Why I will never stop reading newspapers: Because blogs will never greet me over my morning coffee with a headline like this:

Police: Drunken dad called drunken mom to pick up son

YPSILANTI — Police detained a Northville couple after a wife who drove to pick up her young son when her husband was stopped for drunken driving showed up even more intoxicated than he was, police alleged.

Given that no one was injured, I can enjoy this story guilt-free. Every part of it tickles me, from the Ypsilanti dateline — as funny place names go, Ypsi is pretty good, although run-of-the-mill compared to, say, Rancho Cucamonga — to the dry, pro-forma “police alleged” at the end. [Pause.] You say there’s nothing funny about two children being driven around by drunken parents? You say the rest of the world doesn’t exist for my entertainment?

Way to rain on my parade.

Things I learned while looking up links: There’s a video online called “Living the Dream in Rancho Cucamonga” — Windows Media Player and broadband connection recommended. (If I were writing a novel set there, I’d call it “East of Pomona.”) Also, Ypsilanti was named for Demetrius Ypsilanti, hero of the Greek war of independence. A bust of him stands at the base of the Brick Dick.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by?

My plan today was to bitch about Alice Waters. She is promoting a new book, and getting on my last nerve. Farhad Manjoo in Salon sums up my objections in a nutshell:

Though I have eaten some of the best food I’ve ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she’s become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us — of me! — and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It’s got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you’d spend many of your weekends.

As frequently happens to journalists when they fall under Waters’ spell, though, he’s quickly changing his tune, even after the kitchen goddess says things like, oh, “I am disappointed because (none of the presidential candidates) is talking about food and agriculture,” and then adds that food is:

…the No. 1 issue. Not one of 10. This is No. 1. It’s what we all have in common, what we all do every day, and it has consequences that affect everybody’s lives. It’s not like this is the same thing as crime in the streets — no, this is more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security — this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.

In case you people who don’t live in the market basket of America are wondering how you’re supposed to eat in the winter if you’re confined to local produce, the answer is: Root vegetables. Although Waters makes it sound so wonderful: There are turnips of every color and shape!

Yes, well.

We ate from the “100-mile menu” in Stratford last weekend, and lo it was good. But it was also harvest season. I don’t care how many shapes and colors turnips come in. They’re still turnips. I’m not giving up my supermarket just yet.

OK, this isn’t going well. Let’s cut to the bloggage:

It sounds silly, but I’ve read of this happening at least twice before: Hunter shot by dog.

I’m going to Kate’s school Halloween parade tomorrow. I’ll let you know whether the Baby Ho-bag costume story is manufactured for your holiday horror or dead-on. I suspect the former.

More to come later. When I’m awake.

Hour Detroit, the magazine I work for most regularly these days, doesn’t put its content online, so I have to find other links to tell you about a short piece I have in the current issue, about this office at the GM Tech Center in Warren.

Go ahead, click. Marvel. Then come back.

It was designed by one legend, Eero Saarinen, for another, Harley Earl, GM’s first vice president of design, the man generally acknowledged to have brought real style to the product line for the first time. It was the crown jewel in the Tech Center campus, completed after World War II and also designed by Eero Saarinen, along with his father, Eliel. The press materials GM gave me described it as “the most luxurious and romantic office ever built,” and in 1956, it probably was. It has doubtless been usurped by some Nouveau Gilded Age bozo’s realm, but it still looks totally cool and utterly modern.

Partly it’s because mid-century modern is back in a big way, but also because someone had half a brain and declined to do any major modifications over the years. The furniture’s been reupholstered here and there and carpet and drapes replaced, but otherwise that’s the same undulating wall of cherry strips and aluminum extrusions, the same built-in sofas and credenzas, and perhaps best of all, the same high-tech gadgetry.

