One of my local Twitter follows has established a coyote-sighting Google map. He rendered it in Earth, which gives it that CIA-surveillance flava:

Of course I tweeted it to GrossePointeToday.com, and with that I conclude today’s edition of Sentences That Wouldn’t Have Made a Lick of Sense a Decade Ago.

No, one more: Shopping with Kate the other day, I heard a song I liked on the store’s playlist, so I Shazam’d it, but waited until we got home to buy it.

(It was “Rock & Roll Queen” by the Subways. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve always had a weakness for a tight little single that can reach the finish line in under three minutes.)

I was making my cop-shop rounds yesterday in sandals and a T-shirt, freezing to death, when I glanced at the dashboard thermometer and read an appalling figure: 56 degrees. I began an R-rated sort of gibbering rant not unlike the father’s battles with the furnace in “A Christmas Story.” School is out in two days, summer swimming programs begin the following Monday, and the pool is about as appealing as, well, a pool on a 56-degree day. I’m all for a little character-building weather, but my character feels fully constructed at the moment, thanks very much.

When I took responsibility for collecting the public-safety reports for the new website, I anticipated handing this chore off to one of my students, but now that I’ve done it a while? No way. It’s too much fun for a storyteller to examine these little tragedies and comedies, rendered so succinctly in the passive-voice poetry of Copspeak:

A traffic stop was effected…I detected an odor commonly associated with intoxicants…Suspect was confrontagious…

Some of these accounts could be entered in a short-short story contest. Disputes between neighbors are the most interesting, because I have the advantage the involved parties do not: Distance. In my god’s-eye view of things, I can look down with a cool head and only marvel that all these hard feelings, all this yelling, all this paperwork was over…a barking dog. (On the other hand, there is nothing like being awakened at a too-early hour by a gas-powered leaf blower to send the blood pressure off the charts; I have experienced this myself.) Two weeks ago there was an account of a gutter-cleaning job that nearly came to fisticuffs. My takeaway lesson: Do not spray gunky gutter debris on a freshly washed car. In the Motor City, people take these things very, very seriously.

As you can see, I’m short on material today. Fortunately, I have an excess of bloggage:

I hope Kym Worthy sends Kwame Kilpatrick back to jail, and this time she throws away the key.

Jon Stewart, national treasure: Make sure you watch the embedded clip.

The Pope was “visibly upset” over details of abuse in Irish penal institutions church-run homes for wayward children, but the report doesn’t say what, exactly, he was upset about. My money’s on: “that the rest of the world heard our secret.” Count me among those with more than two working brain cells who believe the idea that Rome didn’t know about this vast national network of sadism academies as, well, bullshit. Maybe he didn’t have “The Magdalene Sisters” in his Netflix queue.

But because we like to end on an up note: Sex With Ducks, the music-video response to Pat Robertson’s concerns what legalizing gay marriage may lead to. Safe for work, at least with headphones.

I have so much work to do it’s not funny. So I’m off to do it.

Against the good counsel of our better judgment, a few of us signed up to do another 48-hour film challenge. Not the one we did last year — this one, the original-recipe contest. So I’ve been thinking about stories. This means wasting time with the Apple trailers site, where I’m always left with the overwhelming feeling that I’m just not cut out for showbiz. A movie about a guinea pig strike force in 3D? See, I never would have thought of that.

The next step is wondering if we can assemble a team without turning to Craigslist, which last year gave us a mixed bag, including a guy who presented himself with great enthusiasm. He called me to tell me his idea for a sci-fi short: A man possesses a pack of cigarettes, and… well, I’m trying not to describe them as “magical” cigarettes, but it’s hard not to, because every time he smokes one, he sees a vision of his future. The last one in the pack tells him how he will die.

Now that I write it down, I see it isn’t really a terrible idea, if you did it right. You could make the brand of smokes something like Oracles. He’d have to buy them in a creepy shop; the clerk could be a nice little part. Twenty smokes would give him time to figure out what’s happening. The visions could increase in significance and jeopardy as the pack diminished. The last one would bring the action to a nice climax. You could pepper the dialogue with snarky lines about giving up this filthy habit and “these things are gonna kill me.” Title: “Bob Quits Smoking.”

Unfortunately, when I talked to the guy about it, I must have failed to express my enthusiasm. I believe I told him that under the rules of the contest, sci-fi was only one of the seven or eight possible genres we might be assigned, and did he have any ideas for a chick flick? Because a day or two later he sent me an e-mail withdrawing from the team and complaining that he didn’t feel his ideas were being respected. He didn’t even make it to a single meeting. So I also get a Fail on dealing with sensitive artistic temperaments.

