So, Miguel Cabrera clinched baseball’s triple crown night before last, and where was Detroit’s highly paid celebrity sports columnist? Beats me. I hear he’s on a book tour, but wherever he was, he wasn’t in the paper today.

Mitch did write about Cabrera. On September 23rd. First paragraph:

I remember Carl Yastrzemski. All the kids followed him. It was 1967, the Summer of Love, but for boys sporting high top sneakers and baseball cards in our bicycle spokes, it was the summer of the Triple Crown — or another summer of the Triple Crown. Frank Robinson had won it the year before. And being wide-eyed fans, we figured someone would win it every year.

Ooooohkay, then. Tell me, though: Did anyone ever put baseball cards in bicycle spokes? I remember that trick, but you used playing cards. Baseball cards were for trading, but then, if you’re phoning in yet another soft-focus remembrance of the good ol’ days, it sounds better to make them baseball cards.

Oh, I just don’t have it in me today. It’s the end of the week, it’s been a long one, and Mitch isn’t my problem. But considering this guy is now writing about twice in a blue moon, don’t you think he’d have the time to give us a better ending than this?

Cabrera stays away from newspapers or Internet sites or even TV shows about sports. He said he was spending time watching movies or playing with his kids to keep the pressure off when he’s not at the park. He even has read a few books.

“‘Fifty Shades of Grey?'” someone joked.

“Huh?” he said.

“‘Fifty Shades of Grey?'”

“No.”

Right. Who needs 50 shades of grey when you’re chasing three points of a crown?

And that, as Deadspin might say, is how the winner of the Red Smith Award puts a cherry on top. Booyah.

So let’s go to the bloggage, and congratulate Deborah on her well-earned retirement. Now she can write to us about the Frito pie at the Santa Fe Woolworth’s.

Tina Fey on the end of “30 Rock.” I would so like to work in a writer’s room. It sounds like a newsroom at its best moments:

What are some of the made-up words you’re going to miss from the 30 Rock world? What are your favorites?

I mean, sometimes they come out of skits, skits that we’re shooting in our writers room, so that’s where “lizzing” and “high-fiving a million angels” came from. Some of them came from my daughter [Alice] when she was smaller and didn’t speak as well. [Laughs.] “I want to go to there.” I remember our head of post, when we were trying to cut that episode down to time, said, “We could cut that,” and I was like, “I think we should leave it,” and I’m so glad we did, because you never know what’s going to stick in people’s brains.

Why should hurricanes get all the good stuff? The Weather Channel announces it will name winter storms this season. Bundle up for Orko!

Eh, I’ve hit a wall. Have a great weekend, all, and I’ll see you back here Monday.

Didn’t you guys start to talk yesterday about how to report race in crime stories? This is the rule I’ve always followed, which may or may not be the rule anymore. I’ve been gone from institutional daily journalism a long time.

The rule is: Don’t report race unless it’s important to the story, which can vary. When a suspect is at large and might be a threat to others, someone another person might see and report to police, by all means do so. The problem comes when the description is something impossibly vague like “a white man wearing blue jeans” or “a black man of medium height.” In the case of the two Grosse Pointe girls who were robbed, the description was pretty thorough, and included height and weight, clothing and, yes, race. The guy was armed and had escaped into the neighborhood. Totally defensible to use his color in the story.

Otherwise, if you wouldn’t write that someone was robbed by a person with red hair, I leave it out.

Others don’t follow the same rules. Our weekly newspaper here will sometimes write, for instance, “The 16-year-old was released to his 32-year-old mother.” Ooh, very subtle, just in case you didn’t catch on to the fact the perp was, how you say, not from around here. The worst of all was when they transcribed the written confession of a teenage female car thief, semiliterate spelling, fractured usage and all. It was repulsive, but I’m sure their readership got a real yuk out of it.

Meanwhile, here was the story TV did.

I can’t tell you how much I despise this sort of thing — the stupid hand gestures, the weird delivery, everything, including the obligatory exchange with the anchor at the end, which might as well run:

“Now I am asking you a question we both already know the answer to, in an effort to show you have deep knowledge of this situation.”

