Well, I found a better FalconCam. Campbell Ewald is an ad agency in Warren with a building that stands out in its field, so to speak, rising several stories over the usual inner-ring suburban low-rise sprawl. They’ve had peregrines visiting for a while now, but this year they finally got a nesting pair, and they have the HD video installation such a bird requires. The greatest-hits video blog is here, and the link to the livestream is here. The eggs hatched only this week, with one to go.

It’s really quite arresting, watching the parents come back to the nest with a dead bird in hand to do the regular feedings. I think they’re doing an eat-and-regurgitate thing for now, which makes sense.

As Campbell Ewald is an ad agency, the people running this are a little too cute for my taste. After only a day of occasional checks, I’m growing tired of the memes and anthropomorphizing, but oh well, it’s their camera. They can brand-build with it all they want, I guess.

Of course, now the 20th-century technology of Fort Wayne’s FalconCam looks pretty dim, but the chicks are older, and moving around the nest more, so there’s that.

And there’s bloggage:

A friend is doing some canning, and recalled the single best canning headline ever. Photo is just the lagniappe.

I recall the Freep slobbered all over this place when it debuted, so it’s only fitting they cover the inevitable failure. Yes, it’s another Mike Binder project, which I am shocked, shocked to see didn’t fly. Isn’t Los Angeles just DYING to eat shitty coney dogs? Binder obviously has passed the point of success — let’s call it the Binder Point — where forever after, no matter how many times you screw up, you can no longer fail. Lagniappe: At the time I’m posting this, the local “iconic” potato-chip brand name is misspelled in the story. Because it’s so iconic.

This happened to the son of a woman I worked on a project with a few years back. I get the feeling it happens every year, somewhere. Because BROTHERS.

Hump day is behind us, so let’s float down the other side.

To the stated complaints of a few of my Facebook friends, I’ve cut back on my once-weekly excoriations of Mitch Albom. I just felt like I was running out of things to say about him, and it started to feel like a waste of time. But what the hell, he’s still out there, writing and collecting a fat paycheck. And so here I go.

Mitch on Sunday:

I recently visited my wife’s family in Mexico.

“You’ll stay with us,” they said.

“Which of you?” I asked.

“All of us,” they said.

At first, I thought this was a language barrier thing, the way these particular relatives say, “I love you too much” (translation: “so much”), or the way they pronounce “Meetch.”

But as it turned out, when they said “all of us” they actually meant “all of us.”

They live in the middle of Mexico City.

In a family compound.

Let me start by violating my three-paragraph rule for quoting others’ work, but when you pad out your Sunday column with white space and all those one-sentence paragraphs, you’re asking for it.

And let’s also set aside, for now, the stupid and offensive joke at the Mexicans’ expense for calling a different pronunciation of “Mitch” a “language barrier.” Because I’m hoping that once the guy leaves the family compound, they have a good laugh at how he pronounced “huitlacoche.” In fact, I hope they served him some. But I digress.

Mitch, it turns out to the surprise of not one sentient being who read the first few lines, thinks family compounds are the best:

It’s such a loving, embracing environment, that inevitably, I wondered, “Why don’t we live this way in the States?’”

And then I remembered.

We used to.

Yes, we did. It was not uncommon, once upon a time, for children to sleep four to a room and grandma to have a little room off the kitchen. We lived that way for one reason: Because more people were poor, and there was no safety net, and anyone who thinks it was all fun and games should talk to the people — 99 percent of them female — who bore the brunt of all that loving and embracing. Because it came with a lot of cooking and butt-wiping, too. Mitch’s wife must come from some money in Mexico, because the compound he’s describing — four walled houses sharing a common inner courtyard — is not exactly the way the rank and file lives in North America’s largest Third World city. So let’s allow there’s a goodly amount of loving and embracing there, with the harder work left to maids.

Finally Mitch gets around to acknowledging maybe family togetherness isn’t all beer and skittles, with this:

According to the 2010 census, 4.4% of American households are multi-generational. That’s up from 3.7% 10 years earlier, or about 1 million households.

I’m guessing it is because of the economic downturn, foreclosures pushing families under one roof. But it’ll be interesting to see once we get used to having grandmas and grandpas and cousins and in-laws around, how fast people will want to disengage.

