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.

Sometimes I think I do little more in this space than bitch about something I read someplace else, but I yam what I yam, and having standards isn’t a bad thing. (Is it?)

So I’m reading around this morning and see a Kevin Leininger column on, of all things, raw milk. I worked with Kevin long enough, and know his hobbyhorses well enough, that as soon as I saw the subject, I had a pretty good idea what the story would be, and sure enough, I was right:

Got milk? Mark Grieshop and Troy Fisher do, and thanks to the growing interest in natural and organic foods their “raw milk” business is booming despite government regulations and warnings to the contrary.

Yep, it’s evil big guv’mint holding the little dairy farmer down, when all he wants to do is sell a product that can make you seriously ill. Can you believe it?

I’ve argued with raw-milk people in the past, and I’m willing to leave it at a draw: You can drink raw milk if you like, as long as you’re fully informed about the risks. The problem is, the people who sell it won’t do that, and too often they’re helped along by people who write stuff like this:

“I wouldn’t drink raw milk from an ordinary dairy farm, either,” said Grieshop, who stressed that Pasture’s Delights and other farms that produce raw milk for human consumption are careful to prevent harmful bacteria while preserving the bacteria, enzymes and nutrients that promote good health and can make the product safe even for some people with lactose intolerance.

I’ll take them at their word and assume they’ve vaccinated against brucellosis, but I’d demand a lot more reassurance that they “prevent harmful bacteria,” and as for making a product that contains lactose by its very definition “safe for some people with lactose intolerance,” all I can do is roll my eyes. Of course, Alan points out often that most food allergies are self-diagnosed, so I guess it’s possible.

So let’s move on, eh?

I read this review (nothing much), but it led me via this turn and that to this other thing, just a Deadspin blog post, but something I’ve believed for a while — “It’s not OK to be shitty.”

I bring all this up because I think we’re starting to care more about popularity and financial success than legitimate quality. All right, so that’s hardly news; that’s always been the case, as a general rule, for most of humanity’s reign. But now the smart people are doing it: People who should know better. I’m talking about you, dear reader: You, me, all of us.

You see this everywhere, from box office results to online pageviews to Nielsen ratings to freaking Twitter followers. More people watch the NFL on television than any sport so therefore IT IS THE BEST SPORT. You have fewer Twitter followers than the person you’re criticizing? YOU’RE A HATER. You don’t like that album that went platinum? YOU JUST JEALOUS. BuzzFeed has put a bunch of pictures of kittens together in a way that is easily passed around by idiots? THEY HAVE FIGURED OUT THE INTERNET THEY ARE SUCH BRILLIANT PACKAGERS OF CONTENT THE FUTURE OF MEDIA. We have become a culture that, because we can quantify things in a way we’ve never been able to before, are acting as if those numbers are all that matter.

I dunno, I liked it. I’ve mentioned before that when I first got here, I ran across the Mitch Albom radio show and was pleasantly surprised by it — his regular-guy persona played pretty well on the radio, and I know that might be more of a reflection of the toxic mire of his on-the-air colleagues, but whatever. Nowadays, though, he’s just like what the post describes: “The Newsroom” isn’t a bad show like the critics say, they’re just jealous of Jeff Daniels’ success. “The Bucket List” is a great movie because lots of people liked it. And so on.

Keep your standards. They matter.

Which brings us to the final bit of chat today, a really good Ta-Nehisi Coates piece. I don’t want to give it away, but I’ll say this: I was slow to warm to T-N C when I first started reading him, but once I did, I really did. Also, the ending is great.

So with that, I leave you to your weekend. This week felt long, but I got a lot accomplished. Hope you did too.