“And I am answering, both of us fully aware I’ve never set foot in this place in my life.”

Every crime story about this place has to talk about how peaceful it is, how unexpected the crime is, and of course, how the sucking maw of Detroit lurks just around the corner. It’s our cow picture, the cow picture being the standard photo of Columbus that ran for years with every single national-media story about how the city was starting to really come on strong. There’s a place at the end of the street where I grew up, where Ohio State University has some farm fields for the ag school. Sometimes they graze dairy cattle there, and when the air is clear, you can sometimes catch a nice pic of a cow in the foreground and the city’s skyline behind.

The cow picture. Because Columbus is shedding its cowtown image! Get it?

Oh, well. Moving on.

Anyone heard of Art Prize? It’s a festival held every year in Grand Rapids, where public art is installed all over the city for a few weeks, and the public votes on it. I’ve never been, and honestly, when I first heard about it, I imagined a lot of earnest crap and/or hostile Richard Serra stuff.

Looks like I was wrong. I love the taxidermy piece, and of course the wooden bicycle. Might be worth a road trip.

Time for bed. Hope your day was fine. Mine was busy.

There’s been a tragedy in Libya, and even if there hadn’t been, we would certainly have better things to talk about today than Bob Greene. But talk about him I must.

Thanks to our own Bob (not Greene) for tipping me to this Robert Feder piece catching up with the former Chicago Tribune columnist on the 10-year anniversary of his fall from grace, which my longest-staying readers will recall as a red-circled date around this blog, too.

The firing of Bob Greene was the first post* here that made a splash outside of my little readership, which had formerly numbered in the tens, or maybe the fives. The experience of being an overnight blog sensation was simultaneously exhilarating and disorienting, but I ended up writing my essay for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship on that incident, and I got that gig, so I guess I owe Bob Greene something. But having just read Feder, I think it still needs to be said: Ten years later, Bob still sucks.

In fact, I think that was the point of the blog that day: Who cares if he diddled a teenager? Fire him for being a lousy columnist.

It’s taken a long, long time, but I’ve come to accept that I am a minority voice in the career of Greene. There are plenty of people, people whose opinion I respect, who don’t think he sucks. There’s Feder himself, speaking of Greene’s current venue, CNN.com:

He doesn’t write about abused children anymore (as he did to excess in his final years at the Tribune), but he often returns to other familiar themes with the confidence and grace of an old pro. Reading him again reminded me why he once was a role model for many of us who came after him at Medill.

And there’s Eric Zorn, from whom I expected something more than this:

I had mixed feelings about Greene — he was, he is, an incredibly gifted observer, canny reporter and smooth writer.

With all due respect to Eric, who is all those things: No.

I’m just going to choose the most recent Greene column from his CNN home page. Headline: In Ohio, candidates are salesmen trying to close the deal. Writers generally don’t write their own headlines, but that is vintage Greene. Candidates are selling something? You don’t say! Wow, I never thought of it that way.

And sure enough, that’s it: It opens with a little bit of finger-on-the-pulse reporting, a woman who lives near a presidential speaking venue inconvenienced when she’s expecting a delivery of furniture. The truck can’t get through the crowded street. Not named. Nut graf:

Ohio is getting plenty of visits from the candidates. During the time I was in the middle of Ohio this summer, Paul Ryan was in the area twice, Mitt Romney was there at least once, and on this early afternoon Obama had made his way to Capital. Scenes like this repeat every four years; there are days in highly contested states when something seems almost amiss if you don’t encounter a motorcade or a police escort.

Followed by:

They are traveling salesmen, the candidates are; they hit the road bearing their products — the products being themselves. And although presidential and vice presidential candidates are the most celebrated politicians in the land, they become not so different from the thousands of other sales reps who lug their sample cases across America every work week of the year.

Love that writerly sentence inversion! Impressed, I am not. It helps usher in the tritest observation possible, that politicians are actually? When you think about it? Trying to sell you something. Wow. That’s heavy.

