We’ve been neglecting the Clown File. People who know me know that I dislike clowns. This is a pretty common fear in children, and what can I say? It never left me. For a while I had a Clown File set of pages here, and it got me mail from fellow clownophobes all over these United States.

(Someone also sent me a link that I foolishly clicked, and it took me to a site devoted to clown porn. Yes, people having sex in full clown makeup. No big shoes or floppy pants, although with some truly epic tattoos. These images are seared into my brain, and still make me shudder.)

Once I wrote a column about this, and I got a call from an older man who worked as a clown. All clowns seem to be older men, along with a few younger women. In a whiny, quavery voice he told me it’s tough to be a clown, yessiree, you have no idea. Then he began telling me about “that pervert, John Wayne Gacy,” and how he ruined EVERYthing for decent clowns, and related an incident in Chicago in the wake of the Gacy case. This man, along with a couple dozen other Shriner clowns, were scheduled to do their act at a mall in suburban Chicago. The original plan was for the clowns to spread throughout the mall, delighting shoppers, but the Gacy revelations made that dicey.

“So they told us we had to stick together,” he said. “They made us go in the back door, like a bunch of criminals. Then the shoppers started yelling at us, so we all had to leave. What a lousy day.” At this point I was covering the receiver so he couldn’t hear me snickering. One of my best reader calls ever.

One of my neighbors in Indiana was a dental hygienist, and told of the memorable day, early in her career, when a fairly well-known birthday-party clown came in complaining of jaw pain, “particularly during fellatio.” The dentist blushed and stammered, and my neighbor, young and innocent, said, “What’s that?” It was an uncomfortable moment all around, and every time I saw the clown’s face in advertising thereafter, I thought about …never mind.

I make an exception for my ex-colleague Keryn, aka Twist and Shout the clown. Her specialty is balloons, and can tell the story of the resurrection of Christ using balloons. It’s quite something.

Anyway, clowns. Thanks to Mitch Harper for passing along some clowns in the news items. First, someone is vandalizing the clowns of Sarasota. It’s one of those dopey public-art projects that have been so popular — cows in Chicago, ears of corn in Iowa, frogs in Grosse Pointe. I suppose in tribute to Sarasota’s circus heritage, it’s clowns in Sarasota. And — astonishingly! — someone is hurting them. Who could have seen that coming, eh? Put up 50 icons of childhood terror and then complain when people cut their heads off. I ask you.

Although I did enjoy this passage: The clown whose head was broken off was called Justice B. Dunne, a judicial clown sponsored by a law firm, Nickel said. Police retrieved its head, which was found nearby.

In other clown news, Emmett Kelly Jr. is dead. Say hi to Red Skelton, Emmett.

Bloggage: It’s Festivus time! And now, for the feats of strength.

Thanks, I had a nice birthday. “What do you want to do on your special day?” Alan asked.

“Take a road trip,” I said.

“Where?”

“Port Huron.”

Why Port Huron? Because I’ve never been there. And now that I have, I don’t think I have to go back. Not that there’s anything wrong with Port Huron, except the fact that the downtown riverfront view is of an oil refinery on the Canadian side. Our part of Michigan is full of reminders that we’re not Santa Fe, with an economy based on art galleries and restaurants, but man — that’s a depressing sight for a Port Huronian, I’d imagine.

Anyway, we saw Port Huron. Shared a pizza with the fam later, had a super-delicious chocolate cake and watched “Thank You for Smoking” on pay-per-view. It was exactly as I remember the book — a fine good time when it was going on, almost instantly forgettable afterward, which makes it a three-star flick in my book. Nothing wrong with that. Aaron Eckhart has quite the chin dimple.

Somewhere along the course of the weekend, I made time to watch “Thin,” a documentary airing on HBO. It’s about women at an eating-disorders clinic in Florida.