I confess: I spent too much time on Sunday picking a Mitch Albom column apart like some insane vulture, then decided (after a workout) that I really need to stop doing stuff like that. Direct your energies in productive directions! NO ONE CARES! That said, the column drove me insane. Because it was lazy and dumb and full of stupid usage errors. It’s about a 90-year-old federal judge, a local legend who stood up to both the Nixon and Bush 43 administrations, intersecting with every significant political and civil-rights career of the 20th century in the process. Only he doesn’t really tell you that, because he’s too busy painting word pictures like this:

“Hey, how you been?” Damon Keith will exclaim, his voice high and reedy and sounding like an excited kid permanently on the edge of discovery. It is not an authoritarian voice, not a James Earl Jones boom — not, perhaps, what you expect from a judge. Which is perfect. Because his whole life, Damon Keith has been defying stereotypes.

“Articulate” is inevitably applied to African Americans who don’t employ the usage and syntax of rappers. Corollary rule: The actual tone and timbre of their voices must be compared to either James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman.

Also, “authoritarian” is a very different word from “authoritative.” You could look it up.

But I will stop with that. Because this isn’t healthy, for any of us.

As I guess some of you have figured by now, we took a couple of days off and the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere took off for Chicago. The visit to the University-of was mainly an excuse; I said I wanted to blow town for somewhere, anywhere, and wherever we went, we’d visit an institution of higher learning, to get the kid thinking on the subject, and that it did. UChicago, as it’s branded, would likely be on her reach list, but it’s worth the reach, in my opinion. She fears it would be four years of grind, but she did like the place. The curriculum of core subjects complemented with electives and major courses pretty much matches exactly what I think college should be, but then, I’m not the one who would be attending.

If nothing else, it was a good way to spend a snowy morning. Best moment of the trip: One of the kids in our sub-section was wearing a high-school letter jacket from a school in Arizona, festooned with patches that suggest he is a decorated football player. We entered the athletic facility and gathered in the trophy area for the guide’s spiel, a moment at which I was closer to an actual Heisman Trophy than ever before. The kid’s father asked, “Do the football players have their own gym?” Answer: No. He looked astounded, which astounds me. If the kid’s smart enough to get into UChicago and they traveled all that way, you’d think his father would know it’s not a football factory. Maybe their next stop will be Notre Dame, but unless the kid’s a place kicker, I don’t think he has the size for them.

Oh, well.

Apologies if I didn’t call you when I was in town, and I’m looking at you, Borden. And John. And others. The only people outside my family I got together with were Eric Zorn and Neil Steinberg, columnists for the Tribune and Sun-Times, respectively, because Eric once said I should do that the next time I’m in town. We didn’t have time for lunch but we did have a beverage on Navy Pier after the two did their Friday radio gig. I reflected, once again, that the newspaper business might have been cruel from time to time, but I don’t regret many days I spent working in it, because when it was good, it was like sitting there on Navy Pier, talking about this and that with a couple of smart guys. Fun.

Which seems as good a time as any to segue to this item, which Jim Romenesko calls, with understatement, the most incredible newspaper apology ever:

The Cherokee Scout in Murphy N.C. apologized Friday for asking the local sheriff for the names of gun-permit holders and permit applicants. The paper calls its records request “a tremendous error in judgment” and apologizes to the sheriff for submitting it.

“We never meant to offend the wonderful people of this fine community,” says publisher David Brown.

Ugh. Times have changed.

Finally, the T-Lo red carpet also-rans. “Nothing says ‘Academy Award nominee’ like a dress that looks like a dirty dust ruffle.” Snerk.

And so the week is underway. I think I’ll watch a piece of my Valentine’s Day present — the entire, compleat, every-possible-minute collection of “Homicide: Life on the Street.” I can’t remember if Aunt Calpurnia ever gets hers.

As I go through my day and have ideas or find links I might want to write about, I throw them in a draft post here. I’ve only accidentally published it once. Most days, there are at least a few ticklers by the time I sit down to write. Today, it’s this:

Brooks column

And that’s it. I assume it’s David Brooks, but I have no idea which one, or what would have moved me about it — scanning his recent archive, all I thought was, nope, not that one. Perhaps this suggests my opinions about this and that are fleeting things. They are. One of my most shameful moments as a monger of opinions was the day a reader approached me at an event to tell me he’d really liked that thing I wrote about something, two years ago.

“I wrote about that?” I said. “I can’t remember.”

