First, some housekeeping: No conventional blog entry tomorrow, but probably something — I’m attending TEDxDetroit all day, and my usual blogging time will be colonized by…something inspiring, I hope. I will admit to skepticism about this event, and fear an all-day pep rally, but what the hell, I guess if it is, no one’s holding me hostage or anything. I expect the hall will be wired and wi-fi’d to a fare-thee-well, so that we can tweet and status-update and blog and all the rest of it. In any event, I’ll have my laptop and will be ready to mojo something, should it become necessary. I’ll also be operating on about five hours of sleep. Better pack some business cards, so I can introduce myself if words fail.

Regarding pep rallies: The wife of a friend worked in sales, for a radio station. Let me stipulate upfront that while I know many of our readers are radio people, or were, my brief time in radio convinced me it was the worst business on earth, or maybe second to sex slavery. Certainly it was the weirdest. I was always meeting someone who gave me hope, followed by 10 social outcasts, weirdos, nitwit provocateurs or other oddballs, who would make me despair. I remind you that both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, before they were loathsome public figures, were just regular old radio guys, and no doubt fit right in at whatever station employed them. Certainly I met many less-talented or less-ambitious versions of both, and I was only a dabbler. So, that said, my friend’s wife said her station’s main competition started each day with a meeting of the sales-department staff, and that it was always styled as a pep rally.

“They have to clap and cheer every sale, and then they end with a chant: KILL MAGIC! KILL MAGIC!” she said, Magic (or “Majic”) being the station she worked for. I guess the bosses saw it as motivational; they were all men, and this sort of display was imported directly from the locker room or team huddle. I can tell you right now, being asked to participate in a Two Minutes Hate like that would be a dealbreaker. I refer you to observations about the radio business, above. (Public radio being the exception, although nowhere near as much as they’d like to think.)

Did you know that you have to apply to attend a TED conference? Srsly. That right there almost put me off. The original TED requires an invitation and a $6,000 ticket, in fact. Local TED only wanted my Twitter handle, “three links to help us learn more about you,” and a voluntary contribution of $21. Apparently there is a waiting list, so I can say I was at least more desirable as an audience member than someone, although my guess is, knowing a member of the organizing committee didn’t hurt one li’l bit.

Anyway, we’ll see. But since pickings are already slim, let’s skip to the bloggage.

And the MacArthur goes to…Mr. Laura Lippman (and at least occasional reader and once-or-twice commenter here at NN.C). I still get fewer than 1,000 unique visits a day, but as I like to tell people, they’re the right ones. Congratulations, David Simon. If I ever get to Baltimore or New Orleans, YOU are buying.

(I bet Mr. Lippman gets bombarded with invitations to TED conferences.)

In other TED news, today is the 50th anniversary of Ted Williams’ last game. In another month, it will be the 50th anniversary of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike’s first and last baseball essay, but maybe the finest one ever written. Charles McGrath pays tribute. Essay here.

Richard Reeves: The Tea Party has it backward.

And now, with papers to grade and stuff to post, I’m off to…pour some more coffee.

I hate to point out when we’re prescient around here, but what were we just talking about? This:

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.

Good. Probably time to have that debate. Particularly when it’s accompanied by statements like this:

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”

The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

I wonder what libraries Pezzanite hangs out in. The ones I’ve been lucky enough to have in my communities are not marked by union featherbedding — I’m certain most weren’t unionized at all, although I’m unsure about my current one — nor by employees with nothing to do. I’m sure you could find a few loafers in onesies and twosies, as you can at every company, but by and large, I can’t think of a problem I took to them that wasn’t promptly addressed. From what-does-the-D-in-D-Day-stand-for to can-you-find-me-microfilm-of-this-newspaper-on-this-date, they’ve pretty much been on the job, every day.

I will admit to liking libraries. It’s one public institution I rely on, not just for entertainment but for any number of other functions, from a third-place workspace to a convenient meeting room to an enrichment center when Kate was young. You get your publicly funded sports stadiums, I get my library. Even-up.

I shudder to think of what a library run by a private corporation would look like — 500 copies of “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” and toddler storytime naming rights sold to Juicy Juice. The Allen County Public Library, in Fort Wayne, has a rare book room. Who needs that? A bunch of eggheads. The complete original folios of “The North American Indian” is probably approaching $1 million in value; no need to keep that expensive thing around and insured, and anyway, is this a proper function of government? I mean, is “maintaining a rare book room” in the Constitution, U.S. or state, or in the county charter? Didn’t think so.

But of course, selling the dusty parts of the collection aren’t what this effort is about. It’s about firing yet another rank of public employees, which are now seen not as our friends, neighbors and fellow workers worthy of respect, but as expensive piggies, latched onto the public teat with no intention of letting go. Who needs ’em? We can cycle through an endless roundelay of college students, supervised by a handful of beaten-down wage slaves, and no one will know the difference.

