I’m criminally tired today, to the point that a third cup of coffee is not the solution. What is? Short Attention Span Bloggage Theater, that’s what!

A lede that made me laugh:

British Oscar winner Kate Winslet has revealed exclusively to marie claire magazine that she was bullied as a child and lived with the nickname ‘Blubber’.

When I started as a freelancer, I thought maybe I’d pitch some stuff to women’s magazines, even though other freelancers warned me off with waving arms — “they’re run by insane people, they make ridiculous assignments, they change their minds when you’re 90 percent done and expect you to redo the whole thing for no more money, and they take forever to pay.” I never did much pitching to them, as it turned out; they didn’t like my ideas, so I turned my efforts elsewhere. The only person I’ve even heard of who is successful with the lady books writes under a pseudonym, so as not to sully her more upmarket reputation as an respected essayist.

But mostly I’m discouraged by, you know, reading them. Someone sat down at a keyboard and had to actually write that stuff about Kate Winslet. I hope they had as much fun writing as I did reading. It’s the “has revealed exclusively” that slays me every time, that Hedda Hopper/Deadline USA/stop-the-presses usage that only serves to underline the triviality of the revelation. It’s a staple on the gossip blogs. Someone is always revealing something exclusively to some ink-stained hack. In fact, I think they’ll keep calling themselves ink-stained hacks well into this century, long after ink has gone the way of quill pens.

That was my favorite part of “Shakespeare in Love” — the scenes of Will at work, sharpening his pens, dipping and scratching, the ink gradually spreading up his fingers. You had to be motivated to be a writer, once. Which reminds me of my favorite passage from that Christopher Buckley piece we discussed earlier in the week:

He fired up his computers. He hunched unsteadily over his keyboard. I hovered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

“I’m going to have to dictate to you,” he said.

“I’m a little rusty at WordStar,” I said. “It’s been a quarter-century or so.”

Pup still used the word-processing system he first learned in the early 1980s. Generations of his computer gurus had had to install this antiquated system in his increasingly sophisticated computers, which were like F-22 fighter jets with the controls of a Sopwith Camel.

WordStar, jeez. I hadn’t thought of that in a thousand years. I can’t even remember what word processor I used back in the Cenozoic era, on my very first IBM PC — WordPerfect, maybe? The thing required so many floppy swaps that I went back to the typewriter after the novelty wore off, and stayed there for a few years, until we bought our first Mac and adopted MS Word, a program I have come to loathe. Lately I’ve been doing most of my in-and-out writing on Google Docs. Walter Feigenson has an amusing recollection on his intersection with the Buckleys and WordStar, prompted by the same passage.

Right before my last Mac died I downloaded WriteRoom, which is sort of like WordStar for those of us who suffer from fatigue-induced ADD — green letters, black screen, no distractions.

Finally, Jim at Sweet Juniper is not only ten times the reporter I am, he puts me to shame with his curiosity. He’s the full-time dad to two little kids, and he still finds time to photograph dozens of bottles of hobo pee. If you don’t click that link, you will be sorry.

I was working my way through this story about today’s GOP dilemma — a broader party or a purer one? the headline asks — when it occurred to me this is exactly what some were saying, with great pleasure, when the current pope was elected. It would be a smaller church once Benedict XVI drove out all the lesser souls, but a purer one, and yes, that was exactly the word they used — purer. And while the Catholic church and the Republican party have very different missions in the world, it’s interesting that both are having the very same discussion, isn’t it?

I’d make my own observations about it, but as I may have told you: I’m tired. You feel free.

And now it’s 10 a.m. Work beckons.

Part of my duties at GrossePointeToday.com is compiling the public-safety reports. After three weeks of this, I’m ready to wrap myself in cotton batting, sell the bikes at a garage sale and never go outdoors again.

It’s the drunk drivers, of course. Most of these arrests are well after dark, when I’m safe in my wee bed, but the other day I came across a report for a broad-daylight arrest, on a residential street where I ride my bike. The driver blew a .23, driving with a dog in his lap. For some people, cocktail hour boils down to “any hour that I’m awake.”

This got me thinking about Alcoholics I Have Known, and the humiliations they went through en route to either sobriety or a parting of ways with your truly. Bed-wetting, seizures, property destruction, emotional devastation, and the usual run-ins with the authorities. I thought of the times I spent watching drunks make that another-round gesture at the waitress, the circling finger.

