It’s funny how some news just doesn’t penetrate even a well-informed person’s orbit. Lately a neighbor feud in a downriver suburb has gone national, and, well. It’s really a perfect story in that it features a psycho, a dead mother, a dying little girl and the word “outpouring.” Stories like this always have to feature an outpouring, usually of “support,” frequently “love” and lots of cash.

Short version: Some time ago, a dispute broke out between the Petkov and Edward families, who live across Detroit Street from one another in Trenton. It appears to be over a child’s birthday party invitation that may or may not have been extended to one of the Petkov children, although a text message was involved, so I can’t really speak authoritatively about the nature of the insult. In my circle, text messages are not used for party invitations. Anyway, the Petkov clan began to nurture a grievance against the Edwards, and sometime in recent days social networking got involved.

One reason the Edward family may not have been as attentive as they could have been to their guest list is that the mother of the family, Laura, was dying of Huntington’s disease, and their daughter, Kathleen, also has the disease, the rarer, fast-moving juvenile variety. Laura died last year, at 24; Kathleen is 7. But they all still hate one another. So somehow the Petkov matriarch, name of Jennifer, thought the proper way to respond to all of this was to doctor a photo of Laura Edward to show her lying in the arms of a Grim Reaper-type skeleton, and to take one of Kathleen and make her face the skull in a skull-and-crossbones photo, and post all of this on her Facebook page. Which is when it became a story.

But it wasn’t just a story, it was a TV story, and not just a TV story but a Fox TV story, and not even the regular 10 p.m. Fox newscast, but the extra one they do at 11 p.m., which is called “the Edge” and is where they stick all the stories for people who find the 10 p.m. version too intellectually challenging. Here’s the story. It’s a hum-damn-dinger. Jennifer Petkov appears to be auditioning for a part on “Real Housewives of Downriver.” As entertainment for the mouth-breathing masses, it’s hard to beat.

But the reaction is where it gets interesting.

First, the Petkovs were targeted by 4chan, which I once saw described as “the scariest hive mind on the internet.” Their address was posted, their employers’ addresses and phone numbers, the whole works. A whole henhouse full of eggs has rained down on their house, enough unordered pizzas to feed 10 football teams. Jennifer’s husband lost his job. It really and truly sucks to be them.

As for Kathleen, inevitably described as “little Kathleen,” well, she won the lottery. This is where the outpouring comes in. A respectable five-figure sum was donated to her family. Other Huntington’s-affected families have gathered around her. And yesterday, she was driven in a stretch limousine to a toy store in Ann Arbor, where she was commanded to shop until she dropped, and she did, spending two grand of the outpouring, with the rest being donated to the children’s hospital at the University of Michigan.

Which I guess is supposed to sound like a happy ending, but all it makes me think is, we live in one fucked-up culture, folks. Never mind the lunatic Petkovs and their Facebook. Why does little Kathleen even know about this? What kind of parent allows their sick child to be photographed for television? Why does she even know about the insult? And while it’s admirable that 90 percent of the outpouring is going to charity, why is our response to every high-profile misfortune or offense to shower the offended with cash and prizes? This has bugged me ever since the Make-a-Wish Foundation came on the radar screen, which sounds like a good idea on paper, and I guess it is, but doesn’t anyone ever see the essential horror in telling a kid, “Hey, Bobby, because you have a fatal disease, you know what? YOU’RE GOING TO DISNEYLAND!”

(I once wrote some columns about a kid who was supposed to die of a fatal liver disorder. She went to Universal Studios, got to watch her favorite show taping, got to meet and have her picture taken with all the stars. Then she went home and didn’t die. Not only that, she was cured, more or less — a pharmaceutical company developed a synthetic enzyme that eliminated her symptoms and returned her to good health. Downside: The drug had an annual cost of $300,000 a year. The last column I wrote, her parents were miserable, because they believed she’d never be able to get medical insurance. They were probably right. But you know what that column got them? An outpouring. Not a big one, but it might have made their lives easier. I lost track of them after that. My guess is, the drug no longer costs $300,000, but who knows if the little girl, all grown up, has health insurance. She probably votes Republican.)

It has been a long, exhausting week. I have no bloggage, but I have a full day ahead of me to do whatever I want. I think I’ll start with a shower and see what develops. Have a good weekend, all.