Nevertheless, I think we should do it. The true challenge will be to play it sincere; too many teams treat the assignment as a lark, and end up doing spoofs on whatever they draw — “Snakes in a Minivan,” etc. I think you could stay on the table* just by not cocking your eyebrow.

* Obscure Pulitzer-judging reference for journalists only.

Whatever we end up doing, I hope it includes a follow shot. This link is recommended, especially the video clip. See how many you get. (I was a Fail here, too.)

A quick skip to the bloggage today, because I have ten tons of work today, and ten more tonight. I’m listening to highlights from Barry’s speech in Cairo today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I’m sure others won’t be. After all, you can’t say something like this…

“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

…without being called a wussy little quisling by someone, probably starting with whoever is on Fox at this very moment. But don’t let that hold you back. Discuss.

Something I didn’t know and find sort of sad: What happens to a man married (and divorced) four times? You end up buried next to your mother. What would John DeLorean say about GM? a Freep columnist wonders. My boycott of Mitch Albom’s employer didn’t last long, but I did avert my eyes from Mitch.

I can say uno mas mojito, por favor therefore I speak Spanish. At least, according to Michael Goldfarb, via Steve Benen.

Remember the “terrorist fist jab?” Gawker does:

Here are ten photos from the past year, proving that fist jabs have overcome their scary, black-person-centric origins and flowered into a glorious tableau of diversity.

And with that, I’m out of here. Sharing week continues with today’s Decorum Share: Tell us something that would have been scandalous in a prior century. I’ll start: Some days, I don’t wear a corset.

Publishing success frequently lies in a niche that goes something like this: X Tells You What the Experts Won’t. Vicki Iovine, a clever writer who married a rich recording executive and could have retired to a life of indolence and manicures, hit a succession of books out of the park, all with the title, “The Girlfriend’s Guide to…” etc. I read the pregnancy volume cover-to-cover and skimmed the rest, but they all had the same idea at their root: Screw doctors and nurses, they lie. I will tell you the truth.

There’s something to this. Not all doctors lie, but I do wish more would use plain language, which would help a lot. Say “pain” rather than “discomfort,” for instance. “You will probably” beats “you may experience.” And so on.

Lately I’ve been thinking I should write a girlfriend’s guide to aging, although it would have to be more like The Old Crone’s Guide. I could spend an entire chapter on eyebrows alone. It would be called “When You Look in the Mirror and Andy Rooney Looks Back,” or just “Eyebrows: WTF?!?” Of all the mysterious, horrible, humiliating changes connected to aging, I’ve never read about eyebrows, at least not in women. No one told me about these long eyebrow hairs that appear out of nowhere (I call them “Andys”) and must be banished. No one said I would turn into a schnauzer. I’ve taken to screeching, “Goddamn Andy Rooney eyebrows!” in the mirror as I do battle with tweezers, which prompts Alan to reply, “What the hell are you talking about?”

I should add: For men, this is the only permissible response. That is to say: blindness. The wife of a friend of mine had three babies in five years and idly asked while she was getting dressed one morning, “Do you think we could afford a little work on these?” Indicating her breasts, of course. “Nothing drastic, just a lift.” He said, “Well, I suppose we could figure something out,” and was instantly rewarded with a metaphorical shoe to the head. He didn’t realize the question being asked wasn’t about cosmetic surgery but about their enduring attractiveness, and his scripted answer was, “What are you talking about? They’re perfect the way they are.”

The Old Crone’s Guide to Marital Chit-Chat While Dressing. There’s my title.

So, how’s your week going so far? I’m sitting here knitting my Andys together, scowling out the window. The closed window. The temperature will not reach 70 degrees today. It didn’t reach 70 yesterday. It briefly reached 74 the day before, when the wind changed rather abruptly and imported some air from Arkansas or something. But then it changed back and, well, it’s June and I expect the windows to be open by now, but we’re still walking around in sweatshirts, being grumpy.

Speaking of eyebrows, let’s kick off the bloggage with this short piece, “The Tragedy of Susan Boyle,” by John Wright. (HT: Wolcott.) A taste:

The world which celebrity promises those who embrace its life affirming narrative is a world absent of pain, poverty, boredom, and sadness. It is a fairytale lived in three dimensional splendour, replete with the adulation of millions, more money than you could ever spend, along with untold glamour and excitement. More importantly it offers the only freedom worthy of the name – the freedom to be the person you always dreamed of being, rather than the person you are.

Susan Boyle was one of the anointed few to be allowed entry to this fairytale. This unfashionable, unglamorous, poor woman from an unfashionable, unglamorous, and poor town in Scotland was plucked from obscurity, stuck centre stage, and celebrated by millions of adoring fans around the world. Dubbed the ‘hairy angel’, here was the archetypal ugly duckling with the voice of a swan.