“But I don’t want another,” I might say.

“That’s OK, I’ll drink yours.” Never let a cocktail go to waste.

A year or so ago, I linked to a Washington Post profile of Elmore Leonard, the first I’ve ever read that discussed his drinking problem, conquered years ago:

One day in the early 1970s, Dutch came back from one trip to Los Angeles — where he might go through 20 drinks in a day — and started throwing up blood. It was acute gastritis. His doctor told him this was usually seen in “skid row bums.” He found himself arguing with his wife “every single night,” with him saying “vicious things, which I couldn’t believe the next day. I’d be filled with remorse.”

He moved alone into the Merrillwood Apartments, where he lived and wrote and went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and tried to stop drinking for another three years. “I was flat broke.” The book he was working on, “Unknown Man #89,” was rejected by 105 publishers before finding a home.

“It was a very difficult time,” remembers Bill Leonard.

The couple divorced in 1977, the year he had his last drink — Scotch and Vernors ginger ale one morning while shaving.

It was funny to read this, because alcoholism was a theme in his 1970s-era work, and even a casual reader would know the details came from having walked the walk — staggered the walk, maybe — to the point that I had to put “Unknown Man #89” down from time to time and let it soak in for a while. Two characters are alkies in various stages of recovery, and the picture he paints of one of them sitting in a Cass Avenue bar, ordering glass after glass of cheap white wine, is like something by Edward Hopper. He even gets the stance of the bartender down, the way he leans back against the ice machine and props one foot up behind him, hand resting on his thigh. I think I’ve been to that bar. It’s called the Good Times. Ha ha ha.

The other detail that kills me: The drunk drinks wine. Because everyone knows that if you only drink wine, you’re not an alcoholic. I know a guy whose dad killed a fifth — yes, an entire bottle — of bourbon every night between 5-something, when he walked in the door, and 8-something, when he went to bed. His mom nearly matched him. She had to have a hysterectomy, and the doctors told her she needed to at least taper off before the surgery, so she switched to wine, usually two bottles a night. The father was a high-ranking executive at a major corporation, had a Harvard MBA. He wasn’t an alcoholic because he had an important job that he was good at.

(They had four boys. One had a drinking problem and died young in a one-car fatal, another lost his medical license for self-prescribing heavy-duty narcotics, a third was diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome while still in his 30s and the fourth seems OK. The old man was told he was threatening his health with his drinking and quit in his old age, justlikethat. Well, he always did have an iron will.)

There’s another Leonard book, “Freaky Deaky,” with a character who probably does have Korsakoff’s, although it’s not stated out loud. He’s just addled from a life of drinking. I love that Scotch-and-ginger-ale detail from the writer’s life, because there’s a long passage in that book about an end-stage alky’s morning routine — his servant brings him two vodka-and-ginger-ales on a tray for his eye-opener:

Donnell would have to wait for the swollen face to show life mixed with pain, then for the man to get up on his elbow and take the drink. Donnell would then step out of the way. Soon as the man finished the drink he’d be sick starting right there if he didn’t get to the bathroom in time. Starting this wake-up service, Donnell had brought the man Bloody Marys, till he found out being sick was part of waking up. Did it one week and said, Enough of this Bloody Mary shit, cleaning up a bathroom looked like somebody’s been killing chickens in it.

Part of living with an alcoholic means cleaning up their messes — of all sorts. I never had much of a taste for it.

A note: Every so often I write about drinking in this petulant tone, and it usually kicks up a private e-mail from a reader, suggesting I’m “struggling” with drinking myself. For the record: I find myself drinking less these days than ever — hardly ever during the week, mostly only on Friday and Saturday night. Since I’m chronically sleep-deprived, one too many glasses just makes me soporific. Also, the older I get, the less I need to drink to feel it the next day. Hangovers suck. I’m lucky to down three glasses on a Saturday night, these days. So I’m cool. If I’m struggling with anything, it’s how to pass these lessons down to the next generation. Is it possible to learn about drinking without major trial and error? I wonder.

OK, then. Off to work. A bit of bloggage before I go:

Chris Matthews: Capable of learning?

