Why don’t we just put a template for this story on a macro on standard newsroom computer systems? You could plug in the details, and it would really save a lot of time.

UPDATE: This blog will be respecting Owen Wilson’s request for privacy at this difficult time. Please, do not discuss Mr. Wilson’s personal problems in the comments. General comments about Wilson’s career choices, performances and other public statements, as well as statements of support, are just fine, however. Let the healing begin.

Well, I got nuthin’ for you folks today, mainly because I gotta get somethin’ for somebody else. But we have tasty bloggage. Mull. Discuss. And check back later, when my brain will be a little more sprightly, eh?

As an occasional viewer of “Animal Cops: Detroit” I know my new hometown is to dogfighting what it is to, well, the NBA, MLB, NHL and (to a far lesser extent) NFL — i.e., a contender. Some bastard’s always getting busted with all manner of grisly training devices in his dank basement. If it’s any consolation, I can hardly see how they’re disposing of the losing pit bulls in the manner Vick was accused of, when it’s plain they’re simply released into city neighborhoods to bring their special kind of magic to the urban prairie.

This WashPost piece takes a look at the subculture of “dog men,” a widespread, underground network of fighting operations that evidently included Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels. (Why not “Kennelz?” I wonder.) Interesting.

In my time as a sports copy editor, I became familiar with many Toy Department contenders for the Academy of the Overrated, but none so deserving as Stephen Smith, aka the How-EV-uh Guy. (That was his ESPN catch phrase.) Well, someone agrees with me; he’s being stripped of his Philadelphia Inquirer column. Mitch Albom feels a great disturbance in the Force, or maybe it’s just his testicles snuggling up closer to his body cavity.

And finally, by popular demand…

The Stouder Family portrait, Simpsonized! (That’s Brian and Pam, and their kids, L-R, Shelby, Chloe and Grant.) Have a swell day.

Lately signs have been going up in the neighborhood — OUR TROOPS HOME NOW. It reminds me of 2003, when the signs in Fort Wayne said PRAY FOR OUR TROOPS and the ones in Ann Arbor commanded NO BLOOD FOR OIL and others advertised ANOTHER FAMILY FOR PEACE. Ann Arbor was a photo-negative version of Fort Wayne, I told people at the time; I’m sure it still is.

I never thought the war was a good idea, but I hoped it wouldn’t be a disaster. I hoped it would go the way we were promised it would, that the casualties would be minimal, the shooting brief, the outcome something not too shameful. Well, it turned out to be anything but those things. For most of 2003 I was living in Indiana, and I remember the runup to the invasion, the endless letters to the editor about the importance of supporting the troops and the tiresome repetition of what even then were talked-out talking points, about “fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here.” There was just so much of that crap. Alan was scowled at in a news meeting when he suggested, not long after Mission Accomplished, that we were going to be in Iraq for quite a bit longer. All of this — and, to be sure, a few other events in my life — made me feel I was regarding my community from behind a thick sheet of plexiglass. I’d sit in meetings, interviews, and want to ask, Who the hell are you people?

Things change, and I apologize for woolgathering. It’s just that here we are, four years later, and everything’s different, eh?

Sunday the New York Times ran “The War as We Saw It,” a column with seven bylines, all sergeants and specialists fighting in Iraq. The short version: We’re being lied to, yet again. The surge isn’t working. The situation is FUBAR. No one has a clue. I was struck by this paragraph:

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

That’s my emphasis, by the way. To save the village, we must destroy it, in other words. Saving ourselves, eh, that’s another matter. It’s times like these that I think the Rose Garden doesn’t need a wedding, it needs a hanging. Several hangings.

How depressing. Sorry about that. How about a Simpsons avatar instead?

It’s amazingly accurate, everyone who knows me will attest. Get your own.