But then something happened, something unscripted and completely out of kilter with the expectations of a world weaned on the promise and the dream of everlasting happiness through fame and fortune. Susan Boyle let the world down. Instead of playing the part of the ‘hairy angel’ with the sonorous voice and thus fulfilling the myth by which we escape the drudgery of our daily lives, to be sure a prime time TV version of the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ or ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, she committed the crime of pulling back the curtain on the myth to reveal its ugly truth – human despair.

Ah. Sigh. I haven’t really been following this story, but it doesn’t surprise me.

Some comic relief from Gawker: Watch the Fox & Friends Bunch Try to Process the Bruno-Eminem Stunt. This may require more pop-culture awareness than many of you have, so a thumbnail of the story so far: Sacha Baron Cohen stuck his bare butt in Eminem’s face at some MTV event. There was a flying harness involved and two people with hot product to sell in the entertainment marketplace, and that’s really all you need to know, but it’s still funny to watch these three clueless souls try to figure it out. I had a boss once who was gay but only sorta out about it, and even though everyone knew he was gay, there was one staff member who simply wouldn’t believe it, because he had once been married, and so that meant he couldn’t be gay, didn’t it? Didn’t it? The Foxies remind me of him.

Off to pluck something. Also, edit. Wish me luck.

I read both Detroit dailies every day, not every word but a lot of them, usually returning to the websites several times. I think the Freep may have lost me for good today. I don’t know what the print edition looks like, but you know what the lead story is on the website? (Underneath the Red Wings package, of course; I mean, the bankruptcy of the cornerstone of the underlying industry that supports a whole region might be news, but hey — priorities, people!)

A Mitch Albom column.

A really stupid one.

One with lots of one-sentence paragraphs and padding creative white space.

Oh, and a repetitive catch phrase, like a refrain, because you know Mitch is a songwriter, too.

It is: All fall down.

It’s hard for a newspaper to insult me, these days. I’ve gotten used to the degradation. I told my boss the other day, the one I farm news for, that the hardest thing about this job has been watching the steady decline of newspapers over the last three years. There was an oncology conference in Florida this week, a big one, that we were tracking for our clients. Monday’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times had several stories on the news coming out of it, about new cancer drugs and therapies. So I made sure to visit the website of the local paper, once one of the finest papers in the south, in search of stories. They had punted it to the AP.

But Mitch Albom writing about General Motors? That might just do it for me. I can’t even stand to take it apart for laughs, it’s so depressing and stupid. OK, one line:

We have each other.

What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

Nothing like starting the first day of the rest of Michigan’s life on a high note, I always say.

I’m starting to like these one-sentence paragraphs. I think that extra white space really gives flaccid prose that extra oomph, don’t you think?

It’s sort of like the very short sentences in children’s books:

Look, Sally, look. Mitch is writing a column. See Mitch write. Write, Mitch, write. See Mitch write while he’s doing his radio show. Multi-task, Mitch, multi-task. Mitch is quoting the governor: Gov. Jennifer Granholm told me Monday on WJR. Synergy, Mitch, synergy.

OK, that’s not funny. Here’s what is: I’d be willing to bet a mortgage payment that Mitch makes at least $200K from his Free Press revenue stream, perhaps more. They could get Sweet Juniper for half that, the columns would be better, he’s shoot his own photos and show up in the office more. I know I’ve made this suggestion before, but it bears repeating.

Well. It’s a bad day in Michigan, innit? We are officially in free fall. I’m now working under the assumption we are capital-F you-know-what. For a while now, I’ve been asking old-timers, “Is this the worst recession you’ve seen in Michigan?” and they all say, “No, early ’80s were worse.” That was the “Roger & Me” downturn, the tent cities in Houston, the “Continental Drift” migration of the blue-collar working class to the south. They don’t say that anymore.

Fortunately, we still have the solace of television. Dexter posted this excellent interview with Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad,” which just finished its second season. I was a little worried as the season began; whereas last year’s had a fairly constant undertone of comedy, year two dawned under dark, dark clouds. Gilligan faced the same problem David Chase did with “The Sopranos,” i.e., how do you make a show with an evil character at its heart and still make viewers want to tune in? I remember Chase saying at the time how frustrating he found it to hear viewers describe Tony as a nice guy, when he clearly wasn’t. I think the turning point for viewers came in that show’s second season, too, with the Scatino bust-out and subsequent whacking of Big Pussy. You really couldn’t hold on to your illusions after that.