I wonder if it drives Alice Waters crazy that successful cookbooks are written by people like Hungry Girl. “Cap’n Crunch Chicken” — it is to laugh. (If you click through, examine the picture and weigh in: Cheekbone implants, or are those the real thing?)

It’s not all bad news in the economy: Abercrombie & Fitch is struggling. Huzzah.

If I want to get done in time to take a sprained-knee bike ride (with wraparound ice pack), I gotta get going. Have a good weekend, all.

I generally update this blog in the morning, when I’m useless anyway. I read the papers, start the coffee, drink the coffee, open the laptop and take my morning batting practice while I wait for the French Roast to work its magic. I generally try to be done by 10 a.m., and that’s when my day really begins, work-wise.

It turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong:

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. His brother had received a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., and in his freshman year Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. During his college years, Alex took fifteen milligrams of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing “any ability to sleep for approximately eight to ten hours.” In his sophomore year, he persuaded the doctor to add a thirty-milligram “extended release” capsule to his daily regimen.

This is the lede of a fascinating story making the rounds this week, from the New Yorker. Margaret Talbot’s piece on the off-label use of prescription stimulants and other ADHD drugs is both thrilling and terrifying, the idea that there could be real help for those of us who stumble through our lives unable to concentrate, even if we have to wheedle our doctors for it. Here’s the terrifying part:

Recently, an advice column in Wired featured a question from a reader worried about “a rising star at the firm” who was “using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive.”

Welcome to the new world. Please take your Adderall and get to work.

A few years ago I read a first-person essay by someone who’d taken Ritalin without a prescription, and described the effects as nothing short of revolutionary — the “better than well” sense of energy and focus that allowed the writer to not only work, but work better than he ever had in his life, to concentrate for long periods, to ignore distractions, to finish his novel. How easy it would be to become dependent on such a drug. How simple it would be to fit it into your life.

I can’t believe my generation spent all those years sitting around in smoky living rooms smoking pot, when we could have been swallowing Ritalin and accomplishing something.

(As you can tell, the French Roast is kicking in.)

It’s trendy to refer to our nation’s efforts against self-administered chemicals as “The War on Some Drugs,” or “The War on Some Classes of People Who Use Some Drugs.” You read stuff like this, and you see why it’s funny — because it’s true.

OK. It seems some of you are still back in yesterday’s thread, arguing about torture. Here’s a new starting place for that throwdown, a pretty fair-minded look at how, exactly, we determine what “high-value information” is and how it’s obtained.

If you’d rather take an easier road, torture drives Shep Smith to forget the cardinal rule of live broadcasting.

Meanwhile, why do people bring infants into homes with aggressive dogs? Why, why, why?

And now it’s 10 a.m., time to get to work. Fully engaged, but I could use some Ritalin.

As I may have mentioned here a time or two hundred, I’m a retired equestrienne. One of these days, when I get a working scanner again, I’ll put some pix up of me in my riding togs, jumping fences on my very expensive steed, who was only expensive to me; among people who ride, he was little better than a plug. I rode with 14-year-old girls whose doctor daddies thought nothing of dropping a mid-five-figure sum on a well-trained thoroughbred for their darling daughters, and even that was on the cheap end, even then. At the elite levels, a five-figure sum is the monthly bill.

But never mind that. I did my time in the saddle, and while I never had the build or the talent or the budget to be a contender, I didn’t totally disgrace myself, and I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned was how to fall off.

Falling from a horse, in our culture, is made out to be far scarier than it is. In a movie, if a pregnant woman gets on a horse, she will be suffering a miscarriage within minutes. Bonnie Blue Butler only had to put the fence rails up too high to meet her tragic fate. And while there are a number of horrible accidents in riding competitions every year, they are exceptional. People with fancy horses tend to work them in riding rings with deep, soft footing, and what’s good for Dobbin’s legs is also good for your sorry ass when you land in it. Not that it doesn’t hurt, but unless you come off head-first or somehow land on the jump or the rail, chances are you’ll be just fine. The classic riding injuries are not Christopher Reeve’s broken neck but the big three — broken wrist and/or collarbone (from putting your hands out as the ground comes up to meet you), and cracked ribs.

Which brings us to Madonna, who either needs to toughen up or stay out of the saddle. I’ve dismounted more horses the hard way than she’s dismounted boyfriends, and never once did I have to go to the hospital — on a backboard, no less — for what turned out to be bruises. I thought she was Miss Super Fitness. Just get up, dust off your ass, lead your mount back to the block, get back on and finish the class. That’s how the tough girls do it.