If you’ve known anyone with an eating disorder — what am I saying? Everybody has known someone with an eating disorder. I met my first one in college, one of my roommates. She was recovering from anorexia, although she obsessed about food more or less constantly and had a million strange eating habits, including munching on carrots to the tune of a pound a day. The palms of her hands were orange. Another friend shared an apartment in Manhattan with a bulimic. The layout of the apartment was symmetrical, with a bedroom/sitting area on either side and a bathroom in between. A couple nights a week, the roommate would binge and purge, binge and purge, all night long. A few weeks of listening to vomiting and flushing sent my friend back to the closet she was sleeping in, in Brooklyn.

Anyway, it’s very common. And like all problems, it occurs along a continuum. The women in “Thin” are at the shithouse-rat end of the spectrum; one has a tube in her stomach, which her parents had inserted to keep her alive, although it didn’t take long for her to figure out how to flex her stomach muscles to make it work the other direction. The shots of her gaunt belly, with both the tube and the belly-button ring, were ghastly.

What interests me about eating disorders is how mainstream they are, not just in their frequency but in the increasingly open acceptance of them in regular society. For all the dying supermodels, it’s becoming clear that some people don’t really see anything wrong with it. Supportive pro-anorexia and bulimia websites are out there, and unashamed. Victoria “I’m not anorexic” Beckham claims to have a 23-inch waist. A British writer noted this was the exact circumference of her head. I just got a tape measure and checked — mine, too. Women come in all sizes, but this is ridiculous.

Lately I’ve read about something called “exercise bulimia,” no barfing involved, just obsessive exercise to nullify every calorie ingested. This was reported with a shrug; if you have to be bulimic, might as well be this variety.

But I really goggled at a review of “Thin” in the New York Times, in which Virginia Heffernan noted the infantilizing atmosphere at the treatment center where these women are housed, and then writes:

And after all this restraining of their evil ways, the women can only conclude that they are undisciplined, depraved and out of control, though to look at their gaunt forms and hear about their seriousness of purpose, you can hardly imagine that willpower is what they lack. …Why do these so-called professionals talk like carping schoolmarms? Anorexics notoriously inspire annoyance in other people; it’s not clear why. Maybe, in their self-discipline, they make the rest of us feel slovenly.

Calling anorexia “willpower” and “self-discipline” is like saying someone who washes hands 400 times a day has an impressive commitment to personal hygiene. All you have to do is watch these women eat. They ingest every forkful as though it’s toxic waste. One has to polish off a birthday cupcake and takes forever to do so, complaining throughout that it’s “too sweet” and looking, by the last bite, as though she’s just eaten a turd.

It’s true — anorexics inspire annoyance. It puts me off my feed to see someone at the table mopping butter off an English muffin with a thick stack of napkins. It’s annoying to see someone who can’t spend five minutes without thinking about what she won’t be eating for her next meal. All the women in “Thin” came across as girls, even one who already had two children of her own. One was made that way by her own mother, who taught her the tricks of the game, and another hinted at unspeakable trauma in her past, but in all the family sessions you got the feeling their loved ones were trying hard not to slap faces.

Anyway, in a weekend devoted to overeating, it was an interesting contrast.

So, bloggage:

Gene Weingarten diagnoses John Kerry’s humor problem in a tight paragraph:

The man is as strait-laced as a whalebone corset, as rigid as Formica. His business is politics. He should never be anywhere near a joke.

The same Jerry Seinfeld joke, as would be told by John Kerry– The problem with mall garages is that your mother’s a whore.

Elsewhere in the WashPost, the fascinating story of the AK-47, portions of which I stumbled across in the past. If you saw “Lord of War” you got a nutshell version of this in a Nicolas Cage voiceover, but the story is far more thorough:

The story of the gun itself, from inspiration in Bryansk to bloody insurgency in Iraq, is also the story of the transformation of modern warfare. The AK blew away old battlefield calculations of military superiority, of tactics and strategy, of who could be a soldier, of whose technology would triumph.

When one war ended, arms brokers gathered up the AKs and sold them to fighters in the next hot spot. The weapon’s spread helps explain why, since World War II, so many “small wars” have lingered far beyond the months and years one might expect. Indeed, for all of the billions of dollars Washington has spent on space-age weapons and military technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet, transforming conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. With these assault rifles, well-armed fighters can dominate a country, terrorize citizens, grab the spoils — and even keep superpowers at bay.

