the Edwards, and sometime in recent days social networking got involved.

One reason the Edward family may not have been as attentive as they could have been to their guest list is that the mother of the family, Laura, was dying of Huntington’s disease, and their daughter, Kathleen, also has the disease, the rarer, fast-moving juvenile variety. Laura died last year, at 24; Kathleen is 7. But they all still hate one another. So somehow the Petkov matriarch, name of Jennifer, thought the proper way to respond to all of this was to doctor a photo of Laura Edward to show her lying in the arms of a Grim Reaper-type skeleton, and to take one of Kathleen and make her face the skull in a skull-and-crossbones photo, and post all of this on her Facebook page. Which is when it became a story.

But it wasn’t just a story, it was a TV story, and not just a TV story but a Fox TV story, and not even the regular 10 p.m. Fox newscast, but the extra one they do at 11 p.m., which is called “the Edge” and is where they stick all the stories for people who find the 10 p.m. version too intellectually challenging. Here’s the story. It’s a hum-damn-dinger. Jennifer Petkov appears to be auditioning for a part on “Real Housewives of Downriver.” As entertainment for the mouth-breathing masses, it’s hard to beat.

But the reaction is where it gets interesting.

First, the Petkovs were targeted by 4chan, which I once saw described as “the scariest hive mind on the internet.” Their address was posted, their employers’ addresses and phone numbers, the whole works. A whole henhouse full of eggs has rained down on their house, enough unordered pizzas to feed 10 football teams. Jennifer’s husband lost his job. It really and truly sucks to be them.

As for Kathleen, inevitably described as “little Kathleen,” well, she won the lottery. This is where the outpouring comes in. A respectable five-figure sum was donated to her family. Other Huntington’s-affected families have gathered around her. And yesterday, she was driven in a stretch limousine to a toy store in Ann Arbor, where she was commanded to shop until she dropped, and she did, spending two grand of the outpouring, with the rest being donated to the children’s hospital at the University of Michigan.

Which I guess is supposed to sound like a happy ending, but all it makes me think is, we live in one fucked-up culture, folks. Never mind the lunatic Petkovs and their Facebook. Why does little Kathleen even know about this? What kind of parent allows their sick child to be photographed for television? Why does she even know about the insult? And while it’s admirable that 90 percent of the outpouring is going to charity, why is our response to every high-profile misfortune or offense to shower the offended with cash and prizes? This has bugged me ever since the Make-a-Wish Foundation came on the radar screen, which sounds like a good idea on paper, and I guess it is, but doesn’t anyone ever see the essential horror in telling a kid, “Hey, Bobby, because you have a fatal disease, you know what? YOU’RE GOING TO DISNEYLAND!”

(I once wrote some columns about a kid who was supposed to die of a fatal liver disorder. She went to Universal Studios, got to watch her favorite show taping, got to meet and have her picture taken with all the stars. Then she went home and didn’t die. Not only that, she was cured, more or less — a pharmaceutical company developed a synthetic enzyme that eliminated her symptoms and returned her to good health. Downside: The drug had an annual cost of $300,000 a year. The last column I wrote, her parents were miserable, because they believed she’d never be able to get medical insurance. They were probably right. But you know what that column got them? An outpouring. Not a big one, but it might have made their lives easier. I lost track of them after that. My guess is, the drug no longer costs $300,000, but who knows if the little girl, all grown up, has health insurance. She probably votes Republican.)

It has been a long, exhausting week. I have no bloggage, but I have a full day ahead of me to do whatever I want. I think I’ll start with a shower and see what develops. Have a good weekend, all.

I suppose Starbucks officially became a “mature” business when they started opening locations across the street from one another, but today’s story in the Wall Street Journal pretty much confirms it: They’re “improving” service by making the baristas work on no more than two drinks at a time, which will almost certainly mean longer lines. And you know customers will love this, because if there’s anything coffee drinkers are, it’s infinitely patient. Particularly at the morning rush.