Note the dials and gizmos behind the desk. They can do everything from open the door remotely — a big power play when the big boss remains seated behind the desk, very “show yourself out, then” — to control the lights and sound system. Just behind the pen set in this picture is the desk lamp, tucked away flush in the desktop. Press a button and it rises, unfolds and turns on. The current occupant of the office, GM VP/design Ed Welburn, demonstrated it, and it’s so mechanical — it rises and descends on what looks like bicycle chain. There’s a TV across the room that can be revealed the same way.

Needless to say, it’s huge. Earl was a big man with a big job, and he needed a big space. Welburn’s more average-size, and said you can get a sense of his predecessor’s outlines from the scale of everything — even the concept cars that Earl showed off at car shows were made for a big man with big feet. Of course, everything was bigger, then, including the future. It’s hard not to pick up that sense of IGY-type optimism from just spending a little time in this way-cool space.

My story was pegged to a major Saarinen exhibit that opens next month at Cranbrook. The PR guys who showed me around the Tech Center said the place had recently had Pentagon-level security, but was easing up a bit (although employees are still forbidden to carry camera phones in certain parts of the complex). I felt lucky to see it — the VP’s office was only one of the many design delights of the place.

Oh, and back to the first link: Make sure you scroll down to see the black-and-white photo of the then-Masters of the Universe out on a hunting expedition in northern Michigan. The picture includes not only Earl and Bill Boyer, another GM heavyweight of the time, but also Arthur Godfrey and ol’ blood-and-guts Gen. Curtis LeMay. One look at this crew and you know that whatever their flaws, they probably got those two deer the old-fashioned way, and no one got shot in the face.

Now, if you can, buy the magazine. Old media supports new media, you know.

Bloggage:

Attack of the giant turkeys. Really.

Alan’s been tuning up his dad’s thousand-year-old .22 rifle, downloading ancient manuals online, disassembling it, cleaning it. Finally he took it to a state-owned rifle range in Oakland County and tested his aim. I’d say he did pretty well for an amateur who hasn’t picked up a firearm in years:

It’s times like this I’m glad I live with a man, competent in the manly arts and all that, able to defend our home from an onslaught of squirrels, rabbits and other small game. (And believe me, around here, I think it’s entirely possible.) Then I walked through the living room and saw this:

For your information, Alan selected every item on the top of that bookcase. The “little book” on the right is an art object made by one of our neighbors in Ann Arbor and was a Christmas present in 2003; the vase on the left is Pewabic and was a Mother’s Day* gift in 2005. The little Navajo turtle pot in the middle was found by Alan at an auction last summer. He thought the bottom was getting scratched by sitting directly on the wood, so this weekend he wandered into a shop in Stratford and bought that carpet scrap, part of an antique Persian, or so the saleslady said. “It’s Persian, but it sort of looks Navajo,” Alan replied. I looked at this arrangement and said:

“You know how I know you’re gay? Because you not only bought the pot and the carpet scrap, but when you put them together you placed the pot on the scrap asymmetrically.”

“I’m rebelling against my childhood in Defiance, Ohio.”

Defiance is a very symmetrical place, to be sure. Still.

Well, we heard from Danny, in the comments in the post below. For those of you who didn’t see it, it’s here. He’s safe for now, but as we all know, the area’s still terribly dangerous. Good thoughts, prayers and positive vibes — whatever your preference — to Danny.

However, no tragedy is so great it has no comic relief. I’m glad to see other people’s kids are like my kid:

The police in the afternoon escorted some residents in northern San Diego to retrieve medicine and urgent belongings. Of course, that definition was flexible.

“Bongos? Why the heck are you bringing bongos! We don’t need bongos!” Gerald DaSilva shouted to his daughter as they raced in and out of their relatively undamaged house and loaded their pickup. “Look at all this stuff — CDs, magazines, come on, what is all this stuff? Get your phone chargers.”

Ever think of what you’d grab if you had to flee with one carload? It’s a worthwhile exercise, both in idle woolgathering and for future disaster planning. For me, in order: kid, dog, art, letters. All the rest is replaceable.