It goes on. We never hear from the furniture woman again, but we do hear from Arthur Miller, although I think this big finish really pegs the needle:

In less than nine weeks, two of the four men crisscrossing the nation — Obama, Romney, Ryan, Joe Biden — are going to find out that they failed to make the sale after all, and two of the men are going to find out that they have successfully culminated the transaction. The nervous uncertainty of that is what can make their high-level pursuit at times feel utterly life-sized.

Arthur Miller, in that same play in which he introduced Willy Loman to the world, understood the compulsion behind all of this quite well:

“A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

Or, as John Cougar Mellencamp put it more concisely: And there’s winners, and there’s losers, but that ain’t no big deal.

So let’s move on. Feder singled out the remembrance he did of Jeffrey Zaslow, the Wall Street Journal reporter and author who died last winter. Greene “recalled heroically” his more-talented colleague, Feder wrote, so let’s see what that was all about.

The good news: Better. Greene clearly liked and respected Zazz, but once again, faced with the task of finding one original thing to say about him, came up short. His lead:

“What # are you at?”

The brief e-mail arrived late on the morning of January 24. I keep looking at it.

It was from Jeff Zaslow. We first became friends more than 25 years ago. We got together as often as we could when we found ourselves in the same town, usually for long, laughter-filled dinners; Jeff, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, in recent years became the author of multiple big bestselling books, most of them on inspirational themes.

“What # are you at?”

I guess we’ve all experienced the disorientation of losing a loved one suddenly, of having to clean an office or a closet, thinking this was his, but where is he? This box of ashes, this corpse — I talked to him three days ago. Where did he go? Most of us, however, wouldn’t find a totally mundane, four-word-one-syllable email worthy of not only being the first words in our tribute to our friend, but something to repeat. What planet you on, Bob? Planet Bob, where he’s been doing this stuff for years.

It goes on, and yes, it gets better, but as always, the conclusion drawn is mundane. I’ll save you the trouble. You know why Zaslow was a success? Because he worked so hard. You’re welcome.

I said before that the first rule of writing is to tell the truth. So here it is: Greene is a hack, Albom is a hack, but Nall is a hack, too. Was a hack. Writing a newspaper column quickly becomes a grind, no matter how hard you work at it, no matter how brilliant you are. I wrote many, many shitty columns. I, too, tried to spin grand life lessons from trite observations. It is so hard to do it well, to not suck on a daily basis, sparkle occasionally and shine often enough that people want to keep reading you. The best you can hope for is a snappy prose style that will lift even your stupidest material on an ethereal soap bubble of wonder. That’s Jon Carroll’s secret, but even he fails, and fails often. On the other hand, one column as good as this can make up for a decade of failures. I think I read that column every day for about a year when I was miserable at my job, like a prayer. (Bonus: One of my editors also worked for the Mr. Stern Carroll disliked so. Said Stern wasn’t so bad. Lesson: Never let reporting get in the way of a great column.)

I’d like to point out that Carroll’s is an example of how to write about a death that affected you profoundly. Note that the lesson at its center is no less pat than the one in Greene’s. And yet, look how much better.

I guess, finally, what bugs me about Greene, about Albom, about all the other hacks out there phoning it in, is how they don’t seem to get it. They have the best jobs in the world, and they don’t feel any obligation to get better, to get smarter, to be anything other than crowd pleasers of the easiest audience outside of a cruise ship.

Zorn, despite that early stumble into praise, gets it exactly right at the end:

All writers have their private lives, of course, but columnists, in particular, at least ought to be genuine. Greene, however, always seemed to be channeling a character called “Bob Greene,” behind which the real person hid.

…the one book he hasn’t written — either doesn’t want to write or is perhaps incapable of writing — is a brutally candid account of his phenomenal rise, long cruise at altitude, devastating crash and painful period of recovery (tragically, his wife died of a respiratory illness four months after he left the Tribune).

A book by Bob Greene, in other words, and not by “Bob Greene.” It would be the capstone and perhaps spark the revival of a remarkable career.

Yep. It’s one I’d read. I don’t expect to ever do so.

* I’d link to the post, but it’s gone into the ether. I know I have it saved on a CD-ROM backup somewhere, but I’m not going diving for it now.

Hey, all.