The weekend was pretty much perfect. Temperatures nudging 80, cerulean skies, the sort of string of lovely days that you always get in the fall, but not always on a weekend. So, as the previous entry should suggest, it seemed fitting to blow off a lot of chore-type stuff and enjoy it while we could. Sailing was Saturday. Yesterday was the housewarming party at the Frank Lloyd Wright house mentioned here a couple weeks back — it’s finally 99 percent done. I’m a friend of a friend of the owners, and came as his plus-one. No photos, at the hosts’ request, but you can still look at the ones at the Hour Detroit link (although the captions don’t always match the photos). It’s as lovely in person as in the pictures; I expect if they haven’t heard from a location scout already, they will soon — the place was born to be a movie set.

We walked over from my friend’s house in Palmer Woods, the grandest of the grand old neighborhoods in Detroit. Walking back alone — had to leave early — I was struck, for the millionth time, by how much money there was in this town, once upon a time. These Tudor-revival and Mission-style and midcentury-modern houses are now owned by buppies and gay men and others unafraid of urban-pioneer living, and there was much discussion of $1,400 monthly winter heating bills and other drawbacks to living in an 8,000-square-foot architectural masterpiece with leaky windows. But without them, that Wright house would still be sitting empty and falling to pieces. So a salute to all.

On the way back I passed a masterful pile identified as the Bishop’s House. The marker was unclear on whether it still is*, but did mention the many religious details of the construction, including a rooftop sculpture of the Archangel Michael battling Satan. Couldn’t see it.

* A quick Google reveals it is not. Whew. Houses like that are hard to justify, even for the One True, these days.

What else? Watched “Howl,” available On Demand. Liked it very much, which I gather from the reviews is not the default position. The story of Allen Ginsberg’s magnum opus (although I hold “Kaddish” in almost equally high esteem) is told in three threads — the trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges for publishing it, an interview with Ginsberg by an unseen interlocutor, and the first reading of the poem itself in 1955. It’s a long poem, and long stretches of it are illustrated with animations, and that seems to be everyone’s problem. They’re too literal, they’re not beautiful enough, whatever. I didn’t care. I found myself paying little attention to them; they might as well have been the iTunes visualizer, or the oscilloscope potheads rigged to their stereos back in my wild youth. I was thoroughly taken with the words, the music of which is strong enough to carry the sequences. I guess the filmmakers thought a black screen or the iTunes visualizer would be too much.

James Franco plays Ginsberg as a young man, and together with Kerouac and Cassady tiptoe up to the edge of Abercrombie & Fitch styling, but don’t quite cross over. For $6.99 on the cable bill, I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday night.

One of the duties I neglected this weekend was crafting something for this space that makes sense, or reads well, or has a point. Obviously. So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Living in Detroit, I guess I should know more about the Insane Clown Posse than I do, but honestly, that is one local act whose orbit simply does not intersect with mine in any way, shape or form. Which is good, because they’re pretty disgusting, the sort of rappers who make Eminem look like Leonard Bernstein. Still, it was simultaneously entertaining, appalling and amusing to read this piece in the Guardian about their true purpose in life:

All of which makes Violent J’s recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, Thy Unveiling, that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt.

Oh, but it gets better! Check out the lyrics:

ICP have just released their most audacious Christian song to date: Miracles. In it, they list God’s wonders that delight them each day:

Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs
Fuckin’ rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to
blow your brains.

The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? Yeah!

The internet moves so fast these days you probably already know about the Ohio House candidate revealed over the weekend as having once been a Nazi re-enactor. (Yes, a Republican. I was as astonished as you were.) What you may not know is that in the Six Degrees of Separation Department, I once spent a weekend at this man’s ancestral summer home. His sister was friends with a friend of mine, and she impulsively invited us all up to their place on Devil’s Lake one Friday. It was a pretty gauzy weekend, but I remember enough to report that there were no, repeat no, Waffen SS uniforms in plain view. I do know they were pretty darn rich, which enables a lot of bad behavior and, far more important, an ability to wall yourself off in a world of people just like you, where no one says, “You know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, and if we do, maybe we shouldn’t take pictures of ourselves wearing these uniforms.” Actually, this characteristic is not confined to the rich. Which is why I will never run for elected office.

Which is just a short sidestep to bigotry in general, in particular Carl Paladino’s, who doesn’t want his children “brainwashed” into thinking it’s OK to be gay. Hmm. All I have to say is, “Rabbi? Is it too much to ask you to take your Bluetooth receiver out of your ear when meeting a gubernatorial candidate?”

