Dr. Laura is resign­ing, to spend time in a place where she can speak “what’s on my mind, and in my heart,” and use the N-word when­ever she wants, and oth­er­wise live in a land free of crit­i­cism of any sort, where all the eyes are smil­ing and every pair of hands applauds every word that comes out of her empty skull. Which is to say, Santa Bar­bara.

I wish I could feel hap­pier about this. I would have been over the moon if this had hap­pened a decade ago, but face it — this lady is at least that long past her sell-by date, and this exit is sort of pathetic. She must be grate­ful to at least get to go out via Larry King (of course) and not in a press release that would run in the back pages of a trade mag­a­zine, picked up by the AP for a “where are they now” fea­ture.

I first tuned her in after read­ing a respect­ful pro­file of her in Newsweek mag­a­zine. Kate was a baby then, and Laura Sch­lessinger was get­ting a lit­tle pos­i­tive ink out of being a radio ther­a­pist who didn’t hold your vir­tual hand and say there, there — she would kick your ass and tell you to take some respon­si­bil­ity. This was a new thing at the time. I was work­ing partly from home, try­ing to max­i­mize my time with my wee one, so I thought, OK, let’s see what this lady’s about.

The respect­ful pro­file must have gone to her head, because she was already screechy and insuf­fer­able, and get­ting more so, seem­ingly by the day, a by-the-book fame mon­ster and nar­cis­sist. This was during…what was her thing at the time? Oh, right: Ortho­dox Judaism. No more of that sec­u­lar wishy-washy shit for her, she was going to stay kosher, and be more obser­vant than any Jew in the world. Another Jew­ish woman called in: She had three kids under 5; would it be OK to dis­pense with the leave-your-oven-on-all-day thing for Shab­bos, just until the chil­dren were old enough to leave the oven alone? No! No, you may not! You either get with Judaism all the way, or you get out! The world has enough com­pro­mis­ers! God says no work on Sat­ur­day, and if the rabbi says turn­ing the oven on is work, then you learn to sub­mit!

I lis­tened to this, and thought, “I’d bet a thou­sand bucks this crazy bitch dri­ves to the syn­a­gogue.”

You might won­der why I kept lis­ten­ing. I have a weak­ness for insane peo­ple who live their insan­ity pub­licly, and try to dress it up as some­thing else. True (and doubt­less retold) story: I first heard Rush Lim­baugh months before he broke out nation­ally; our local talk sta­tion was run by the two cheap­est peo­ple in the world, and they were among the very first to take a chance on this new talker. I lis­tened for five min­utes and said, “This is a fat guy who can­not score with chicks.” For Dr. Laura, I said, “Sounds like some­one is still chas­ing daddy’s approval, and the fact daddy is dead and buried isn’t going to stop her.”

Some time later, I read another pro­file, in which Ms. Laura revealed her father once said she was noth­ing spe­cial to look at, that her sis­ter was the lucky recip­i­ent of her mother’s great-beauty genes, and she’d never turn a man’s head. Imag­ine my smug sat­is­fac­tion at learn­ing Laura was estranged from both her mother and her sis­ter, and that she had got­ten her big break in radio by sleep­ing with a man decades older than her, the one who took those nude pho­tos of her. Although I shouldn’t have been smug. It’s no great tal­ent to read an open book.

I men­tioned the male who spawned this crea­ture was already dead by then. With her utter lack of self-knowledge (which is not the same thing as self-obsession), that means our Miss Laura will always be chas­ing the next thing. She shed Judaism some­time after she dis­cov­ered yacht rac­ing, which often hap­pen on Sat­ur­days, and G-d con­sid­ers trim­ming sails work. She gave up hec­tor­ing work­ing moth­ers after her own kid grew up, and started hec­tor­ing wives. (If your hus­band is unhappy, it is YOUR fault. Etc.) And when her kid turned into a mon­ster, she… Well, I don’t know what she did. I had long since stopped lis­ten­ing, and as I said before, she now runs in the wee hours, and ulti­mately, who gives a shit? She has her mil­lions, her sail­boats, and if she hasn’t much of an audi­ence any­more, it isn’t for lack of try­ing.

Now she can sli­i­i­i­ide into full retire­ment and com­fort­able obscu­rity, there to await the death of her much-older (ha ha!) hus­band, and god-knows-what from her hor­ri­ble son, and then, finally, the ran­cid breath of the Reaper him­self. “It’s time, Laura,” he’ll whis­per, as he will to us all. What will she say in reply?

“Daddy? Is that you?”

Bonus, as we move into the blog­gage: Note how weird her lower face looks in this clip from the King inter­view. Is that fillers, Botox, or both?

Speak­ing of women who can­not get enough atten­tion, finally, the Tai­wanese ani­ma­tors meet a sub­ject wor­thy of their art — $P. An absolute, can’t-miss clas­sic.

A harsher look at James Kil­patrick, from one of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ sta­ble.

And now the cof­fee is kick­ing in, and I feel — damn! — pretty good. Have a great Wednes­day.

James J. Kil­patrick died Sun­day, I see. Younger peo­ple will recall him as a car­toon, the basis of Dan Aykroyd’s “Shana, “Jane, you igno­rant slut” sendup of “Point/Counterpoint,” the back-and-forth exchange at the end of “60 Min­utes.” Older ones, based on the obit­u­ar­ies I’m read­ing, would be for­given for think­ing “no big loss,” given how vile his stances were in the heat of the argu­ment:

Mr. Kil­patrick pop­u­lar­ized the doc­trine called inter­po­si­tion, accord­ing to which indi­vid­ual states had the con­sti­tu­tional duty to inter­pose their sep­a­rate sov­er­eign­ties against fed­eral court rul­ings that went beyond their right­ful pow­ers and, if nec­es­sary, to nul­lify them, an argu­ment traced to the writ­ings of Thomas Jef­fer­son, James Madi­son and John C. Cal­houn.