Connie, you want to take this one?

While I have a head of steam going, I offer this wet kiss from the New York Times to the GOP jerkoff running the campaign of another GOP jerkoff, Carl Paladino. Yes, that’s the same Carl Paladino who sends around racist e-mails “because I work in construction.” Jerkoff No. 1 is “brash,” “impish” and “no holds barred.” The Times must be preparing for a Paladino win.

Can someone make a poster of this photo? Because I would totally hang that one in my basement.

And Monday awaits. Hate Mondays, for the most part. But I fell ready for this sucker now!

Good story in the New York Times yesterday, which I heard expanded upon and rehashed on public radio, en route to Wayne State yesterday. It was about a growing movement to recall mayors and city councils, not for mal- or misfeasance in office, but for doing shit that pisses voters off. Lately, that would mean: “their jobs.”

I paid attention because it happened here. Grosse Pointe Shores, the wealthiest of our five leafy little Edens, went through a bruising recall earlier this year, aimed at the mayor and four council members who voted for a 1-mill tax increase to finance road repairs. There was a similar attempt in the Woods, where I live, over a similar tax bump, but it didn’t advance beyond the petition-passing stage. In the NYT story, the lead anecdote deals with another city:

Daniel Varela Sr., the rookie mayor of Livingston, Calif., learned this the hard way when he was booted from office last month in a landslide recall election. His crime? He had the temerity to push through the small city’s first water-rate increase in more than a decade to try to fix its aging water system, which he said spewed brownish, smelly water from rusty pipes.

“We were trying to be responsible,” said Mr. Varela, whose action set off a lawsuit in addition to his recall as mayor of Livingston, which is in the Central Valley. “But as soon as the rates started to kick in, people who weren’t paying attention were suddenly irate.”

In the radio interview, Varela said he was elected on a platform that included a promise to improve the city’s water quality, so he did. The voters’ response was, essentially, but it wasn’t supposed to cost anything!

In the Shores, city services are at country club-concierge levels. A woman I know who lives there said that on the first garbage-collection day after they moved in, there was a knock on the door. She opened it to find a city public-works employee, offering a key to her house. The previous owner wanted the trash picked up from inside the garage, he said; would she like to continue the arrangement, in which case he would keep the key, or would she like to take it back and put her own trash out? The police respond — promptly — to calls from residents fearful of entering their own houses, because they saw a strange car parked on the street; they will escort the resident inside and do a room-by-room check for monsters. For this, residents pay taxes on a par with the other Pointes, but the collapse of the real estate market has meant a disastrous shortfall in tax receipts, which means…well, you know the drill.

The standard taxpayer response is Tim Gunn’s: Make it work. That’s what’s going on now. Maintenance schedules are lengthening, user fees are rising, municipal employee salaries are frozen or trimmed; small perks like car allowances are disappearing. In the Pointes, we’re still in patch-patch-patch mode. But my students in public-affairs journalism, each of whom is covering a city in the metro area, are turning in stories that turn my hair white. One city is likely going to sell or otherwise privatize their municipal rec center. One school board held their first-year meeting in a cacophony of complaints about students not getting counseling services they need, thanks to millions in budget cuts just now being felt. More are surely coming.

The collapse of the auto industry surely would have brought some of this to pass no matter what, but for me, this is one more turn of events to blame on the people who wrecked real estate by turning the mortgage market into a casino. However, it is our mess to clean up, which is one reason I’m paying a great deal of attention to who is representing me in any number of public-policy arenas of late. When I think about it, I wonder what could have been easier than running a well-to-do suburb in the high-cotton days, the money flowing reliably year after year, the most perplexing decisions in how to spend it all. But those days are gone. We need people who are present, and engaged, every step of the way.

For the record, I have to say I understand the anger of voters, and it’s not as simple as them being big babies, as Michael Kinsley once called American taxpayers, who want everything, now, and at Third World prices. It’s very hard to justify tax increases in a recession, when everyone is already making do with less. I wonder if maybe this is one of those fulcrum moments in American history, when we redefine the whole idea of what “public” really is, and the very idea of a municipal rec center passes into memory as something we could once afford, but can’t anymore. Oh, well — kids can play basketball in their driveways, and isn’t an indoor pool just a little too luxurious, anyway? Why do we need libraries, when we all have broadband? And so on.

One thing I do know: I’m no longer paying attention to bumper-sticker politics. Don’t you even knock on my door and tell me you’re going to push for “balanced budgets.” If you can’t tell me how, take your literature down the road. The job’s too important to be a resume-padder for some lawyer looking to make partner next year.

Eh, let’s lighten up with some bloggage:

Tom and Lorenzo wind up a season’s worth of “Rachel Zoe Project” recaps with another winner. You are encouraged to check out the screen grab of the star in a dress that reveals her bony chest and the edges of her sad little fat-starved puppy-ear breasts. Her husband keeps bugging her to have a baby, but not to eat a sandwich. The body protects itself first, Rodger; I doubt this woman has ovulated in the last decade.