Finally, via MMJeff, a Daily Howler worth considering:

For decades, your public discourse has been scripted by skillful players—and by their skilled, clownish messaging. We have drowned in ludicrous statements on policy matters; we have drowned in ludicrous statements about targeted public officials. (If we lower the tax rates, we get higher revenues! The Clintons are serial murderers!) And no matter how stupid these messages got, the “press corps” agreed not to notice. Endlessly, Limbaugh got a pass. So did Chris Matthews, during the many years when he worked for plutocrat masters. (No one did more to send Bush to the White House. But for years after that, Joan Walsh had to keep kissing his keister, the better to get on TV!)

Better get moving. Manic Monday now segues into Terrible Tuesday. I want to work less, or at the very least, be paid more. Is that so much to ask?

Because on a day like today, why the hell not?

My neighbor was carjacked yesterday, a few blocks from here, on the other side of the freeway. It’s the nature of our neighborhood that I didn’t recognize her talking head on the 11 p.m. news, didn’t recognize her common name, and only knew it was her when they flashed her distinctive vanity plate toward the end of the report. Ah, well.

What made this carjacking newsworthy, as opposed to all the others in the Naked City yesterday, was the fact the perps were pre-teens. Srsly. One was about 11 and the other about 12, and my neighbor said her first reaction, when they demanded her keys, was to tell them to run along. Then one showed the gun in his waistband, and life imitated “The Wire.” She said when they drove away in her big Escalade, they could hardly see over the wheel.

Without blaming the victim in any way whatsoever, this is why I would never drive an Escalade, or any other luxury SUV, without Kwame Kilpatrick’s security detail rolling on backup. Not in the stolen-car capital of North America. Just too tempting. Three or four years ago, their last Escalade was stripped of all four of its tires and wheels (replacement cost: about four grand) in their driveway, by one of those Nascar-type theft crews that can get the job done in the time it takes you to pour a cup of coffee. Nice ride, but not worth the trouble.

Insurance is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Which is why it costs so much.

I once asked a local cop who’d done time on the car-theft task force what happens to all the stolen cars around here. Are they rolled into shipping containers and sent off to Moscow? Stripped in chop shops? Stacked on car carriers and taken out of Michigan entirely? Hardly. Most go a few miles into Detroit, where, depending on the thief’s skill and connections, they will be parked somewhere and ineptly hacked at, like a buffalo carcass on the prairie. Kids take the tires and wheels, because they’re easy to get off and you can roll them to the local shops that will buy them, no questions asked. Other thieves remove the air bags, the scrappers go underneath and saw off the catalytic converter, the electronics and sound system and so on find other buyers, and finally the carcass turns up crippled and worthless, maybe torched. A chop shop requires skilled labor, he said, and a network of buyers. Just as James Bond-style cat burglars were outnumbered by strong-arm home invaders, so too is the chop shop more a fixture of the movies than reality. Although they do exist, as our own J.C. Burns, whose 10-year-old Honda Civic disappeared from his Atlanta driveway a few years back, can tell you. Those are reliable, long-lived cars. Parts are valuable, and decade-old antitheft devices easily detoured.

So that was yesterday in my world. What about yours?

Which seems a good segue into the bloggage. In a dispatch from that other capital of criminal weirdness — South Florida — we meet a man who settled a grudge with a squirt bottle of Roundup:

In the front yard, Ewing gunned down flowers and bushes, the report stated. To get to the plants in the backyard, he filled water balloons with the weed killer and tossed them onto his neighbors property. Ewing estimated the landscaping damage to be about $250.

The victim owed him about $200, so it sounds like he got his money’s worth.

Have you ever watched a surgeon operate? I have. The first thing you notice is how all that “delicate hands of a surgeon” crap is just that. It’s more like stuffing a turkey, as this DetNews story on the life of a Motor City trauma surgeon points out:

Patton’s most important tool appears to be his right index finger. That digit acts as his probe, his periscope, his divining rod, his cork. He can remember on more than one occasion saving the life of a gunshot victim who arrived at the hospital in the back of a sedan. He simply plugged the hole with his finger.

“Feeling is believing,” Patton tells a glassy-eyed intern as he fishes around in a knife wound in the back of a man’s knee, trying to augur whether it’s damage to the vein or the artery.