I’d never heard the term “mature business” before my newspaper’s publisher used it during a meeting some years back. It refers to one that has reached the end of its growth curve — well-established, very likely fat and happy, but no longer growing in any significant way. The only way to increase profits in a mature business is to innovate or cut costs. In the newspaper business, which has been mature longer than Morley Safer, we innovated by larding the management level with assistant managing editors with more slashes in their title than there were discarded Starbucks cups in the trash cans, i.e. assistant managing editor/enterprise/trends/features/fashion. We were told there was an AME at the Philadelphia Inquirer whose job it was to read other publications all day, not to steal ideas but to just get that plugged-in feeling, so that s/he could be the newsroom oracle of the Zeitgeist. I never knew who this person was. Honk if you did.

We also cut costs. Relentlessly. One of my last acts as an employee was to steal a package of brass brads from the supply cubicle. It’s not like anyone used them, and there they were, the nice fat ones I couldn’t find at Office Depot. I figured it was the least I could do to thank them for all they’d done.

In other words, the A-team, the visionary bastards who built the newspaper industry, the Hearsts and Knights and the rest of them, had long since moved on, leaving the bean-counters in charge. I assume this is what’s happening at Starbucks, which probably, now that I think of it, has literal bean-counters on the payroll. The McDonald’s of dark-roast coffee needs to shoot itself in the foot, needs to move into its assistant-managing-editors-with-slashes period, evidently. This is how it does it. Good luck to you, Starbucks. This is why I order my triple espressos without any of that fancy shit, unless it’s a fourth shot of espresso. Because when I need my triple-e, I don’t want something with a pretty fern traced into the milk foam. Because I don’t want milk foam. I WANT COFFEE AND I WANT IT NOW.

Rescued Chilean miners: 11 down, 22 to go. I see a reality show spinoff in the future. “Survivor: Mineshaft,” maybe. One thing I don’t think I’ve seen in all the coverage: What sort of mine is this? Coal, ore, minerals? Does anyone know?

Coozledad’s bull, Llewd, was feeling poorly, seems better now. With pictures. Reading C’s accounts of treating the livestock at his vegetarian petting zoo always stirs the same reaction: 1) I miss my horse, followed by 2) I don’t miss my horse. What I miss: Riding him around and jumping fences. What I don’t miss: The staggering amount of work required to keep animals that size healthy, fed and confined. Llewd hurt his foot during his most recent escapade. Hurt foots require doctorin’, and you can’t put a bull in crossties and expect him to stand quietly, not with those horns. But such a cute face, and that poll just invites scratchin’. I send you a scratch from a long distance, Llewd.

This was yesterday’s talker, although most of the talking was me, asking questions: Dog returns to life after vet allegedly euthanizes it. Such as, where was the dog in the interim between the shot and the attempt at burial? Doesn’t this vet use a stethoscope? What, the guy walked out with a “dead” Rottweiler in his arms through the waiting room?

I bought a sweater late last summer at the Gap, and when I put it on this week I noticed it has the new logo on the label, now the old label. What am I bid for a knee-length white cotton coat-style cardigan, worn maybe three times? In true Gap fashion, it is already starting to fall apart at the seams. P.S. I liked the new label. Who are these people who have all fucking day to complain about a logo on their Facebook pages? I have some student copy I can subcontract to you to edit, if you’re interested.

Which is what I need to do now. So have a swell one, all, and thank your lucky stars you’re not a Chilean miner. Imagine being the last guy out.

Reading the news these days — excuse me, consuming the news — requires a real strategy. It’s difficult, in a world flooded with links to more information than any human could possibly consume in a 24-hour day, to know which ones to click. Some reveal everything you need to know in the headline:

Home-built plane crashes in Livingston County

Do you really need to know anything more? I mean, y’know, sorry for the damage to the bright firmament of humanity, but…”home-built plane.” Yeah.

[Pause.]