In honor of the spirit of Labor Day, not much of a post today, but a link to a very nice Labor Day column by Brian Dickerson, the only columnist worth reading in the Free Press. If y’all looking for tips on how to write a personal column with a larger point, read this little gem — fewer than 500 words, simple, sincere.

Albom could take a lesson, but he won’t.

Happy Labor Day, all

I read the news today, oh boy. Actually, I heard it — one of those long-drive-to-Lansing days. Mitt Romney described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, said “culture” is the reason for the gulf between Israel’s and the Palestinians’ GDP, made a serious factual error (the GDP figures), and otherwise had one of those days where, if it had been had by Barack Obama, would have been accompanied by screeching, real hysterical screeching, on the right. Because it was the other way around, it was accompanied by a sober report on NPR in which the reporter explained, in reasonable tones, the “controversy” attached to calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

And that’s the way it was on the drive home.

As always, don’t just consider the source, consider the audience. Romney was speaking to a group of rich donors at the King David Hotel. It must have been successful; he is said to have left with more than a million bucks in his pocket.

Enough time passes between presidential elections that I forget stuff. Is this the way presidential candidates are supposed to behave “on foreign soil,” a phrase we hear a lot at times like this. Because that struck me, even considering the audience, as a rather obnoxious speech. But what do I know?

Back to the mind-numbing palliative of men’s gymnastics. Boy, are these guys not my type — short, musclebound, as hairless as a baby’s ass. I keep thinking of real-world applications for this level of physical mastery. Many years ago, I read a column in the American Spectator — perhaps the only good thing I ever read in that rag — about Rudolf Nureyev, after he died of AIDS. It was a snotty column, but there was an eyewitness account in there, about a rooftop party busted by the cops, and somehow Nureyev ended up on the other side of an air shaft or narrow alley, and the cops said, “Get back over here.” The dancer gave them an arrogant look and leapt back across the gap like a gazelle, which somehow reduced whatever had brought the cops there to the level of ashing your cigarette on the sidewalk. That’s when it would be good to be a gymnast. You never know when you might have to jump across an air shaft or turn a few handsprings.

As it is, most of us will only go to parties with people who will have a few and then reprise their role as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”

Meanwhile, what the hell with this Jonah Lehrer guy? It’s not enough that he blew it. He had everything, and he blew it. I get really tired of these entitled little shits with their book contracts and their think pieces and all the rest of it. Don’t make stuff up. It’s not so hard.

OK, time to watch the end of these gymnastics, and try to pretend I don’t already know the U.S. team collapsed like a muscular little house of cards.

Because I care about my readers so very very much, and because Alan went fishing last Friday and Kate was off doing something, and it was hot and I was at loose ends and had an hour to kill, I did something I normally wouldn’t do, even for you.

I watched Bristol Palin’s reality show via my on-demand service.

I wish I could tell you it was a fine bit of bad television, worthy of an extra beer and a bowl of popcorn. Alas, I cannot.

Part of the problem is reality TV. I had a colleague who was always promising that reality TV was done, done, dunzo, and soon we’d have no more of it. This was more than a decade ago. Not only is it not dunzo, it seems stronger than ever, even as every last trope is as tired and clichéd as a CPAC flag salute for the mama grizzlies. There’s the mission (Bristol is restless, and wants to “give back” to a charity in Los Angeles) the staged think-it-over scene (Mama Sarah Grizzly sings a little of the “Beverly Hillbillies” theme song, screwing up the lyrics), the packing, the move, the reveal of the ridiculous mansion (“owned by a friend of my mom’s”), etc.

Ostensibly, Bristol is working for a charity called Help the Children, and isn’t that a great name for a charity? Guess what their mission is? Helping children! They have branded polo shirts, and Bristol gamely puts hers on and goes for a driving tour of Skid Row. Not a lot of children-helping can be observed, mainly because we have to endure long confessional interviews with Bristol and her sister, Willow, dragged along to be a babysitter to little Tripp, her 2-year-old son with Levi Johnston. Willow’s not very enthusiastic about being there, and whines on the phone to a friend back in Alaska. Tripp, we’re told, is the very reason for this excursion, because Bristol “wants him to see there’s a whole world out there,” something anyone who’s ever taken care of a 2-year-old for long knows is not exactly at the top of their bucket list.