…At times, Mr. Kil­patrick went beyond con­sti­tu­tional argu­ments. In 1963, he drafted an arti­cle for The Sat­ur­day Evening Post with the pro­posed title “The Hell He Is Equal,” in which he wrote that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an infe­rior race.”

But 89 years of life is long enough to grow, it seems:

Mr. Kil­patrick ulti­mately acknowl­edged that seg­re­ga­tion was a lost cause and re-examined his ear­lier defense of it.

“I was brought up a white boy in Okla­homa City in the 1920s and 1930,” he told Time mag­a­zine in 1970. “I accepted seg­re­ga­tion as a way of life. Very few of us, I sus­pect, would like to have our pas­sions and pro­fun­di­ties at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.”

Yep. I’m kind of a softy on James J., because I once wrote him a let­ter dis­agree­ing with one of his columns, and he wrote me back, on his per­sonal let­ter­head, no secretary’s ini­tials at the bot­tom, acknowl­edg­ing my points and respect­fully dif­fer­ing. I wish I still had that let­ter. Respect­ful dis­agree­ment — what a relic of a dif­fer­ent time.

I don’t want to excuse Kilpatrick’s ear­lier sup­port for seg­re­ga­tion and the like, although one thing this book project taught me — and I think I’ve said this before and I’ll prob­a­bly say it again — is that his­tory is both the up-close, day-to-day details and the long view, and as long as progress is being made, we’ll prob­a­bly be OK. Seg­re­ga­tion embar­rasses con­ser­v­a­tives today, because it reminds them of how many of their num­ber were on the wrong side, so I guess there’s some plea­sure in rub­bing their noses in it from time to time, but ulti­mately, what’s the point? If Jack Kil­patrick can change, any­one can.

I used to read his columns when they came in; he wrote two or three times a week for prob­a­bly a few hun­dred news­pa­pers. I know syn­di­cated colum­nists still exist, but I don’t read any of them any­more, at least not out­side their home papers. He wrote about pol­i­tics and lan­guage — an Ask Mr. Lan­guage Per­son with­out the humor — and, from time to time, coun­try life. Those columns were date­lined “Scrab­ble, Va.” and were about the nest of wrens under the eaves or what­not. It takes a lit­tle bit of tal­ent to make life’s mun­dane details into some­thing oth­ers want to read, and read again the next time. (She said mod­estly, sur­vey­ing her audi­ence of dozens…) In the grand scheme of things, he was a suc­cess­ful jour­nal­ist at a time when that was both eas­ier and harder than it is today.

Here’s some­thing that struck me from the obit: His first wife died in 1997. He remar­ried in 1998. Ha. Another man lost with­out a woman. I have a friend who tells his wife, “Honey, I love you and all, but if any­thing ever hap­pened to you I’d be stand­ing on the side­walk in front of the funeral home, propos­ing mar­riage to ran­dom women walk­ing past.” The most pow­er­ful men I’ve known know enough to be hum­ble around their wives, because their wives make their lives pos­si­ble. They run the house, get the dry-cleaning done, bal­ance the fam­ily check­book, pay their hus­bands an allowance. I saw one at a char­ity event, drool­ing over a silent-auction item. He turned to his spouse and asked, “Can I afford this?” Ask if they’d like to come over for din­ner, and he says, “Ask the boss. I show up where she tells me to go.”

I’d hope that Kil­patrick would be offended by a dum­b­ass like Jonah Gold­berg, but you never know. For now, it doesn’t mat­ter.

Blog­gage, while we’re on the sub­ject:

The Newt­ster, cra­zier than ever after all these years. As my friend Lance Man­nion points out, why is this allegedly “bril­liant” scholar still get­ting respect­ful cov­er­age from the D.C. press corps?

Everybody’s seen this by now, but just in case you haven’t: A few other things in the “hal­lowed ground” penum­bra of ground zero. I think Olga’s Salon & Spa should change its name to the Hal­lowed Ground Groom­ing Insti­tu­tion. Classy!

As some­one who’s dri­ven four-cylinder cars for­ever, I’ve never under­stood why they’re so often ignored by Detroit car buy­ers. (Even my fel­low Pas­sat dri­vers around here are all sport­ing V6 badges on the trunk.) Some respect, please.

Time to take Kate to the ortho­don­tist and, oh yeah, write a syl­labus. Later, all.

Mitch Albom got the Red Smith Award from the Asso­ci­ated Press Sports Edi­tors this month. It’s a life­time achieve­ment award, the sort of thing you get with your gold watch and appoint­ment with the death panel. Mitch, at 52, is prob­a­bly cov­er­ing the gray in his hair but nowhere near retire­ment, but hey! That’s entirely in keep­ing with his career! By the time Mitch hits what would be retire­ment age for you or me, we’ll all be watch­ing white smoke pour out of the Vat­i­can chim­neys as he’s elected the first Jew­ish Pope. George Clooney will be work­ing as his house­boy. And so on.

Over time, I’ve reached a sort of peace with Albom — I only get my dan­der up when he wan­ders off the sports pages. Which is often. But this isn’t one of those times. Let the APSE give him what­ever award they want. I don’t even work for news­pa­pers any­more. They made their bed, and they can lie in it, the feebs.