And all Mikhail Kalashnikov was after was a decent, non-jamming weapon.

On a more peaceful note, NN.C reader and sometime commenter Jeff Gill turns up in the Columbus Dispatch, defending the Hopewell Indian mounds of Newark, Ohio. Well done.

And now we are 49. Sigh. Oh well — maybe I’ll have a career again by 50.

Here’s my “Alice’s Restaurant” tradition: For a number of years when I lived in Fort Wayne, I would rise on Thanksgiving Day, shower and immediately head out for Columbus, in happy anticipation of dining with my family in a few hours. Depending on atmospheric conditions, I could usually catch the entirety of “Alice’s Restaurant” twice and sometimes three times, on classic-rock stations in Fort Wayne, Columbus and sometimes Dayton.

You needed to know that, didn’t you?

I mention this only because the WashPost has an amusing story about Stockbridge, Mass., Alice, Arlo and the song that made it famous in Sunday’s travel section.

And so we kick off all-bloggage Monday. Why? Because there was some good stuff in the papers over the weekend, and I’m so tired I can’t think of anything else to say.

My brother claims that he once told a gym weightlifter that “today is no-grunting Tuesday.” I’m sure the weightlifter wasn’t amused. No-grunting rules, however, are no joke, as this NYT story points out:

Albert Argibay, a bodybuilder and a state correction officer, was at a Planet Fitness gym with 500 pounds of weight on his shoulders one afternoon this month when the club manager walked over and told him it was time to leave. Mr. Argibay, the manager explained, had violated one of the club’s most sacred and strictly enforced rules: He was grunting.

He continued lifting, but soon was surrounded by town police officers, who told him to drop the weight slowly and pack his bag, then escorted him from the gym. Now Mr. Argibay is considering suing the club, claiming the notoriety the incident earned him in this cozy 5,000-person town 75 miles north of Manhattan is tantamount to defamation. Mr. Argibay said he has endured ridicule from colleagues who call him and make grunting noises, and he fears that inmates will lose respect for him.

No grunting at a gym? That’s like no sweating. I can see a please-minimize-your-grunting rule, but man, this place goes a little overboard:

At Planet Fitness gyms, grunters and other rule-breakers are treated to an ear-rattling siren with flashing blue lights and a public scolding. The “lunk alarm,�? as the club calls it, is so jarring it can bring the entire floor to a standstill. (A lunk is defined, on a poster, as “one who grunts, drops weights, or judges.�?

The worst grunter I ever saw wasn’t even at a gym. It was at a public playground in Fort Wayne, on a weekend. On weekends, the ratio of caretaking fathers to mothers increased dramatically, due to either dad’s-turn or custody weekend. On this particular weekend, an impressively bulked-up dad turned his kids loose and promptly went over to a set of parallel monkey bars and started working on his guns. He grunted so loudly I thought at first he’d taken a stray bullet from a nearby gun battle. But no, he was just being a jerk.

Busy day, leading up to the holiday. More later, maybe. Discuss The Game, if you want to. I had my hopes pinned on the last few minutes, but it wasn’t to be.

In the Freep, Bill McGraw visited Woody Hayes’ grave. (If I’d known, I’d have had him wave to my friends Jeff and Craig Clark, brothers, buried just a few doors down at Union Cemetery. AIDS, if you’re wondering. Both of them.) He spent a second entry remarking on the epitaph etched on the headstone:

And in the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love hears the rustle of a wing.

The author is Robert Greene Ingersoll. McGraw said it seemed “slightly out of character” for Woody, and I guess if all you knew about him was his football persona, it does. “Three yards and a cloud of dust” might seem more fitting, but you didn’t have to know much about Woody Hayes to know he was a lot more than the bullnecked coach you saw on the sidelines.

He was what you might call old-school, a student of classics who made his players keep their hair trimmed. He didn’t allow them to appear in Playboy’s Pigskin Preview. After his famous flame-out at the Gator Bowl he laid low for a while, then emerged as an elder statesman. He lectured at Harvard on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he used in his coaching.