He was crushed. “You seemed very emotional about it, too,” he said. Honestly, I couldn’t remember one detail from it. And you know what else? I didn’t care enough to go spelunking into the archive to discover what I was so het up about, either. It’s times like that when you remember what happens to old newspapers, shrug and maybe add, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

An so, with that in mind, I read this column in the Detroit News, editorial-page editor Nolan Finley misting up over the coming loss of his office space:

For me, The News building is furnished with memories. I’ve spent my entire adult life here. I know it the way a farmer knows his fields. I’ve been in its newsroom for every historical moment of the past four decades, and most of the mundane ones as well. It’s where I’ve met the people who shaped my career and where I bid many of them farewell. I’ve seen it gutted and restored. I’ve known it when it was too small to hold all of the people we needed to put out a newspaper and when it became so big for the staff on hand you could hear echoes.

It is what we used to call in the south The Home Place.

Excuse me, I feel the need for a little musical accompaniment here. Beyond that, not much more.

But that’s just me. I may feel differently tomorrow.

A far tougher read was in the NYT — Sunday’s magazine cover story, on a developing strategy in prosecuting child pornography offenders — making those found in possession of illegal images pay financial restitution to victims who can be identified — whether they had anything to do with taking them. The story focuses on two women who were abused by relatives, men who photographed the acts, which became among the most-downloaded illegal images in the child-porn portfolio. Both women have received substantial sums over the years, and a recent higher-court decision affirms the strategy is legal and so it will likely continue. But just to read about what these women went through in the first place, and how long it’s taken them to even partially recover (they are, as Marcellus Wallace said after a similar assault, pretty effin’ far from OK), all one can think of is: It’s not enough, it’ll never be enough. I also noted that one of the pedophiles charged with paying was a former vice president with a major pharmaceutical company. Having spent five years or so clipping stories about the lavish compensation packages in that industry, all I could think was: She should have asked for more.

And because we seem to be crepe-hanging today, let’s take a moment to consider the staggering death toll in a Brazil nightclub fire over the weekend. We have nothing to brag about on this score, except maybe comparatively; American public facilities have had and likely will continue to have tragedies like this. But it reminded me of something I noticed in Argentina few years back — how so many of the safety measures we take for granted here are virtually non-existent elsewhere in the world. Sidewalk repairs would appear out of nowhere without so much as an orange cone of warning, that sort of thing. Maybe this is just yet another reminder of the terrifying speed at which fire can move, and why it’s always wise to note the exits before you step into a crowded room.

But that’s a journalist talking, a long way from the old home place. Have a good Monday.

I came across the term “paddy wagon” in this Atlantic piece about the Stonewall uprising today, and it sent me spinning back to the era of extreme political correctness in American newsrooms, which is to say, the ’90s.

I don’t like the term “politically correct” anymore, because it’s been twisted so from its original, ironic usage, not to mention utterly co-opted by people who use it as a code for “I’m a jerk.” (Really, if someone says to you, “I’m not what you’d call politically correct,” isn’t that precisely what they’re saying?)

But there was without a doubt a time when it looked like we might lose terms like “paddy wagon,” “gypped” and other American slang to those who would rinse the language of even its pastel color, not to mention coherence. I mean, everyone knows what a paddy wagon is, right? A “prisoner transport vehicle” might be anything.

I try not to get too excited about these things anymore. Language is elastic, and some of this stuff is, to be sure, offensive, even obscene. You let in paddy wagon and pretty soon someone thinks “n*gger-rig” is just fine, too. But in general, I give this a pass, and I’d be willing to bet a show of hands among people under 40 would reveal precious few who can even tell you a) “paddy” is slang for an Irishman, and b) the wagons got that name because they were so often filled with brawling Irish drunks.

I’ll go almost as far with “gypped.” I had no idea it referred to gypsy scams until adulthood, but given how often I’ve read press releases from law enforcement, warning business and home owners about scams being perpetrated by “travelers,” I can’t say the term doesn’t have at least some legs. But OK, if you want, it’s now “swindled.”