I guess I’m not surprised to hear “John From Cincinnati” isn’t being renewed. The show really was a disappointment. (Did I watch all 10 episodes? Of course. That’s how I know.) I preserved high hopes to the end, thinking perhaps the promo guys were telling the truth when they said “all will be explained” in the final episode.

It wasn’t. As far as I can tell, God sent JFC to earth to save a surf-gear business, but I could be wrong. The show sort of went off the rails for me after John made his speech at the barbecue a few episodes back, a sermon that sounded like it was written, but not delivered, by potheads on the fifth day of a smoke-a-pound binge. A commenter at Television Without Pity said it best: Dear Mr. Milch, Please, put the drugs away. When the series was debuting, he (David Milch) went on Craig Ferguson’s show and said, “The wave — which I’m told is what surfers ride — is the only visible embodiment of what physicists tell us all matter is composed of, which is particles held together by some kind of magnetic or molecular force, and that’s what makes the waves move. And if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of man, he might use some drugged-out surfers.”

My gut reaction to this was: What b.s. But I wanted to believe. And I didn’t learn much about the deepest nature of man, except that Milch really needs to lay off the pottymouth dialogue and if I never hear the phrase “whippin’ his skippy” or “dump out” again, I can die happy.

Ah, well. “The Wire” will be with us eventually. Some compensation. And “Big Love” is really hitting its stride this season. I’ll keep HBO another year, I think.

You know what day we got digital cable with HBO? September 11, 2001. I could hardly bear it when the cable guy had to disconnect service briefly to get us hooked up to the ones-and-zeros feed. I told him as much when he got it reconnected, and said to just leave it on CNN, I’d show myself around the premium-channel landscape later. He said, rolling his eyes, “Yeah, man, this stuff” — gesturing to the carnage in New York — “it’s crazy.” Not the word I would have used, but OK.

A little pre-weekend bloggage, then?

Is she really going out with him? Not only that, they’re engaged. Jenna “the drunk one” Bush snags a pasty-faced fiancee. Let’s hope they don’t wind up on that John Waters show.

Make cruel fun — you know you want to. Back later.

The big news from the Hoosier state is pretty big, as Hoosier news goes: The Republican nominee for mayor of Fort Wayne was indicted yesterday. Nothing like a perp walk in handcuffs to cast a pall on a campaign, I always say. The nominee is a squeaky-clean kind of guy; when he was doing some last-minute primary campaigning at stoplights in the spring, he ran across none other than Alex, our regular commenter here at NN.C. The candidate, Matt Kelty, asked for his vote. Alex said he lived outside the city limits and couldn’t help.

“Pray for me, then,” he said, dashing off to the next potential voter. This is the sort of thing people say to one another in Fort Wayne, but not so much in political campaigns. But that’s Kelty. So to see him indicted on nine counts of various campaign-finance law violations, seven of them felonies and two for perjury (!?!), this picture of a nice young man — well, it’s a shock.

The primary battle was a two-man race, with most of the old GOP guard supporting Nelson Peters, a good ol’ boy county commissioner. He was set to win in a walk when Kelty upset him the old-fashioned way — by running harder and having the luck of a record low turnout. The finance-law violations came up pretty quickly, when Kelty amended his reports to say, Oh, that $158,000 loan I made to my own campaign? Turns out that money came from someone else. See, he loaned it to me to loan to the campaign, and I probably should have made that clearer. No biggie, right? Yes, a biggie. If campaign-finance law has one purpose above all, it’s to make financial issues transparent. Voters have a right to know who’s backing whom with cash. This looked like a pretty bold case of money laundering to conceal a major donor, and it went before the three-member election board, two Rs and one D, which split 2-1 in Kelty’s favor. The D on the board asked the county prosecutor for an investigation, and lo and behold, the investigation turned up the nine counts.