Anything else? Doesn’t look like it. Now to hop to the shower — more office hours. Today I’m bringing a lunch.

I need to check out the right-wing Catholic blogs more often. Otherwise, it might have been even longer before I learned that Joseph Sobran, an embarrassing oddity for the ultraconservative commentariat, died late last week, succumbing to kidney failure and what sounds like a cascade of other health problems brought on by him being such a p.o.s.

You’ve probably never heard of him. I’ve only heard of him because my newspaper carried his column, one of the relative few that ran him at his peak and the tiny handful that hung on after Sobran broke with William F. Buckley Jr. and was fired by the National Review. It was bad enough that we bought his phoned-in paleoconservative dreck when he was respectable, but after Buckley called him out for praising an unapologetically racist magazine, and Sobran retaliated by saying his mentor was a tool of the Podhoretz clan and more concerned with getting seated at the right dinner parties up there in Jew York, well, he crossed the line into embarrassment.

If you paid absolutely no attention to any of this when it was happening in 1993, I’ll try to make this tie together with what we were talking about yesterday. Because while it’s no doubt way too generous to call Sobran crazy, he was one of those right-wing shitheads who took radical and offensive positions in part, I am sure, because he just liked being reviled, and was somehow able to make the revulsion read — in his own mind, anyway — as resentment for a brave truth-speaker. Such as? Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. William Shakespeare was a fraud. The Clintons were white trash. And the Jews were indirectly responsible for 9/11, by shaping U.S. Middle East policy to favor Israel. And so on. The last time I looked him up, he was referring to Barack Obama as “our mulatto president.” Classy.

After his cashiering from polite salons, he was free to do things like give speeches to the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denial group. He spent a lot of time in this keynoter claiming he has no animus for Jews. As for what Hitler did, well…

Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don’t read German, so I can’t assess the documentary evidence; I don’t know chemistry, so I can’t discuss Zyklon-B; I don’t understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, “Holocaust denial” is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that’s proof enough.

…Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it’s safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today’s mainstream press.

If the president says he was born in Hawaii, I take him at his word. After all, I wasn’t there.

Sobran’s passing was barely noted in respectable conservative journals, ignored by the blogosphere, and, as I mentioned before, acknowledged sadly by right-wing Catholics. Apparently Sobran considered himself a faithful and devoted servant of the Roman church, albeit twice-divorced and not enough of an expert on chemistry to formally acknowledge the slaughter of 6 million of God’s chosen people. I think even they were embarrassed by him.

I wonder what his last days were like. Where did he get his money? How did he live? In such cases, it’s useful to remember that there’s a very good chance he spoke to groups like the Institute for Historical Review because their checks cleared. (Boy, there’s a short film ready to be made, eh? “The Old Conservative in Exile.” Shiny suits, pilled cuffs and dandruff just play better on the big screen.)

Whew. I need a palate cleanser. How about a feature borrowed from Zorn, Fine lines?

Add the butter. One of the many reasons that restaurant food often tastes better than the stuff we make at home is that restaurant cooks do not know your cardiologist and have no real interest in your long-term enjoyment of life. They cook for this moment and for the fleeting feeling of delicious transcendence they can offer a diner. Next time, you can use less. This first time, add all four tablespoons.
– Sam Sifton on a pork ragu

Our symphony orchestra is on strike. Gloomy Gusses here think its death is inevitable, that a world-class orchestra is simply something we can no longer afford:

There are lots of numbers here, like there are in just about any labor dispute. But, at base, there are only two metrics that truly matter in the first DSO walkout since 1987 — changing consumer demand and the 21.3 percent decline in Michigan’s median income between 2000 and 2009.

That nation-leading collapse, a sickening number for the ripple effect it delivers to everything from home values and wage levels to public tax revenues and, yes, support for the local orchestra, goes further than just about anything else in describing what’s happening to the DSO. It’s also what will affect public and private institutions, businesses and communities, here for years to come.

Orchestra musicians can walk picket lines for the next year and it won’t change the fact that the economic profile of their geographic home has changed dramatically, if not irreversibly, in ways that peers in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco simply haven’t seen and probably won’t.

As much as it pains me to say, that’s probably true. Although it was also true during the Depression, and the DSO hung on then. With help. You know how Francis Ford Coppola got his middle name? Well, his daddy was a flutist in the Detroit Symphony in the 1930s, and never forgot the group’s sugar daddy, whose financial support kept the place afloat. It could still happen.