The best thing I ever read about Woody Hayes was a column by Columbus Dispatch columnist Mike Harden, written after Woody’s death in 1987. It’s almost 20 years old now and I’m going to quote from it liberally, probably busting copyrights all over the place, but what the hell, I just paid $3 for it from the Dispatch archive and I’m giving credit where it’s due. Here’s how it starts:

When Woody Hayes wheeled his Chevy into Glenn Webb’s Shell Station in West Jefferson, Ohio, he paid scant attention to the loitering locals, the scrawny kid resting his back against the Coke machine. But the kid noticed him, and so did the locals. With the possible exception of an occasional horrific wreck on Rt. 40, not much stirred in the Madison County hamlet. So when Woody Hayes, the Woody Hayes, pulled in for a fill-up on that lazy summer day in 1963, the news traveled up Main St. to Smitty’s bar before the coach’s gas tank was half-filled and was already old gossip at Doc Mellott’s Rexall by the time Glenn had scrubbed the last dead bug from the coach’s windshield.

…In my youth, my opinion of Woody Hayes was a mixture of personal awe coupled with the echo of comments voiced by my father and his cronies as they sat around the radio nursing longneck Strohs and listening to the game. To them, Woody was half prophet, half good ol’ boy — Moses with Charlie Weaver’s voice. It was not that they thought him above reproach, for their hindsight refinements of the plays Woody called were always good for another six-pack after the game was finished. Years later I would recall my father’s post-game dressing down of Woody, aimed, as it was, at the radio speaker of the Philco. I was seated in the stadium watching the coach as he paced the sideline studying what appeared to be an index card. He called three consecutive power slants into the line, gaining four or five yards at the most. The punting team ran onto the field, and Woody was still contemplating the card when the fan seated next to me shouted, ”Dammit, Woody, turn it over. There’s plays on the other side.”

If you grew up in Columbus in the Woody era, you know that scene like you know Christmas morning. He was simply part of the fabric of life, whether you attended OSU or not, whether you liked football or not. But of course, the times they were a-changin’; Harden continues:

Woody Hayes and Ohio State football were congenitally joined at the hip; yet, the first time I personally heard him speak in public, it had nothing to do with the game. It was the spring of 1970. My first quarter as a freshman at Ohio State was about to be cut short by the campus riots. The Oval was filled with strikers, gawkers and campus cops. Some firebrand revolutionary who wouldn’t have known Lenin from Irving Berlin was admonishing the crowd to seize the moment as they chanted, ”On strike! Shut it down!” There in the throng, sandwiched amid the tie-dye revolutionaries, stood Woody Hayes. Arms folded across his chest, he listened quietly to several speakers until one of the organizers spotted him and summoned him to the platform.

Compensation. The pay-forward theory. It had seemed like some flimsy platitude penned by a greeting card company for a high school graduation card. Not for Woody. He lived it, breathed it.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about Woody Hayes today. Bo Schembechler is the one who just died. But I didn’t grow up with Bo, except as once-a-year nemesis. I grew up with Woody.

UPDATE: I assembled most of this entry last night but didn’t post it, for two reasons: I wanted the Tibetan girls to stay at the top of the blog for at least 24 hours, and I wanted to see if the Freep’s star columnist could top Harden. He wrote approximately four times the length, but it should not surprise anyone who’s read both writers to know the answer is: No.

If you haven’t heard, Jesus Camp voluntarily shut itself down yesterday. I guess, in the climate of anti-Christianity swept in by Tuesday’s elections, they no longer felt safe. Whatever. Haven’t seen the movie — except for that righteous clip of Ted Haggard, tee hee — and now I don’t have to, although I probably wouldn’t have, anyway. I lived in Jesus Camp for 20 years; I am no stranger to this demographic. I wish them no ill. I can only hope they feel the same way about me.

But in meandering through a thread on the subject over at Metafilter, I came across this hilarious account of standing in opposition to a prevailing Jesus subculture at one person’s North Dakota high school. It reminded me of the various Jesus subcultures at my own, which were in evidence even during the Ford administration.