My trainer didn’t coddle people who fell. She wasn’t a tyrant about it; a kid who was honestly terrified by the experience wasn’t forced back into the saddle at gunpoint or anything. But she never made a big fuss one way or another. It was like oopsy-daisy, everything OK? Fine, up you go and pick up a posting trot. As all parents know, the bigger the fuss you make over any injury, the more the injured party is frightened. However, I get the feeling that making a fuss over Madonna is pretty much the point of her existence, so I’m not surprised she was content to stay immobile on the ground while worried faces and EMTs peered down at her.

BTW, I was dumped because of “paparazzi,” too. I could never afford a good, well-trained horse, so I rode a couple of young, spooky ones. A barking dog, a loud muffler, a sudden hand gesture or windy day could turn them into the sorts of animals who disappear from underneath you and simultaneously reappear 10 feet to the left. You felt like Wily Coyote, running off the cliff. As I picked myself out of the dirt, I’d tell my trainer, “(X) spooked him.” She’d say, “Learn to stay on your horse.”

In Madge’s defense, however, one of my favorite lines from Thomas McGuane, as a character is riding the spooks out of a young stud colt: “By your mid-thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day it admits you.” True dat.

OK, some quick bloggage for, what else, a dreary Monday:

How fast food can kill you. It has nothing to do with cholesterol.

Dear Mr. President, this is how letters get to your desk.

It’s a good thing Berkeley has so many rich people. White roofs for all!

Why I keep fivethirtyeight.com bookmarked, even though the election’s over: For posts like this, about Minnesota’s Senate election.

Finally, since we seem to be heavy on the popculch today, to the next person who sends me the Susan Boyle video:

Stop it. I don’t care how much you were moved, wowed, whatevered. I don’t care. Don’t you realize how condescending this all is? Don’t you know how much you’re being played? Is there nothing Simon Cowell can’t make a buck from? You know why Susan Boyle is such a phenomenon? It’s not because she’s a great singer; how would anyone know? There are two recordings of her singing two songs extant in the world. No, Susan Boyle is a phenom because she’s ugly. Go ahead, say it: Ug-ly. Leave the nicer euphemisms — frumpy, dowdy — for the weak-willed. The bottom line is, when someone is ugly in our culture, we expect nothing good from them. The idea that a ugly woman could open her mouth and have something beautiful come out flummoxes us — how could she have been cultivating a love for music when she was neglecting her eyebrows and fitness routine so? Doesn’t she know our priorities? If a gorgeous woman had come out and given the exact same performance, you probably wouldn’t even know about it.

The next step, after celebrating Susan Boyle for being a fine singer, is a YouTube video of some street-looking black kid who steps to a microphone in a speech competition and delivers a perfect reading of a Shakespearean sonnet. Look, he’s so articulate! Just be aware.

Also, pleeze: Does anyone honestly believe the judges didn’t know what was coming? Do you think people make it onstage at shows like that without a single pre-performance screening? You think Simon didn’t know the camera was on him, red light lit, when he smiled? How dumb are we?

Pretty dumb, I’d say.

Did you know the Michigan Militia still exists? The headline on Charlie LeDuff’s column tells us “anger boils” among them, which is a little like observing that the laws of gravity were still in force this morning.

Anger is the point of the Michigan Militia. During their moment in the sun, in the early- to mid-90s, they were the O.G.s of the nutso paranoiacs. They harbored Tim McVeigh for a time, but he left out of frustration that all they wanted to do was talk and bitch and maybe shoot beer cans in the woods. (I always think of Terry Nichols, McVeigh’s feckless, dim-bulb accomplice, as their poster boy.) The closest they came to action was when they hatched a plot to forcibly take Camp Grayling, the sprawling northern Michigan National Guard training camp. It’s an article of faith among certain lunatics that it’s a “FEMA concentration camp” just waiting to be activated by order of our Muslim president. Like pretty much everything the Michigan Militia put its collective mind to, the plot came to naught.