Walt had more sympathy going for him; the guy had cancer, and his turn to meth cooking was initially because he felt he had to leave a grubstake behind for his family. So Gilligan had to rub our faces in the fact even a noble end doesn’t justify the evil means, and the first few episodes were so, so bleak. But Chase figured it out — when you need relief, turn to the other characters. And so we got buffoons like Paulie Walnuts and sweet, clueless Adriana to leaven Tony’s march into hell. Gilligan did, too, and found depth in the characters of Skyler and Jesse and even Hank the DEA agent. Jesse, Walt’s toddler-dressed accomplice, turns out to be the one who most regrets his actions, and his suicidal depression at the end of this season will be interesting to watch in the next.

And in the meantime, we have “True Blood” to look forward to, and then “Mad Men,” coming back in August. If we still have cable then, that is. You never know.

Not much bloggage on this depressing day, but what I have is amusing: my left armpit smells while my right one doesn’t. this isn’t even a shower issue, it smells right after a shower — Oversharers on Twitter. HT: Brother Jim.

Off to the gym. Because if only the strong survive, I want to at least be able to carry one of their suitcases.

Look, it’s like a United Nations of hockey:

Saturday night in Detroit, before the game. (The Wings won. You knew that.) Walking around this particular neighborhood with friends — our zombie flick was part of a short-films festival in the same block — I marveled at how often you still hear the ghost-town claim about downtown, always from people who don’t live anywhere nearby and haven’t visited since 1974. You should have been there. It’s not Chicago, but it’s a hell of a lot more than you might think.

I cannot deny it: I look forward to P.J. O’Rourke’s byline. Mostly I am disappointed by what I find under it these days, but he still can find the mark once in a while, and he’s always good for a guffaw here and there. But I smelled something when I read his Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal pegged to the GM bankruptcy, The End of the Affair: Old-man smell. And it started so promisingly:

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

This touches on something I’ve been thinking for a while: I’m worried about a government-imposed plan for the domestic auto industry, because I think cars are one of those things like newspapers, magazines and anything else with even a soupçon of creativity at its heart — they just can’t be made by a focus group. And the public is fickle. They wanted fuel economy last summer, when gas was $4 a gallon, but a few months later it was down to $1.50 and Priuses were sitting unsold in California lots near where they’d been unloaded from the freighters. The Obama administration is absolutely justified in imposing some harsh restrictions on a company so badly managed it’s taking on staggering cash infusions and bleeding them out nearly as fast, but…still. O’Rourke is right. The automobile is a powerful tool of personal freedom, and all the bike trails in the world won’t change that.

He loses me, however, when he lapses into his you-kids-get-off-my-lawn act. “In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible,” he writes, and in an underhanded way “to make me hate my car.” He adds:

How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

Oh, for God’s sake. Let me see the hands of all those who want to return to the golden era of bare-metal dashboards, leaded gasoline and seats free of safety belts. Thought so. There’s a great deal to be said for automotive design of a bygone era, but complaining that cars pollute less seems like a spectacular case of missing the point. To me, what makes cars dull and boring today is their slow transition from conveyance to living room, a sea change driven entirely by what a good libertarian like O’Rourke would recognize as the holy of holys, the Market. At least once a week, I pull up in the carpool lane at Kate’s school behind an SUV or minivan with a backseat entertainment system, and even though the kids are just going to school, it’s on and playing Sponge Bob for the backseat occupants. Modern cars are big and comfortable and climate-controlled and some of them make me yearn to stretch out on the third seat and take a little nap. That’s sort of the opposite of sex appeal.

My six-year-old VW has pollution control and 5 mph bumpers and cupholders and air bags, and it’s a blast to drive, a little Audi wearing dress-down clothes. It’s even a station wagon. The modern driver appreciates tight handling in the corners as much as an early XY-chromosome boomer like O’Rourke appreciates speed off the line. I’ve driven John and Sam’s Prius, and it’s a blast, too. Al Gore’s kid was clocked doing 100 in his. So the modern “shade-tree mechanic” can’t work on them anymore — so what? The best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne, a guy whose customer base was so devoted they followed him from a Mercedes dealership to his own driveway after he got forced out, told me once he couldn’t work on modern cars anymore, they were so technically advanced beyond his tool chest, but he didn’t care. They’re better now, foreign and domestic. Keep the oil changed and even a cheap one should last 100,000 miles at the very least, a milestone that used to be remarkable. One of Alan’s colleagues drove an Acura with 260,000 miles on it, until it got stolen. (In Detroit. Only in Detroit.)