For the architects in the room, a WSJ column about the perils of designer buildings. I don’t know if the facts are entirely present — this is entirely out of my knowledge zone — but it echoes the experience of the Snyderman family of Fort Wayne, who once had a sexy Michael Graves house that went wrong from day one.

Speaking of celebrity architects, I met the owners of this Frank Lloyd Wright house in Detroit at a party a couple years ago, when they were still mid-restoration. Everybody seemed to know where this place was, but I didn’t, and so hadn’t seen it until the magazine story this month. Man, what a jaw-dropper. I know Wright houses are notorious for problems, but to live in a space that gorgeous would almost be worth a few leaky windows. Make sure you check out the photos.

The owners also have the best and most creative florist shop in town. Yeah yeah, I know — gay men, flower arranging, yadda yadda. But these guys are good. I remember talking to one about the difficulties in getting their early customers to appreciate the beauty of a bunch of daisies, tied in rough twine, stuck in a Mason jar. They don’t deliver out my way without a huge surcharge, which is probably for the best. I’d go broke cheering myself up.

And with that, I think it’s time to say adieu for the weekend. Our heat wave is ending. I’ll try to console myself with an apple pie.

The New York Times had a story on brick theft in St. Louis yesterday. I’m late getting to it, yes, but somehow I doubt brick theft is a big issue in the blogosphere. The gist: Scrappers, crackheads and other scavengers are taking advantage of abandonment and social disarray to steal the city’s red bricks, “prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.”

The preferred harvesting technique is arson. Then,

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”

It is a crime that has increased with the recession. Where thieves in many cities harvest copper, aluminum and other materials from vacant buildings, brick rustling has emerged more recently as a sort of scrapper’s endgame, exploited once the rest of a building’s architectural elements have been exhausted. “Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”

You have, Royce? You heard right:

I ran this picture a while back. I took it in the fall of 2008 while escorting a pair of French journalists around the city. They wanted to see the $1 houses, and this one was across the street. This house had been looted, scrapped, torched and, when we visited, was giving up its final harvest — the bricks. Two homeless-looking guys were at work with crowbars and a rubber mallet, taking them off one by one and knocking the mortar off. They were tossing them on a pile, but I draw your attention to the pallet in the side yard, the bricks neatly stacked and wrapped in plastic, awaiting the fork lift to take them off…somewhere. I guess to the south, where developers will prize their distinctive character.

In many ways, this photo inspired a screenplay I’ve been working on for a while now, and will finish — 30 more pages! — if I ever get a minute or two. It started me thinking about scrapping in general, how this economic disaster has made it so much easier to take the accumulated wealth of our region and distribute it around the world. Whole factories are being disassembled, their assembly lines cut out with torches, loaded onto freighters and shipped off to places where labor doesn’t demand a living wage and certain safety precautions. Abandoned houses are being stripped of their plumbing and window frames, which is trundled off to the scrap yards and sold by the pound. And now the bricks. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.

See, it just slayed me how systematic all this was, how the sleazy mortgage brokers and other sharpies figured out how to descend upon a city that any fool could tell you was already a pretty well-picked-over carcass to begin with, and still find some marrow to suck out of its bones. This neighborhood, the Realtor told me, had been a functional concern until fairly recently. I wouldn’t have wanted to live there, but a lot of people a little closer to the margins had found it acceptable enough. And then the knock came one day, a former drug dealer trading up to home refinancing, and that was the beginning of the end. They wrote loan after loan against these modest little houses, aided and abetted by their friends in the business, who didn’t care they were loaning 110 percent of a house’s worth to someone whose residency in the working class — and chance of repaying even a fraction — was tenuous in the extreme; their end came out of the fees, the risk passed down the line to some other sucker. Who, it turned out, was us.

Then it all caved in, and the fun really started. Seen above.

A few years back, I toured the Edsel and Eleanor Ford estate with Kate’s Brownie troop, a Cotswold-style mansion on the shores of Lake St. Clair, the sort of thing built by the second generation of a great fortune. The guide pointed out all the architectural details that had been imported from some dismantled English country home — the windows, the floorboards — and it made me wonder if it hasn’t always been thus. Wealth is created, then stolen or traded, traveling around the world in tidal waves of destruction and reconstruction.

I bet the Fords bought their windows fair and square, however; the developers snatching up those nicely wrapped pallets of St. Louis and Detroit brick, not so much. But they have plausible deniability.

In case you’re wondering, I put a few human beings in my fictional story. My struggle is how to make a story that’s essentially about worthless real estate compelling. Get me rewrite.

Another ridiculous day ahead, so better hop to the bloggage:

Ohio University’s Rufus Bobcat delivers an end-zone smackdown to Brutus Buckeye, and friends? I couldn’t be prouder. When your little MAC team is about to serve as an early-season hors d’oeuvre for the Big 10 behemoth 90 miles up the road, the least you can do is get a little mojo for the school any way you can. The guy says he’s not sorry, and he definitely would do it again. Hell yeah.