Now they’re more like O.D.s — original disgruntled. As LeDuff explains:

The coordinator of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia is a postman. The corpsman of the Lenawee Volunteer Militia works in the paint and hardware department at Wal-Mart. He earns $11.25 an hour. His son, the major, works in a group home for the developmentally disabled. He earns $9.50 an hour. Their comrade, the commander, was laid-off from his job at a vitamin store. He earns nothing.

This sets the scene for a report from the MM’s field day, which was a combination picnic/shootenanny/tax protest. The mood was, well, you know:

“I’ve seen a 35 percent reduction in pay,” said …Cyn Soldenski. “I bought a house 18 months ago. The interest rate is going to reset and I’m so far underwater I’m going to drown. We’ve got to take the stupid government and throw it out.”

If you listen to this group you begin to realize that they cannot take over the world; they probably couldn’t take over their brother’s trailer payments. They are a restless and frustrated group: a hodgepodge of ex-farmers, ex-military, ex-truck drivers, ex-factory workers, wipers of other people’s bottoms. Many are firmly among the state’s 20 percent unemployed or underemployed.

I’m sure if you told Cyn Soldenski we just did take the stupid government and throw it out — last November, you might recall — she’d laugh in your face and say something about the lack of difference between a Republican and a Democrat, and from her point of view, she’s right. The government has nothing to do with her free-floating anger, except in the sense of certain economic policies which were probably inevitable under all the major political parties. She and others like her are economic cannon fodder, like Tiffany Clay of yesterday’s dispatch from Newark, minus 50 IQ points and plus (take your pick or add your own) a teen pregnancy, a mother who drank, teachers who didn’t give a shit, town fathers who got old and tired and sold their light-industry plants to international concerns and retired to Arizona.

Every so often people tell me they don’t understand how I can drive through certain parts of Detroit, how terrifying it is. I’ll tell you what terrifies me: When we go to our cottage in Branch County and maybe attend the county fair, where we see the future haunting the midway — teens and young adults with dead eyes, neck tattoos, 50 extra pounds of fat, infants in strollers, the boys aping the fashion choices of hip-hop artists and the girls smoking generic cigarettes. The smart ones have already left town, many via military enlistments. What will become of these little towns with their empty downtown storefronts and big-box sprawl on the fringe? Will everyone end up working at Meijer or Wal-Mart? Given that choice, I might buy a gun, too.

Yesterday I followed a link from another site and ended up here. Matt Taibbi:

The reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

We’ve had populist uprisings in this country before, most notably in the late 19th century, when a whole generation of similarly idled and angry farmers raised their voices against a class of tycoons and easy-credit ripoffs. They had their moment and withered quickly, swept away, or swept along, by the tide of modernism. Something will clear these folks out of the northern Michigan woods the same way. But they’re having babies, too, and last I checked, a lot more than I did.

Or maybe they’ll run into that class of yuppies who’s simmering in traffic in some awful Midwestern city, with a good job but without a sense of purpose, dreaming of cashing out, buying a few acres in some beautiful, pure place far off the grid, and setting up a subsistence farm of a few goats, chickens, a big garden and of course a little patch of marijuana…

I’m seeing a movie in my head, right now. Comedy gold!

So that was my tax day, and today is my housecleaning day. I’m starting to feel the urge, a thousand screaming caffeine molecules telling me it’s time to vacuum. Have fun in the comments, and I’ll pop back in from time to time.

This is spring break in our neck of the woods. As usual, we didn’t go anywhere. I thought just this one year we’d have company, but it seems the need to escape a Michigan winter trumps recessionary income downturns. Also, everyone in Michigan has a relative in a warmer state, so even if you can’t afford a cruise, you can visit the siblings or parents in Clearwater for a few days. So Kate is stuck moping around the house. Yesterday’s weather made it worse — a chill all-day rain with temperatures in the 40s. At midafternoon I cracked, and we went to the mall.

I needed a new printer, anyway, a scan/fax model for those times when I need to do one or the other. Kinko’s charges $3 a page, anything out of the area code is considered long distance, and yes, you must have a cover sheet, although they cut you a break on that — it’s only a buck. Freelancers have to fax a lot of tax forms. And of course, on the next rainy day when everyone’s out of town, I can send the kid to the printing station to scan her butt and face.