This is a blessing for journalists in a slow news month in an election year, but it was hard to watch the video of Kelty getting into the police car with his hands cuffed in front of him; the man is more to be pitied than reviled, perjury or no. One had the sense of a lamb being led to slaughter, of a guy who just looked up in the middle of the road and saw a bus coming down on him. He’s a political novice (obviously), and he’s in over his head. This is only his second campaign (I think); he gave a scare to a lazy incumbent a few years ago, and I think he spent election night having red-faced men with three bourbons under the belt tell him he has a future in this party. Son, you’ll be mayor one day. He got mixed up with the wrong crowd, i.e., Allen County Republicans. That’ll learn him. Unfortunately.

I have a barn to build and a day to do it, as the Amish say, so scant bloggage today:

Only in Indiana: Deep-fried Pepsi. (Note the picture.)

Isn’t it weird when you find a picture of yourself on Flickr that you didn’t know existed? (I added the notes.)

More maybe later, when I have some time to breathe. I know you folks can take care of yourselves in the comments anyway.

I don’t know why you read the newspaper. I read it to fan the always-flickering coals of irritation at the continuing degradation of the language of Shakespeare and Lindsay Lohan.

From a weekend review of “Skinwalkers”:

The werewolves ride into town on motorcycles, sporting dark sunglasses, shaggy but mostly human except for pearly white, canine teeth.

There shouldn’t be a comma between “pearly white” and “canine.” I guess if I looked through my Strunk & White I could find the precise reason, but I play by ear and I say no. That started me thinking about how you use a comma when you have multiple adjectives in front of a noun. I would write, “MaryMarv* lived in a big blue house,” but also “MaryMarv* is an arrogant, elitist asshole.” I’m sure both are correct, but I don’t know precisely why. Some nice English-teaching nun in the readership, tell me. (Here’s my case: There’s no natural pause between big and blue if you read it aloud, and there is between arrogant and elitist. As I said, I play by ear.)

The next case was more irritating. The story was about a teacher at a local school who’s had some public problems with her temper of late:

Those two incidents earned her a one-day suspension and rebuke this year from D. Allen Diver, then the school’s principal.

“Unfortunately, these patterns of berating individuals have happened far too often during my six years at South,” Diver wrote July 11. “I am continually forced to diffuse situations that you have created because you sometimes appear to speak without thinking or have sent e-mails that are inflammatory.”

Educators are sometimes the most enthusiastic misusers of the language, but this one drives me crazy. It’s “defuse,” not “diffuse,” D. Allen Diver, please. I see this all the time. You defuse a touchy situation the way you defuse a bomb. You diffuse a bad smell by fanning a magazine in the bathroom before you leave. My Oxford American says:

USAGE: The verbs diffuse and defuse sound similar but have different meanings. Diffuse means, broadly, ‘disperse’; defuse means ‘remove the fuse from (a bomb), reduce the danger or tension in.’ Thus: Cooper successfully diffused the situation is incorrect, and Cooper successfully defused the situation is correct.

Of course, the reporter was quoting from a letter in a personnel file, but still. Either correct it or ‘sic’ it. (For continued friendly access to D. Allen Diver, I strongly recommend the former solution.)

Refreshed by curling my lip in scorn at the peons still employed in newspapering, I can then go about my day with a song in my heart.

There wasn’t much written about the gay debate Thursday. I know it was called something with “human rights” in the title, but I will think of it as the gay debate, since it aired on Logo, the gay cable channel, and featured gay questioners, and had the gayest audience ever, including the inevitable elderly lesbian couple, one with gray mullet. I had it on in the background while I worked, and have a few thoughts, none especially deep, but I thought it was sort of sweet and earnest — everyone had that “I can’t believe this is happening…to ME!” thing going on. You don’t see a lot of amateur television anymore, especially when presidential candidates are concerned (all Democrats, and I missed the part where they explained why). And the Logo production was decidedly amateur. The set was sort of homemade looking and some of the questioners looked just gobsmacked to be there, and yes I’m talking about you, Melissa Etheridge, and the post-game interviews were conducted by a young man who looked like he got out of high school five minutes ago. But that gave the whole production charm. Really.