Let’s close with a bookend, then. I have work to do:

“If a guy is anti-Semitic and no one is listening, is he still anti-Semitic?” — Paul Shaffer

Happy Tuesday, all.

I’m sorry I’m going to miss this.

Nothing here is the least bit startling to anyone familiar with the Detroit area, but the graphic representation is arresting:

That’s the racial/ethnic breakdown of the Metro: Whites are red, African Americans blue, Hispanics yellow. I don’t think Arabs have a color, or you’d see their numbers, too. If you click the photo itself, you’re taken to the Flickr page where I found it, which contains notes you can mouse over, and see the various neighborhoods/municipalities. (I live in the little comma of red curved in the southeast, on the lake. Here’s a map for Chicago.) Everything, and I do mean everything that happens in Detroit? Is about race. City-suburban relations in particular are like disputes between armed fiefdoms. If we cooperated we could maybe get something done around here. But no.

My partner in GrossePointeToday.com went to a conference earlier in the year, where everyone had to give a presentation on their area. She started with some photos of life around here — the pretty houses, the lake — and finished with one taken a few blocks away in Detroit. The audience gasped. Yep.

In the suburbs, race has its own set of euphemistic vocabulary. My favorite is “changing demographics.” I went to local Republican headquarters to cadge some McCain-Palin yard signs, props for our zombie movie two years ago. The guy who gave them to me said he couldn’t believe all the Obama signs in the Pointes, which he attributed to changing demographics. Because I was in the process of taking his signs for the purpose of making fun of them, I didn’t suggest the alternative, i.e., his ticket sucked, but there you are.

I don’t have much time this morning — more office hours — and precious little bloggage, but what I have is magnificent, a Mitch Albom takedown by someone who’s even more irritated by him than I am. My source on this speculates that perhaps Albom is gearing up to take over Andy Rooney’s job whenever America’s designated lovable coot kicks the bucket. Hmm. Hadn’t considered that. He’s certainly qualified, and he’s precisely the sort of get the producers of “60 Minutes” would consider golden.

Anyway, enjoy. If his editors won’t handle Albom, someone has to. I’ll be back tomorrow.

The New York Times had a story on brick theft in St. Louis yesterday. I’m late getting to it, yes, but somehow I doubt brick theft is a big issue in the blogosphere. The gist: Scrappers, crackheads and other scavengers are taking advantage of abandonment and social disarray to steal the city’s red bricks, “prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.”

The preferred harvesting technique is arson. Then,

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”

It is a crime that has increased with the recession. Where thieves in many cities harvest copper, aluminum and other materials from vacant buildings, brick rustling has emerged more recently as a sort of scrapper’s endgame, exploited once the rest of a building’s architectural elements have been exhausted. “Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”

You have, Royce? You heard right:

I ran this picture a while back. I took it in the fall of 2008 while escorting a pair of French journalists around the city. They wanted to see the $1 houses, and this one was across the street. This house had been looted, scrapped, torched and, when we visited, was giving up its final harvest — the bricks. Two homeless-looking guys were at work with crowbars and a rubber mallet, taking them off one by one and knocking the mortar off. They were tossing them on a pile, but I draw your attention to the pallet in the side yard, the bricks neatly stacked and wrapped in plastic, awaiting the fork lift to take them off…somewhere. I guess to the south, where developers will prize their distinctive character.

In many ways, this photo inspired a screenplay I’ve been working on for a while now, and will finish — 30 more pages! — if I ever get a minute or two. It started me thinking about scrapping in general, how this economic disaster has made it so much easier to take the accumulated wealth of our region and distribute it around the world. Whole factories are being disassembled, their assembly lines cut out with torches, loaded onto freighters and shipped off to places where labor doesn’t demand a living wage and certain safety precautions. Abandoned houses are being stripped of their plumbing and window frames, which is trundled off to the scrap yards and sold by the pound. And now the bricks. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.

See, it just slayed me how systematic all this was, how the sleazy mortgage brokers and other sharpies figured out how to descend upon a city that any fool could tell you was already a pretty well-picked-over carcass to begin with, and still find some marrow to suck out of its bones. This neighborhood, the Realtor told me, had been a functional concern until fairly recently. I wouldn’t have wanted to live there, but a lot of people a little closer to the margins had found it acceptable enough. And then the knock came one day, a former drug dealer trading up to home refinancing, and that was the beginning of the end. They wrote loan after loan against these modest little houses, aided and abetted by their friends in the business, who didn’t care they were loaning 110 percent of a house’s worth to someone whose residency in the working class — and chance of repaying even a fraction — was tenuous in the extreme; their end came out of the fees, the risk passed down the line to some other sucker. Who, it turned out, was us.