In other news at this hour, it should be obvious I got nothin’ today. Well, I got this:

“Albus Dumbledore” is an anagram of “Male bods rule, bud!” (Thanks, Vince!)

Any astute reader would have seen that one coming a mile away. More later.

* CORRECTION: It was an anniversary gift. “I don’t give you Mother’s Day gifts. You’re not my mother!” He’s right. I was confused.

What were we talking about just the other day? The need for a national water policy? How about just a little common sense? Ahem:

ATLANTA, Oct. 22 — For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life has, for the most part, gone on just as before.

The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains blithely sprayed, football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. In early October, on an 81-degree day, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million gallon mountain of snow.

In late September, with Lake Lanier forecast to dip into the dregs of “dead storage” in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.

Like lots of women, I’m a worrier by nature. I’ve been concerned about gas prices since OPEC was a new player on the scene, throughout the era of ’70s road boats and ’90s road freighters. I was an early adopter of recycling. Jimmy Carter didn’t have to tell me to turn down my thermostat; it was already lower than he recommended. So the idea that an area can be in a drought for two years and no one even considered whether it’s wise to keep watering lawns simply baffles me. (John and Sammy, my friends there, have been gray-watering for months, so I know at least some people have the sense to pay attention to the world around them.)

People have pointed out, correctly, that too much caution is as much a handicap to success as heedlessness, but I yam what I yam. My parents were Depression babies, and “waste not, want not” is part of the Midwestern DNA. It drives me nuts to see automatic sprinklers going in a downpour. I say, “Were you born in a barn?” And if my local landscape included sights like this at the reservoir that served us all, I wouldn’t be standing by smiling while someone tried to make snow on an 81-degree day.

I had a job interview a few years ago in Houston. People there crowed about how they had “air-conditioned the outdoors.” Never have I been so glad to not get the offer. Place would have made me insane.

We continue to keep our fingers crossed for our friends and readers in SoCal, no matter what idiots with a national platform say about the place. Three hundred thousand evacuations is quite a lot. Having lived here all my life, it’s hard to get my head around the conditions that could lead to such a disaster, and I give the WashPost credit for some pretty good description of the strangeness of the weather there: The winds were the Santa Anas that routinely sweep into Southern California from the northeast and funnel through its canyons, gaining speed, heat and dryness as they descend and compress. One gust was clocked at 112 mph, which I imagine would be like a blast in the face from a giant hair dryer.

I once asked a native why you couldn’t keep a house safe in a fire like that by, essentially, turning on a roof sprinkler. What if every house had a built-in water line that followed the peak of the roof, and when fires approached, you could attach hoses to the master line, turn them on, and keep it soaked down, the way firefighters will pour water on structures adjacent to out-of-control fires, so they don’t get engulfed, too?

I gather, from his reaction, that it was perhaps the stupidest remark possible, but only now do I fully understand why it wouldn’t work — the conditions are simply too super-dry and super-hot for water to do any good at all. You just have to wait for a break in the weather.

Well, it’s raining here. If I could, I’d send humidity your way.

Our friend Ashley is attending to family business today, but if he were here, perhaps he’d make the obvious New Orleans native remark: Let’s ask ourselves, is it wise to rebuild San Diego? I mean, isn’t it simply inevitable that another fire will come along someday and burn these structures all over again? Isn’t it foolish to develop areas that nature is programmed to clear out with fire every few years? Really, does it make sense?

I’ll leave you to think on that one.

In the meantime, it’s only stuff, folks. Although it’s hard to remember at a time like this.

OK, here’s some good stuff:

If you are tired of family-values Republicans being exposed as vile hypocrites you’re not going to want to read the WashPost’s detailing of Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce woes. If, however, you agree with me that this sort of thing never, ever gets tiresome, well, you’re going to lap it up like sweet, sweet cream. Sex! Money! Six pairs of sterling-silver asparagus tongs! A Lab named Beauregard!

HT to Lawyers, Guns and Money, who also claims to have turned up another reason to hate the Yankees — Derek Jeter, aka Herpes Harry.