Then, yes­ter­day, some­one sent me this, from Dead­spin. Snicker:

…the Happy Meal the­ol­ogy of (Mitch) Albom’s books that would’ve made Jonathan Liv­ingston Seag­ull want to fly into the near­est wind tower.

I know it’s not just me who hates him. I once bat­ted around the idea of a sep­a­rate Mitch blog with another Detroit writer, or maybe even pitch­ing a col­umn to the Metro Times, in the grand tra­di­tion of Bob­watch, the Chicago Reader’s Bob Greene snark­fest. Among sports­writ­ers, how­ever, I’ve always assumed the dis­like of Albom was based far more on jeal­ousy than any­thing else. The num­ber of sports­writ­ers I hon­estly respect as writ­ers, period, is pretty low, and I’ll bet the over­whelm­ing secret thought most of Mitch’s col­leagues enter­tain is this: Why didn’t I think of this shit first?

How­ever, Dead­spin lays out a pretty good col­lec­tion of argu­ments as to why this award is the equiv­a­lent of Pia Zadora win­ning a Golden Globe. Its cor­ner­stone is this Dave Kin­dred col­umn about why Albom’s 2005 trans­gres­sion — lav­ishly cov­ered at the time, I won’t go into it here — ought to have dis­qual­i­fied him for this sort of lau­rel for­ever.

Well-argued, but as I said: That’s the APSE’s busi­ness. I was more inter­ested in fol­low­ing the other links, espe­cially this one, for which I reserve a com­ment I know many of you find offen­sive, but I can­not help myself: Jesus fuck­ing Christ. If I recall cor­rectly, Mitch’s 2005 shenani­gans cost this man two weeks’ pay in the final arbi­tra­tion. I guess not every­one can hold a grudge as long as I can.

Oh, well. Deep breaths. All bet­ter now.

Some of you may have noticed these new entries are arriv­ing later in the day than they usu­ally do. I’m sleep­ing later, plus I’m get­ting ham­mered with work from my hyper­local site. Which is good for me, but may neces­si­tate another sched­ule rejig­ger­ing, because I can’t keep this up.

So let’s skip to the blog­gage:

Not quite OID, but close: Lit­tle girls set up lemon­ade stand, which is robbed. (Note to self: GREAT MOVIE SCENE.) In what news­pa­pers love to call “an out­pour­ing,” they’re find­ing this is prob­a­bly the best thing to hap­pen to them, ever.

Coo­zledad, remem­ber when you said you found a worth­less eHow arti­cle on burn­ing pel­lets in a wood stove? One of the writ­ers speaks:

“I was like, ‘I hope to God peo­ple don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll prob­a­bly poi­son them­selves.’

“Never trust any­thing you read on eHow​.com,” she said, refer­ring to one of Demand Media’s high-traffic web­sites, on which most of her clips appeared.

Finally, a sweet story for cat lovers. Because you know what a softy I am in my tiny black heart.

Happy Thurs­day. Where did the damn week go?

It’s a per­fectly lovely morn­ing here, the last few days’ oppres­sive humid­ity blown off, the sun gleam­ing, the air deli­ciously cool. So you know what that means:

The peo­ple across the street are hav­ing some trees trimmed this morn­ing. Yes, a wood chip­per. I am going insane.

This is the down­side of work-at-home self-employment. Well, that and the lousy money, and the lack of health insur­ance, and no one to bat ideas around with. I could prob­a­bly think of a few more, but, well — the wood chip­per just fired up again.

Sorry. I shouldn’t com­plain.

Hav­ing a bit of dif­fi­culty get­ting started this a.m. Or rather, I got started pretty early on other stuff, and can’t shift my head into blog­space. It seemed I missed a lot in my absence, includ­ing the whole Weigel thing, which I still can’t quite wrap my head around. The Wash­Post hires a blog­ger to cover the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, encour­ages a blog­ging voice, and then pushes him out when he becomes, what? A lit­tle too blo­ga­li­cious? Because he trashed Matt Drudge? In writ­ing? Well, OK. I get it. You can’t go around mak­ing smart cracks of the sort peo­ple make every day, at least not in writ­ing. Because that would prove…something, I dunno.

For the record: I’m in favor of a more open exchange of ideas and even insults. If that means a lot of “biased” peo­ple get to keep their jobs, then so be it. I liked Weigel’s columns while they lasted. Have we fig­ured out who dimed him? I’m still catch­ing up, but this…

“It seems like he spends a lot of time apol­o­giz­ing,” said Penny Nance, the chief exec­u­tive of Con­cerned Women for Amer­ica, one of Weigel’s con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics. “The prob­lem is Con­cerned Women for Amer­ica and other con­ser­v­a­tives resent the idea of the Wash­ing­ton Post or other major news affil­i­ates hir­ing peo­ple who hate us to be the ones to report on us. David Weigel has already shown great dis­taste, if not down­right dis­dain, for con­ser­v­a­tives, so it’s dif­fi­cult for us to take the Post seri­ously when this is the per­son the Post hires to cover con­ser­v­a­tives.”

…caught my eye. In other words, we want to approve who cov­ers us. The line for ring-kissing forms to the left. I can’t add more than Scott Lemieux at LGM, so I won’t.

And with that, I think I’d best get back to work. We’re obvi­ously off the rails here. Apolo­gies, and I’ll try to come to the table with a lit­tle more sentence-crafting savvy tomor­row.