My proudest moment with a car came on M-129, a road as straight as a plumb line, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Four of us had borrowed my friend’s bad-ass ’69 Camaro, and decided to see how bad-ass it could be off the line. I forget who was driving. He dumped the clutch, laid rubber in first gear, chirped the tires again going into second, and then, blurp — it wouldn’t go into third gear. We pulled over and for the first and maybe only time in my life I said, “I can fix it. Got a wrench?”

This had happened before, the first week Mark had the car, and I was riding with him. It had happened in Columbus, back when every gas station was a service station, and Mark had limped it into one, where they put it on the lift. I watched the mechanic find the problem — jammed transmission linkage — and fix it with a smart whack of a rubber mallet. So I took a hefty wrench, wiggled under, found the linkage, gave it a similar whack and lo, it was healed.

While I think it’s fine that the problem could be so simple that a dumb ol’ girl could fix it with a blunt object, honestly, can you imagine that happening to a modern car today? I’ve had my transmission problems, but you could speed-shift my Passat every day of its life and not have the linkage jam. And my car is about as old now as the Camaro was then.

(On the other hand, that Camaro was promptly christened the Coolmobile. I can’t imagine anyone bestowing such a name on my car.)

It’s sad to grow old and have more of your life behind you than ahead. But yearning for your lost virility shouldn’t get you the cover of the Weekend Journal. Just sayin’.

OK, then. I suppose everyone will want to talk today about Dr. Tiller. I don’t have much fresh to add except to note that I’ve only known one woman who had a second-trimester abortion, and I don’t know where she got it, but she had her reasons: She needed chemotherapy for a devastating cancer diagnosis that came at the worst possible time. I don’t judge people who sometimes need an unpleasant and unpopular medical procedure. I’m just glad there are at least a few doctors willing to provide it. One less, today. Sigh.

Busy week ahead. Enjoy yours.

People these days are always accusing one another of living in an echo chamber. To be sure, it’s a hazard of modern life. You may find yourself writing things like this:

So, are we supposed to use the Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er, like Niedermeyer?

That’s Mark Krikorian, writing at National Review’s brainless group blog, The Corner. And OK, so he wrote it, big deal, these things tend to be self-correcting. Not in echo chambers:

Most e-mailers were with me on the post on the pronunciation of Judge Sotomayor’s name…

Well, of course they were. Perhaps they prefer the Ellis Island option, in which the Supreme Court nominee would have been renamed Sally Sutton in exchange for her parents getting that cushy public-housing apartment. But Krikorian goes on:

But a couple said we should just pronounce it the way the bearer of the name prefers, including one who pronounces her name “freed” even though it’s spelled “fried,” like fried rice. …Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English…

Then there’s a bunch of nonsense about how his name has been anglicized from the original Armenian — one whole syllable got added, oh my — and you just think stop stop stop you’re going to choke on your shoe, man, but nooo:

Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch.

You hear that? There ought to be limits. Conformity is appropriate. A man can only bend so far. You let people pronounce their names however they want, and the next thing you know, we’ll have a man in the Oval Office named Barack Hussein Obama.

Someone tell Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito — I mean, Andy Scalls and Sam Allen — there’s a lady coming who’s going to give ’em all fits.

One of my Twitter follows said it best: It’s spelled Krikorian, but it’s pronounced “Kracker.” HT: Virgotex.

Yeesh, what a week so far. Gathering the police news this week, I found a report of two coyotes attacking a cat. The witnesses called police to see if the cat had survived. In classic copspeak, the report revealed: “The officers found that it had not,” and disposed of the body. This seems sad all around. Sad that some family lost its kitty. Sad that two coyotes lost their meal, although the report wasn’t that specific, so it’s possible they got away with enough to make a decent lunch. Sadder still that this particular suburb spent quite a bit of effort in the last two years trying to eradicate their coyote population, with little success. They caught a female with pups, but anyone who knows coyotes knows this is like killing six rats and pronouncing the problem solved. Not that coyotes are rats. Just…it’s sad.

I’ve bored you before at length about one of my favorite things about Detroit — the wild animal life that thrums below the surface of human activity. If it can survive at this latitude, we have it, the coyotes, the ghetto dogs, pheasants, exotics. It’s not exactly Miami, but it’s getting there. Speaking of which, did anyone read the New Yorker piece last month on the spread of the Burmese python throughout Florida? Worth your time, and then some.

It seems the right time to kick off the bloggage, then. Another from my Twitter clan:

Feral children — they have their own website. With some killer prose: Certainly, it’s true that some animals wouldn’t make good parents. It’s difficult to imagine a crocodile doing anything other than eat a human baby. Noted.

You’ve watched “Mad Men.” So you shouldn’t be surprised by some of the ad campaigns they dreamed up. Check out the one for the Lysol douche. Yikes.