One was The Way International. Most observers identify it as a cult, and from some of their activities, I wouldn’t be surprised. At one point they were instructing their management layer in marksmanship and weapons-handling, and calling it “hunter safety courses.” The kids who were into The Way did something that was mystifying to a girl raised Catholic and living among mainline Protestants: They spoke in tongues. They were “taken by the spirit” at prayer, opened their mouths and supposedly ancient languages poured forth, praising God.

A few of my friends were into this, but not for long; by the time we grew close, they’d fallen out with The Way (out of The Way?) and heavily into ridiculing it. One liked to get so wasted he started slurring his words, at which point he opened his eyes wide and said, “Hey! Tongues!” Another pointed out that when one still-faithful member spoke in tongues, if you listened closely you always heard the phrase “Yoko Ono,” proof he was faking it. (Although, when you think about it, it may have been an early sign that John Lennon was a divine being, not so hard for some people to believe.)

Although our community was WASPy and generally not into this sort of thing — I’m still uncomfortable in any church where people lift their hands above the level of their shoulders while praying — they were respectful. Also, drugs were spreading through the schools like the Norwalk virus, and anything that kept kids away from that was seen as worth a try. In junior high we were all released one afternoon to attend an assembly, and when we arrived were treated to a half-hour concert by a rock band called the Free Fair. There was no obvious point to the show, although we were all invited back for a longer one that evening at the high school. I should have known something was up, as normally our principal didn’t opt for midday rock’n’roll breaks, but my friends were going to the show that night, so I did too. And sure enough, after the music came the Testimony: Drugs ruined my life blah blah but Jesus Christ saved it blah blah. The lead singer said he’d once been so strung out, he’d sold his winter coat for marijuana.

I was no expert on drugs, but even in eighth grade this sounded like crap. Marijuana, all the magazines said, was non-addictive and a fairly mild high, and this guy sold his coat for some? Maybe if he’d recently moved to Florida, maybe if it was already April, but otherwise even I — who had never been high in my 13 years — knew that marijuana would be no match for the misery of being outside without a coat in winter.

I left and went outside, where a few of my friends were in the baseball dugouts, smoking cigarettes with one of the Free Fair’s roadies. He had his arm around my friend Ann’s shoulders. She said he kissed her, stuck his tongue in her mouth and copped a feel. This was my very first experience with this sort of youth-culture Jesus-freakery evangelism, and you might say it left a mark. Lies on stage, jailbait groping outside — I had these folks’ number early. There were many parents who had good reason to worry about the various religious movements taking their children away — Hare Krishna, the Children of God, the Moonies — but mine never did. The Free Fair was my immunization.

Thank you, Jesus. The Lord truly does work in mysterious ways.

Well, OK then. Faith restored, balance forthcoming, etc. etc. For the record, I don’t think 2007 promises a geyser of ponies on every lawn, but maybe it serves as a wake-up call.

Nothing demonstrates my state of mind better than my vote in the Michigan governor’s race. Seldom have I pulled a lever with less enthusiasm than I did for Jennifer Granholm yesterday. As I explained earlier in the fall, there is only one issue of concern to Michiganians, and likely will be for some time: Economic development. This state is going through a paroxysm of agony over the draining of good-paying manufacturing jobs, jobs that are likely never coming back. The time is long, long overdue for every business leader and policy maker in the state to be thinking creatively about how we diversify our state’s economy so that we aren’t so dependent on one sector. I don’t expect government to fix the problem, but I expect it to be part of the solution. I expect public office holders to be paying attention.

Granholm’s “plan” for economic recovery hasn’t done squat so far and likely won’t in the future. Dick DeVos spent $40 million of his own money to point this out; for months and months, he’s been advertising on television, pointing this out. She was wide-open and vulnerable.

However.

DeVos didn’t have much of a plan of his own, other than the usual: Tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts. He had no clear answer for how he was going to reconcile these cuts with political reality in Michigan — what do we cut elsewhere? Mumble mumble. Still, he was only pointing out the obvious, and for much of the summer and into the campaign he had a handy lead over Granholm, until she started her own advertising, and his lead shrank to nothing more or less overnight.

And the next words out of his mouth were: Intelligent design.