I was sit­ting in the midst of Bitches Brew Revis­ited, one of the opening-night con­certs at the Mon­treal Jazz Fes­ti­val — excuse me, the Fes­ti­val Inter­na­tional de Jazz de Mon­tréal — when it occurred to me why jazz is so pop­u­lar here: Because French Cana­di­ans are basi­cally French, and the French can be reli­ably counted on to embrace any­thing most Amer­i­cans hate. It makes them feel supe­rior. Per­haps they are supe­rior. They’ve cer­tainly got the charming-city thing fig­ured out. “Bitches Brew,” I’m not so sure. There are moments in that record that feel like genius, oth­ers more like the emperor’s new clothes. That’s when your mind wan­ders.

So I’m start­ing a list: Things the French Love that (Most) Amer­i­cans Hate. So far: Mod­ern jazz, sweet­breads, politi­cians with wan­der­ing peck­ers. Let’s leave Jerry Lewis off for now. Dig deeper.

And yes, we had a fine time in Mon­treal. You are free to dis­agree with my con­tention that French Cana­di­ans are “basi­cally French.” I’m aware that to a Parisian, a French Cana­dian is a knuckle-dragging, fur hat-wearing lum­mox. A for­mer edi­tor of mine was French Cana­dian on his mother’s side and spoke the lan­guage, and told me a story once of rid­ing in a taxi from the Paris air­port, chat­ting up the dri­ver, who com­pli­mented him on his grace­ful usage while simul­ta­ne­ously dis­parag­ing those block­head Canucks who mas­sacre it every day in his taxi, and… Sud­denly this is sound­ing very much like a taxi story, I real­ize.

What­ever. I did enjoy being immersed in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage for a few days, because it reminds you both of how very much you know and how very much you don’t know. I pointed out to Kate sev­eral times that fak­ing it through a for­eign coun­try isn’t so hard, that much of it is non-verbal puzzle-solving and other tricks. The ele­va­tor but­ton for the hotel lobby says R instead of L, but it’s noth­ing you can’t fig­ure out. Besides, it’s so amus­ing. The Lonely Planet guide said that even in France, stop signs are red, octag­o­nal and say STOP, but in Que­bec, they’re red, octag­o­nal and say ARRET. Still, if you know the red octa­gon part, you can fig­ure out the rest. And it’s fun to speak fake French, and spec­u­late on why it’s the lan­guage of diplo­macy; my the­ory is that it sounds much classier to call some­one le sac du douche than just a douchebag.

More sto­ries to come as the week wears on. For now, just this one, tran­si­tion­ing into the blog­gage: We were ques­tioned closely at the bor­der, enter­ing Canada, about our plans for the week, and whether we were going to stop in Toronto for the G20 con­fer­ence.

“The G20 is meet­ing in Toronto?” I asked. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought, as jour­nal­ists, you would know about the half bil­lion we’ve spent on secu­rity, the anar­chist pro­tes­tors, and all the rest of it,” the guard said.

Shamed! I was shamed. To be sure, the G20 is one of those things I pay atten­tion to when it’s going on, but crim­iny, buddy, the pregame is sort of the def­i­n­i­tion of a local story. Nev­er­the­less, once we were in the Globe & Mail cir­cu­la­tion area, it was hard to avoid, and com­ing home Sat­ur­day, we stopped for din­ner in a sub­urb of the big T, and watched the vio­lence on live TV. It looked pretty bad, but I’m just going to throw this out there and see what you think:

Police love noth­ing more than expect­ing trou­ble. It gives them a big, big bar­gain­ing chip to present to their munic­i­pal­i­ties, in return for a blank check. When the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Fort Wayne, the sheriff’s deputies fell out in a long row behind a line of riot shields that were so new you could prac­ti­cally see the stickum where the price tags had been. Riot shields are not nor­mally gear the Allen County Sheriff’s Depart­ment uses, and I’m sure that was only the begin­ning. News that the world’s anar­chists are com­ing to your city is music to a cop’s ears, as it rep­re­sents huge over­time checks, hel­mets and gas masks and, for the bul­lies, a license to swing a club.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t rather be patrolling a pleas­ant sum­mer day in the park. I’m just say­ing there’s a time in every job when you’re needed, and that feels good to every­one. I’m not say­ing I agree with the con­tentions in this rather para­noid arti­cle — short ver­sion: that, in need of a rea­son to use all that new equip­ment and jus­tify its expense, that the police started their own riot — but it’s inter­est­ing to think about. The stuff about the shoes is intrigu­ing.

I don’t know what the total dam­age in Toronto will be. But if half a bil­lion in advance spend­ing couldn’t stop it, maybe a dif­fer­ent approach is called for next time.

Full-on blog­gage today:

A story for Pride 2010, via Hank: After 45 years, a wed­ding. Also, an 89-year-old Stonewall vet sits it out this year.

The Back of Town blog — the “Treme” peo­ple — gets some love.

The Texas GOP comes out against oral sex. Way to nail down the swing vote, guys.

Susan Ager came out of retire­ment to write a very long account of her recent brush with endome­trial can­cer in Sunday’s Free Press. I know the lady had — has — a lot of fans, but I was rarely one of them. She didn’t even rank on the Albom Scale of Irri­ta­tion, but she could get on my nerves. I can take or leave Sunday’s story — it’s cer­tainly bet­ter than most of what they run on that space — but can I just say some­thing? When I was a colum­nist, I got a cer­tain amount of fan mail, and it wasn’t all from Brian Stouder. But when I pub­lished reader let­ters, I cut that stuff out. If some­one wrote me a let­ter, told me how much they liked my col­umn and then com­menced to ask a ques­tion about some­thing else, I cut right to the ques­tion. So when I read stuff like this…

(The sur­geon) smiled at my bed­side and said, “You’re meet­ing me for the first time, but I’ve known you for years through your work.”