(Herpes is making a real comeback, it would seem. All those who are free of this scourge, kiss your faithful partner, and make a note to talk to your kids about it. Valtrex or not, ewwww.)

Department of Looking on the Bright Side: At least the hand-wringing about Chief Wahoo is over for at least another year. In the meantime, for those of you who can’t leave the Cleveland Indians’ mascot alone, a modest proposal for a makeover. (Note: I have no idea how long the modest proposal’s been out there, so this may be older than dirt. I just like the idea of a ballpark with vindaloo available at the concession stand.)

Ellen DeGeneres, serial dog dumper?

Bow your heads for the Malibu Castle Kashan, destroyed by fire yesterday. And let’s all send good thoughts to L.A. Mary, Danny and our other SoCal readers who may be in harm’s way.

When I was apparently the only Democrat living in northeast Indiana, I longed for a day like today, when I would wake up to read a story like this…

More than a third of the top fundraisers who helped elect George W. Bush president remain on the sidelines in 2008, contributing to a gaping financial disparity between the GOP candidates and their Democratic counterparts. Scores of Bush Pioneers and Rangers are not working for any Republican candidate, citing discontent with the war in Iraq, anger at the performance of Republicans in Congress and a general lack of enthusiasm. More than two dozen have actually made contributions to Democrats.

…and then a story like this…

In a strong repudiation of a fellow Republican, Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, yanked his support Tuesday from GOP mayoral candidate Matt Kelty, who is under indictment on perjury and campaign finance charges. “My endorsement of Matt Kelty does not stand,” Souder said in a two-page statement released shortly after 7 p.m. He painted a picture of spurious statements from Kelty’s inner circle and said the “indictments were substantial, not superficial.”

…and then a story like this…

Fred Thompson got into the Republican race with great expectations. And sure enough, just after he got in last month, polling showed Thompson and Rudy Giuliani were just about tied for front-runner. But since then, Thompson’s taken a lot of flak for a lackluster campaign from party activists in Iowa and New Hampshire. Support for his campaign has also wavered.

…and I would think I had died and awakened in the Land of Just Desserts, or that I’d lived long enough to see the pendulum finally come swinging back. And I would pour a great cup of coffee and wander around crowing at random Republicans, “sucks to be you!”

But I don’t feel like doing that. What is this strange thing inside me that stops me from gloating? I believe it’s called “empathy.” We Democrats are long on empathy; it’s what makes others refer to us as bleeding hearts. Well, my right-wing friends, be grateful for that big leaky muscle today.

Actually, the story that most interests me is the second one, the one about the Fort Wayne mayor’s race. It’s instructive to my vast international readership (“16,836 visits came from 96 countries/territories” — Google Analytics), so please, don’t skip down to the bloggage just yet. What’s happening in that mid-size city far off the beaten path is a microcosm of what’s happening elsewhere in the party; the insulting cake is sort of a local, sweeter version of the war in Iraq. And what’s happening is this: The GOP is finally coming to grips with who’s been living under their big tent with them, and screeching, “There goes the neighborhood!”

Republicans, like Democrats, have always fallen into subgroups that have less in common with one another than perhaps was evident back when they were winning elections. For every country-club Republican who thinks some taxes are necessary and abortion should remain legal, there’s one who would happily turn every street into a toll road rather than pay for ones s/he never uses and throw women in jail for using birth control. Until recently, they thought they were all on the same team. Turns out they aren’t. Hence, delamination.

They need a Sister Souljah moment, stat. For now, I’ll just sit back and watch the show.

Anyway, none of this matters, because the deadly bacteria is going to get us all. I read about this stuff every night when I’m combing the globe for health-care news, and let me tell you, it can affect your outlook. The other day I was passed by a car with a vanity license plate: MRSA. All I could think was, “Why would someone get a plate commemorating methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus?” I was home before it occurred to me that it might have been some lady proud to call herself Mrs. Adams.