Gene Weingarten mourns the death of the English language, citing in his evidence:

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”

I shared with him one of my favorites, which appeared in a small Ohio daily way back when: “(The film) contained more violence than a Peck & Paw production.”

Bonus for those who’ve read this far: The brick-theft story, in the venerable and still fully staffed New York Times, contains a similar homophone error deep in the copy. Find it, and I’ll give you…my sincere respect. UPDATE: Eh, never mind. It’s been fixed. Bricks are stacked on a pallet; the original version had them on a palette. That would have been hard to hold.

A good day to all.

Oh, look: Christine O’Donnell was on the record back in the ’90s claiming Bill Clinton needed to be tried for the “murder” of Vince Foster. As Talking Points Memo helpfully explains, the Murder of Vince Foster was to the ’90s what the Kenyan Birth Certificate is to the oughts.

But that’s not all — she also claimed “scientists” have created “mice with human brains.” “Fully-functioning” human brains, no less.

Well, that’s good. My own feels little Swiss-cheesey at the moment; I could use a donor that comes without moral baggage. Although, I dunno. I’m trying to cut back on cheese.

The thing is, I know these people. I do. Not well, but I know them. They were seemingly half the population of Indiana back in the day, and would occasionally call me up to gnaw on my ear about Vince Foster, among other things.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but could I show you some literature about another candidate?” one called to me as I made my way into my polling place on election day. “It’s Bo Gritz. Rhymes with ‘rights.'”

Oh yeah, that guy. He’s still out there. My measure for Crazy back then was whether the lunatic in question had a radio show available on shortwave; many of their natural constituency lives far off the grid in Unabomber cabins and need that extra service. Nowadays, the internet serves for everyone, and I guess they do their reading at the library when they come to town for more 50-pound bags of rice.

But Vince Foster was a biggie, even with mainstream crazies. Was it Dan Burton who restaged the shooting (using watermelons) in his back yard, before concluding yes, yes, it was MURDER? He was a Hoosier. I don’t know why Christine O’Donnell didn’t relocate to Indiana when she was looking for a launch pad for her political career. She’d fit right in. She’d be mainstream.

Speaking of which, I guess everyone has heard by now of the twin Comedy Central rallies planned for D.C. next month. If I could, I would so totally be there:

Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we’ll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila. Join us in the shadow of the Washington Monument. And bring your indoor voice. Or don’t. If you’d rather stay home, go to work, or drive your kids to soccer practice… Actually, please come anyway. Ask the sitter if she can stay a few extra hours, just this once. We’ll make it worth your while.

That’s the Jon Stewart side. Over at Colbert’s end of the Mall, it’s the March to Keep Fear Alive:

America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear — that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear — forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need. They want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget — “Reason” is just one letter away from “Treason.” Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.

I like that line about reason and treason. That’s worth stealing.

I’ve got a meeting in 45 minutes that’s a 25-minute bike ride away. Should I? Of course I should. I’ve been staring at a screen all week, and it’s time to remind my body it exists below the level of its burning eyeballs. So, a skip to the bloggage:

New York City hit by a tornado-like storm. It’s always strange to think of New York as even vulnerable to weather at all.

Madonna is “a director.” Ha. The project is “W.E.,” allegedly about Wallis Simpson. Terrific — another Madge-branded project on a strong woman who is simply ahead of her time and cannot be grokked by the squares. Can’t. Wait.

The new Kickstarter I’m backing — the Mower Gang. They go out with lawn mowers and weed whackers and reclaim city facilities from nature. The video is recommended — last summer they found, and reclaimed, a velodrome. In Detroit! They’re currently trying to raise $600 to make a labyrinth and maze in some overgrown grass. Chip in if you feel like it.

Onto the bike, and outta the door.

I have a rather busy morning today, pals, and frankly, I’m a little tapped at the moment. Things will ease up after noon, but I think I’ll use the time to catch up on a little housekeeping — real, literal housekeeping — instead of blogging. Fortunately, good peanuts for the barflies today:

Fascinating: Farm boy steers his steer to a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair. Twice. He wins in 2010 with Doc before it’s revealed that Doc is a clone of Wade, who the same kid showed to the same title (“big steer”) two years previous. You have to be from Iowa — or Ohio — to understand how important a big championship at a big state fair can be, and while this has aspects of a joke, it was obviously intentional; the kid’s dad is president of a bovine-genetics firm. And maybe you have to have an amateur’s interest in animal husbandry, as I do, to find this interesting, but it is.

Fierce! Woman pulled over for suspicion of drunken driving walks the line like it’s a runway, demands her “Amanda rights.” Via Eric Zorn.