Went to the Apple store — let’s pay top dollar! The geniuses had but three models in stock, none on the floor, and gave me that Genius Bar smile that suggests printing is so last century, it’s kind of cute that I asked for it. We left without one, and as a consolation prize, I bought Kate a pair of red Chuck Taylor high-tops, on sale. Chucks are very big with her crowd. I tried on a pair and marveled that men once played basketball at a professional level in these things. No wonder the dunk is a fairly recent innovation in the game.

And today? More shopping! Today we’re going for the full Monty, an hour’s drive to the world’s biggest outlet mall, or something. All I know is, they have an Aeropostale store, which will take care of the bulk of Kate’s list (brand loyalty, thou art a 12-year-old girl) and Under Armour, which will take care of mine. The rest of the time we will wander and drink Starbucks. Female bonding.

I wonder if we’ll see any teabaggers along the way. If so, I’ll take pictures and notes.

We have some amusing bloggage today:

Sandra Tsing Loh takes a second look at Paul Fussell’s “Class.”

Couldn’t the Obamas have found a dog that was somewhat less adorable? I’m starting to think they’re not playing fair; can’t they conjure some asymmetry or imperfection to make the rest of us feel less bewitched? Meanwhile, my “awwww” at Bo’s appearance on my TV last night prompted Alan and Kate, one floor up, to say, “It must be video of the new puppy.” Those mismatched white socks! That fluffy coat! I am entranced. (Oh, and sorry, but I’m not buying the allergy-free line, either. I’d tell the pediatrician: “It’s a big house” and leave it at that.)

Jeff TMMO just posted this in the previous thread, so let me post it here, another elegant Dan Barry dispatch from, whaddaya know, Jeff TMMO’s hometown. It’s about the difficulty of nurturing art and an artistic temperament in a place like Newark, Ohio. I was struck by this passage:

Here in Newark, half the students are poor enough to receive lunch free or at a discount. The system also has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio; nearly a third of the high school students do not graduate. That elevated percentage seems out of place given the Middle America setting, but officials have a theory:

Back in the day, you could drop out and still get a good job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town. You could pay the mortgage, buy a car new, take holiday trips — all without a high school diploma.

“Now those jobs have gone away,” says Keith Richards, the city’s schools superintendent. “But the mindset has not.”

It echoes something I heard on the radio yesterday: In the latest survey of Michigan parents, half — HALF — thought their kids would be able to earn a middle-class living with only a high-school education. Half. Earlier in the show, the host referred to the auto industry as “economic crack.” A lot of people have yet to detox, apparently.

Me, I’m off to spend a portion of my tax refund.

The New York Times now runs ads on its front page and, occasionally, a different sort of report on what journalism is becoming. Yesterday there was a pretty good piece on “hyperlocal” websites, and since that’s what I’m trying to do, of course I read it avidly.

And I see my/our problem: We’re too tied to actual human beings. You know — storytellers.

It seems, if you want to attract the big journalism-foundation grants and venture-capital bucks, you have to figure out a way to do it without people. The ultimate hyperlocal site, I gather, is something like Outside.in, which:

…publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate.

Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web.

Indeed, when I go to Outside.in it uses its IP-sniffers to point me to “Recent Stories and Discussions in Grosse Pointe Farms.” There’s a single link, to a two-week-old story from Crain’s Detroit Business about an earnings report from a Farms-based company. No discussions (or “Discussions” — I know I’m screwed when the thing that bugs me most about this outfit is that it Doesn’t Know What Should Be Capitalized). Seven-point-five million. I’m astonished. Do you know what my two partners and I could do with $7.5 million?

More promising is EveryBlock, started by some guy who got a big grant from the Knight Foundation. It’s deeper, but again — it relies on the fact someone else is out there doing the shoe-leather work, to which it links. To be sure, it does some interesting stuff with data feeds, public documents and clickable-nine-ways-to-Sunday zip-code-based information, but what is missing? A heartbeat. Fingerprints. The hot, stinky breath of a human being who looked at those crime reports and tried to see a pattern or — what’s the word I’m looking for? — oh, right:

A story.

Most promising of all is Patch, which still believes in human beings. It has editors and reporters, runs the sort of pictures newspapers don’t run anymore (and let me just add: for good reason). It Twitters, it has mojo (mobile journalists), it has bells and whistles galore. Patch is the closest to what we’re doing, with one key difference: It has money. Seven software engineers?! My head is spinning. Also vice presidents, directors of, and the inevitable Jeff Jarvis, who I’m going to bet is not working free of charge.