What else? I recall being lectured about the use of the syllable “jap” in a story slug — i.e., the file name. If you’re like me, sometimes you shorten words in file names. SALESPROJ, maybe, or VACAYEXPNS. But woe fell upon the wire editor who shortened an account of the Sino-Japanese trade talks to SINOJAP.

Also, we were instructed not to ever use the word “gay” to describe a homosexual female. She would be, of course, a lesbian. But could you say, “The move was applauded by gay people across the country?” You could not. The move was applauded by gays and lesbians.

“Can I say lesbians aren’t funny?” I asked my boss, who was gay, once, just to bait him. I was writing about the spectacular tanking of Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom after she came out. What had been a pleasant little half-hour about a woman running a book store turned into a weekly lecture about gay rights — er, rights for gays and lesbians, and also bisexual, transgendered and questioning persons.

“Sure,” he said. I now regret that column. Wanda Sykes is a funny lesbian. So is Tig Notaro, and so are many others. I’d also like to say the only person who made that string of individual categories work in a sentence was Lady Gaga.

What happened to ease up on all the oversensitivity? Something happened around 9/11 — all of a sudden people were running around talking about bombing Afghanistan back to glass. You started hearing “c*nt” on premium cable. A whole new crop of insult comics made objecting to “paddy” and “gyp” sound like squalling over using the wrong fork at dinner. And with the collapse of the newspaper business, well, who had time to worry about that?

Speaking of what gets in the paper, I guess Kirk wasn’t working this particular night.

And with that, we have pivoted to the bloggage at the end of a very long week. I don’t have much, but I have this silky video of a skateboarder navigating a decayed but oddly beautiful Detroit. Or maybe that’s just the Portishead talking.

Enjoy your weekend. I plan to.

All day long, I keep seeing social-media reminders that I should be ashamed — the world is paying attention to Manti Te’o, and not to the Notre Dame St. Mary’s girl who said she was raped! This is terrible, etc. etc.

I won’t apologize. This story takes Crazy to a whole new level. An invented tragic girlfriend is one thing, but an almost entirely hoodwinked sports media is quite another, and truth be told, I’m getting more pleasure out of watching the spinning by august outlets like Sports Illustrated and ESPN. A friend of mine asked me today, how could this happen? For a couple of reasons, which I mentioned in comments yesterday. First, because once something is reported, the chances of it being re-reported fall pretty sharply. There are, simply put, a lot of hacks out there. There are also a lot of overworked reporters doing more with less. And let’s also remember: There’s less and less time. For everything. But there’s no doubt that many people who should have known better failed to follow up, and missed what was sitting in plain sight. Which makes it a good story with a creamy layer of good-second-story icing.

And also, a lot of great Twitter action:

Since he’s Mormon, it’s possible Te’o has multiple fake girlfriends.

— Mick Farrell (@StumpWoodley) January 17, 2013

If Manti Te’o is really that naive, they should invent a new word: naivete’o

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) January 17, 2013

If you think it’s impressive that AJ McCarron’s girlfriend was Miss Alabama 2012, Manti Te’o’s girlfriend was Miss Narnia 2009, 2010 & 2011.

— She Ratchet (@RatchetAfrican) January 17, 2013

And so I would like to close out this week and start primping for the Charity Preview. I went out and bought some department-store foundation, a splurge for me. But I cannot deny it — this Almay drugstore crap just doesn’t blend. Because tomorrow is payday, I also went for a new lipstick, because that’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull. And as it usually takes seven hours to make me presentable, I’d better sign off now. But first, some links:

Six theories to explain why Te’o did it. A nice little condensation.

OID: Necromancy in the Motor City, or how a 93-year-old corpse ended up in his son’s freezer.

As long as we’re harshing on national magazines, did anyone getta loada Esquire’s profile of Megan Fox? Vice did.

You know what really makes a man’s outfit? A fancy watch. The Rolex Romeos speak:

Mike, who earned $400,000 last year, including a $120,000 bonus, even admits to driving his Lexus LS around the Jersey Shore in the summer, the windows rolled down and his wrist hanging out, on display.