My guess is, they’re going to want to disengage pretty damn quickly. I’ve known my share of big families sharing small spaces, and it left me with a new appreciation for a room of one’s own with a door that closes. And those were only large mom/dad/kids families. Add some in-laws and grandmas, and I don’t see how anyone stays sane.

But of course, the ultimate irony to all of this is Mitch Himself, a man who has apparently made the choice to remain childless. He married his girlfriend after Morrie Schwartz persuaded him to make a little more time for non-work life, but it never went further than that. From time to time he’ll write about his nieces and nephews, but if he has any regrets about not increasing the Albom family through birth or adoption, he only shares them when he’s envying someone else’s arrangements, and even then he doesn’t seem to get it. Why don’t families live together anymore, he whines, without noting that he never let anything other than work guide his decisions.

I hear he has a big house. He could take in a few family members, if he’s missing ’em so badly.

And there’s a one-sentence paragraph for you.

Oh, my, more rain today. A beautiful day yesterday, but I had to work. Today I filled the prescriptions for the eyedrops I have to start taking two days before my surgery, which brought it all home a bit more. Along with the typos. And the testiness about Albom.

But for now, let’s let this all go. And get some bloggage:

Big language warning on this, but worth your time for some of the excellent obscenities trotted out to abuse this InfoWars dipshit, caught trying to do a standup in Boston by a passerby. Who had his own camera. And let him have it: I’m the smart guy, because I’m not telling people the FBI blew up the Boston Marathon, you fucking shitheel.

I’m thinking that story is going to get the Boston Globe at least one and maybe several Pulitzer Prizes this time next year, and one might be for this great tick-tock in Sunday’s paper.

Although I also liked this piece from the Sunday NYT, on the thwarted dreams of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and how readily the hole in his heart was filled by the radical posing he pursued next.

And now it’s on to Sunday evening, pork tenderloin on the grill and “Mad Men.” Let’s have a good week.

A Lansing day. A long one, but a good one. Alan had a similar one. Which is to say, it was a hot dogs-on-the-grill-and-a-bag-of-chips sort of evening. Then we remembered we had some McClure’s pickles in the fridge, and the evening improved.

Yeah, more rain.

Let’s take a look at what the Internet tide washed up on NN.c’s beach, then.

I strengthened all my important passwords around the new year, but obviously someone needed to at the AP — a hack of the Associated Press Twitter account touched off a brief 100-point drop in the Dow when the hackers tweeted a prank about the White House being bombed. Everything recovered, but as the linked story points out, it’s time for Twitter to start getting serious about security.

My former colleague Jack Lesssenberry had a good commentary on Michigan Radio yesterday. He touched on something that has always bugged me about the current discussion of public education, that schools aren’t doing a better job at turning out workers for the new economy. I see their point, but, well. There was an education summit in Lansing Monday, and the state school superintendent said something about it. Jack put his finger on it:

What (superintendent Mike) Flanagan said that bothered me so much was this. “Most of us in education have grown up with an ethic that was something like this: Education for Education’s Sake. That’s just silly.”

Well, excuse me, Dr. Flanagan, but no, it’s not silly. There’s nothing wrong with education for education’s sake—if that means teaching people how to think, and how to learn.

You didn’t used to have to explain that to people, but I guess you do, now.

Speaking of learning how to think, may I break out of my rainy slough of despond to ask, calmly, WHERE THE HELL DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE, AND WHY AREN’T THEY WEARING STRAITJACKETS?

Not that I am grumpy.

I’m glad to say I never worked for Gannett, the giant newspaper publisher, but Alan did, until the News was sold a few years ago. He would come home with stories, most of which must remain marital secrets. I know there are many Gannetoids out there who have their own, and now that the man who made Gannett what it was for so long has shuffled off this mortal coil, please feel free to share a few. RIP, Al Neuharth.

Neuharth is best-known as the founder of USA Today, but it’s safe to say he also presided over a period in which many of the nation’s newspapers, which at their best should be unique reflections of the community they serve, became so many heat-and-serves from the chain kitchen. He wasn’t all bad, certainly; his stupid three-dot columns provided hours of entertainment, and while he was absolutely correct in demanding Gannett’s newsrooms be racially and ethnically diverse places, some of the heavy-handed ways such directives were imposed didn’t make him, or the rest of his management team, any friends.