Nate Silver deconstructs the “Obama is targeting Republican car dealers” meme by pointing out the obvious: Most car dealers are Republican. There you are.

And here I go. Have a great Thursday, all.

A note on our type problems: J.C. is aware, and is working on it from his vacation in the Upper Peninsula, where wi-fi is something no one’s really heard tell of yet. Good news: This seems to be a home-page problem. In the meantime, if you click the headline, it’ll take you to a separate page (with comments) where everything’s OK. Noted? Noted.

EDIT: Type problem seems fixed, for now. Thanks, brother Jim! Also, a version of the Eaton Beaver clip is now linked in comments. Thanks, Duffy.

It’s a measure of how scattered I’ve been of late that I’ve been sitting here for two days thinking I have nothing to write about, and then — forehead slap — I remember that I went to see Elmore Leonard last Thursday. He did a read/chat/sign at Border’s, supporting his new one, “Road Dogs.”

The reading was brief, just the first page of the novel, which in the usual fashion, starts halfway down the page. Maybe three paragraphs, after which he said, “And that’s what the book’s about,” shut it, and started talking. He was aided in this by his son Peter, who just published his second novel — it’s a father-son book tour. The two chatted back and forth for about half an hour, took some questions, signed some books. Among the highlights:

Peter talked about the party his father threw for the cast of “Out of Sight,” after they wrapped shooting in Detroit. He walked into the dining room to find George Clooney had just arrived and was standing by himself. They chatted for a while, and then “the women heard he was there.” Surrounded.

The “10 rules of writing” were delivered at Bouchercon, the convention for crime-fiction writers, and were something he just whipped up on a legal pad. Today the list is a book, and one of the most often-quoted in stories about him, probably because they’re short, snappy and don’t require much introduction. One of the rules: Never use a word other than “said” to carry dialogue. Another: Use no adverbs. Because they suck. (In the signing line, I told him about the reporter for the Ohio University Post who used “ejaculated” to describe an exclamation. His editor announced to the room: “Someone ejaculated on Tim’s copy.” That was hard to live down.)

My favorites were the stories about the old days, about being called in to a movie set to convince Charles Bronson — I assume this was “Mr. Majestyk” — that yes, his character would have a particular female character with him in the pickup truck during the big chase scene, because otherwise who would be driving when he crawled into the bed with a shotgun to fire at the bad guys? (“I don’t know why the producers couldn’t have told him that.”) But also about the era of pulp fiction, which he barely touched on, other than to say he’d been paid 2 cents a word for “3:10 to Yuma,” “which was the top rate for the pulps.” I wish he’d talked more about this bygone era in American fiction, where so many great writers paid their dues and learned their craft. (I was once lucky enough to interview an expert on the mass-market paperback, and I could have talked to him for hours and hours about cover art alone.) Fiction workshops are all well and good, but there’s something to be said for strong characters, snappy dialogue and the whip of the market as a navigator of plotlines. Every so often Leonard is asked why he switched from westerns to crime fiction, and he always shrugs and notes that that’s what the market wanted at the time. Try telling that to the next MFA you meet.

(That said, my favorite MFA, Lance Mannion, is a great respecter of genre fiction and its writers. So this may not apply to all of them.)

Martin Amis, in an essay about Leonard collected somewhere, described his writing as jazz, and that’s the truth. He said he doesn’t outline his novels, never knows where they’re going to end until they do, and that sounds to me like a nice bebop solo, the trumpeter stepping out to noodle around with phrases, themes and melodies for a while, until he’s said all he has to say and steps back to let someone else take a turn. Leonard is Miles Davis with a pen.

I bought “Road Dogs,” which I’m interspersing with “The Quiet Girl,” two books that couldn’t be more different. If Leonard is jazz, Peter Hoeg is atonality, translated from Danish. I can only recommend one, and I think you know which one it is.

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

A tale of two Michigan economies — Ann Arbor and Warren. From the WSJ.

The right’s talking points on Sotomayor, by Dahlia Lithwick, another writer nearing national-treasure status.

Only in Detroit: A city councilwoman is billed a pittance in property taxes for a decade. How much of a pittance? Try $68 a year. Turns out the city records show her address is a vacant lot. Her reaction: Huh. I wondered about that. Now it turns out she probably won’t have to pay much at all. This city. I ask you.

Only in Detroit Journalism: Yes, I saw the “Eaton Beaver turns 69 today” clip from one of our local TV station’s happy-birthday roundup on the morning show. No, I cannot direct you to it, as the station has effectively wiped out the clip. More proof every news organization needs an editor well-versed in dirty jokes, puns and Johnny Fucherfaster stories.

And now, I have a barn to raise and a day to do it. Onward to the work pile.