Fu’ u’: Via Roy, a look at libertarian thinking on the Tea Party. It all started with George W. Bush, says Steve Chapman, only it was apparently an invisible movement then. Huh. Meanwhile, Carl Paladino is a vile racist, and I’ll cut any bitch who says he isn’t. But, following Chapman’s reasoning, the GOP is “lucky” to have him.

Faboo: When your baby photo becomes a meme, better lie back and enjoy it.

Back tomorrow, with 50 percent less lameness.

So I’m scanning this and that yesterday, trying to get caught up on all the didjusee motes of the day, and I discovered this. It’s a post about photos taken at the National Federation of Republican Women annual board meeting in Charleston. Some photos from the event — themed “a Southern experience” — were posted to Facebook, and, well, you decide for yourself:

The African Americans, I learn through further Googling, were paid re-enactors. The man in the middle is the South Carolina state senate president Glenn McConnell, and no, I don’t know why he’s dressed in Yankee blue, as he, too, is a re-enactor, and like all good southron boys, prefers the home team’s uniform. Maybe he swings both ways.

It appears the event may well have been innocent; these could have been the “Gullah singers and storytellers” referenced in the event’s flyer. And maybe McConnell can’t resist a chance to put on the old-timey clothes and the uncomfortable shoes and let his freak flag fly. The desire for vaccinated time travel runs strong in white guys like these, and I won’t even speculate that he wishes he lived c. 1860 so he could legally own the people on his left and right. It was a simpler time all around, wasn’t it? The government mainly stayed out of a man’s business and women wore heaps of petticoats, making seduction that much more exciting. You could pour yourself a glass of sippin’ whiskey of an evening and sit on the veranda, watching the sun go down, knowing tomorrow will be about the same as today.

A while back the Embassy Theater in Fort Wayne screened “Gone With the Wind” for a summer movie, with guests encouraged to come in period attire. The Lincoln Museum felt the need to pass out a flyer informing the audience that the picture of the Old South onscreen was — gasp! — idealized and divorced from reality. I recall a passage about B.O. and bad teeth. Noted, but I thought it was party-pooping just the same. (There’s no question the African Americans in that photo have benefited from fluoridated water and toothbrushes. Good teeth and shoes are the giveaway of reenactors everywhere.) So maybe I’m out of line here, but the next time I read that old perennial from the op-ed page — When Will Black People Learn That Only Republicans Have Their Best Interests at Heart? — I’m going to show them that photo. Among many others.

I didn’t get both my stories done yesterday — one down, one to go — and so must duck out early today. Fortunately, I have bloggage:

Llewd, Coozledad’s bull, is up to his old tricks. That mischievous scamp.

I wish I had a booty like Inez Sainz. That’s all I have to say about that.

I don’t want anybody else. When I think about you I …watch Christine O’Donnell’s teenage self opposing masturbation. She asks the timeless question asked by girls everywhere: If he can please himself, why am I in the picture? Guys, you want to take that one? Maybe Llewd can start us off.

And with that, I have 1,200 words to write for someone else. Lucky me.

This is Fashion Week in New York. You might not know this, but in the Nall-Derringer co-prosperity sphere, with its alarmingly New York-centric newspaper and magazine subscriptions, it’s hard to escape. Maybe you’re feeling lost. I will try to help.

As some of you may know, I once covered fashion. Sort of. Here’s how it happened: My paper’s longtime fashion writer, June Wells Dill, a grandmotherly sort of woman who occasionally wore hats, was retiring. At the staff meeting to discuss her replacement, no one else wanted the job.

“Does it still include a couple trips to New York every year?” I asked. It did, I was told.

“OK, I’ll do it,” I said. And that’s how the big papers handled staffing, once upon a time. At least in the women’s department. And so I packed my suitcase and my portable computer — a primitive device that weighed a ton, generated a printout as you wrote and somehow managed to transmit an electronic copy of your story back to the newsroom — and went off to New York.

An aside: I required training on the computer. Because 90 percent of the newsroom travel at the time was done by the sportswriters, I was taught by our Cincinnati Reds beat writer.

“And this is how you make a quote mark. You’ll need this if the dresses have anything to say,” he said. A real wiseguy. Have you ever heard the sorts of things baseball players say? You could put that shit on a user key, only we didn’t know what a user key was, back then.

Anyway, off to New York I went. I didn’t go for Fashion Week per se, which didn’t exist in the current form. Rather, all the designers showed around the same time of year, and you ran around between their studios or whatever they had booked for their 20-minute shows. But that was for the New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily and the other bigs. Papers from Rubetown went for Eleanor Lambert’s coordinated week of shows, which was actually the forerunner of Fashion Week itself.