“[The girls] will cheer and wave when they see my big watch,” he laughs. “It’s right out of a rap video!”

Have a good weekend, all.

National Soup Month started with a bang on New Year’s Day — lentil, enlivened with a couple hot Italian sausages from our boutique sausage outlet here. I used Mark Bittman’s recipe, doubling the lentils because I like a lentil soup you can stand a spoon in.

It was great. Really good, really flavorful and it had that wonderful lentil-soup benefit, which is to say, it was as pleasant leaving the body as it was entering it, and let’s speak no more of that, shall we?

But it’s hard to go wrong with lentils. I used the rest of the bag on a Madha Jaffrey lentil-and-Basmati-rice recipe, with lots of cardamom. Yum.

Pot No. 2 was tomato. Here’s the problem with tomato soup: You want it when the weather’s cold, but then you can’t get really good fresh tomatoes, and I’m sorry, but it’s taken me this long to admit that I’m not a canner and likely never will be. Fortunately, modern food processing has taken care of that, and I was able to make a very nice cream-of soup using the Cook’s Illustrated master recipe from one of my Christmas cookbooks. I believe I’ve mentioned before that my husband once worked at a northwestern Ohio factory run by the company that came up with the whole idea of National Soup Month. He saw too much there, and won’t touch anything made by them, and as their tomato is a mainstay, it means he doesn’t get too much tomato soup. He really liked this one. You can eat it with a grilled cheese sandwich, or just some cheesy croutons.

(I have to say at this point that other than the stockpot, the kitchen utensil that gets used more than anything else during National Soup Month is my immersion blender. It really is one of those things where once you get it, you wonder how you lived without it. Also, you drink way more smoothies.)

Pot No. 3 was a cream of cauliflower, only with no cream. Milk of cauliflower doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? I used this recipe, because it allowed me to throw a couple of potatoes in there, and I’m always looking for a way to use up the last couple of potatoes in a bag. It came out nice and thick and rich-tasting, but like many great soups, wasn’t particularly rich. It was, however, a bit farty. Not enough to not make it worth eating, but, y’know, be advised.

The final pot of the fortnight was spicy sweet potato, and the closest thing to a disappointment so far. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. The Russell Street Deli here in Detroit makes a sweet potato bisque that makes you want to lick the bowl. I once asked the waiter what the secret was, and he said, “Oh, those North African spices,” but couldn’t really elaborate. I will continue my search for its equal.

Tonight, at the fulcrum of the month, it’s chili. And I’m open to suggestions for the second half.

I’ve been unaware of the so-called Sandy Hook Truthers in all but the vaguest sense of the term. I mean, of course there are people who believe that Evil President Muslim somehow ordered the execution of 28 people so HE COULD TAKE OUR GUNS!!!!!!, but you know, I’ve made my peace with that. Crazy is just part of the landscape, and while I’m sorry this is happening, I get it.

This, however, is another kettle of fish. Maybe J.C. or Basset will weigh in on this new wrinkle in local news — the local lunatic who feeds the Crazy under the nominal cloak of respectability. In many ways, l.l. Charlie LeDuff does the same thing here, only without the paranoia, only the egomania. Is this a new Fox consultant thing? I’m a little baffled. (This breed — the super-conservative TV reporter — is quite common otherwise, in my experience. So much for the liberal media.)

We need a palate-cleanser to close out Hump Day. The Martin Luther insult generator, hell yeah. I bet even Tim Goeglein would approve.

Happy Wednesday, all.

Deborah asked yesterday about the pay model that Andrew Sullivan’s trying. He wrote today that the first day of the fund drive raised $333,000, with more than 12,000 jumping in. I wish him well, really I do, but I won’t be one of them. And I don’t see a pay model for NN.c anytime soon, barring catastrophe (job loss, etc.). It will be very difficult to do even under those circumstances. I lack Andrew Sullivan’s towering sense of his own worth.