Take “mainstreaming,” a policy that — please correct the details, Gannetoids, if I get any wrong — dictated that stories contain a diversity of sources. On paper, a wonderful thing. In practice? I recall a journalism-review story about a Japanese-American woman in some Kansas tank town who was always being rung up by her local paper to get her reaction to this and that. She was quoted over and over, on everything from her opinion of a new park to changes in education policy. From there, the policy spread to encompass communities where the chain felt they might have circulation gains to make.

This led to some desperate moments in newsrooms, as reporters scrambled to find people with the correct address and ethnicity to quote and photograph. I remember hearing of one newsroom-wide message: I NEED A JEWISH PERSON TO REACT TO THE DEATH OF THE POPE. MACOMB COUNTY ONLY!!!! CAN ANYONE HELP??? There were stories of bushes being beaten for African-American deer hunters and ice fishermen. But my favorite story may be from a friend who once covered a July 4 parade in a working-class suburb so white they might as well have been at a Klan rally for all the diversity it had to offer. Suddenly, the photographer spotted a unicorn — a black family! On the other side of the street!

He cut through a marching band, getting to them. Good times.

From my time news-farming, I recall USA Today didn’t really deserve its reputation for shallowness. They had decent Washington coverage and even an above-average health desk, covering everything from exercise motivation to the FDA. But the jokes about deserving a Pulitzer for Best Investigative Paragraph will likely dog them until the paper goes the way of its founder.

So.

Alan and I were out to dinner when the cops in Boston — all the cops in Boston, plus a few more municipalities, it looked like — finally got their man. I woke up early and read the most reputable news accounts of the day, and didn’t come away any more enlightened. I was wrong about the common criminals stuff, but I think David Remnick nailed it with this elegant phrase:

… the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men.

That’s pretty close to perfect, and could describe any number of other victims of testosterone poisoning, including Tim McVeigh.

Finally, I’m sorry to report some more bad news among our commenting community: Brian Igo, who commented here under the handle “baldheadeddork,” died over the weekend. I knew he had been sick for a few months; he last posted something around the time of the Newtown massacre. We were connected via Facebook, and he posted very little there, other than very occasional updates. As I recall, his announcement of it came around the time Facebook started putting those stupid prompts in the text window:

Facebook asks, “How are you feeling, Brian?”

Well Facebook, since you asked, I recently found out I have Stage IV abdominal cancer, and today I learned I may have two years to live with chemo and 8-10 months without.

Anything else you want to know, asshole?

I gather, from subsequent updates, that he kept his sense of humor and grace to the end. Maybe, when J.C. gets back from his vacation, he can do one of his comment carve-outs, as he did for Ashley, Moe and Whitebeard. Then no more! Please!

Sorry to start your week off with a bummer, but it is Monday. Let’s hope the week improves.

Many many years ago, when I was a mere infant, it seems, a columnist for my paper took offense at Hillary Clinton’s oft-used African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” This has always, always seemed to me to be a simple, even banal, bit of common sense. We look out for one another and especially for children. You don’t learn every single thing from your parents; no family is an island. We all watch a movie about it every year at Christmastime. D’ya know me, Bert? My mouth’s bleedin’!

Anyway, this writer wrote a column with the headline “The village won’t raise my kid,” and oh, the love poured in, fists shaking at that non-cookie baker, Hillary Clinton. Parents raise children, not villages! And so on.

Again, I never understood why this was seen as some big deal. Hillary wasn’t advocating for institutional care or re-education camps or anything else, only decent schools and health care and a functional society that looks after its most helpless members. But my mind doesn’t work the way some do.

Gail Collins recently wrote a column about a chapter in history I knew nothing about — the attempt, by Walter Mondale, to pass a national program of preschool education.

Mondale’s Comprehensive Child Development Act was a bipartisan bill, which passed 63 to 17 in the Senate. It was an entitlement, and, if it had become law, it would have been one entitlement for little children in a world where most of the money goes to the elderly.

…The destruction of his bill was one of the earliest victories of the new right. “The federal government should not be in the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological ideal of great importance,” Pat Buchanan once told me. He was working at the White House when the bill reached Nixon’s desk, and he helped write the veto message. He spoke about this achievement with great pride.