Sorry. I was interrupted. Something hit the kitchen window hard a little while ago. I thought it might have been one of the million sticks that seem to rain out of a mature oak over the course of a season, but when I went outside to take the trash to the curb a few minutes later, there was a robin lying on its back in the driveway, eyes closed but still breathing. I stood around waiting to see if it was planning to die, but soon the eyes opened, so I went back inside, put on some gloves (West Nile) and rolled it onto its sternum, where it remained upright on its own power. Went back inside and poured another cup of coffee, read some more web and just went back out. No robin, and a runny bird poo in the place where it had been sitting. Fingers crossed it made its recovery and exited under its own steam and not in a cat’s mouth. Sometimes all you need is to be reoriented. Sky up, ground down? Check. Man, do I have a headache. Good luck, robin.

I have a mixed bag with wildlife, but I try to do my part. My next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne was a veritable Dr. Doolittle, however. I once saw her catch a wild raccoon with her bare hands, free it from the plastic grocery bag it was hopelessly entangled in, and release it without getting so much as a scratch. After which a bluebird perched on her shoulder and whistled a happy tune. One of the previous two sentences is untrue, but both are equally unlikely to happen. I guess that sort of confidence in handling animals comes from growing up in the country, with a grandfather who neutered his own barn cats. He kept a special tool for those occasions — an old overcoat with one sleeve sewed shut. He’d catch the half-grown toms (no small feat in itself) and stuff them face-down into the sleeve, which presented him with the target area and only two legs to contend with. Swipe, cut, squeeze, snip and release. It was over in a minute.

Horses are gelded more or less the same way, or were, before veterinary anesthetics. “As long as they keep moving afterward, they’re fine,” a grizzled old farmhand once told me. The probably spend the recovery time searching for their lost gonads. And then they forget they ever had them, and become useful to the human race again.

Testosterone may well be the engine of civilization, but in animal/human interactions, it just screws things up. Although it certainly makes for some entertaining entries on Coozledad’s blog.

Four hours of sleep last night. It’s one of those mornings where I suspect I’m actually dying. Better grab a shower. But before that? Some bloggage:

Whew, Dick Cheney, not looking so great. I’m sure his black heart will gurgle on for some time after the host has died; in fact, I’m sure the new host is being prepared now. Why do you think the College Republicans even exist?

“Worst Canadian Thanksgiving ever” — Jon Stewart + Carl Paladino = entertainment. It’s funny to see the Republicans at this time of year. “Men in Speedos,” i.e., a tiny fraction of the gay community, carrying on at a gay pride parade is gross. Photo of woman doin’ it with a horse? Hey, I think I’ll forward this to all my friends! Because I’m in construction!

OIM: When bears attack! Something about this story smells. And it smells like chicken.

Shower, save me.

The weekend was pretty much perfect. Temperatures nudging 80, cerulean skies, the sort of string of lovely days that you always get in the fall, but not always on a weekend. So, as the previous entry should suggest, it seemed fitting to blow off a lot of chore-type stuff and enjoy it while we could. Sailing was Saturday. Yesterday was the housewarming party at the Frank Lloyd Wright house mentioned here a couple weeks back — it’s finally 99 percent done. I’m a friend of a friend of the owners, and came as his plus-one. No photos, at the hosts’ request, but you can still look at the ones at the Hour Detroit link (although the captions don’t always match the photos). It’s as lovely in person as in the pictures; I expect if they haven’t heard from a location scout already, they will soon — the place was born to be a movie set.

We walked over from my friend’s house in Palmer Woods, the grandest of the grand old neighborhoods in Detroit. Walking back alone — had to leave early — I was struck, for the millionth time, by how much money there was in this town, once upon a time. These Tudor-revival and Mission-style and midcentury-modern houses are now owned by buppies and gay men and others unafraid of urban-pioneer living, and there was much discussion of $1,400 monthly winter heating bills and other drawbacks to living in an 8,000-square-foot architectural masterpiece with leaky windows. But without them, that Wright house would still be sitting empty and falling to pieces. So a salute to all.

On the way back I passed a masterful pile identified as the Bishop’s House. The marker was unclear on whether it still is*, but did mention the many religious details of the construction, including a rooftop sculpture of the Archangel Michael battling Satan. Couldn’t see it.