…I cringe. What hap­pened to self-effacement? There was a Det­News colum­nist who did the same thing. When she was off sick, she’d come back and write a col­umn about how sick she’d been, pep­pered with reader notes about how much they’d missed her beau­ti­ful face smil­ing out of the news­pa­per. I ask you.

And now I ask you for leave, because, as usual, Mon­day is a killer.

Hank Stuever had a post on his blog yes­ter­day, about a happy time in his life that coin­cided with a happy time in my life, i.e., work­ing on the col­lege news­pa­per. And even though his happy time was a decade after my happy time, it sounds as though the tech­nol­ogy we used was about the same, and that was part of the fun of it:

I miss lay­out. It was prob­a­bly the only crafty, tac­tile skill I ever mas­tered — start­ing in the jour­nal­ism room in high school. I miss the waxer, the long strips of freshly devel­oped type set in col­umn inches, the bor­der­tape, the pica poles, the photo reduction-ratio wheels, miter­ing my cor­ners, the Zip-o-Tone, the 20-percent gray screen half-tones, the light-tables; writ­ing head­lines from count orders (”they need a 3-36-1 in 19-pica col­umn width, and don’t for­get that flitj only counts for half a char­ac­ter”). I miss the mon­strous and can­tan­ker­ous pho­to­stat machine. I miss light blue Copy-Not pens. I miss being able to fix a typo with a knife instead of a reset.

Much of that is prob­a­bly gib­ber­ish to most of you, but to me, that para­graph, loaded with all those terms of art, is what sep­a­rates a writer from a lay­out artist. I hadn’t thought about Zip-o-Tone (Zip-A-Tone, to be exact — sorry, Hank) since maybe 1978, and just that phrase brought it all back — the late nights at the Post doing just that, fueled on day-old dough­nuts and bad cof­fee, trad­ing jokes and insults. Disco light table! some­one would squeal when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on the radio from down Park­ers­burg way, flick­ing the switches on and off dur­ing the cho­rus.

But I think I may have cov­ered this topic before. What I meant to point out was this apt com­par­i­son later in Hank’s mini-essay:

I think I derived the same joy from lay­ing out a news­pa­per that quil­ters derive from quilt­ing bees. It required con­cen­tra­tion, mea­sure­ment, tech­nique, artistry — but it never dis­tracted you from con­ver­sa­tions and gos­sip and laughs with your col­lab­o­ra­tors.

Yes. Exactly. It’s the crafti­ness of it. I’ve never been much for crafts, but like Hank, I miss the cama­raderie of build­ing some­thing with your hands in a group. I got a lit­tle of that dur­ing my time on the copy desk; the work wasn’t so dif­fi­cult you were risk­ing anyone’s con­cen­tra­tion by occa­sion­ally not­ing, out loud, “Name Redacted is the worst writer this news­pa­per has, and I’ll fight any man who dis­agrees.” We were just Amish ladies stitch­ing squares together.

So thanks, Hank, for that. And yes, I will join your Lay­out Club. We can put out a newslet­ter or some­thing, ol’ skool. I may still have some Letraset lying around here some­where.

J.C. will prob­a­bly use his admin sta­tus to post a photo in com­ments from those days. He was one of the super­vi­sors of our back­shop, back in the day.

So, any­thing else today? There’s this: You may have heard how the pres­i­dent of the Detroit Pub­lic Schools board imploded last week, or rather…[cue boom-chicka-wow sound­track] maybe I should say, exploded. Mathis was briefly shamed into resign­ing after the super­in­ten­dent accused him of play­ing pocket pool dur­ing their meet­ings, and if you want the gross details, well, read all about it.

I say “briefly shamed” because he had no sooner resigned than he tried to take it back, claim­ing “health prob­lems” caused him to take mat­ters into his own hands, ha ha. I think Laura Berman sums up the man in a few dev­as­tat­ing sen­tences, here:

After grad­u­at­ing from South­east­ern High School with a D-plus aver­age, he got into Wayne State Uni­ver­sity in a pro­gram for the aca­d­e­m­i­cally unqual­i­fied. When he failed to pass an Eng­lish lan­guage writ­ing exam required for grad­u­a­tion, he sued, claim­ing the exam dis­crim­i­nated against African-Americans. When the exam was dropped, a decade later, he duly received his bach­e­lor of sci­ence degree.

Mathis was praised by his col­leagues for his cool­ness under pres­sure and his lack of defen­sive­ness: qual­i­ties that have stood him in good stead over the years, as he faced down chal­lenges to his com­pe­tency. As he told me in a March inter­view, his deficits had been writ­ten about before. “Peo­ple make a lot of noise for a while and then it all blows over,” he said.

Maybe he felt com­pelled to test how low expec­ta­tions might really go.

And they were already pretty damn low, let me tell you.

With that, an announce­ment: I’ll be scarce around here for a while. We’re tak­ing a few days’ vaca­tion, and this time we’re going some­place my cell phone con­tract doesn’t cover, so no mobile uploads. And where might that be? They speak French there, but it’s in North Amer­ica. Where could it be? Let me put it this way: I told Kate I wanted to take her to Europe, but we can’t afford Europe, so we’re going for the clos­est equiv­a­lent within dri­ving dis­tance.

So: Au revoir for now, and I’ll see you back here Mon­day.

The New York Times has a front-pager on the fate of Larry King’s show on CNN, which seems pretty cloudy. The web ver­sion fea­tures a photo of King taken at the cor­re­spon­dents’ din­ner this spring, look­ing 112 years old. I was shocked to learn he’s only 76; I thought he was 91-year-old Andy Rooney’s col­lege room­mate or some­thing.