Even this synopsis is boring, isn’t it?

Anyway, it all leads up to the big money scene, where Bristol is out frolicking with friends and an angry gay man yells YOUR MOTHER’S A WHORE. There’s some shakycam of the two of them squabbling, then a big meltdown in which she has the nerve to say, “And there are cameras everywhere!” and we end the episode on some note of sadder-but-wiser.

I feel sorry for Bristol. I feel sorry for Willow (although I think she has a chance). I feel sorry for Tripp. And I am reminded of a conversation I had with a woman from People magazine, who was applying for a Knight Wallace Fellowship the year after mine. She wanted to spend her year working on a book about what happens to people when they become famous overnight, not for something they did, but for something that happened to them. They go a little crazy, she said, mentioning Elizabeth Smart, whom I believe had just asked to play herself in the TV movie about her abduction, rape and captivity.

And then, because my self-loathing apparently knows no bounds, I did something I haven’t done in five years. I listened to a Mitch Albom show, or part of it, on the way home from Lansing Monday. I last tuned in during the Terry Schiavo affair, on a similar boring drive, and I was left with the impression that of all his media personae, radio Mitch was the least offensive. Maybe because so much of talk radio is so deliberately offensive, his aw-shucks regular-guy act was almost likable.

I’ve really, really lost my taste for that sort of commercial radio. There’s allegedly a conversation going on between Mitch and his co-host, but the whole show’s on ADD, what with stock-market closing numbers, traffic on the fives, weather and all the rest of it. But at one point they briefly chatted about “The Newsroom,” the new Aaron Sorkin series on HBO. It’s not being kindly reviewed, and having watched one episode, I’m agreeing with the critics — it’s preachy and speechy and rat-a-tat-tatty, and it left me pretty cold.

The co-host/sidekick said, “It’s not getting good reviews.”

“That’s because people are jealous of Aaron Sorkin’s success,” Mitch said, airily. “That’s what we do in this country. If someone is successful, we have to tear them down.”

Scratch the regular guy. The monsterfication of Mitch is fully complete.

And now, I know we all want to talk about whatever the Supremes had to say today, so I turn it over to you. Only one bit of bloggage, via Dexter: A numismatic ORGY!!!!!

I’m writing this Wednesday night. I can only imagine what tomorrow will be like — 100 degrees here, and I have two interviews and a meeting, with out 150 miles to drive. Oh, joy.

Nora Ephron died today. I didn’t even know she was sick. I guess this is terrible news, but not — Ephron got her threescore and ten, plus one (that means she was 71, for those of you who don’t speak Bible), and to be frank, she wasn’t writing as well as she once did, although Ephron on a bad day was better than most people on their very very best.

My bestie Deb once wrote a column that named Ephron as her role model, in the same way that Ephron named Dorothy Parker as her own. As it turned out, we both — Deb and I — had our chance to sit at her feet, however briefly, and warm ourselves in her glow.

I’ve said here before that Ephron wrote great essays as a young woman, stuff that I read and reread and re-reread, internalizing them and turning her phrases over and over, secreting my own nacre over them until they became stepping stones to my own voice as a writer. I’m serious: I’m the writer I am in part because Nora Ephron was the writer she was, not the greatest ever, but a voice I envied and aped — casual, funny, smart, confessional. I wanted to be her, and while I couldn’t be the 1941-born Jewish daughter of screenwriter/playwrights in Los Angeles, imitating her for a while helped me become the 1957-born Catholic daughter of a couple of ordinary parents, with whatever voice that became.

This stuff is important. I can’t quite explain why.

Her essays for Esquire and New York, compiled in “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble, Scribble” are what I’ll remember her for. Her essay on the development of the first vaginal deodorant was genius, as were the ones on the Pillsbury Bake-Off, consciousness-raising and working for the New York Post, among many others. That’s the Nora I wanted to be.