In my era, the event was held at the Plaza, and I sat there on the runway and got a self-taught crash course in descriptive writing. The thing about fashion is, after a while it’s just a blur. Dress dress dress suit suit suit dress dress dress wedding gown. (The wedding gown is — was — the traditional finale of every show. Does anyone do that anymore?) So I quickly learned the jargon, tissue faille and gabardine and ruching. And then I learned about the details, bateau collars and swing pleats and bugle beads. And then I learned the high-level vocabulary that everyone uses, almost all of which is meaningless and can be recombined endlessly. It’s based on a few simple adjectives, which I reveal to you now:

1) Modern
2) Sexy
3) Unconstructed / Constructed
4) Edgy
5) Retro

“It’s an unconstructed jacket with retro touches, very modern and sexy.”

“I love that edgy, constructed thing he has going on. It’s modern and retro at the same time. Which is what makes it so edgy.”

See how easy? Watch a few episodes of “The Rachel Zoe Project,” and play along. Rachel is famously inarticulate, so drop unconstructed/constructed and substitute major: “This collection is so major, so sexy and modern, I just love it.”

It’s amusing to me how often “sexy” gets thrown around, given how many clothes are designed by gay men, who have no sexual interest in women, and displayed on walking hangers with no tits or ass to speak of, parading with angry scowls on their faces, perhaps with violent slashes of neon-green eyeshadow or with their hair greased into threatening spikes. Some of these people have strange ideas of sexy.

Here’s a sexy dress, or so I’m told, one of the most famous red-carpet dresses ever, the Versace safety-pin dress worn by Elizabeth Hurley in 1994. I thought she looked like a streetwalker. Any dress you have to be glued into, that has to be minded at every minute lest your boobs pop out or your abdomen reveal a wrinkle, isn’t sexy to me. Halle Berry’s Oscar dress — that’s sexy.

But I’m getting away from my point. Oh, wait: I didn’t have one.

Can I just ask one question about Rachel Zoe, however: What, exactly, does she do for her clients that qualifies her to be called a stylist? A stylist, as I understand the job, puts together looks for you. Every time I see Rachel Zoe, she’s just shopping, swanning around fashion shows and boutiques, loving everything and name-dropping: I love this for Demi. It’s so major. She cadges free dresses, and her clients try them on, and she claps her hands. What’s her business model? How is she paid? Did Cameron Diaz finance those crackbrain shopping trips to Europe? I don’t get it. If you have the means to hire her, you should be spending your money on someone who can really help you look your best — a gay man.

Anyway, I have to go. There was a Tom Ford show yesterday, and I’m on the hunt for photos. Oh, wait — only one photographer was allowed to take pictures (which explains all these point-and-shoot pix of someone’s nostrils, with credit lines to the reporter). A fashion show with no photographers. How modern. How edgy.

Bloggage?

You know all that talk about how we’re going to have to come to grips with retiring later? Have you ever noticed how often it’s written by people with jobs like “economist” and “college professor?” A look at what work, real work, is like for many blue-collar workers, and why they can’t work until they’re 70.

Jon Stewart, last night. It’s worth watching just for his “Community Center of Death” graphic open.

I have two stories to write today. Nothin’ big — just 2,000 words by day’s end. Groan. Better get to it.

Not to belabor a topic, but:

Poking around the web yesterday between students, I found a long story from the Fortune magazine archive on the Oddly Familiar Case of the Agees in Boise. It suggests that the Cunningham-Agee co-prosperity sphere is a complicated entity, and what happened during their time in Idaho wasn’t something that summarizes easily into a paragraph or two, although if you have to bottom-line it, as the CEOs say, this probably works for a nut graf:

A few things are obvious. Agee nearly wrecked the company and thoroughly destroyed his already shaky reputation as a corporate manager. In the simplest terms, he tried to turn Morrison Knudsen — a bridge, dam, and factory builder — into a railcar and locomotive manufacturer, and failed spectacularly: Last year the company lost $310 million on sales of $2.5 billion. Important customers became disillusioned with Agee — one called his railroad business plan “cartoonish.” Top executives mutinied. William P. Clark, a former Reagan adviser Agee put on the board, conducted an investigation that prompted Agee’s dismissal. A score of shareholder suits have been filed against Agee, the company, and the board.

But the very next sentence acknowledges:

This isn’t a tidy tale of good and evil, though. Behind the devastation of Morrison Knudsen is a complicated mix of ancient feuds, foolish gambles, and personal insecurities. There are clashing cultures, religious fervor, bad luck–even the terrifying specter of a black rose.

OK, I’m reading the rest. And I did. And I could almost see it from Mary’s side: She was raised by her priestly co-parent to go forth into creation and, armed with the secular world’s golden ticket to power — her Harvard MBA — do something different. Do something good. No, do something Good. Capital-G good. And on her very first job, she falls in love with a married man and watches while he ruins her career, drags her name through People magazine while at the same time giving her an express pass (which she stuffed into her purse with her golden ticket, and sorry for this metaphor salad here) to another sort of life, filled with luxury and private planes and trips to Lourdes and the Vatican, no small thing for a religious girl. I bet she saw the latter, the papal audiences and the like, as payback for her professional ruination.