Ahem:

“Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks, hitting with the hand, kicking, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shaving, beating on the soles of the feet, burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods, made to sleep outside overnight, being forced into cold or excessively hot baths and showers, hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.”

Abu Ghraib? No. Guantanamo? Nope. The Mississippi prison farm in “Cool Hand Luke”? Sorry:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.

The report, linked above, is stomach-turning — this wasn’t the 16th century, but the 20th. This wasn’t one or two bad apples, it was a broad and deep conspiracy of sex abusers and sadists. It didn’t go on for a few months or years, but decades. One of the religious orders named within, the Christian Brothers, had the wherewithal — and the balls, for lack of a better word — to successfully sue the commission before the report came out, to keep names out of it. This was in 2004. Five years ago.

When I read accounts like this, I find it useful to imagine myself in the abuser’s shoes, participating in, oh, let’s say the beating while “hanging from hooks on the wall.” I try to imagine all the places, in the process of carrying out such a punishment, at which one would have the opportunity to have one of those Scorsese camera-pulls-back moments, when one could see oneself clearly: Now I will lift this kid and hang him from this hook…OK, where did I leave my lash?…OK, swing the arms a few times, loosen up the shoulders… And I can’t do it. Any child in such a position must have been hysterical, or fighting, or in shock. Torture is hard work for everyone; sometimes it really is heavy lifting. You have to go home at night, look in the mirror and think, just another day at the office. I really can’t fathom it.

So the discussion for today, if I may kick it off: What happens when this happens? What sort of group hysteria takes over that keeps participants from blowing the whistle? Are new members of a group chosen on the basis of their willingness to beat and rape children, or for their willingness to remain silent? What’s the deviant psychology that takes over and creates the conspiracy of silence? Is it just the Milgram experiment, over and over?

Or does the answer lie in this simple sentence, deep in the NYT story? The Vatican had no response.

Your call. I’m sorry to duck out on such a bummer note, but I have so much to do today it isn’t funny. Turns out running two websites is more than 2X the work.

I need some new idiots. Allow me to explain.

A while back I opened a new bookmark sub-folder for blogs. Called it “idiots.” It was useful in that it reminded me not to take the contents within seriously. I had a strict set of standards: The idiots had to be fun idiots, not depressing ones. I wasn’t interested in screechers, unless they were amusing, campy screechers. I started with seven or eight idiots, and one by one they have disappointed me and I deleted them from the feeds. I’m down to four. Four can’t sustain a coffee-break web-surf, although god knows, Rod Dreher tries. But even he has backed down on the entertaining hand-wringing hysteria of last fall, when the Wall Street meltdown had him running to Costco for 25-pound bags of rice and fretting how unprepared we were for food riots. Now he’s back to wearily shaking his head and disapproving of his fellow conservatives. If he can’t find a slut to kick around soon, I may be dropping him, too. Even Lileks is a bore these days, although it’s amusing to see how capably he’s motoring through the financial crisis at his newspaper, keeping his sunny side up, up. He’s made himself a TV star, he’s back to filing pointless columns about his difficulties with customer service, he’s — ohmigosh — “fisking” George Will for two million words. You need a fresher schtick to stay in my idiots folder.

So send me some idiots to check out. No, on second thought, don’t. If I relentlessly culled all my bookmarks down to the ones I actually visit, I’d be down to the Lolcats, Gawker, Jezebel, Roger Ebert and a handful of others, and I probably should. Cull, that is. I have enough ways to be distracted while working. And at the moment, I have enough work I don’t need the distractions. And Roy still does an excellent job as sort of an Idiot’s Digest.

Also, I have some fiction ideas I’d like to explore this summer, although I know I’ve said that before.

Besides, it’s time I spent more time in the analog world, and maybe admitting I can’t read the entire Internet every day is a good start. This, for example, was published in January, and I had to learn about it from freakin’ Facebook on Monday.

Also, I don’t want to end up like Kevin Smith:

As you mentioned, Zack and Miri didn’t do as well as expected. How did you take that?
I kind of dropped out of society. I just kind of wrapped myself in a weed-infused cocoon … a coma, if you will. And it was great. It was really, really wonderful, man. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s all, “Let me tell you about legalization!” But, my God, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life. And after years and years of … you know, I used to literally fight with people online. I would waste days online, talking to total strangers, some of them probably children. I was a joke.

Don’t become a joke: New motto.

Bloggage:

The line in Obama’s Correspondent’s Dinner routine that made me laugh loudest was the poke he took at Michael Steele — in the heezy, yo! Dana Milbank, not so funny, but an amusing wrapup of the GOP’s gaffe-a-palooza.