Later she made her way to Hollywood, and that’s what most of the obits I’ve seen so far have in the lead — her scripts for “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally,” “You’ve Got Mail” and others. To be sure, she wrote some great movies, but her direction was always sort of meh and many of the films she’s best known for were likewise. She was always about making a living, and you make more money as a screenwriter and director than as a magazine essayist. But one thing that always struck me? How those early essays kept popping up in her later work. I watched “Julie & Julia” and caught many lines that I’d read decades previous in her pieces about cooking.

She came back to them, in an even lighter way. “I Feel Bad About My Neck” was a collection so slight it would blow away in a breeze, but it was still fun to read. (I think I did so, standing up, in a Border’s outlet.) It was her first collection in years, and if it wasn’t “Crazy Salad, Redux,” it was like sitting down with an old friend and discovering she still had it, that she could make jokes about lettuce and cookbooks and why dietary cholesterol has nothing to do with serum cholesterol.

She could be maddening; she moved in elite circles, and wrote about their “problems” in ways that suggested aggravated cluelessness. There was a piece about being a resident of the Apthorp, an upper west side apartment building that was rent-stabilized when Ephron moved in, in the 1970s, and eventually squeezed tenants like her out. I remember she said she had a five-bedroom — five bedrooms! — apartment for some ridiculous price, and oh what a tragedy it was to lose it. Cry me a river, etc. (A five-bedroom apartment in the Apthorp today? Nearly $15 million.)

But this is all water under the bridge now. Something you might not know about her: She had a listed phone number, and she answered her own phone. One year, Robert James Waller, the author of “The Bridges of Madison County,” was supposed to speak in Fort Wayne, and I planned to cover it. I reread Nora’s essay, “Mush,” about Rod McKuen, and then I called her and asked if she had any thoughts or advice or, y’know, what am I doing calling Nora Ephron? Mistake mistake mistakemistakemistake. She laughed and we chatted about Waller’s mush and its relation to McKuen’s mush, and she said I couldn’t quote her but that I should enjoy myself and write something good.

Waller cancelled, but it was hardly a wasted assignment. I talked to Nora.

Bloggage today? How about this? A jumping-off point for many things — not all things — Nora. And let’s leave it at that.

UPDATE: This is a really well-done remembrance, with the bonus of lots o’ links. And this.

Really interesting little story playing out up NPR way — an intern wrote a blog about her music-acquisition habits. You’d say music-buying, but she doesn’t do that. She just…has it, and she hasn’t paid for very much:

I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

You can read a lot more at the two links above, but I think the best of it was this thoughtful response from David Lowery at the Trichordist, “a community blog for those interested in contributing to the advancement of an Ethical Internet, and the protection of Artists Rights in the Digital Age.” (Capitalization obviously not mine.) It’s long, but it’s worth the read, because he takes apart the intern’s argument pretty effectively:

The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself? Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

I don’t think Emily, the NPR blogger, will know what hit her, but she — and a lot of other people — need to hear this. I gave my students last term a reading assignment about Kim Dotcom, an obscenely rich jerkoff who’s made his dough on sites that hold huge files, no questions asked. I’d never heard of the guy; they all had, and many had accounts on his site. I just don’t get it. Or maybe I do — they don’t have a lot of spending money, but somehow they’ve gotten their priorities screwed up. Lowery nails it: Spending for the hardware isn’t a problem, but the rest of it should be free.

Ergh.

While we’re on the subject of digital matters and stealing, I was surprised to see myself turn up in this piece about Jonah Lehrer, someone I hadn’t even heard of until this week, when he was accused of self-plagiarizing, i.e. rerunning his own work for multiple paying clients. And why would he do this? I think this Slate piece gets to the point: He’s not really a journalist, but an “idea man.” Some people look at a mop and see a high-paying corporate lecture; I look at a mop and say, time to clean the floor.

Let’s wrap up with a T-Lo post, what they might call your daily pretty: Mrs. FLOTUS looking like a million bucks.

I may be stepping in it here, because I admit to never having seen “The Vagina Monologues” performed live. I’ve read the essays/stories that form the heart of the play, but so far, I’ve never been so hard up for entertainment, even in the depths of February, to attend a performance.