I was appalled. Rarely have I felt so insulted as a voter. It was flag-burning and Willie Horton all over again.

DeVos advocated Michigan schoolchildren be taught ID in science class. Now. By my reckoning we’ve already fought this battle twice, once on the local level (Pennsylvania) and once on the state (Kansas), and both times the issue was a stunning defeat for the pro-ID camp. Presumably DeVos is not so dumb that he thinks he could just slide this one by the people of Michigan, and knows that even if he could push it through the state board of education, it would lead to yet another months-long, outrageously expensive and ultimately pointless court battle. Recall, again, that we’re in a one-state recession here, unemployment above 7 percent, and Job One is convincing the employers of the 21st century that Michigan will be a good place to do business, with its priorities straight and its workforce well-educated and ready.

Isn’t that just what we don’t need? The third rerun of the Scopes monkey trial? National ridicule, cable-news hot air, the Discovery Institute poobahs testifying again about their “alternative” theory?

You’d think.

So you have to figure DeVos knows this, too. If he believes God made the world according to his design, that’s his business. He can’t possibly think Michigan’s monkey trial would be the third-time charm. And he knows that, in a state as blue/purple as this one, his chances of taking the idea very far are pretty low. So what was he really saying when he said, “Let’s teach ID in science class”? Just this:

Psst, religious right. I’m just like you!

And that, finally, was enough for me to say, uh-uh. Because if there’s one group of people I have, finally, heard quite enough from, it’s those guys. Enough culture warring, please. You see what happens to the art of political compromise when you deal with extremists; you say, “OK, look, no one feels totally hunky-dory about abortion. So let’s sit down together and see what we can do about it.” And their reply is, “There is no compromise. My position is the only moral one available, but while we’ve got you, be advised: Our next fun issue will be to make it perfectly legal for your pharmacist to insert his own pious moralizing into your relationship with your doctor, and make you drive 100 miles to get birth-control pills.”

The Schiavo case was hideous enough — the governor of Florida and U.S. Congress poking their noses into one family’s agony, not to mention the spectacle of Catholic priests going on talk shows to insinuate Michael Schiavo beat his wife into a coma and now wants to finish the job. As though this pathetic woman with her brain turning slowly to pudding was about to wake up one day and say, “Don’t let him finish the job.”

But suppose there was hope for Terri Schiavo, and it lay in stem-cell research. Those same lying priests would have said it was better for her to spend her life flicking her unseeing eyes across the walls of her nursing home than for one 16-cell blastocyst to be used for science. Because to do so would be just like Dr. Mengele’s experiments on twins, don’t you know.

So farewell to those folks, too. Bye, Rick Santorum; dogs everywhere appreciate your interest in their welfare, but alas. (Yes, I know: Bob Casey is pro-life, too. But he’s not Rick Santorum. An improvement.)

And then, finally, there’s the war. Already the airy arguments are beginning. Sniffed HTML warrior James Lileks: “…perhaps it’s possible for a country to win a war with apologies and investigations.” Uh-huh. Funny. Of course, it wasn’t possible for us to win the war with Donald Rumsfeld in charge, either, WHICH WAS THE POINT, AFTER ALL. I could accept the war, opposed to it as I am, if I thought it were being run competently, but it’s the Hurricane Katrina of foreign policy, and instead of accountability, what we get from the Bush administration is: Heckuva job, Brownie! We need more soldiers; what we should be hearing from the 101st Fighting Keyboarders is why the frat-house row at Dartmouth isn’t empty, because all the patriotic young Republicans have marched off to fight in this war they believe so fervently in. But we don’t hear that. We don’t hear much at all, other than, “I guess we’re going to cut and run now.”

Cutting and running makes more sense, at this point, than more wasted American lives. Unless we could put Rummy in body armor and put him on the turret gun of a Humvee, patrolling Tikrit.

So that’s the mood of one voter, today. I’m not exulting over the GOP shellacking, but I am pleased to see they’ve learned about pendulums and what they do. This was a corrective, and it was long overdue.