We have: We three, plus some volunteers, many of them bought-out and otherwise idled Detroit newspaper journalists. We have: No money other than our own, although we’re finalists for a grant in the low five figures. I’m interested in harnessing the power of the bell and the whistle, but I remain, at the center of it all, stubbornly old school. Bells and whistles are only tools. Story is the key. I believe in stories. I’m so old I smell of Dentu-Creme, but I believe in stories.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to update the public-safety map. I’m groping toward a voice for this little corner of the site. Maybe the Arcata Eye’s, crossed with my own. Need to brush up on my limerick-writing skills.

By the way, while I was in one of the Pointe police departments yesterday, gleaning what I could from the reports, the conference-room TV was tuned to Fox News. They ran a breathless promo for the tea-party protest coverage, which I gather has been set for this weekend. Tea partiers are upset over taxation, they say. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most of these people, theoretically under $250K annual income themselves, getting a tax cut under the new regime? I’m confused.

And I see Minnesota now has its second senator. Can it be over now? Doubtful.

Happy Tax Day eve to you. Get filing.

I wandered through the room as Lester Holt was laying out the pirate-rescue details on NBC, and of course I stopped. (I cannot walk past Lester Holt without stopping, I am so fascinated by his utterly immobile upper lip. My old neighbor, the ex-dental hygienist, theorized he’d had extremely good cleft-lip surgery at some point in his life. But never mind that.)

What fascinated me this time was the animation of the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips. They needed an animation — a re-creation, based on information provided by the Navy — because of course reporters weren’t there. I don’t know how close the U.S. news media was able to get to the scene, but the correspondent on the scene was in Kenya, so that’s a pretty good bet. Anyway, the animation was very odd. You know those caricatures you see lately, where the caricature is all done in Photoshop? (Example.) No need to learn to draw when you can emphasize features with digital tools. It was like that — the “ocean” was plainly a water tank, the “ships” were toy models and the Somali pirates were symbolized by three black silhouettes; when they were “shot,” the silhouettes popped into the air and then flew out of frame.

Oh, hell — let’s just go spelunking for the damn clip. Here it is. Sorry about the Applebee’s ad.

I’m not opposed to re-creations or animated graphics. This one was just weird. And sorry, but I’m a word person. Describe it simply and clearly, and I can see it in my head. Lots of people probably think a lifeboat resembles a giant rowboat, however, like the ones in “Titanic.” So I can see the problem.

By the way, is there anything to these reports, about why the pirates feel justified in robbing American and European ships? I know, I know — failed state, warlords, etc. But if Italian mafias were shipping toxic wastes to my coastline to dump, I’d be pissed, too.

How was your Easter? Mine was lovely. We went to the Detroit Institute of Arts, not to see the Norman Rockwell exhibit or anything, but just to poke around. I hadn’t been since the big reno/reorg a couple years ago, so that was interesting — it really is a better museum now, with rooms grouped around ideas rather than strictly by periods. (Two ways of looking at an arch, Gothic and Renaissance, for instance.) Alas, we couldn’t linger with the Diego Rivera murals; there was some sort of presentation going on there, a dramatic storytelling thing that required a loud, screechy voice that echoed around the space and was not exactly conducive to art appreciation. Another time.

I also stayed away from my computer for much of the weekend, although I did finish my taxes and discovered, mirabile dictu, I’m getting a refund. Nothing like having a little money worry go away to make a person feel mellow and happy. Which is why I don’t understand Caroline Kennedy these days — glutton for punishment, or does she really think these things should be hers? The Vatican? Why not Ireland, or Luxembourg, or some nice, inconsequential minor principality with good food and a decent party circuit? Who in their right mind would want to grovel before Ratzi? As Michael Wolff puts it:

Caroline Kennedy has come to represent something that makes people crazy. Whatever she wants, people don’t want her to have. This is partly because she can’t but seem to act like she’s entitled to it. And it is partly because she does not seem to want to bother erecting the pretense that she is qualified for it (after all, she, of all people, knows that most politicians are not brain surgeons). And it is partly because her desperation is so apparent. She needs a job. Any job. Please. Which is not a good way to present yourself.

Well, yeah. Is being rich that boring? Having made one’s choice (to be quiet and wealthy and good), is it so hard to realize it doesn’t come with all the benefits one would like? This girl needs a good therapist.