Every­body lucky to live long enough gets old, but not every­body in their eighth decade is old. I met an 81-year-old man at the Eco­nomic Club gala last week who looked like he could tow a tanker down the Hous­ton Ship­ping Chan­nel with his teeth. King, on the other hand, fairly dod­ders. If his show goes away at the end of the sea­son — the once-mighty rat­ings colos­sus is already well behind Sean Hannity’s and Rachel Maddow’s shows in the same time slot — it will have died of noth­ing more than ter­mi­nal geezer­hood.

I lost patience with it years ago. I don’t even under­stand why the show is named after King, as all he does is show up, sit there and occa­sion­ally announce a com­mer­cial break between unchal­lenged chunks of celebrity blath­er­ing. Jon Car­roll once called him a tab­ula rasa, and that, in my opin­ion, would be a much bet­ter name for the hour: Tab­ula Rasa with Sus­penders Man. Tonight, Kate Gos­selin!

I can never, ever in a mil­lion years improve upon this James Wol­cott take­down of King, pegged to the last week of June 2009, when Ed McMa­hon, Far­rah Faw­cett and Michael Jack­son all kicked the bucket within days of one another. King is at his best, or worst, or whatever-you-call it when celebri­ties die. I remem­ber read­ing this in the car on our way down to Defi­ance one day last sum­mer, and laugh­ing so hard Alan told me to put a sock in it, I was dis­tract­ing him from the road. A lengthy pas­sage, but all in one para­graph:

For his June 26 show, he assem­bled an A-list trauma team to pay their respects: Liza Min­nelli, Usher, Quincy Jones, and Deepak Chopra. O.K., maybe Deepak dragged the over­all grade down to B-plus, but the next evening Larry gave us Cher, Celine Dion, Smokey Robin­son, and Corey Feldman—Cher and Celine on the same show being Christ­mas come early for the drag-queen com­mu­nity under­served by cable news. For the next two weeks, Larry King Live was wall-to-wall Michael Jack­son in memo­riam, the guest list and the qual­ity of insight being offered begin­ning to betray moth holes—in a sur­real inter­view with renowned der­ma­tol­o­gist Dr. Arnold Klein, rumored to be the bio­log­i­cal (sperm donor) father of two of Jackson’s chil­dren, King asked, “Is it true that he wanted to look like Peter Pan?,” to which Klein replied, “I didn’t see him implant­ing wings on the back of his back or doing any­thing like that, right?”—until the addled nadir was reached dur­ing an inter­view with Jer­maine Jack­son at the Nev­er­land Ranch when, as an inside tour was being con­ducted of the vacated rooms, a shadow crossed the end of the hall­way. To those who dare to believe, who dare to hope, it was the ghost of Michael Jack­son return­ing to his place of solace. On YouTube, the shadow was there for all to see. “Plenty of America’s most stag­ger­ing dip­shits saw it,” reported Gawker, “so CNN devoted an entire seg­ment on King’s show tonight to solv­ing the mys­tery. And the answer to all of this is—A crew mem­ber walked [past] a light­ing fix­ture, cre­at­ing a shadow on the wall. Yep, that’s it, just as any per­son with mod­er­ate lev­els of oxy­gen flow­ing to the brain should have deduced on their own.” I’m not sure how large a per­cent­age of CNN’s core demo­graphic fits the def­i­n­i­tion of “stag­ger­ing dip­shits,” but it is reas­sur­ing to know that the net­work isn’t ignor­ing their needs.

But that’s King at his best. Most nights he just sits there, grunt­ing. Wol­cott again:

Elo­quence is not his thing. He solic­its and accepts banal clichés that con­vert every celebrity death into a crunchy meal, while toss­ing off non sequiturs that keep every­one guess­ing. Part of what makes King per­fect for his role is that he came out of the Wal­ter Winchell world and thinks in stac­cato three-dot seg­ments (as wit­ness his widely mocked col­umn in USA Today), equip­ping him with a built-in short atten­tion span that some believe makes him the unof­fi­cial god­fa­ther of Twit­ter. A typ­i­cal Larry King Live is a pas­tiche whose absur­dism defies par­ody. Wear­ing his trade­mark sus­penders and pur­ple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with ver­ti­cal seat belts, unable to eject. Sit­ting across from him may be for­mer Incred­i­ble Hulk Lou Ferrigno—whom Larry mis­tak­enly refers to as “Lou Fer­rag­amo,” cor­rects him­self, then repeats the error—and Mar­lon Brando’s son Miko, dressed in a fes­tive Hawai­ian shirt, fol­lowed by a panel explor­ing “the world of celebrity autop­sies.”

There was some talk in the NYT story that the rea­son Han­nity and Mad­dow are thriv­ing and King isn’t is because they appeal to peo­ple on the ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, who want noth­ing but an amen cor­ner for their own beliefs. Um, no. It’s because they have a pulse. I can’t watch Han­nity — those close-set, beady eyes just creep me out — but Mad­dow reg­is­ters with me because she seems to have all of her big brain engaged with whomever she’s inter­view­ing. Of course she goes easy on left­ies and hard on their oppo­nents, but even a few lobs are more tol­er­a­ble than King’s non-engagement. You get the idea he’s think­ing about his alimony pay­ments.

Or maybe he’s think­ing about his replace­ment. The story spec­u­lates on who might replace him. Katie Couric? Eliot Spitzer? But then, once again, com­edy gold:

Mr. King has said in the past that his first choice for a suc­ces­sor is the enter­tainer Ryan Seacrest.