I don’t read the Daily Dish, and haven’t read Sullivan (much) since 9/11/Iraq war. (Isn’t he the one who came up with the infamous “fifth column” observation? Why, I think he was.) My boss is a fan, and occasionally passes stuff along, and I gather he’s not as much of a douche as he used to be. But the site simply isn’t important enough for me to consider it a cheap magazine subscription. If you read his initial post on this, you know it’s not the entire site going behind the wall, just some longer posts, and even then, you get a few freebies a month before the wall goes up. That will suit my Andrew Sullivan needs for pretty much ever.

Still, I want him to do well. Writers should be paid, and he obviously has lots of readers. I also want to see various forms of pay-for-content schemes duking it out in the marketplace. Maybe one will work for me.

When we were doing GrossePointeToday.com, we were approached by a micropayment site, whose name I forget now — Jingle, Ka-ching, something like that. Here’s how it worked: You designated a monthly amount you were willing to pay for online content, sort of like a public-radio sustaining pledge — $10, $15, whatever, billed to your credit card. When you read something online that you liked, and that site was a Ka-jingle member, you clicked a button. At the end of the month, your ten bucks would be divided between all your clicks. If you only clicked one, they got $10. Two sites, $5 each. And so on. I don’t think it got off the ground, as I have never seen their logo anywhere, but the idea is interesting.

After 9/11, when “warblogs” were all the rage, a lot of them had “tip jars” through Amazon or PayPal, but I could never bring myself to put one up. If I accepted even a dime, I’d feel obligated, and I have enough obligations already. I always tell myself that if this gets to be too much of a grind, I can walk away without guilt. Believe me, there are many, many, many days when I’ve given a little less than my all here. If it bothers any of you, you’ve been kind enough not to say anything.

To my mind, the best free-to-pay transitions will be like Sullivan’s (and Talking Points Memo, which is trying something similar): Most of the site remains free, and premium content is there for paying customers.

No, I’m waiting until I do something else, I hope a book (and not lose my job and tumble into the fiscal abyss). Then, I’ll ask you to buy it, but this joint, for now, is and remains what it’s been since January 2001 — just a little key-clattering for fun, to take or leave as you see fit.

John Scalzi, as smart about balancing the paid-writer/unpaid-blogger life as anyone, mentions just a few of the headaches here:

To anticipate the question of whether I would/should/could do something like this, my short answer is that even if I could – a proposition I consider questionable for a number of reasons — I would prefer not to. Among other things it requires keeping track of subscriptions and handling customer service issues and doing all sorts of other stuff that I already know I would rather drag my tongue across a razor than to do. If I were hard up for cash I would probably put advertising up on the site before I did a subscription scheme. But I would be far more likely just to write something and put it up for sale; that seems to me to be the easier and more effective route for me.

In the ’80s, when I lived in a four-unit apartment building across the hall from Jeff Borden, he made an interesting observation about the party culture of the time. This is when cocaine was starting to appear at parties among the cool set, and Jeff said the ritual surrounding it was interesting and a little depressing.

Marijuana, he said, was a social drug. Light up a joint at a party, pass it around, make some friends. Cocaine was anti-social; you found a buddy or two, maybe someone you wanted to impress, and asked them to meet you in the bathroom for a special treat. You probably saw these duos and trios coming out of a bathroom or back bedroom many times, eyes glittering, noses twitching, expressions smug and superior. Sucks to be you, loser. This site will remain marijuana for the foreseeable future, or at least early ’80s-era marijuana — cheap or free, just mildly intoxicating, a giggle at best, sometimes a headache. Those other bloggers can deal in stronger stuff in their paywall bathrooms. But not here.

Bloggage? Some:

This is so outstanding, but be warned, it’s the unbleeped version: “Downton Abbey” cast members mash it up with “Breaking Bad.” Stephen Colbert’s staff are geniuses.

And while we’re on the subject: Vince Gilligan talks about crafting the final season.

Ezra Klein: Good riddance to the worst Congress in history.

A good weekend to all, and the full-week grind restarts Monday.

I wandered into a discussion about journalism today — which is sort of the cue for anyone with half a brain to turn the page — but it occurs to me that what it’s really about is something else. First, a piece by Susan Shapiro, writing teacher, over an assignment she gives her “feature journalism students,” i.e. “the humiliation essay,” which she calls her signature assignment. Students are required to:

…shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.