So, bloggage:

Why do I keep getting 20-percent-off coupons by mail for a chain store in Michigan, when I lived about the same distance from an identical store in Fort Wayne and never got anything? Zipskinny will tell you why. Try the comparison feature and see whether you’re moving up in the world. (And note how numbers lie; according to stats alone, the Zip code for the University of Michigan is one of the poorest in the country. I guess when you consider work-study incomes of dorm residents, sure. But please. Forest, trees, etc.)

NFL wide receiver says he never tips the pizza delivery guy, is challenged to do the job for a shift, accepts. I’m sure he got a real sense for what the job is like, what with all those TV cameras following him around.

I am refusing to root for the Tribe because that will curse the Tribe. So I am not rooting for the Tribe. But on behalf of my long-suffering, Tribe-loving friends and colleagues, I am cautiously hopeful for a pleasing outcome.

How’s that for weasely? Have a swell day, all.

The Eastern Market is my favorite place in Detroit. Every Saturday morning, thousands of shoppers from city and suburb converge on the gritty urban space to buy cheap vegetables and flowers, meat and whatnot. I have a procedure: I find a parking place at one end, walk through on a reconnaissance pass, then walk back, shopping. I know who’s selling what and who has the good stuff, but this gives me an excuse to walk through twice.

Also, there’s a surprise every week.

I’ve spent my life living in pretty homogeneous places, and at midlife, I’ve had enough of that shit. When I walk through the market stalls I can pretty reliably count on hearing at least six different languages (three of which I cannot identify, all fricatives and coughing), seeing women in saris and hijabs and men in turbans and skullcaps, being offered the Final Call, being asked to sign a petition in support of impeachment or medical marijuana or Al Gore for president, being panhandled by a pathetic homeless guy asking for “just enough to get a coney for breakfast,” and witnessing at least one purchase of live poultry, usually by an Asian man who carries the birds away by the feet, suggesting he is not buying pets.

Over at Bert’s Marketplace, they have outdoor tables set up, a giant barbecue going (manned by cooks wearing T-shirts reading, “Why you all in my grill?”) and karaoke that always seems to have a singer, even before the lunch crowd arrives. A couple of weeks ago Kate and I heard the voice of a black gospel singer belting the last lines of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Our view was blocked by a truck, and as we passed we saw the black gospel singer was actually a skinny white guy, comin’ for to carry me hoooooome.

When I’m done getting my vegetables, I cross the freeway on the pedestrian bridge, which is hung with the goods of hawkers pitching shea butter from the motherland and T-shirts with Marvin Gaye’s picture. Also, CDs that look suspiciously bootlegged, framed posters and lots and lots of incense. On the other side is the Gratiot Central Market, a mall of meat, one building for all your protein needs. It’s loud and rowdy — the clerks behind every counter encourage anarchic, step-right-up ordering, but it works, and you rarely have to wait more than a minute. Nothing is yuppified or gourmet, and in fact, there’s a fishmonger selling buffalo at something like $1.49 for four pounds. Everything is cheap, though — you can buy whole beef tenderloin for $6.95 a pound, and they’ll cut it to your order; the going rate at the upscale market close to my house is three times that.

After the meat, if it’s not too hot and I don’t have a reason to return home quickly, I allow myself a little me-time. If it’s close to lunch, a slice at Flat Planet Pizza. If Kate is with me, we buy bulk cherry sours and gummy worms at Rocky Peanut. If I wanted to, I could even get a pair of balls, but so far, I haven’t needed any.

Usually I park near a storefront that’s been turned into a rehearsal space for an African dance group. Anywhere from three to six men beat drums while women dressed in sports bras and kente cloths do the moves. It’s hard to tell if they’re rehearsing for something, holding a class or just working out; they don’t seem to mind onlookers, but they don’t explain or introduce anything, and they don’t have a bucket out for thrown dollars. They just drum and dance. The vibe is old-school black pride — long, graying dreadlocks, rasta tams and the like. Last week three young men stood on the sidewalk, watching from the other end of the fashion spectrum; they were all the way hip-hop, with the baggy pants, cocked ball caps, lots of attitude. The drummers barely gave them a glance, which seemed deliberate, or maybe it wasn’t. It takes lots of concentration to keep a steady dancing rhythm among two or three others. After a while the hip-hop guys moved on, and the dancing continued.