I’d watch that if he wore sus­penders.

OK, another morn­ing when I’d like to get the exer­cise over with early — it’ll be mid-80s before too long. I leave you with a bit of blog­gage:

The non-link between vac­cines and autism, as explained by Dr. Andrew Wake­field… in comics! Via Metafil­ter, where a com­menter adds the Jenny McCarthy Body Count.

And may I just say, yesterday’s com­ment thread was fan­tas­tic? I never knew that about Austin Peay, the col­lege whose name rhymes with “pee.” Bas­set, last night: Back in the, I don’t know, late 60s or early 70s the star of Austin Peay’s bas­ket­ball team was one Fly Williams… which led to the cheer, “The Fly is open! Let’s go, Peay!” You guys are great.

And now I’m off. Rumor has it Greg Kin­n­ear is shoot­ing a movie in the Farms, so I’m off on bike patrol to gawk.

Hey, pals. I spent the morn­ing writ­ing a col­umn for Grosse​Pointe​To​day​.com, which some of you might enjoy. Here’s the top:

For many years, center-left peo­ple like me knew who the bad guys were — the reli­gious right. We learned to rec­og­nize their code words, their iter­a­tions and mash-ups of “fam­ily,” “val­ues,” “faith” and “life.” (They, in turn, knew ours — “diver­sity,” “tol­er­ance,” “embrace” and the all-important “peo­ple of” usage.) I sup­pose, in the back of my mind, I knew the pen­du­lum would swing away from them some­day, but as long as they could get respect from the peo­ple who spent my tax money, the watch­word was vig­i­lance.

What I didn’t expect was the emo­tion I felt watch­ing the strange, bum­bling com­edy at the War Memo­r­ial Thurs­day night (March 25), where a little-known Grosse Pointe Farms group called Point of Rel­e­vance spon­sored a pre­sen­ta­tion by one Linda Har­vey, a Colum­bus, Ohio woman whose group, Mis­sion: Amer­ica, seeks — quot­ing from their web­site here — “to equip Chris­tians with cur­rent, accu­rate infor­ma­tion about cul­tural issues such as fem­i­nism, homo­sex­u­al­ity, edu­ca­tion and New Age influ­ences.” Har­vey came expect­ing to speak to the like-minded Point of Rel­e­vance. But they were out­num­bered by a crowd of my peo­ple, scram­bled via social net­works and e-mail, hold­ing signs and itch­ing for a con­fronta­tion.

As a jour­nal­ist, I’ve seen many such divided crowds, taunt­ing one another. But I’ve never looked at the other side and felt this: Pity.

You can read the rest here. I’m not much for the cross-posting thing — most of you live else­where, I know — but I can’t be two peo­ple, peo­ple!

Besides, I have some good blog­gage today:

Hank found a photo from the White House’s Flickr stream, and got a pretty good blog post out of it. It’s of spe­cial inter­est to those of you who write, for the liv­ing or for the love. If you fol­low his link back to the orig­i­nal on Flickr, you can blow the photo up huge and exam­ine it in detail. It’s worth it.

But don’t stay there — on the White House’s pho­to­stream — too long. You can get lost in there.

This let­ter, “from a doc­tor who will not com­ply,” is rac­ing around the inter­nets. I’m call­ing b.s. on it. From the too-generic name (Linda John­ston, MD) to the sus­pi­cious lack of any iden­ti­fy­ing details (city or even state of prac­tice), to the casual use of ques­tion­able sta­tis­tics (Oba­macare cre­ates 150 new gov­ern­ment agen­cies), to the oddly lit­er­ate, flow­ing prose, the let­ter is peg­ging my meter. The time-stamp on my Face­book call on this was about 8:30 a.m. I’ll apol­o­gize if I’m wrong, but if I’m right, I want credit.

And while we’re on the sub­ject of doc­tors, real ones, I know the one in this NYT story today. Mike Mirro is a car­di­ol­o­gist in Fort Wayne, one of the very very best, and this story is impor­tant. Read.

With that, I’m out. Have a great week­end.

The jour­nal­ism world, such as it is these days, is dis­cussing Randy Michaels’ no-no list. The for­mer radio wreck­ing ball, now the CEO — I get dizzy just think­ing about it — of the Tri­bune Co. issued a list of 119 words and phrases that must never, ever be heard again on the company’s news-talk sta­tion, WGN.

This story is being spun as a mon­u­men­tal case of micro­man­age­ment. It is. How­ever, it is noth­ing new. Every media out­let in the world has a boss who hands down these edicts; it’s one of the perks of the top job — cre­at­ing a world unto your­self in which no one ever, ever uses the word butt. The only thing that makes this case dif­fer­ent is the fact it’s the CEO doing it. In most com­pa­nies, espe­cially one like the Tri­bune Co., inevitably referred to as “trou­bled,” the CEO is — should be — the big-picture guy stand­ing on the bridge look­ing at the seas ahead, scan­ning for ice­bergs, not going below to instruct the coal-shovelers on the proper angle to wear their sailor caps. Not in Chicago, evi­dently. Ah, well.

Here’s the other thing: Michaels kind of has the right idea, or seems to have backed into the right idea. A big chunk of the entries on the list are the sort of trite jour­nalese that any­one with a sen­si­tive ear hates — clash with police, say, or went ter­ri­bly wrong, or one of my per­sonal pet peeves, diva. (I pre­fer the sim­pler bitch.) Look­ing at the rest of the list, though, I’m going to assume the smart part of it is sim­ply a case of a mon­key bang­ing out the first act of “Ham­let.” Remem­ber, this is Lee Abrams’ other half.