Hillary sort of wiped the floor with everyone else, which she’s been doing consistently this season, although Obama and Edwards held their own. But perhaps only on Logo would you hear someone, when asked for a reaction afterward, say, “She looks really good in coral.” By the time the wrap-up turned to somebody I’d never heard of for the “lighter side” reaction, it was probably inevitable that Dennis Kucinich would be called “adorable. …like someone born in a flower.”

As a native Buckeye, I’ve thought of Kucinich a lot, but never like that.

Speaking of Ohioans, caught “The People vs. Larry Flynt” Friday night on cable. It holds up after a decade, and may have even improved with age. I was stung anew at the injustice Milos Forman perpetrates in the name of narrative coherence — he relocates Flynt from Columbus to Cincinnati. So, so wrong. Ohioans know what I’m talking about. Columbus never embraced Flynt, but it tolerated him better than the Queen City, where he was vigorously prosecuted by Simon Leis, one of those crusading, stick-up-the-butt prigs Hamilton County specializes in. When the movie came out, I wrote an essay about living in central Ohio when Larry was in high cotton, and I’d like to rewrite it now, and throw in all the stuff I had to leave out because of the family-newspaper thing. But it needs a news peg. I’ll save that for when he dies, or brings down another speaker of the house.

Apologies for lameness today. I had a more substantive, linky post in progress, and then discovered Alan had recommended the subject to one of the paper’s columnists, so I’ll step aside and let the people who provide our health insurance go first.

Do I have bloggage? Oh, a little:

I’ve been reading all I can about the current Wall Street meltdown, understanding maybe 80 percent of it. My econ training is apparently all obsolete now, although maybe not entirely. (One conclusion I’ve reached: If the Fed bails these dildoes out again, I’m becoming an anarchist.) If you’re finding it baffling — investment vehicles based on risky mortgages? ARMs as perpetual fee-generators? — you’re in good company. Slate provides a 101-level explainer, in plain English.

The last rat jumps from the sinking ship of the Bush administration. Tim Goeglein’s prolificacy of late, explained? Maybe he’s auditioning to be the News-Sentinel’s culture writer. Or maybe he was just killing time in his office while the wallpaper peeled off.

Discuss.

* name changed to spare the feelings of regular commenters named Mary. I don’t think we have a Marv yet, but I expect one to show up any minute.

I know I said no more blogging, but some things are out of my control. Tim Goeglein must have a lot of spare time on his hands there in the rapidly delaminating Bush White House, because he’s a machine lately. A machine, I tell you.

OK, a really boring machine:

What makes for a good life? What is the measure of true greatness in the human life? Can it be measured or weighed? What is the purpose of it all, of the life well-lived?

Tell us, Rev. Tim.

The Westminster Confession of Faith famously concludes that the purpose of a life well-lived is “to know God and love him forever.” This is in congress with the traditional values of filial piety and family responsibility as the cornerstones of a successful life.

And the eyes in the pews glaze over. What did Mom put in the crockpot before we left for church? Oh, right. Pot roast.

I remember reading Plato’s “Republic” for the first time at Indiana University in Bloomington. The whole aim of the book is to show that justice and the virtues of wisdom, courage and moderation are in everyone’s best interest and are required for true happiness.

Moderation! Ha! Funny. Most of the artists Tim likes to occasionally rhapsodize over lived highly immoderate lives. But I guess no one ever said they were “truly” happy, either.

This search begins anew, I suppose, with each person who comes to ask himself the fundamental questions of human existence: Who are we? Why are we here? What separates man from the animals? Is man a slave to his desires? What is the soul? What is the function of human reason and the ability to think? Do we have a higher nature that can rise above greed and lust? Does might make right? Do we have a higher purpose than self-gratification? Should we ever return harm with harm? What is a moral principle? Does moral law precede civil law, and if so, every time?