Sometimes people ask, “Do you go every weekend?” I reply, “As often as possible.” No one ever asks why, but if they did, I’d tell them.

Bloggage:

Why “drop a load of barrels” may replace “take a dump” in American slang.

Weingarten’s got a great poll this week, in which we are asked to judge the Style Invitational, aka The Contest For People Much Cleverer Than You. The challenge was to “take any word, remove its first letter, and redefine the result. You were allowed to insert spaces or punctuation, but not to alter the order of the letters.” The results in the poll are all pretty good; I don’t know how I’d choose between Riskies: A brand of pet food made in China and Unich: German city voted World’s Safest Town for Women.

Why I would hate to investigate traffic accidents. I read once that for all the attention homicide detectives get, the ones with the really strong stomachs are the ones who clean up our blood-slicked highways. No surprise there.

Work beckons. Have a swell day.

Kiss my ass.

And when you’re done back there, check an atlas. I know your chances of being elected president are approximately equal with Mike Gravel’s, and I know you may well have your own reasons for telling sympathetic western audiences we need a “national water policy,” because states like yours are parched and some, “like Wisconsin,” are “awash” in water. Great Lakes residents recognize this for what it is: Pouting, and a longing for a very long drinking straw. But sorry, you can’t have it. No pipelines for you. Even if every resident of Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana thought it was a great idea to, say, sell New Mexico water at a nice fair price of $3 a gallon or so, it wouldn’t work. You know why?

BECAUSE WE SHARE THE GREAT LAKES WITH CANADA, YOU DOLT.

Lake Michigan is fully enclosed by the U.S., but it’s all part of the same basin. There’s this thing, you could look it up, called the International Joint Commission. Hardly anyone outside of the eight states with Great Lakes shorelines has heard of it, but lo, it exists. From its Who We Are page: The International Joint Commission is an independent binational organization established by the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. Its purpose is to help prevent and resolve disputes relating to the use and quality of boundary waters and to advise Canada and the United States on related questions. Key word: International.

Sorry to shoot down your little trial balloon, but really, you need to get a grip. Also, build fewer golf courses.

UPDATE: He takes it all back. That is all.

Today’s Moment of Poignance, Old Newshound Division: Thousands of Michigan schoolchildren, perhaps including my own, will have to retake part of the MEAP, our state test to make sure no child is left behind (God FORBID), because of a security breach.

Which was? A newspaper doing a story on the testing revealed essay topics before all students in the state had been tested. The fear, evidently, is that perhaps an untested child in the Upper Peninsula read the website of the Jackson Citizen-Patriot, and might have gotten an early warning on the test topic. Yes, really.

And the moment of poignance? Ahem:

“It’s not like we were going to find out the answers,” Brooke Nemens, 10, a sixth-grader at L’Anse Creuse Middle School — North, said after she heard the news. “I don’t even read the newspaper.”

Well, Brooke, you should. God knows what you could have learned.

The offending newspaper in Jackson (motto: “Home of the Largest Maximum-Security Prison in Michigan, and also the Jackson Cascades“) is making the usual mea-culpa sounds, although this blog entry, by an “opinion columnist,” is sort of weird — “testicles on a pitchfork”? How times have changed. (I don’t generally talk about my last, strange months in the newspaper business, but in the interest of making wicked fun, I’ll reveal this: Upon my return to the paper post-fellowship, the editor felt compelled to propose a blogging policy. Among the proposed rules: All blogs must adhere to newspaper standards of content and propriety, which at that time included a blanket ban on the word “butt” as a description of the fleshy pads we all sit on. And now, barely three years later, a paper in a city just as conservative as Fort Wayne, arguably more so, is allowing pitchforked testicles under its online brand. Ha. Ha. Ha.)