This is preschool we’re talking about. Preschool.

I don’t follow political news as obsessively as some people do, but this story did catch my eye, about an MSNBC personality who said much the same thing. Headline: “Why caring for children is not just a parent’s job.” Fightin’ words!

Of course, common sense tells us we do this every day — entrust our children to others. Relatives, babysitters, scoutmasters, etc. The headline said not just a parent’s job, not not ever. But that didn’t stop the backlash; Rich Lowry’s response is typical, and typically dumb:

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

I just sprained by eyeballs, rolling them. Does everything have to be culture war? Can’t we agree on anything as simple as “kids should be looked after by everyone.” You’d think.

Well, let’s hop to the bloggage and I’ll watch “Southland.”

I’m growing weary of the Roger Ebert stories, but a few gems are still coming down the sluice. This one, by the author of the story that Ebert “hated, hated, hated, hated, hated,” is pretty good.

For you “Mad Men” fans, the complete quips of Roger Sterling.

Bedtime approaches. Let’s have a good Thursday.

Monday is usually my Lansing day, but this week it was Tuesday. Ate lunch with some economists (story planning), at which I learned that economists know the proper plural to “equilibrium” (equilibria).

With the lunch, and the commute, and all the rest of it, it made for a 12-hour day, however, after which all I really wanted to do was pour a glass of wine, grill hot dogs for me and the kid, then have another glass of wine and watch “Top of the Lake.”

However, I have some bloggage you might like:

I’ve been neglecting the work plugs, so please, click and give ’em some love — Bridge had a nice package on guns in Michigan today. You can start with the mainbar here, and click through to the sidebars. Don’t miss this one, though, about a gun-shop owner who’s found himself a frequent theft target.

Also, I’m now the editor of a new sub-section of Bridge, a Sunday commentary section we’re calling Brunch with Bridge. The first two are on the state’s most precious natural resource, H2O.

When you’re done helping keep me employed, you might enjoy this David Simon yarn about an old joke from “The Wire,” featuring a Baltimore Orioles pitcher recently lost to us.

Sorry Michigan didn’t make it in Monday night’s championship game. I did my part, by ignoring it entirely; any interest in my part in any sporting team is the kiss of death.

I hear the game was pretty good, though. Maybe next year.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

I don’t know what I could say about Roger Ebert that I didn’t say three years ago, when the extent of his injury, and his badly reconstructed new face, was revealed in Esquire magazine. I wouldn’t change a word, but in looking around the web in the late afternoon, I can see that I missed a lot.

This was maybe my favorite, the public spat between Ebert and Conrad Black, who owned the Chicago Sun-Times for a while. Black was a Canadian and believed all the good things in the world were made for him and him alone, and the correspondence between the two, carried out in public, is delightful:

Dear Roger,

I have been disappointed to read your complaints about the former Hollinger International management. I vividly recall your avaricious negotiating techniques through your lawyer, replete with threats to quit, and your generous treatment from David Radler, which yielded you an income of over $500,000 per year from us, plus options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your own Web site at the company’s expense. …

…which led to:

Dear Conrad,

One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind. I am not at all surprised by your letter to me, because I would assume that is how you would feel; what is refreshing is that you say so.

Let me just say in response that I have never complained about my salary at the Sun-Times, but to describe my lawyer as ”avaricious” is a bit much; he engaged in spirited negotiations, as he should have, and he and you settled on a contract. It goes without saying that any contract negotiation includes the possibility that either party might choose to leave rather than to sign. I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself. Since you have made my salary public, let me say that when I learned that Barbara received $300,000 a year from the paper for duties described as reading the paper and discussing it with you, I did not feel overpaid.

You really had to live through the newspaper business to believe it.

This, Will Leitch’s story about how he loved Ebert, then insulted him, instantly regretted it and came to be forgiven, is the talker of the hour, but it’ll be a few more hours before you read this, and something else may come up in the interim.

You might also like to read Neil Steinberg’s obit, which is very fine.

Oh, this is such a loss. He worked so hard, for so long, it seemed he’d never stop.

By the way, if you’re looking for some longform Ebert to read, I suggest “The Great Movies” collections, particularly Vol. 1. He really loved his work.