Yesterday’s most interesting robo-call: The voice of a young African American woman tells me Jennifer Granholm “takes our money and gives it to the suburbs.” She doesn’t care about “us.” “We” can’t trust her.

It’s like the old punchline of the Lone Ranger joke: What do you mean “we,” white man?

This is interesting on several levels, starting with the assumption that, because I live in the 313 area code, I’m black. If you saw “8 Mile,” you remember that last rap battle scene, where Rabbit asks everyone in the crowd to th’ow it up for the 313. Like everything here, it’s a racial code, as well as telephonic. Wayne County, where Detroit is located, is the 313. Oakland and Macomb Counties, where most of the suburban communities known as “metro Detroit” are located, are the 248 and 586, respectively, although there may be some 734s over there in western Oakland. However, Grosse Pointe, overwhelmingly white, is in Wayne County, too, so if I’d been at that rap battle in a pink cashmere cardigan, pearls and a cute madras headband, I’d have been entitled to th’ow my hands in the air for the 313, too. (I’ve always found this image amusing, yo.)

However, if you robo-bomb 313 phone numbers with a coded message aimed at African Americans, chances are you’ll get more hits than misses. Detroit is something like 82 percent black, after all.

The other level upon which this is interesting? Um, consider the alternative.

Ah, but it all ends today. Election Day. I was a newspaper reporter long enough that I feel like its rhythms are part of me. Reporters get to sleep in on Election Day; traditionally, if you’re covering a race, you don’t come to work until polls close. So it’s a day to catch up on your errands and watch “The View” or whatever. If you’re not covering the race, your job is to vote on your way in to work and ask the poll workers how early turnout looks, then report it to the city desk when you arrive. Either way, the long stretch of voting is, shall we say, down time.

If you’re a copy editor, at least for a p.m. newspaper — and I may be the last journalist left in American who never worked for an a.m., and how the hell did that happen — you come to work extra early on Wednesday. Frequently you greet the reporters leaving in the wee small hours of the morning.

The reward for both shifts is food, which the company springs for. Reporters get pizza, editors get donuts. If you like salty things for breakfast, there’s usually a cold pizza left to chew on.

(If this sounds pathetic, it is. Small-market journalism is a study in self-debasement. Hey, free pizza!)

In between, though, my but it’s fun. You go to campaign headquarters, where someone writes the incoming results on a blackboard. There’s liquor, which means some of your interviews will be with people half in the bag, which means you have half a chance of getting a quote that doesn’t sound like it came from a robot. Although don’t count on it, because there’s always spinning galore.

I was never a political writer, but I did my share. Two vivid memories:

In 1984, shortly after I’d been hired in Fort Wayne but before my column started, I was drafted to cover the election-night festivities of the third parties — at the time the Libertarians and a weird splinter called (I think) the American Party. Both were wan, cheerless affairs, but the American Party vigil was the Island of Misfit Toys. I think they were meeting in an Eagles hall or something, with a few 2-liter bottles of pop and potluck snacks. The folks were right out of Diane Arbus, and the official spokesman was turned out in a vivid polyester leisure suit with contrasting topstitching, the sort of thing that Herb Tarlek used to wear on “WKRP in Cincinnati.” I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I remember that evening as my first exposure to the can’t-catch-a-break, pissed-off, paranoid demographic that would fuel the crazier frequencies on talk radio. And that leisure suit. It belonged in a museum.

The other was one night in Columbus. The publisher’s dad liked to go over to GOP headquarters and tip a few, then come back to the newsroom to soak up the atmosphere. What the hell, he owned the place. One election night, late, he was trying to leave the parking lot, only couldn’t get out of his parking space. He would pull forward and tap the bumper of the car ahead, then back up and tap the bumper of the car behind, up and back, up and back, tap tap tap, never making any progress. A reporter was leaving work at the same time and saw this, and said, “Sir, why don’t you let me help you? Step out a minute and I’ll get you out of this spot.” So he did, and the reporter had his car out in half a minute, and even though the old man was probably too drunk to drive, the reporter let him get back behind the wheel.

As he climbed back in, the ex-publisher pressed a fiver into his hand. The reporter still believes, I’m sure, that the old man thought he was the parking attendant.