On the other hand, no one forced her to sit for all those interviews with People, which she was doing as recently as just a couple of years ago, when her daughter graduated from — where else? — Notre Dame. And then I found this passage:

In 1991, Mary was diagnosed with a form of cancer–non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she told the Detroit Free Press the following year. Despite four lumps in her neck, she refused biopsies and chemotherapy. Mary says that on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, the lumps disappeared. (“I believe the angels went before almighty God and said, ‘This woman is doing something good. Give her a chance,’ ” she reportedly said.)

Granted, that’s a big “reportedly” there, and granted, out of context it’s impossible to know whether this line was delivered with a wink, a wordier version of somebody up there likes me! It’s the “almighty” in there that makes me think she was serious, and with that? Well, I stopped sympathizing. I think it was MMJeff who posted something on Facebook a while back, a cartoon of someone in the midst of a terrible calamity, the caption reading, “Remember, God loves you very much, and has a wonderful plan for your life.” But this is, in a nutshell, what bugs the crap out of me about these folks. Because if you believe that — that guardian angels plead your case before almighty God, who grants up-or-down cancer reprieves like some celestial caesar — than you have to accept the flip side, that on Christmas Day 2004, He looked down from heaven and said, “Eh, I’m drowning a few hundred thousand of these yo-yos. What the hell, most of them are Hindu anyway. Let’s have a tsunami!”

And when you start accepting that, that the Lord truly works in mysterious and extremely fucked-up ways, then it’s just a short hop to my neighborhood, where God, if he exists at all, is so unknowable he’s like a version of the crazy guy down the street with a plate in his head, Boo Radley with a lot more power. Or as my friend Lance Mannion says, “Any God that would destroy the World Trade Center to reveal George Bush’s true purpose in life isn’t worth worshiping.”

So, bloggage. Parents, everything you fear about sending your children to college is true. Seen yesterday at Wayne State:

It’s a movie, of course, rated R for “strong crude and sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, drug and alcohol abuse.” That’s entertainment.

Via Roy and Scott Lemieux at LGM, a new blog I’m enjoying: Gin and Tacos. Or rather, ginandtacos.com. Worth reading all the way through, but this post on the anti-vaccine movement spoke to me in particular, mainly because of the map. I dunno the design thinking behind the microscopic type, however; maybe begone, grandma.

Finally, a correction: Steven Slater’s story cannot be verified. Repeating, Steven Slater’s story cannot be verified. This is kind of major.

Eating breakfast, heading out for another redonkulous day. Enjoy your weekend.

Another day, another dispiriting defeat for the Thomas More Law Center. You may not have heard of this regional oddity, a right-wing legal action team founded by Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s Pizza tycoon turned religious crusader. The Wiki passage on its founding gives you the gist:

The Center was founded in 1999 by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, and Richard Thompson, the former Oakland County, Michigan prosecutor known for his role in the prosecution of Jack Kevorkian, and who now serves as the Law Center’s President and Chief Counsel. Among those who have sat on the Law Center’s advisory board are: Senator Rick Santorum, former Senator and retired Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton, former Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, noted Catholic academic Charles Rice, former Fortune 500 CEO Mary Cunningham Agee, and Ambassador Alan Keyes. Santorum has played a crucial role in promoting intelligent design through his Santorum Amendment; however, following the Center’s defeat in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case (see below), Santorum resigned from the Law Center’s advisory board. Originally, the Law Center’s funding came from Monaghan’s Ave Maria Foundation, but is now primarily financed by contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Richard Thompson prosecuted Kevorkian with such gusto, single-mindedness and, um, failure, that he was eventually turned out of office in conservative Oakland County, no small feat. Fortunately, Monaghan was able to be his sugar daddy and help him land on his feet in a job better-suited for his talents, i.e., losing more cases, but this time on behalf of God. The Thomas More Center was the prime mover in the Dover intelligent-design case (which it lost), the Terry Schiavo fiasco (lost), and various actions seeking to stop taxpayer-supported institutions from offering same-sex domestic-partner health-care benefits (lost).

They don’t always lose; it successfully defended an Ann Arbor high-school girl who wanted to condemn homosexuality in a class discussion. Yay, them. People should be free to be idiots. Otherwise, well, it’s hard to push Republi-God’s case in a pluralistic democracy. How do you keep raising money when you keep losing, I wonder? I guess when you’ve positioned yourself as the Last Best Hope of Republi-God, losing doesn’t necessarily hurt your cause; in fact, it’s proof that wallets need to open that much wider.

Interesting to see “former Fortune 500 CEO Mary Cunningham Agee” on that list. I spent a few hours digging her up last winter, when I was researching the Detroit Economic Club book; Bill Agee was on the club’s board for a while, and the whole tawdry Bill-and-Mary show unfolded right here in the Metro. I even stumbled across the Gail Sheehy series about St. Mary, and… I’m getting ahead of myself.