And Roger wins the New Yorker caption contest is worth your time, too.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, shall we?

While we’re on the subject of working as long as one is able, Elaine Stritch is playing her final shows, at the Carlyle, before retiring to Michigan. She’s 88. I hope to see her in a cafe somewhere around here soon.

And not to leave you with a total bummer, here are some squirrels, in some remarkable tableaux.

Oh, and the president, doing what he does, with the cutest kid ever.

Let’s all have a happy weekend, shall we?

ADDED: An editor (of Ebert’s) speaks. Some good stuff (for writers, anyway) on his process, and what he was like to work with:

He was a celebrity in the journalism and film world, but he never pulled the star act. He was quite amenable to editing. If you needed or wanted to make a change, he was fine with that. He just rarely needed it. The prose just flowed. He was a real wordsmith.

OK, one more:

One day an inspector from the Chicago Post Office came to our editor, James Hoge, with a puzzling discovery. Several hundred empty envelopes addressed to Ann Landers had been found in the trash behind an address in Hyde Park. With an eerie certainty, Jim called in Milton and asked him for his address. Milton, whose jobs included distributing mail, had been stealing the quarters sent in for Ann Landers’ pamphlet, Petting: When Does It Go Too Far? Discussing his firing after work at Billy Goat’s, he was philosophical: “Hundreds of kids can thank me that they were conceived.”

There’s no use pretending the story of the day is anything but Buzz Bissinger. Sorry, homosexuals, even your landmark Supreme Court arguments can’t steal the spotlight from this:

I own eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves. Those who conclude from this that I have a leather fetish, an extreme leather fetish, get a grand prize of zero. And those who are familiar with my choices will sign affidavits attesting to the fact that I wear leather every day. The self-expression feels glorious, an indispensable part of me. As a stranger said after admiring my look in a Gucci burgundy jacquard velvet jacket and a Burberry black patent leather trench, “You don’t give a fuck.”

I don’t. I finally don’t.

But this meltdown-masquerading-as-an-essay is more than 6,000 words long, and that’s just 100 words and change. There’ so much more, including but not limited to sex, marital, kinky and pathetic; money, vast and unthinkable; magnums of champagne; Tom Ford cosmetics (used by the author) and so much, much more. Long story short: Buzz Bissinger, author of “Friday Night Lights,” has been going insane for the last few years, and has spent nearly $600,000 on high-end clothing, most of it from Gucci, lending the piece its ridiculous, wan headline, “My Gucci Addiction.” It’s like calling a deep dive into the culture of high-school football “High School Football.”

Don’t drop out, no matter how embarrassed you are, before you get to the sex part. Because that’s really the icing on this cake of tawdriness.

If you think I’m maybe getting too much glee from another’s public confession, be advised BB has been something of a jerk of late. Now we know he was being an even bigger jerk on the websites of the world’s high-end retailers.

I’ve known some shopaholics before; some of them had untreated mental illness, usually bipolar. My next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne was a house cleaner, and told me of trying to organize the closet of one of these souls — unsuccessfully, as it turned out, as she just went out and refilled the closet floor with a million more bags. You get a hole inside, you look for a way to fill it.

Speaking of filling holes, and change, and going a little nuts, here’s a story to bum out all your journalists: A 17-year-old just earned more than you will in your lifetime by inventing an app that boils your lovingly crafted story down to 400 characters. Yes, not words, but characters — that’s the new currency.

I guess we can talk about the homosexuals after all. I’ll go out on a limb and say Prop 8 will go down 6-3, with Alito and Sca-mos on the other side. Anyone want to float a different idea?

Never underestimate the power of a good headline, I always say. Take the Daily Mail on Monday:

Why does the devil in ‘The Bible’ look exactly like President Obama?

This is what I get for watching “Girls.” I’m missing “The Bible,” but fortunately, I have Jeff watching for me. Of course I clicked the link; if the Brits know anything, they know how to get you to look at their paper. He didn’t look exactly like Obama, but yeah, there’s a resemblance — maybe if Obama gay-married Frank Langella and they genetically engineered a baby. Well, I’d expect nothing less from the Mark Burnett production house.