Go vote if you haven’t. I’m headed for the showers and the polls, in that order.

Those of you in the Fort Wayne orbit have already seen this, so I apologize for the lateness. (DIF fumes clouded my brain.) However, the Josh Jennings for Congress campaign, created and executed by our online penpal Nathan Gotsch, is pulling off a last-weekend stretch run that’s really turning heads.

Also, it’s funny. Enjoy:

There are other spots, too.

Holy freakin’ monkey on the moon, would you look at these poll numbers in Ohio? If the results come even close to these, they’re going to have to invent a new word for how hard the GOP goes down.

The numbers, for you non-clickers, are from The Columbus Dispatch’s poll, and show the Democrats winning by margins so lopsided they’re positively…Soviet. Ted Strickland over Ken Blackwell in the governor’s race by 36 — that’s thirty-freakin’-six — percentage points. Just for starters. My pal Jennifer Brunner over her opponent in the secretary of state’s race by 21. And so on. And if you’re preparing to play the Liberal Media card in interpreting them, know two things first: The D is not a liberal newspaper, and their poll is well-respected, with a strong track record. (It was one of the few to predict the Reagan landslide in 1980, for starters.)

This is just Ohio, mind you, and Ohio was hit particularly hard by GOP corruption in the last four years. But if Ohio is any kind of bellwether, this is one loud bell.

It’s a mixed grill of bloggage that should lead to some fine snarkage in the comments today. Why? Because I have phone calls to make and another wallpaper border to strip. Since all the wallpaper in this house seems to have been applied with a space-age formulation of cement and epoxy, I don’t have time to dawdle. (Just once, I want to strip wallpaper that I hung, just for the pleasure of encountering strippable paper and easily dissolved glues.) I will be in and out on “breaks,” “five minutes of Me Time” and other procrastination throughout the day, so have at it, because the fruit hangs low today:

I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s not funny, is it? That a top-tier evangelical minister spent three years getting his wing-wang dang-doodled by a male prostitute, right? Are you laughing? I can’t even rouse a chuckle. At this point, the Cavalcade of Evangelical Hypocrites is like the last sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” and in its sixth or seventh minute, no less. The joke is so old, and has been told so often, that it’s, like, oh look look what’s on my lawn. It’s a sparrow! There’s something you don’t see every day.

I love this sidebar, though. This is worth a giggle: Claim against evangelical leader stuns Springs-area residents. “Stuns.” They’re “stunned” by this. Evidently they don’t read the newspapers in Colorado Springs.

For some reason — please, don’t ask me why — I followed a link to a video condensation of an interview Madonna gave earlier this week, justifying her baby-shopping. Once again, I’m struck by the prison so many women my age build for themselves with Botox. Like Queen Noor/Lisa Halaby, it seems Madge has opted to freeze her face with chemicals rather than allow it to form an actual expression, which could lead to wrinkling. It’s a pity, or maybe it isn’t, as Madonna was always a terrible actress, and her current cosmetic choices would seem to rule out any roles other than Third FemBot in Shower, but only as long as she doesn’t have to smile.

I got a call yesterday from a fast-talking hireling of the Republican National Congressional Committee. I know he was a real person, not a recording; I could just tell. And I tried without success to try to get him to shut up and think for just a minute about what he was saying: That I should vote for Mark Souder next Tuesday and save the 3rd District of Indiana from the likes of liberal Tom Hayhurst.

“HEY!” I said. “SHUT UP A MINUTE AND LISTEN TO ME. I HAVE A 313 AREA CODE. I LIVE IN MICHIGAN. I CAN’T VOTE IN THE THIRD DISTRICT OF INDIANA.”

Didn’t do any good. How in the hell did they get my phone number? I’m sure I’m still probably on some voter roll in Indiana. It’s only been two years since I last voted there. But once you see — or even a computer sees — that telltale evidence: The landline telephone at a new address in another state, the lack of voting activity since 2004, don’t you start to get a clue? You’d think.

OK, I can put it off no longer. I take DIF in hand and mount the ladder. Wish me luck, comrades.