I remind you: This guy works for Karl Rove. Asking himself if moral law precedes civil law. Only when there’s a presidential signing statement.

The wonderful thing about questions like these is that they are really problems, at least at one remove, that are not solved. Rather they must be lived with each decision made. So while there are new and improved aorta valves that can be surgically implanted, there is not a new and improved program that can be downloaded on a person’s hard drive that will solve the problems he will face in life.

Tim cooks with the Genius Sauce, at least where his metaphors are concerned.

OK, I’m going to spare you most of the rest. Shorter verson: Blah blah blah “philosopher Aristotle,” blah blah blah Michael Jordan and Jack Nicklaus, blah blah blah Clara Barton blah Abraham Lincoln, blah blah George Orwell. Wait, Orwell?

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the protagonists in the totalitarian society employed “newspeak,” the inversion of words to create false meaning. “War is peace,” “good is bad,” “moral is immoral” are merely a few of the possible inversions.

Wrong. Newspeak wasn’t the inversion of words to create false meaning. The goal of Orwell’s Newspeak was to remove all shades of meaning from words, to enforce a brutal simplicity that would discourage the consideration of nuance. Good, ungood, doubleplusungood. For a guy who serves a social movement that has virtually outlawed the color gray (except when it comes to torture), this takes some real cojones. Wait, Orwell advised against euphemism. So let’s just say it: Brass balls. Family good, homos bad!

Let’s pause for a minute and consider how much Orwell would have hated the following phrase —

While Orwell passed this mortal coil years ago,

— and skip ahead. More name-dropping (Wordsworth, John Buchan*, Theodore Roosevelt, God), blah blah blah. More rhetorical questions (Or rather is it Providence who enters into time, raising up great men and women as instruments in his hand?). And then, praise Jesus, we come to the end:

Seeking and living a good life matters profoundly. Greatness abounds.

Guess what the headline on the piece was?

Seeking and living a good life matters profoundly.

Well, you really can’t blame an editor for giving up sometimes.

* Did you know Buchan’s title was “The Rt Hon. The Lord Tweedsmuir?” I didn’t. I think we should start calling Tim that.

As predictable as the “politicization” of the Minneapolis bridge collapse are the condemnations of it — the finger-wagging, more-in-sorrow-than-anger pleas for just a little human decency:

There can no longer be any such thing as a tragic accident in our country. We apparently no longer have the ability to witness such a horrific event, learn from it, and move on to simply do things better and try to reduce the chances of similar, future horrors. A sacrifice will be demanded, initially, and it shall be found. Inevitably the first goat led to the alter will turn out to be some low to mid-level functionary from the City Engineering department or something similar.

Of course, not all are so gentle:

Shame on the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman and the rest of the left who are laying the blame for the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge on GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. We don’t even know the number–let alone the names–of people killed. Doesn’t matter to Coleman and his ilk. Take any shot to smear a Republican.

You could argue whether laying blame at this point of the recovery is helpful — although I read the Coleman column in question and it’s hardly over-the-top; this is the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, after all. Here’s probably the most pungent passage, and it comes after several paragraphs of sorrow, gratitude to the heroes and the rest of it:

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

How ironic is it that tonight’s scheduled groundbreaking for a new Twins ballpark has been postponed? Even the stadium barkers realize it is in poor taste to celebrate the spending of half a billion on ballparks when your bridges are falling down. Perhaps this is a sign of shame. If so, it is welcome. Shame is overdue.

I hate to be the turd in the birdbath here, but this is a perfectly reasonable point to make, and now’s the time to make it. Everybody I’ve talked to about this has said some version of the same thing: “I can’t believe it hasn’t happened here yet.” Minneapolis is a haven of prairie progressives here in the Midwest; good lord, they have light rail there. I was last there in 2004, and compared to Detroit, it’s Munich. (They tax the pants off their residents, but Michigan/Wayne County/Grosse Pointe Woods taxes the pants off me, too, and I don’t feel like I get all that much for it, other than a halfway-decent school system and sidewalk snow removal. Many city employees, on the other hand, get city-provided cars. My congresswoman leases a Cadillac at taxpayer expense to travel around her district, but she has yet to stop by.) I expect a bridge to fall in Detroit any day now.