And that’s it for me, today. Off to speak to a journalism class out in Dearborn and then to contribute to my IRA. And then to e-file.

I sat around for 90 minutes this morning, trying to stir my brain noodles into something resembling a finished pasta dish, but bleh. Thought I’d go pump some iron and return improved, but it’s no better.

Instead, here’s a story to give you an icky thrill: NYC cop says he tested positive for cocaine through “passive ingestion,” via his girlfriend. While we admire the policeman for being, er, sensitive to a woman’s needs, we also think he’s a big ol’ liar.

So you guys take it away, today. I already feel myself sliding into a holiday-weekend head. Back later, mebbe.

I posted this picture on Facebook yesterday:

It’s from my Russian teacher’s fascinating library of Soviet-era children’s books. This is in a beautifully illustrated picture book about the alphabet, pitched at, I’d estimate, the kindergarten cohort. Because this was published in 1962 or so, and because this was the Soviet Union, the parade of alphabet pages are interrupted by propaganda. The sausage-fingered Ukrainian above is, of course, Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev. The copy tells us he is a soldier for peace, ha ha. Sometimes peace needs to be imposed at the point of a bayonet. I’m impressed at how the artist captured his essential peasant nature — check out the fit of that jacket around the shoulders. And the brow.

Later in the same volume is a page about Vladimir Lenin. I regret I didn’t take a picture, but I was too amused by the text under his portrait, which reads:

Lenin is dead.
Lenin is alive.
Lenin will rise again.

Just a little mystery of faith for you Catholics to contemplate during Holy Week. You gotta think that was deliberate, but Catholicism isn’t so big in Russia, and I’m not sure that passage (“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”) is part of the Orthodox liturgy. One thing about the internet is, you can throw any question out there and someone will answer it in an hour or two.

How is your week going? Mine is the usual train wreck, complicated by my glance at the calendar Monday to discover it is now the second week in April and I haven’t even started our taxes yet. So that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of today, and maybe the rest of the week. Unholy week, in my case.

So before I send you off with a half-baked effort, here’s a story from the NYT’s front page today, about good Samaritans using social networking and other digital technology to return found objects to their rightful owners:

Companies are also moving to exploit the fact that millions of people have published information about themselves on the Web. Traditional lost-and-founds are migrating online, and a batch of start-ups and hobby Web sites have sprouted with the aim of harnessing people’s altruistic impulses to return lost items.

“Generally when people are given the opportunity to do something good for someone else, they’ll take it,” said Matt Preprost, a college student in Canada who has created a blog, Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures, to reunite cameras and their owners.

The opening anecdote is about a lost camera and the Scottish woman who did not rest until she had returned it to its rightful owners, a couple who thought they had lost all their wedding and honeymoon pictures.

And how coincidental that Metafilter led me to Is This Your Lost Luggage, a site kept by a guy who buys abandoned bags at auction, then photographs their contents. You can claim your property if you don’t mind knowing a total stranger has taken a picture of your “Daddy’s Girl” t-shirt, Roxy bikini and green-and-pink hippopotamus PJs.

If you ever wondered why mystery novels are popular, here’s why. People love to solve a mystery.

The story touches on the findees, some of whom “feel weird” that others were able to find out so much about them, even if it was for a good cause. Good grief. We live in Overshare Nation and this surprises anyone? Be grateful you got your stuff back and shut up about it. As Coozledad pointed out so eloquently the other day, your damn mail carrier knows far more about you than you might think, let alone Facebook.

Finally, I’ve started taking special notice of a few talking heads/bloggers, who are ignoring the conventional wisdom about Michelle Obama — that she looks great — and instead picking nits over her wardrobe, that sleeveless is the same as topless, that cardigan sweaters are tacky, blah blah blah. Oscar de la Renta seems mainly peeved that she’s not wearing more Oscar de la Renta. I know those pink knit suits are popular with some people — hello, Mrs. John Roberts — but for the life of me I don’t understand why people are so up in arms, ha, about Mrs. O. It’s not like she wore a tank top and trucker hat to Buckingham Palace. The NYT celebrates the end of Wife Wear.

You can sense I’m putting off the inevitable. Time to install Turbo Tax and do the job I really should delegate to someone smarter than me.