To those who might not remember: Right around 1980, Bill Agee, then president of Bendix, then an auto supplier of some note, hired a pretty young protege, Mary Cunningham. She was a newly minted Harvard MBA and had long blonde hair and the sort of gleam in her eye that can only come from a girl whose primary male caretaker growing up was a Catholic priest (a cousin of her divorced mother). Soon, cruel rumors began to swirl through the company, that Agee and Cunningham were doing the after-hours horizontal mambo in the executive suite, or wherever they had moved their mentor-protege relationship at cocktail hour. The rumors gained momentum when they were picked out of the crowd at the Republican National Convention by a TV camera, which showed them gazing fondly into one another’s eyes in a way that anyone with five minutes of experience in male/female relationships would recognize as distinctly unbusinesslike.

Well. Then Agee stood up at the company’s annual meeting and, without being asked, addressed the rumors. Nothing to them, he assured the stockholders. That gave every business journalist in earshot permission to start writing about them, and the cat exited the bag.

Some stories are all about timing, and this one broke at the precise moment women were starting to elbow their way into corner offices, with all the attendant gossip about just how they got there — on their backs, of course. It also happened when Gail Sheehy, the writer of giant zeitgeist tomes, was already in a pretty deep relationship with Cunningham, researching a story on this very phenomenon — successful businesswomen, that is. So, when the story about her and Agee started to roll, Sheehy quickly batted out a three-part series on Cunningham that was widely syndicated in American newspapers.

I was just starting my career at the time, so young and callow I blush to remember. I recall reading the series and seething with sympathy for poor, poor Mary. Not surprising; I could find it with some deep Googling, but I’m pressed for time this morning, and this Time summation is pretty dead-on:

Written by New Journalist Gail Sheehy (Passages), the series unblushingly depicts Cunningham as an angel, awesomely gifted, scrupulously moral and out to improve the world through humane capitalism; it is laced with enough mawkish prose and gratuitous personal detail to make Harold Robbins blush. As the scandal mounted, for instance, Sheehy reported: “Mary Cunningham sat in her hotel room at the Waldorf. She could not eat. Every so often, she stepped into the bathroom to vomit.” Also: “The mildew of envy is a living, corroding organism in the corridors of power.”

I didn’t see this at the time. I saw Cunningham the way Sheehy did, a victim of jealousy and all that blonde hair. The story finally played out with Cunningham leaving Bendix for Seagram’s, where she could improve the world through the humane selling of liquor, I guess. Agee made some bonehead moves at Bendix and ended up losing the company. And — I know you will be as shocked as I am — Bill and Mary got married. Yes, they’d been in love all along. I can’t find a cite for this, but I believe they deployed the old “no, we weren’t sleeping together, but the ordeal pushed us into one another’s arms” defense. A People story at the time gets to the point:

She says now, “Maybe the world is just a little young yet to understand the difference between a profound love for someone that you work with and for, out of sheer respect for their professional talents, and being in love.”

Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.

And then they kind of went away. When I looked them up this past winter, the first thing I found was the picture taken at the convention; looking at it with eyes 30 years older was a revelation. Of course these people were in love; it was so plainly written on their faces that anyone sitting nearby would have moved out of respect for their privacy and fear of getting hit by a flying shoe when they started tearing one another’s clothes off. Then I found the Sheehy series, and marveled at its ridiculousness, but also at its spot-on portrayal of a type I’ve come to know well since — the Catholic saint who is not sinning, oh no. This body does its own thing, but the mind — the soul — is always looking toward heaven. They are pure, pure beings consisting mainly of light and stained glass, and if one or two of the windowpanes get a little grimy, well, we’re all human, aren’t we?

But I was most amazed by this: After Agee lost Bendix, after he married Mary (and converted to Catholicism, under the instruction of Mary’s guardian priest), he went to Morrison Knudsen, the Idaho company that built the Hoover Dam, and ran it into the ground. There was a story from one of the Idaho papers that said Agee tried to do his job from Pebble Beach, which Mary preferred over Boise, flying back and forth on the company jet a few times a week. And then both of them withdrew to a quieter level of business, him running a small charitable foundation, her something called the Nurturing Network, which supports women in problem pregnancies. Contrary to the More Center’s Wikipedia entry, I don’t think she ever reached Fortune 500 CEO status. (A where-are-they-now piece from 2005 adds another priceless detail: Homeschooling. Naturally.)

So this epic love story played out, in other words, with two embarrassing corporate train wrecks and a comfy life financed by golden parachutes? Mary is using her Ivy League MBA to essentially run a crisis pregnancy charity? That, friends, is the waste of a good college education.

Maybe she can give the Thomas More people some tips.

Bloggage? There might be some, but I’m running late. I’m meeting my students this week, so another chunk of office hours awaits. If you found something interesting you’d like to share with the class, leave it in comments. I have to get dressed and catch a rabbit.

Have a great day, all.