To politicize, I guess, means “to bring politics into the situation,” but politics is the term we use for the process of making public policy, and the building and maintenance of infrastructure is about as close to the heart of public policy-making as you can get. It’s not very sexy; you don’t get a Bridge to Nowhere every legislative session, but to say politics shouldn’t be brought into this discussion is simply fatuous. Here in America’s rusting heart, we see on a pretty regular basis what happens to sewers, roads, bridges and electrical grids when they’re 100 years old or older — the steam pipe that exploded in midtown Manhattan last month, the combined sewers that overflow into rivers, the rural section roads that have to be widened and resurfaced to accommodate the suburbanites pouring farther and farther out into exurbia, the schools that have to be retrofitted to make them ADA-compliant. Take your pick.

And Coleman is right that too many legislatures have spend too much time, and way too much money, on showy projects like stadiums and other sports venues, which serve to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy while providing little to the people who pay for them other than the opportunity to take the family to a major-league game and pay hundreds more for the privilege.

So, yeah, it’s time to talk politics. Time to start the drudgery of figuring out what we need to fix and how much it will cost and how we will pay. Nothing wrong with doing it before the funerals, even before the bodies are recovered. The matter is urgent.

So, let’s keep the bloggage light after such a leaden kickoff. It’s Friday:

National treasure Jon Carroll on the question of accessibility* in poetry. I always wonder how hard he sweats his writing, because it all sounds so breezy and effortless:

There is always ferment in the world of poetry, probably because there is rarely money in the world of poetry (absent the eccentric bequest), so turmoil is the only recreation available.

Lance Mannion, who graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, can tell you a thing or two about poets, and that is Word.

I should check Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny’s blog more often. He challenged his readers to name the film that’s the source of this image, and offered as a lure his undying respect. I knew instantly — thank you, Jeff Borden, for making me see it — but someone else had posted it in the comments. I still get the undying respect, I hope. (I’d hot-link to the image — his bandwidth is paid for by Premiere magazine, I assume — but budgets are tight all over the print world, so you’ll have to click through yourself. Then hit his ads. I’m doing this every day on my favorite blogs now, and so should you.)

And that’s it for me. Thanks to the several of you who sent nice notes about my “subject and theme” post day before yesterday, and said it helped you get past obstacles in your own work. I’ve been feeling a little draggy about this self-imposed blog obligation this summer, and told a friend the other day I needed to get a few strokes with a kind hand rather a riding crop, and that did it. Re-energized, I’m back in the game.

* stupid spelling error fixed; thanks, Brian.

Sorry for taking the day off. Had an early appointment in Detroit Wednesday morning, a day that promised to be brutally hot (and delivered), with an ozone alert to boot. Curtail your driving, the radio warned. So I took the long way home.

It might have been an environmental misdemeanor, but until you’ve worked at home, you don’t know how important it is to just get the hell out of the house once in a while. I followed Woodward to Jefferson and took a lap of Belle Isle, which is being readied for the Indy Grand Prix Labor Day weekend. I’m not sure what the exact course is, but if it’s what I think, there’s one sharp turn pretty near the water, and I wondered what the chances of a spin-out ending up in the river might be. That would be so awesome.