* A quick Google reveals it is not. Whew. Houses like that are hard to justify, even for the One True, these days.

What else? Watched “Howl,” available On Demand. Liked it very much, which I gather from the reviews is not the default position. The story of Allen Ginsberg’s magnum opus (although I hold “Kaddish” in almost equally high esteem) is told in three threads — the trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges for publishing it, an interview with Ginsberg by an unseen interlocutor, and the first reading of the poem itself in 1955. It’s a long poem, and long stretches of it are illustrated with animations, and that seems to be everyone’s problem. They’re too literal, they’re not beautiful enough, whatever. I didn’t care. I found myself paying little attention to them; they might as well have been the iTunes visualizer, or the oscilloscope potheads rigged to their stereos back in my wild youth. I was thoroughly taken with the words, the music of which is strong enough to carry the sequences. I guess the filmmakers thought a black screen or the iTunes visualizer would be too much.

James Franco plays Ginsberg as a young man, and together with Kerouac and Cassady tiptoe up to the edge of Abercrombie & Fitch styling, but don’t quite cross over. For $6.99 on the cable bill, I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday night.

One of the duties I neglected this weekend was crafting something for this space that makes sense, or reads well, or has a point. Obviously. So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Living in Detroit, I guess I should know more about the Insane Clown Posse than I do, but honestly, that is one local act whose orbit simply does not intersect with mine in any way, shape or form. Which is good, because they’re pretty disgusting, the sort of rappers who make Eminem look like Leonard Bernstein. Still, it was simultaneously entertaining, appalling and amusing to read this piece in the Guardian about their true purpose in life:

All of which makes Violent J’s recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, Thy Unveiling, that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt.

Oh, but it gets better! Check out the lyrics:

ICP have just released their most audacious Christian song to date: Miracles. In it, they list God’s wonders that delight them each day:

Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs
Fuckin’ rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to
blow your brains.

The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? Yeah!

The internet moves so fast these days you probably already know about the Ohio House candidate revealed over the weekend as having once been a Nazi re-enactor. (Yes, a Republican. I was as astonished as you were.) What you may not know is that in the Six Degrees of Separation Department, I once spent a weekend at this man’s ancestral summer home. His sister was friends with a friend of mine, and she impulsively invited us all up to their place on Devil’s Lake one Friday. It was a pretty gauzy weekend, but I remember enough to report that there were no, repeat no, Waffen SS uniforms in plain view. I do know they were pretty darn rich, which enables a lot of bad behavior and, far more important, an ability to wall yourself off in a world of people just like you, where no one says, “You know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, and if we do, maybe we shouldn’t take pictures of ourselves wearing these uniforms.” Actually, this characteristic is not confined to the rich. Which is why I will never run for elected office.

Which is just a short sidestep to bigotry in general, in particular Carl Paladino’s, who doesn’t want his children “brainwashed” into thinking it’s OK to be gay. Hmm. All I have to say is, “Rabbi? Is it too much to ask you to take your Bluetooth receiver out of your ear when meeting a gubernatorial candidate?”

Finally, via MMJeff, a Daily Howler worth considering:

For decades, your public discourse has been scripted by skillful players—and by their skilled, clownish messaging. We have drowned in ludicrous statements on policy matters; we have drowned in ludicrous statements about targeted public officials. (If we lower the tax rates, we get higher revenues! The Clintons are serial murderers!) And no matter how stupid these messages got, the “press corps” agreed not to notice. Endlessly, Limbaugh got a pass. So did Chris Matthews, during the many years when he worked for plutocrat masters. (No one did more to send Bush to the White House. But for years after that, Joan Walsh had to keep kissing his keister, the better to get on TV!)

Better get moving. Manic Monday now segues into Terrible Tuesday. I want to work less, or at the very least, be paid more. Is that so much to ask?

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

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

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

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

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

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

But also:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off to Diversity U. See y’all tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curried butternut apple soup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shower-bound. Have a great day.