You can’t remain removed and dignified and ace it. I do promise my students, though, that through the art of writing, they can transform their worst experience into the most beautiful. I found that those who cried while reading their piece aloud often later saw it in print. I believe that’s because they were coming from the right place — not the hip, but the heart.

She goes on at some length about this assignment, and how to make it worth reading. It’s a good one. I’ve always felt the first job of any writer, whether one works in fiction or nonfiction, is to tell the truth. Telling the truth about yourself is frequently the hardest thing you’ll do as a writer, so learning how to do so early in your career is probably a useful exercise.

Hamilton Nolan at Gawker disagreed, making the very good point that a journalist’s last job should be to write about themselves. He points out that Shapiro, who seems to be only about 50 or so, has already published three memoirs, and maybe that’s not the craft’s highest calling. He’s onto something there, and notes:

…let us more generously interpret Shapiro’s attitude as not a cause, but a symptom—her own honest reading of the state of the professional writing market today. In a way, she is not wrong, although she is also part of the problem.

Shapiro is, in essence, telling her students that they only way they will get published and sell stories and books and have careers as professional writers is to exploit every last tawdry twist and turn of their own lives for profit. Why, she could be the editor of any number of popular websites! Her takeaway from editors’ and agents’ demands for interesting stories is, “Sharing internal traumas on page one makes you immediately knowable, lovable and engrossing.” She is teaching a gimmick: the confessional as attention-grabber. Her students could just as well include naked photos in their essays, for the same effect.

They’re both right, and they’re both wrong. Journalism students should be learning, first and foremost, how to write about other people, not themselves. But. Making yourself your toughest assignment is hardly a waste of time; besides what I mentioned before, confronting your own awful story may well help you when you’re trying to write someone else’s. So I’ll defend the assignment.

But Nolan’s position is more than defensible, and from how she described them in her piece, I doubt I’d find Shapiro’s memoirs very interesting. In fact, the one she talks most about — “Five Men Who Broke My Heart” — sounds ghastly. I have five heartbreakers of my own; why would I give a fat rat’s ass about yours, Susan Shapiro? He’s right that a typical memoir of today traffics in just this sort of overheated crap, which is why I don’t read many of them. But to reject the personal essay/memoir out of hand as “not journalism” is simply ignorant — “Out of Africa,” “Ten Days That Shook the World,” etc. etc. and more etc.

The difference, of course, is that these great storytellers were writing about something outside themselves, through their own eyes. They have the sense to know what’s interesting and what’s just self-indulgent twaddle.

I really don’t know much about Shapiro’s students; maybe “feature journalism” is what she calls memoir or personal history.

Ultimately, one of my favorite writing lessons is the one Norman MacLean’s father delivers in “A River Runs Through It” — an assigned essay of a certain length, which he requires his sons to cut in half, cut in half again and maybe a third time, after which he delivers the final verdict: “Now throw it away.”

Most writing can be thrown away, when you come right down to it. Newspaper work teaches you that, as you’re virtually assured that your precious words will end up wrapping fish, lining birdcages, training puppies, abandoned atop the toilet tank or shredded into insulation. The best you can hope for is to be pinned to someone’s refrigerator for a while.

A book note before I go, while we’re on the subject:

I didn’t say enough good things about “Capital” last week. The author is British, and I’d forgotten how much fun their slang is. “Naff” took me a while to figure out, and I’m still not sure I’ve quite got it. (I think it means tacky, but that’s not exactly right.) Speed bumps are “sleeping policemen.” And then I was sidetracked by the in/on thing.

New Yorkers stand on lines, everybody else stands in them. But there’s a difference between English and American English on the subject of addresses. Brits are more likely to describe life in a road than on it. Why is that? I always figured that the older the road, the more likely it is to be cut into the countryside by years of passing conveyances, and maybe there’s more in than on to them by then.

I’ll leave it to our resident Brit commenters. Because I’m mighty tired, and think I’m off to bed.