I’ve grown fond of Neil Steinberg’s blog, partly because of its spectacular name: Every Goddamn Day. I sometimes wonder if newspapers might fare better if they’d change their names to hew closer to the best of the internets — your Balloon Juices and Gin and Tacos and Self-Styled Sirens. I should change this blog’s name, but I lack the imagination to come up with anything very good. Every Goddamn Day is taken. And I have no intention of posting every goddamn day; five days a week is plenty, thank you very much.

Anyway, Tuesday’s entry, Calvin Klein’s plywood house, was one of my faves so far, as it formed a little community around the relative handful of people who read Jacob Bernstein’s piece in the Sunday New York Times, about Calvin’s new house in Southampton, and basically said WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.

Bernstein, you journos probably already know, is the son of the late Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, and appears to specialize in trolling readers. His July profile of Caroline Kennedy was particularly sick-making, and this sort of adoring tongue bath for Calvin Klein mainly tells me that whatever his mother gave him, she didn’t give him her gimlet eye for bullshit.

Steinberg notes that Bernstein saves this amazing revelation about the $70 million Klein summer house for the 30th paragraph:

After that, a life-size mock-up of the two story house was built of plywood on the property. That project was so substantial that it required a building permit from the Village of Southampton and wound up costing approximately $350,000, according to two sources close to Mr. Klein. So that Mr. Klein could get an even better idea of what it was to be like, the furniture he had in mind was created of foamcore.

This house was such a dog and pony show that he spent $350,000 on a full-scale model, complete with fake furniture, before he actually built the house. Steinberg notes:

That’s a big drawback of being rich, I believe—I’m guessing here, but I feel fairly confident. Wealth gives you the illusion that you can have everything Just So, everything to your liking, all the time, and allows you to go to ridiculous lengths to try to get it. Not to take anything away from Calvin Klein. As a young man, I owned one of his bomber jackets and was immensely proud to have it. And now, his boxers and undershirts—just the best. Wouldn’t wear another brand; nothing else will do. So he earned his money, and if he feels compelled to spend it in such a patently crazy, controlling and almost sad fashion, well, there you go. If I read of the plywood dry run house in a Christopher Buckley novel I’d smile, shake my head and think that Buckley had gone a bit over-the-top, and strayed into overbroad parody. That it is instead a factual occurrence is a matter of wonder, and deserves the widest possible dissemination.

Yeah.

He’s been on a roll of late. I thought this piece about Charlie Trotter, the celebrity chef currently delaminating somewhere in Chicago, was very fine.

And while we’re taking Chicago Columnists for $1,000, Alex, here’s Eric Zorn on the sorts of people who sucked lemons when Diana Nyad emerged from the Florida straits:

I left it to others to sound the note of bitterness: “I would love to accomplish my dreams too,” as a CNN.com commenter put it, “but a thing called working always seems to interfere with that goal.”

Meanwhile, over at the Atlantic, there was a photoblog of Burning Man. Someday my kid is going to want to go to this thing, and I guess there won’t be much I’ll be able to say about it. I’ll do like Frances McDormand in “Almost Famous” — DON’T TAKE DRUGS!

I’m writing a story, and as usual it is draining me, so not too much more today, sorry. It’ll be a lovely day today, though — enjoy it.

Man, am I beat, and I’m not sure I know why. No, I do: 85 degrees, rain allegedly on the way but probably not. I love sun and summer as much as anyone, but a little cool breeze would be welcome right now.

On the other hand? Still summer.

I do feel like I’m a little empty after all the Leonard stuff, and so, let’s just go with some linkage, which has been piling up in the last couple of days.

A big talker around here today, still shocking to consider: There are an estimated tens of thousands of stray dogs in Detroit. The shelters can’t hold them all, the police can’t deal and in the midst of all this misery you can still find wonderful details like this passage:

Aggressive dogs force the U.S. Postal Service to temporarily halt mail delivery in some neighborhoods, said Ed Moore, a Detroit-area spokesman. He said there were 25 reports of mail carriers bitten by dogs in Detroit from October through July. Though most are by pets at homes, strays have also attacked, Moore said.

“It’s been a persistent problem,” he said.

Mail carrier Catherine Guzik told of using pepper spray on swarms of tiny, ferocious dogs in a southwest Detroit neighborhood.

“It’s like Chihuahuaville,” Guzik said as she walked her route.

Chihuahuaville!

Meanwhile in animal news, The Chronicle of the Horse has been sold, and the staff is not pleased. And while I know you don’t care, I thought this passage was funny:

Since Bellissimo, 51, purchased the Chronicle in mid-July, readers have been venting in the magazine’s online forum, a kind of country club for mannered and fanatical horse enthusiasts. To even register as a commenter, one must answer trivia questions like: “If Mr. Ed was an off-the-track Thoroughbred, we might have seen one of these when he was flapping his lips with Wilbur.” (Answer: Tattoo.) Or: “If the farrier shoes three geldings in front and trims four more, how many shoes does the farrier need?” (Answer: Six.)