Then it all caved in, and the fun really started. Seen above.

A few years back, I toured the Edsel and Eleanor Ford estate with Kate’s Brownie troop, a Cotswold-style mansion on the shores of Lake St. Clair, the sort of thing built by the second generation of a great fortune. The guide pointed out all the architectural details that had been imported from some dismantled English country home — the windows, the floorboards — and it made me wonder if it hasn’t always been thus. Wealth is created, then stolen or traded, traveling around the world in tidal waves of destruction and reconstruction.

I bet the Fords bought their windows fair and square, however; the developers snatching up those nicely wrapped pallets of St. Louis and Detroit brick, not so much. But they have plausible deniability.

In case you’re wondering, I put a few human beings in my fictional story. My struggle is how to make a story that’s essentially about worthless real estate compelling. Get me rewrite.

Another ridiculous day ahead, so better hop to the bloggage:

Ohio University’s Rufus Bobcat delivers an end-zone smackdown to Brutus Buckeye, and friends? I couldn’t be prouder. When your little MAC team is about to serve as an early-season hors d’oeuvre for the Big 10 behemoth 90 miles up the road, the least you can do is get a little mojo for the school any way you can. The guy says he’s not sorry, and he definitely would do it again. Hell yeah.

Gene Weingarten mourns the death of the English language, citing in his evidence:

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”

I shared with him one of my favorites, which appeared in a small Ohio daily way back when: “(The film) contained more violence than a Peck & Paw production.”

Bonus for those who’ve read this far: The brick-theft story, in the venerable and still fully staffed New York Times, contains a similar homophone error deep in the copy. Find it, and I’ll give you…my sincere respect. UPDATE: Eh, never mind. It’s been fixed. Bricks are stacked on a pallet; the original version had them on a palette. That would have been hard to hold.

A good day to all.

There’s something about autumn that gets me in the mood to batten down the hatches. Alan took Kate to a Matt & Kim concert Saturday night, and…

…may I just interject something here? I think I’ve mentioned before that Kate’s enthusiasm in pop music isn’t for superstars like Lady Gaga, but these smaller, less well-known artists like, well, Matt & Kim. In the last year she’s been asking to go to their concerts. She doesn’t ask for much, so if certain circumstances are met (parent escort, not a school night), I generally say yes. But these bands don’t play at arenas, or even at theaters, but at clubs. Rock clubs. And while I guess I always thought I might someday sit down with my daughter at a bar, I didn’t think it would be when she was 13. Last night it was Matt & Kim at the Majestic, and next month she has tickets for All Time Low at the Shelter. The Shelter is the basement part of St. Andrew’s Hall, a.k.a. “the most dangerous concert venue in America.” That’s not literally true. It’s just outside of touristy Greektown; the description refers to all the hip-hop acts that got their start there. Still. The accompanying parent on that trip will get the full treatment from me — don’t let them get too close, nowhere near the speakers, no moshing, whatever.

Saturday night they didn’t get home until after 1 a.m. Alan said the show was pretty good. (Although he mentioned that Matt recalled their last gig in Detroit, after which he was robbed at gunpoint.) Kate got her CD signed by Kim. That’s another reason she likes these little bands — the meet ‘n’ greets at the merch tables. Lady Gaga doesn’t do those, methinks.

OK, back to hatch-battening. While they were out, I tackled my home office, where I was losing the battle against the heaps of paper that work their way into our lives. Why so much paper? I’m striving toward a paper-free existence, and the rest of the world is picking up the slack, plus some, it seems. I sort into piles, then re-sort, and by the third time through I’ve usually made my peace with throwing most of it out. It can take me days to clean an office. My final six months at my last full-time employer were the best, because I’d made a resolution: In hostile territory, it’s best to travel light. When I quit, I walked out with my coffee cup, one file folder and 20 years of memories. It. Felt. Great.

Oh, and the ankle’s better, thanks. If it happens to you, follow RICE therapy immediately. Also, praise G-d for ibuprofen. It made all the difference. It’s still puffy and sore, but I was able to go for a little bike ride yesterday without howling in pain. Progress.