But mostly I looked at the landscape. We’re deep in the Big Dry now — haven’t had a significant rain in weeks and weeks. A shower here, some drops there, but little more than that. It’s making everything look tired and zapped. In Grosse Pointe, people water constantly, even the median strips are sprinklered, so it’s still fairly lush, but in Detroit, not so. In the car with Kate, I’ve taken to pointing out dead trees — the emerald ash borer continues its sawdusty reign of terror — and they’re more common than P.T. Bruisers. Especially in Detroit, where they can’t keep up with removing dead buildings, let alone dead trees. (Wait until we finally do get a thunderstorm, and they come down on power lines.) One of the many incongruous sights in this city is a profusion of green growing over a crumbling ruin, like the “ghetto palms” that sprout on roofs and through cracks in pavement. It seems to make a statement about the implacability of nature and the impermanence of everything else, but when nature can’t keep up anymore, it’s sort of creepy.

Today will be hotter, we’re told. Oh, I can’t wait to see my electric bill this month.

Last night was taken by the tragedy in Minneapolis. Whenever there’s a breaking story like this, the first thing the over-cabled household does is look for the channel with the least offensive anchor presiding over it all. CNN had Paula Zahn, whose passive-aggressive style requires her to mention children on that school bus seen “with blood on their faces” and no other explanation. So I switched to MSNBC. Keith Olbermann can be insufferable in many contexts, but I liked him doing breaking news; he prefaced every fact with a million caveats — this just in, unverified, we don’t know if this is true, chaotic information streams, etc. Given how much of breaking-news info turns out to be b.s., it’s nice to hear a little honesty. One other thing: Olbermann has a command of the English language that’s getting rarer every day. Yesterday I heard a radio host speak of “accolations” instead of “accolades,” and of a body being “interned,” rather than “interred.” One of the bridge-collapse witnesses said he’d crossed the span moments before, “and that’s too close to call.” Of course he was upset, but he meant to say “too close for comfort.” I don’t blame the guy for flubbing the common expression, but does it have to go on the newspaper website?

(Note to non-journalists: You fix that by lopping the last two words — “…and that’s too close.” The quote is still accurate, and it makes more sense. Or you don’t use the quote.)

It’s unseemly to quibble like this when there’s been a tragedy of such magnitude. As I write this, it’s nine confirmed dead and 20 missing, which suggests the final death toll will be around 30. Just an average day in Baghdad. And a final note: Much of the early TV coverage concerned the children on the school bus, and rightly so. We’re hard-wired to protect children; they are, as the great philosopher Whitney Houston tells us, the future. That’s one reason I was so stunned to learn that, in actuarial terms, the death of a child is nothing much. I learned this from a man who’d had a child drown at his summer camp, and participated in the wrongful-death settlement. Kids, for all their innocence and potential, for the injustice of having them taken from us, for the devastating pain it causes their survivors, the insurance companies don’t really pay a lot for them. Their father or mother, yes, especially if they’re sole support of a family. But you don’t pay for potential. This is the market at work.

So, bloggage:

I read the Daily Telegraph every day. How did I miss this? Fifty must-watch web videos. They’re a tad Brit-centric, but the must-sees of all this TV are David Attenborough’s lyre bird segment and, of course, the Mike Tyson montage. God, that guy was an animal. I don’t know why more of his opponents didn’t just shit their pants and faint at the sound of the bell.

A nice deconstruction of yet another legacy of the Bush family, Clarence Thomas. It concerns his legal arguments, not his video-rental habits.

Roy has a cold, too, but it didn’t stop him from appreciating the most recent 6,000-word geyser of crap from Camille Paglia. This one’s a gem. Read.

Off to stare at the punishing sun and mutter.

Many years ago, when there was still money in a newsroom budget for training, our paper flew in a couple of editors from Philadelphia to talk about so-called narrative reporting — the long-form pieces you’re likely to find in Sunday editions. Not the eight-graf government meeting stories, but pieces with a longer or wider reach that seek to tell a bigger story. Semi-regular commenter Kim teaches this stuff, so maybe she has a better capsule definition.

What I recall most vividly from that day was the subject/theme discussion. Some writers have a really hard time understanding what a “nut graf” is — the explanation paragraph that answers the readers’ “so why should I care” question — as well as why you need one, and why the best nut grafs encompass the theme of the story in some way. So they went around the table and had each of us think of a narrative project we’d like to write or have written, and asked two questions: What’s it about? What’s it really about?