How about another from the U.K.? The Scottish Sun: Meet the woman with the world’s strongest VAGINA. Yeah, “vagina” in all caps, just in case we might miss it. How do they know how strong it is? She inserts an egg-like thingamabob up there, with a hook attached. She attaches dumbbells to the hook and holds them there, with the power of her ya-ya. There’s a video; never mind the content warning, everything is discreetly hidden from view. She’s Russian, and says she’s achieved this power after “20 years of vigorous training.” OK.

Let’s pick an American newspaper at random. (Spins in circle, points finger at…The Columbus Dispatch.) “Bill would allow school safety levies.” OK, well — legislatures are notoriously difficult to brighten up, unless they’re fighting with canes on the floor. (Or fighting about vaginas.)

The problem with headlines (these days) is SEO. To attract search-engine interest — absolutely essential in this day and age — heds have to be dumb, obvious and boring. The Obama/Satan and strong-vagina stories had the advantage of being lurid stories where even dumb, obvious headlines couldn’t be boring. Although I’d like to try; I bet a few copy editors could muck those up. Groups claim depiction of demon resembles prexy, perhaps, or Russian woman lifts weights — intimately. Prexy is a great headline word, along with solon. And “intimate” has been standing in for dirty, dirty sex for a long time now.

And now here we are, and here are some less-alluring heads on some fare more interesting stories, eh?

The WashPost on the peculiar trend of “Moorish American nationals” squatting in unoccupied homes. This seems to be an African-American thing, but I recall a rural white version from my Hoosier days. I think they called themselves “sovereign citizens” and did much the same thing, declaring their homes tiny little nations.

Last year, the Michigan legislature repealed the motorcycle helmet law. Twelve months later, motorcycle deaths up 18 percent. Alan and I drove behind a couple riding a motorcycle through Grosse Pointe. Both unhelmeted, although the woman was wearing a straw hat with fluttering ribbons she was clasping to her head with one hand, the other wrapped around the man’s waist. She seemed to think she was the cutest trick in shoe leather, and she was. I hope she never does it again, however.

If, like me, you were bothered by the knee-jerk criticism of Rob Portman over his turnaround on gay marriage, please read this, about Debbie Stabenow’s personal stake in better mental health care. I take turnarounds however they come; we are all human, and shaped by the events in our lives.

And with that, I approach the hump of Wednesday.

I read “Wired” in paperback, Bob Woodward’s book about John Belushi’s life and death, but it was many years ago. My impressions, after all this time, are mostly about the reaction to it among Belushi’s circle. They went along the lines of who is this serpent we have clutched to our bosom, and I admit — this was sort of amusing to see. I think Judy Belushi, the man’s widow, actually said in an interview that she thought she was hiring Robert Redford from “All the President’s Men” and instead got this Judas, this betrayer in human form.

The other thing I remember is that Woodward was a terrible writer. His description of the cheezborger-cheezborger sketch read like description for the blind; in recent years, as I’ve become acquainted with his nasal Chicago voice, I hear it in my head that way. A customer asks for french fries but is told the diner only carries chips, which causes the cry to echo among the countermen: “No fries, chips!”…

Twitter says there are already some people taking issue with this piece by Tanner Colby, who wrote the same book, only the one authorized by Judy Belushi. He takes issue with Woodward’s account, and while it’s been a lot of years since I read it, I have to say, some of these examples ring true:

The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:

I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.

When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:

A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.

Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just — wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.

I’m familiar with reporters like this, who think their only job is to stick to the absolute letter of the fact, draw only the most obvious conclusions. The Jack Webb School. Just the facts, ma’am. Nothing like this:

Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances. And when Woodward fails to convey the subtleties of those little moments, he misses the bigger picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office. After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real meaning of what went on.

Stenography has its limitations? You don’t say.

Oh, I’m so enjoying this Kwame story. The feds released some videos today, including one of a sludge-company executive putting a case of Cristal in Bernard Kilpatrick’s car. Because nothing gets it done like $2,500 worth of champagne.

Hank didn’t think much of the Dick Cheney autobiography, but I can’t get over the photo of the newly slim prince of darkness that accompanies his review. Now that is a face. Dunno quite what kind, but there you go.

I hope I sleep better tonight than I have been. A friend is advising klonopin. I’m sort of tempted, but I should probably give liquor a chance, first.