So what do we think of Al Gore’s Nobel? Lost Bush v. Gore, but got a couple of nice consolation prizes — an Oscar and now this one, which also includes dinner with the King of Sweden. I’ll start: I’ll enjoy this if only for the apoplexy it will induce in the needs-more-evidence community.

Had a good interview yesterday, and now must go over notes to make sure I didn’t forget anything, because the subject leaves for two weeks in Fiji in about 12 hours. How’s that for a ducking-out-early excuse?

Later, maybe. If not, have a good weekend.

I was meandering through a Kurt Andersen piece in New York magazine — “The Age of Apoplexy,” fyi — when Brian dumped another link in the previous post’s comments, about some free-floating apoplexy in Indiana, that seemed to underline Kurt’s point.

When you’re looking for a topic that can be dashed off quickly, sometimes the Lord provides. Also, “Free-Floating Apoplexy in Indiana” would be a great name for a band.

Andersen’s point is, the world has grown too touchy, about practically everything:

For a while now, I’ve fretted that we’re turning into a nation of weenies and permanently enraged censors, that too many of us are afraid of letting disagreeable or uncomfortable ideas into the limelight. If it’s not the p.c. overreach of campus “speech codes” or the attempts to criminalize “hate speech,” it’s the FCC’s crackdown on cussing in PBS documentaries and the Secret Service’s keeping protesters fenced off in “free speech zones.” But during the last month, this impulse to squelch—indulged by the left and the right and the milquetoast middle—seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as if we’ve entered a permanent state of hysterical overreaction.

…During a single week at the end of September, everyone from the Daily News to the Democratic speaker of the New York City Council denounced Columbia for inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak (and Hillary Clinton joined the mob in saying he should be turned away by police—at gunpoint?—if he tried to go near ground zero); Verizon refused to broadcast NARAL’s abortion-rights text messages; Bill O’Reilly’s goofy can’t-we-all-just-get-along attempt to sow racial harmony was called racist; and Congress, after wasting its time officially condemning MoveOn.org for its stupid, over-the-top “General Betray Us” ad, was asked to waste its time condemning Rush Limbaugh’s stupid, over-the-top crack that only “phony soldiers” criticize the war in Iraq.

Not a bad summation of the case, but Andersen lives in New York, and probably is unaware of the naked mockery represented in Fort Wayne mayoral candidate Matt Kelty’s birthday cake. Feel free to examine this excellent photo of the offending foodstuff, described in the usual dead-serious newspaper prose:

The cake had a Wizard of Oz theme. It depicts an outhouse labeled “GOP HQ” sitting on top of a baseball field, believed to be reference to the $120 million Harrison Square project Kelty opposes. Resting atop the diamond and under the outhouse are legs resembling those of the Wicked Witch of the East.

The outhouse also refers to Allen County Republican Chairman Steve Shine and Allen County Commissioner Nelson Peters, whom Kelty defeated in the mayoral primary.

From the outhouse is a yellow road leading to the Emerald City. Along the road are signs referring to City Councilman Sam Talarico, R-at large, who has been an outspoken supporter of Kelty’s opponent, Democrat Tom Henry.

Not that the story lacked humor. Nothing like a quote like this to get the giggles started:

“I don’t endorse the comments made on the cake,” (said Kelty).

You have to have been to a few birthday parties in Fort Wayne to fully appreciate the humor in this story, especially birthday parties for Republican Christian knobs like Kelty, parties where the most exciting thing that could happen is someone getting a little frosting in their mustache. Always remember, though, a candidate should have plausible deniability:

Kelty said his 43d birthday party – which served as a fundraiser charging $43 per person – was a hectic event and he did not know about the cake until it was already cut and served.

Well, there you go.

Friends, I got a front-loaded morning. Might be back this afternoon. In the meantime, tell any offensive-cake stories you have.