What’s it about? It’s about a couple who had a kid with a terrible genetic disease, and it was really breaking them down, and then she got pregnant again and they considered aborting but decided not to, figuring God wouldn’t curse them twice, but the second child was born and it had the same disease. What’s it really about? Coping.

The first question is the subject, the second is the theme. The story can be big:

What’s it about? The Rwandan genocide. What’s it really about? The paralysis of moral actors in the face of great evil.

Or small:

What’s it about? These two guys, lifelong best friends, who’ve spent all the lives chasing Bigfoot sightings, until one got discouraged and switched to 9/11 conspiracies, and they stopped speaking. What’s it really about? Craziness and friendship.

See how it works? The first question is easy, but if you can’t answer the second, you’re going to get into trouble, because at some point you’re going to get stuck and say what the hell, and if you don’t know what you’re really writing about, you won’t be able to go on. Sometimes the answer is a little vague — craziness and friendship may only appeal to those people who enjoy good stories about people — but the theme is the glue that connects the problems of two little people to the rest of the hill of beans we call this crazy world. (Umm…) Only a few of us are Bigfoot chasers, but we all have friends we’ve fallen out with. Anyway.

There’s always some smartyknickers who says, “But my story doesn’t have a theme,” like that makes them special. These are frequently the ones who disdain writing classes of any kind, preferring to spend shoe leather on reporting rather than time discussing these sissy topics. That’s perfectly fine, reporting is essential, but frequently in a long-term project they’ll spend a few weeks reporting, then disgorge a bunch of facts onto the computer screen and tell their editors it’s their job to make it readable. To them I would point out the “Godfather” paradox. If you wrote the story of the Godfather narrative, the lead would be something like, “Michael Corleone has emerged [note that passive voice, a fave of the shoe-leather school] as the heir to the crime family founded by his father, Vito, after a series of suspected mob-related executions last night in New York and Las Vegas.”

But when you consider the theme(s) — and there are so many in the Godfather story that you can’t count them on all your fingers — then the story becomes operatic, mythic. You’ve got the corruption of evil, fathers and sons, the tendrils of family and blood, the futility of trying to outrun your past, the immigrant story in America, and on and on. Why do you think people still watch this movie? Because Moe Green gets shot in the eye? Grow up.

It’s been my experience, as a writer and an editor, that when you’re blocked on a piece of writing the problem is one of two: 1) You haven’t done enough reporting; or 2) You don’t understand the theme. What’s it really about? Does this paragraph illuminate that? If not, you’ve lost your way. The subject is the path, the theme lights the path.

Does this make any sense at all? I hope so.

I’ve been struggling with several pieces of work all summer, and yesterday I had a sitdown with myself and tried to take my own advice. What’s it about? What’s it really about? I realized I’d never really asked myself the second question, and when I did, it was like a door opened, or a wall fell, or something. The light came on. It all got easier.

Which is to say, I have to get back to work. In the meantime, bloggage for the faithful reader.

Kate will be joining this outfit in a few years: The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation, dedicated to helping people recover from the pain of petting-zoo mishaps. Yes, a joke, but a semi-amusing one. Make sure you mouse over the logo. Via Metafilter.

What’s Chelsea Clinton up to these days? The NYT finds out. The short answer: Turning into a clone of her mother.

First the Swede, now the Italian: Michelangelo Antonioni dies. I loved “Blow-Up,” did you?

As for Tom Snyder, I thought David Letterman appreciated him best when he recalled the night Snyder had some chef on the show, and the two of them whipped up a little snack, and Snyder was stirring a bowl of something with a butt in his mouth. A real individual.

Is it all about death today? No. It’s also about sex: After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers (at the University of Texas) have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

Off to let my theme light my path. Have a good day.