Here’s my prejudice: It always seemed so… calculated. It’s one of those plays designed to be something the squares don’t get and the hip get too well. It’s just so easy. There’s hardly any rehearsal needed. It’s a just-add-water theatrical event: Recruits some local actresses for the heavy-lifting monologues, mix in a few famous faces, dress everyone in red, light the podium from below and curtain up. Everyone reads from a three-ring notebook. The performance itself is a benefit for a sexual-assault treatment center or a domestic-violence shelter or wherever, so everyone feels good about being there. And before you know it? There’s Mrs. Mayor McSnoot, talking about her pussy! It’s Famous Anchorlady, saying cunt! And that? Is entertainment!

I remember when they did it in Fort Wayne the first time; you’d have thought the theatrical community was performing “King Lear” as a nuclear warhead made its way toward the city. So brave! Standing up for Art is a city full of Philistines! Because isn’t that what matters? And is that Famous Anchorlady up there, talking about her vagina? Have you ever seen such a thing?

Just so you know. This is my prejudice. I prefer my plays with plots, snappy writing, maybe some decent costuming, definitely some good acting.

When Rep. Lisa Brown spake the V-word on the floor of the Michigan House last week, and her male colleagues responded by silencing her from speaking for a day, it was probably inevitable that they would arouse the publicity-seeking spirit of Eve Ensler, always looking for a fresh angle for her now 16-year-old franchise. So, as Eddie Murphy used to say, they brought this shit on themselves.

And what shit it was! Three thousand people, carrying signs about bushes and ladybits and whatever other euphemisms you can think of. And Ensler herself:

“I’m over dudes who can’t even say vagina,” she said. “I’m over the Michigan state Legislature … censoring and rebuking and removing Lisa Brown. My vagina’s got decorum.”

She called on all women to participate in “One billion Rising,” on Feb. 14, 2013. On that day, she urged women to leave their jobs and their schools and go to the streets to dance.

“I want you to take over this place,” Ensler said. “I want you to dance for vaginas and life.”

Call me a cynic, but when someone tells me to dance for vaginas, I’m so far outta here, they need another name for it.

But I did find this giggle, deep in the Wikipedia entry. Shoutout, LA Mary:

Harriet Lerner, renowned in the field of women’s psychology, points out the “psychic genital mutilation” embedded in the play’s title, which ignores the clitoris and labia, and should more accurately be called “The Vulva Monologues.”

Damn right.

So, to the bloggage:

I meant to post this yesterday, but forgot: Simon Dumenco on the fly in the Facebook ointment:

Zuckerberg might argue that the concept of “cringeworthy” oversharing is meaningless to digital natives, and that personal privacy/boundaries are fuddy-duddy notions that will diminish as everyone gets more comfortable with their lives becoming open (Face)books — and as old fogies who still care about privacy/boundaries shuffle off this mortal coil. Fine. Maybe that’s true. And maybe a lot of people won’t log out of Facebook on their Apple devices for fear of oversharing.

Then what? Well, that’s where the Law of Diminishing Returns comes in. Because a massive flood of new Facebook “shares” from iOS users will become a nightmare in another way: The noise will increasingly drown out the signal.

I know I keep saying, in regard to Mitch Albom’s Sunday column, “this is a new low,” but folks? Srsly? This is a new low. If it took him 10 minutes to write, he spent three of them scratching his ass.

Hey, Nancy Friedman and other Nancys who read this: Did you know there’s a Nancy Tumblr, and it apparently uses only panels from the Bushmiller era? Nancy is Happy — go there now.

And finally, Hank reviews the new — the latest — Palin family train wreck:

As you might assume, being Bristol Palin means a life of continued anguish and suffering. In her somnolent Lifetime reality show, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” which premieres Tuesday night, we keep hearing about the painful glare of media attention that snapped on nearly four years ago when her ­values-preaching mother, Sarah Palin, ran for vice president on the Republican ticket just at the time a teenage Bristol was pregnant with a son. That glare never ended, mostly because Bristol keeps reaching to turn the switch back on.

Yeah, yeah — like taking candy from a baby, but what else are you supposed to do when the baby just hands it to you?