The usual crazed week lies ahead, but I have a jump on things — nothing like a mild sprain to get your paperwork done — and I think I’m ready, just as soon as my loins are girded. In the meantime, some bloggage:

Leave it to nerdy NPR for something like this: When everyone in the world is being called a socialist, what does a real, admitted, avowed one say? These people are not socialists. In part 2, what is a libertarian, and why many of the Republicans who claim to be so, are not.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/09/17/129936548/the-friday-podcast-socialists-libertarians-part-1

The Wall Street Journal has its own axe to grind with the web, but I think their reporting on online privacy, or lack thereof, is pretty prize-worthy. Bottom line: Nothing on the web is free, and the price you pay is your personal information. (Except here at NN.C, where all I know about Dwight is that his ISP is somewhere in the Chicago region. Or was. Maybe.) The latest installment is on the worst offenders — websites frequented by children. Lovely.

Only in Detroit: The Guerrilla Marching Band. Watch the video for some great glimpses of Hamtramck — pierogi, For Sale or Lease signs and fat people. Great town.

Out the door, I am.

Oh, look: Christine O’Donnell was on the record back in the ’90s claiming Bill Clinton needed to be tried for the “murder” of Vince Foster. As Talking Points Memo helpfully explains, the Murder of Vince Foster was to the ’90s what the Kenyan Birth Certificate is to the oughts.

But that’s not all — she also claimed “scientists” have created “mice with human brains.” “Fully-functioning” human brains, no less.

Well, that’s good. My own feels little Swiss-cheesey at the moment; I could use a donor that comes without moral baggage. Although, I dunno. I’m trying to cut back on cheese.

The thing is, I know these people. I do. Not well, but I know them. They were seemingly half the population of Indiana back in the day, and would occasionally call me up to gnaw on my ear about Vince Foster, among other things.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but could I show you some literature about another candidate?” one called to me as I made my way into my polling place on election day. “It’s Bo Gritz. Rhymes with ‘rights.'”

Oh yeah, that guy. He’s still out there. My measure for Crazy back then was whether the lunatic in question had a radio show available on shortwave; many of their natural constituency lives far off the grid in Unabomber cabins and need that extra service. Nowadays, the internet serves for everyone, and I guess they do their reading at the library when they come to town for more 50-pound bags of rice.

But Vince Foster was a biggie, even with mainstream crazies. Was it Dan Burton who restaged the shooting (using watermelons) in his back yard, before concluding yes, yes, it was MURDER? He was a Hoosier. I don’t know why Christine O’Donnell didn’t relocate to Indiana when she was looking for a launch pad for her political career. She’d fit right in. She’d be mainstream.

Speaking of which, I guess everyone has heard by now of the twin Comedy Central rallies planned for D.C. next month. If I could, I would so totally be there:

Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we’ll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila. Join us in the shadow of the Washington Monument. And bring your indoor voice. Or don’t. If you’d rather stay home, go to work, or drive your kids to soccer practice… Actually, please come anyway. Ask the sitter if she can stay a few extra hours, just this once. We’ll make it worth your while.

That’s the Jon Stewart side. Over at Colbert’s end of the Mall, it’s the March to Keep Fear Alive:

America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear — that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear — forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need. They want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget — “Reason” is just one letter away from “Treason.” Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.

I like that line about reason and treason. That’s worth stealing.

I’ve got a meeting in 45 minutes that’s a 25-minute bike ride away. Should I? Of course I should. I’ve been staring at a screen all week, and it’s time to remind my body it exists below the level of its burning eyeballs. So, a skip to the bloggage:

New York City hit by a tornado-like storm. It’s always strange to think of New York as even vulnerable to weather at all.

Madonna is “a director.” Ha. The project is “W.E.,” allegedly about Wallis Simpson. Terrific — another Madge-branded project on a strong woman who is simply ahead of her time and cannot be grokked by the squares. Can’t. Wait.

The new Kickstarter I’m backing — the Mower Gang. They go out with lawn mowers and weed whackers and reclaim city facilities from nature. The video is recommended — last summer they found, and reclaimed, a velodrome. In Detroit! They’re currently trying to raise $600 to make a labyrinth and maze in some overgrown grass. Chip in if you feel like it.

Onto the bike, and outta the door.