Speaking of Roy, he has an amuse bouche up now, about reaction to Ted Kennedy’s improved health. A few of the usual bitingly funny lines are therein.

Admit it: The guy who rescued the wee ducklings is your new hero. And yes, I know there are those who say the ducklings would have been fine without the rescue, but we wouldn’t have the cute video, otherwise.

And now I’m going to make some calls, then go ride my bike for a long time. I plan to pass by an open field near the Milk River, where there will be crowds of Canada geese goslings (Canada goslings?). They will be nearly as cute as the ducks, but their parents are bigger and meaner. I won’t pass too close.

Today’s question is: How do you manage your credit cards? Mine strategy is pretty simple, and has been ever since I stopped living paycheck-to-paycheck: Most months, I pay them off in full. If I can’t pay them off, I pay them as quickly as possible. The longest I’ve carried a balance in recent years is about six months, maybe seven.

Like most moderates, I walk the middle of the road on plastic. Let me see the hands of anyone who wants to return to the days when, if your washing machine broke and you didn’t have liquid savings to replace it, you used a laundromat until you could scrape together a few hundred bucks? Didn’t think so. On the other hand, the last time I used a 90-days-same-as-cash financing option — to buy a new mattress after the old one sprung a leak and started poking me in the ass with a spring — the first mailing I got from the finance company was to spread that $300 over two years for an absurdly low monthly payment, etc. So I see how people become hard-liners.

I see plastic as an ally in navigating modern life, but as a treacherous one that must be watched at all times. Money — or rather, credit — is a powerful drug, and I’ve seen too many people end up in rehab. My sister has a friend who at one point owed a five-figure sum to MasterCard and Visa equal to half her annual salary. (She told me she knew the mortgage industry was crooked when someone offered this woman a 100 percent loan to buy a house, with enough extra cash thrown in to pay off all her cards, which at the time was something like 40 grand.) I’ve gotten in over my head a time or two, but was always able to recover quickly — maybe $2,000? On one card? Sounds about right.

Over the years, I’ve heard plastic horror stories from both sides of the fence, not just the in-over-your-head spenders, but also the gamers, the people who claimed to be harnessing the power of their cards, using the frequent-flyer miles and cash-advance perks to their advantage, and it’s fair to say I trusted them only incrementally more than the deadbeats. “I write two checks a month,” a friend told me once. “The mortgage, and MasterCard.” Everything — groceries, restaurants, utility bills, clothing — went on the card, which accrued frequent-flyer miles at the rate of $1=1 mile. He paid it off in full every month. After a year it had earned him a free ticket to Paris. He’s not the liar sort, so I guess I believed him, but part of me…didn’t.

Gaming plastic just sounds like something too good to be true. There’s got to be a catch. There’s always a catch.

Turns out, there’s a catch:

Credit cards have long been a very good deal for people who pay their bills on time and in full. Even as card companies imposed punitive fees and penalties on those late with their payments, the best customers racked up cash-back rewards, frequent-flier miles and other perks in recent years.

Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

I did a story on credit a few years back, for a financial magazine. You know what the industry calls people who pay off in full every month? Deadbeats. Ha ha.

I have one card now, a Discover. I use it for newspaper subscriptions, which are set up as monthly bills, my iTunes account, and anything I order online, mainly because I can remember the number and expiration date and don’t have to dig up my debit card. I pay it off every month and have currently accrued cash-back rewards equal to a moderately priced piece of software. If they think I’m going back to the annual-fee days, they are, um, mistaken. I’ll go back to writing checks.

Why is money such a taboo in our culture? If I ruled the world, I’d institute a class in high school — say, sophomore year — called Practical Finance, and it would be all about using money in the adult world. Half the year would be spent studying credit. I think it’s at least as important as sex education, and maybe more.

Quick bloggage, because I went to a city council meeting last night that featured tears and cries of embezzlement, and I want to get the story written p.d.q.

Bloggage? Sure:

Matt Yglesias takes apart another stupid George Will column. Ably. I’m not even a total believer in light rail, but this is about facts.

A Gallup poll adds up the damage to the GOP:

Since the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001, the Republican Party has maintained its support only among frequent churchgoers, with conservatives and senior citizens showing minimal decline.

In other words, the party of Palin and Plumber. Good luck with the rehab.

One of those Sara-Jane-Olson-but-not stories — prison escapee builds new life on the outside, only to see it come crashing down decades later — concluded here today. Susan LeFevre was released today and, surprise, said something dumb:

“Prison is a very tragic – it’s a very hard place,” she said. “People really do suffer. Beneath the laughter and the veneer, there’s suffering.”

You don’t say.

I say: Time to write that council story. And do it justice.