I’m going to fur­ther assume that many of these words never made it onto WGN’s air to begin with. Fatal death for instance. An intern might write that, but pre­sum­ably it wasn’t a rou­tine usage. Ditto bare naked and med­ical hos­pi­tal. I looked in vain for con­tro­ver­sial, and didn’t find it. He got famed in there, but not all its vari­a­tions; gen­er­ally, I fol­low the rule that if some­thing is famous, you don’t need to remind peo­ple.

The list also bans cer­tain words jour­nal­ists rely on to pro­tect our­selves — alleged, for one. Laypeo­ple hate that one. I think Eric Zorn tack­led it after the Flight 253 near-disaster, when a reader com­plained that we shouldn’t be call­ing Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab the “alleged ter­ror­ist.” Zorn said yes we should, because that’s what we do — it’s not the news media’s job to decide when you’re guilty, but a court of law’s. If you don’t like it, you can always move to Afghanistan. Or tune your radio to WGN.

Zorn looked at the list, and the fall­out, on his blog yes­ter­day. In his defense, Michaels and his under­ling point out there’s noth­ing wrong with striv­ing for clear writ­ing, from the CEO all the way down. Agreed. But please explain, gents: What’s your prob­lem with pedes­trian? Is there a bet­ter word for a per­son walk­ing across a street? Or offi­cials? Don’t for­get that news writ­ing evolved the way it did because those sen­tences have to carry a lot of freight. It’s eas­ier for lis­ten­ers for a broad­caster to say “city offi­cials said” rather than “street depart­ment, police and fire and parks and recre­ation super­vi­sors said.”

With that, I go behind closed doors. I seem to have turned a cor­ner, health-wise, but not work-wise. So you all enjoy Fri­day, and I’ll see you in the wake of the week­end.

I spent most of Fri­day doing some­thing at the last minute. (So sue me, I have a journalist’s heart. We do things at the last minute.) Con­sid­er­ing I was judg­ing col­lege jour­nal­ism, that seemed fit­ting.

Fifty entries in an SPJ con­test. I read every one. I liked many of them. When it came time to pin the rib­bons, I felt the usual remorse that so many good entries wouldn’t go away with a prize. I expected all of this. What I didn’t expect was this: How lit­tle has changed. I’m not talk­ing about the flag of The Post, my col­le­giate alma mater, still rec­og­niz­able after, what? Thirty years of sub­se­quent edi­to­r­ial staffs? (Admirable restraint, if you ask me. The first thing a new edi­tor does in the real world is order a sweep­ing redesign. Ninety per­cent of the time, a crim­i­nal waste of effort.)

No, I’m talk­ing about the form itself — the stu­dent news­pa­per. By this time, the new media should have swept col­lege cam­puses. There shouldn’t be a stu­dent news­pa­per, but rather, a com­pletely inter­ac­tive platform-neutral infor­ma­tion stream, pro­cess­ing all the impor­tant news on cam­pus — in my day, record reviews, clas­si­fied ads on apart­ments and two-for-one pizza coupons — into a seam­less gar­ment of data acces­si­ble on every­thing from a lap­top to a phone, plus Twit­ter and Face­book and all the rest of it. Maybe, some­where, that is the case. All I know is that I saw tra­di­tional news sto­ries writ­ten in tra­di­tional ways, pre­sented in tra­di­tional lay­outs on tra­di­tional ink-on-paper. It was more than tra­di­tional. In fact, it was retro: At one point, I beheld a head­line with a kicker. You know what a kicker is? It’s the lit­tle mini-headline that runs over the main head, usu­ally with a rule under­neath, usu­ally just a few words:

Swine flu sweeps fresh­man dorms; vac­ci­na­tion clinic announced. Kicker: ‘Sick as a dog’

I haven’t seen a kicker in pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ism since Jim Bar­bi­eri was writ­ing them at the Bluffton News-Banner. That is to say: A while.

There are two ways of look­ing at this. One, that col­leges are seri­ously fail­ing jour­nal­ism stu­dents by keep­ing stu­dent papers around at all, like a school offer­ing buggy whip-braiding classes in 1925. Or maybe, just maybe, the news­pa­per isn’t a ter­ri­ble way to deliver news in any envi­ron­ment, but par­tic­u­larly on cam­pus, where kids fre­quently find them­selves with 20 min­utes to kill between this and that, and a paper is not only an effi­cient deliv­ery vehi­cle for the infor­ma­tion those stu­dents might want, but actu­ally, I dunno, some­thing pleas­ant to pass the time with.

I’m hold­ing with hope. It’s all I’ve got. Although a word of advice to stu­dent jour­nal­ists: You can almost always make your sto­ries shorter. You’re com­pet­ing with Twit­ter, you know.

And now the week­end is over, and I’m fac­ing a two-week sprint unlike many of recent years. Good news: It’s work, it’s pay­ing work, and that’s good. Bad news: Might be spotty around here for a while. But you guys are good con­ver­sa­tion­al­ists; you can carry this dump for a few days here and there.

Let’s start with an under­re­ported story, in my opin­ion: What if health-insurance reform dies, as so many seem to want? What then? The cost of doing noth­ing. Not cheer­ing.

Or try this: A white soror­ity wins a step con­test, tra­di­tion­ally an all-black show. What then? Metafil­ter has a nosegay of links, and from watch­ing their per­for­mance, I’d say they brought it.

Dear Mr. Pres­i­dent, Stop smok­ing. Try Chan­tix — I hear it works.

And that’s it for me today. We’ll see what tomor­row brings.