Dogs? Animals? WENDY. Playing the crabapple game:

And if you missed the late comments yesterday, our own LAMary, playing “The Weakest Link” some time back:

Now, however, I have to go drink some wine. It’s feeling like medicine right now.

When it comes to Mitch Albom columns, I’m getting harder to impress. I’ve become numb to week after week of hastily dashed-off I-was-just-thinkin’ or join-me-in-my-outrage-over-something-dumb or weren’t-the-good-ol’-days great, etc. I believe it’s been three consecutive Sundays that he’s been peeved about something having to do with the Internet, because the Internet is baaaad.

Sunday’s column, however, was beyond the pale. Couched as a ringing defense of celebrity privacy, pegged to Tigers first baseman Prince Fielder’s recently revealed divorce filing, it is positively Grandpa-Simpsonian, whining about “Internet morsels” and “cyberspace monsters” and how-dare-we (which is to say, you), and a truly bizarre section about the abuse of the Freedom of Information Act, which is weird, as the mere fact of looking up a person’s divorce filing has nothing to do with FOIA. You just go down to the courthouse and check the file. Never mind the irony of a guy who’s invoked his status as a professional journalist (as opposed to those wicked bloggers) who went to professional journalist school not knowing this.

But never mind all that. I read it and decided to just let it all go, or at least wait and see if I still thought he was full of shit after I went for a long bike ride. Fortunately, by the time I got back — 22 miles — someone else had taken it on. Very satisfying takedown. I’m glad he could do it, because 22 miles in the direct sun takes it out of you. Although I felt so good that I sprinted the last half-mile or so home. The pavement on my last leg was like glass, and I just felt like it. The app on my phone said I hit 19 mph. Take that, Lance Armstrong.

What a glorious weekend it was. Lovely weather, not too hot or cold, sunshine all the way. I failed to mow the lawn, but it’s stopped growing anyway. August. The driveway is covered with acorns, the markets are tumbling with peaches and tomatoes, and the light is coming in at a new angle. I want to enjoy every final minute.

So, bloggage:

I know lots of people run hot and cold on Bill Simmons, but when he gets rolling, I’m there for every word (if I understand what he’s talking about). His examination of a Showtime documentary on the Eagles is a great specimen. If you grew up in the ’70s, you will like it. Whether or not you like the Eagles.

Guess what I made for dinner last night? Corn and tomato pie. With a biscuit crust. Yum.

At the dawn of my career, a smart colleague observed that our industry was ripe for a shakeup. We hadn’t really changed that much since the Civil War, he observed, and while it would take time before his speculation happened, it wasn’t so much in the grand scheme of things.

Every so often I think the same thing about TV news. (I also think I’ve written this before. Have I? Well, I’m old. We repeat ourselves.) It’s been the same for, like, EVER, especially the local variety. Co-anchors: Male and female. Reporters: Gene Eric Ethnic and older white guy. Weather: Panic-stricken. Sports: Duuuude. And so on.

So when I read this piece on Romenesko, a list of consultant-approved words and phrases “to help reflect and promote urgency and a ‘happening now’ feeling in a newscast,” well. Been there, heard that:

* we do have some breaking news right away
* rapid developments
* this story is rapidly changing
* you saw it here first just minutes ago
* we are going to be covering this live for you
* breaking overnight

In other rapid developments, a story you must read — how a bassist who had been fired from both Soundgarden AND Nirvana became a Special Forces soldier:

So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered a fast track to becoming a Ranger and perhaps eventually to the Special Forces.

…Everman started waking up early while his bandmates slept in; he went biking, swimming, got in shape. One day, with zero warning, he resigned. He put all of his stuff in storage. He took a flight to New York and went to an Army recruiting office in Manhattan. A couple of weeks later he was on a flight to Georgia. “Was I nervous?” he asked. “I was a little nervous. But I knew.”

When he arrived for basic training at Fort Benning, his hair was cut, his nose ring was removed; he was as anonymous as every other recruit. At 26, he wasn’t an old-timer, but he was close to it. Training had been going on for about a month when Cobain committed suicide and Everman’s rock past was discovered, which gave more ammunition to the drill sergeants. There was a lot of “O.K., rock star, give me 50.” Everman insists he didn’t expect anything else.

Finally, how to drink past the age of 28. It was more like 26 for me. But we all hit that wall.

Holiday eve! I hope we all feel the freedom on Thursday.

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.