And now the week is under way. It’s supposed to be in the mid-90s for the next two days. I hope I hold up. You, too.

I think I’ve mentioned here before that one of my college classmates was Peter King, now a bigfoot sportswriter at Sports Illustrated. Another was Jay Mariotti, this guy. You should read that link; apparently life has taken a turn for the former Chicago Sun-Times scribe, who quit the paper in a huff after becoming convinced the web was the future.

Things have gone downhill from there, as the Gawker post points out. It’s so hard to reconcile this image of Jay with the guy I knew in 1978, whom I recall as quiet and hard-working. Well, things change.

Another classmate, one who yearned to be a famous sportswriter with every fiber of his being, was this guy. He wanted it so bad he sued the Plain Dealer for racial discrimination, although it never went anywhere. Now I see he’s landed on his feet, having published a book about cereal:

Even the most miniscule detail about breakfast cereal impacts Gitlin and his passion for pouring bowls.

About 20 years ago, he said he sat down for a spoonful of Alpha Bits and, much to his horror, Post had removed the sweetening.

“I was stupefied,” he said. “I went in my room and cried. Very soon after that they took Alpha Bits off the market, and when it returned it was pre-sweetened again. Post understood the error of their ways.”

That story’s from the Plain Dealer. Good to see they don’t hold a grudge.

What a long, tiring day it was. Spent most of it at a conference in Lansing. I still have to write about it, so I guess I shouldn’t say too much, other than this: The lunch was very good, the lunch entertainment even more so — a rapping organic gardener. No, I am not kidding. Did you know farmin’ ain’t easy? Did you know he gots to have his kohlrabi, spinach and chard, and the rest of the rhyme probably included the word hard? It so happened I’d just listened to an interview with Ice-T on NPR on the way in; he has a documentary film about the birth of rap and hip-hop he’s promoting. I wonder what rhyme Ice-T could do for kohlrabi. The rappin’ gardener:

And then I get home and discover the real news in Lansing yesterday was in the state legislature, which silenced a female representative for a day after she said the word “vagina” on the floor, and no, I’m not kidding about that, either. I encourage you to watch the video and tell me if you think she was out of line. My only complaint is a technicality; the male legislators pushing this bill don’t want to be in her vagina, they want to be in her uterus, but as we’ve discussed here before — we’ve discussed everything, haven’t we? — a lot of people like to throw the word vagina around, and many of them do so incorrectly. As L.A. Mary once said, “We’re really talking about the vulva, aren’t we?” If Lisa Brown had said that, however, I’m sure the entire House of Representatives would have burst into flames.

The lege isn’t exactly covering itself with glory in recent days.

But while we’re talking about ladyparts, I must say, I’ve grown to like “Girls,” after its somewhat rocky start, and I think this Onion AV Club piece gets the show (along with “Enlightened”) exactly right. If nothing else, I admire Lena Dunham’s willingness to bare her highly imperfect body week after week after week, knowing the sort of shit that’s talked about her on the internet:

The world of entertainment still, all too often, values women only as objects of beauty to be placed on screen and ogled. I have no problem looking at a beautiful woman, but the world is full of other women who have profound, intelligent, often hilarious things to say, and Dunham is very quietly making a space for those voices on TV, in a way that’s revolutionary both in terms of the show’s gender politics and in terms of its presentation.

Or look at it this way: If this show was called Guys, and its showrunner/protagonist was in every other way similar to Dunham/Hannah—a dorky, slightly overweight guy who bumbled his way through Brooklyn, trying to find his purpose and working his way through a calamitous love life—would any of these criticisms have popped up? Would the people being uncharitable toward Girls have been uncharitable toward that series?

Lena Dunham’s body is no worse than that of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Segal or any number of young male protagonists we’re expected to believe are sexually successful with women who look like Elizabeth Banks and Mila Kunis. And her love interest on “Girls” is actually in her league, in many ways. So fuck all that.

The decline and expensive fall of the Michigan film tax incentives, by moi, complete with sidebar, also by moi.

But that’s no note to leave on. So let it be this: Great weekends to all!