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!

Not exactly scintillating stuff, but what the hell, every click counts: Yesterday’s story.

I have to tell you: I understand the thinking here, but there’s something dispiriting about making the case for treating little children well on a dollars-and-cents level. On the other hand, that’s how our society values everything, right? The important thing is, it gets done.

And now, the head goes down for the final day of maximizing, incentivizing, and other verbified nouns. In two hours, Tom Friedman! What is two hours in units of Friedman?

Joumana Kayrouz is the T.J. Eckleberg of Detroit. For a couple of years now, her face has dominated every third billboard across the metro area, advertising her services as a personal-injury lawyer. This seems to be what she looks like more or less au naturel:

She has an arresting appearance, with white-blonde hair, lashes and brows. This was her first billboard image:

Lately a new billboard is replacing it. Through the miracle of technology, she’s grown a giant pair of lips:

I crossed the street behind this bus yesterday, and up close, you can see how crappy the Photoshopping was; they didn’t even try to match her actual lips:

I hope she’s a better lawyer than her art director was a Photoshop artist.

And that is your Friday eye candy (if you like wax lips). But it starts us off on a thematic foot, as our first bit of bloggage today involves the subject of how women look. I realize calling Rush Limbaugh a vile sack of pus is like calling the ocean wet, but Laura Lippman posted this today, and it left me wondering, for the thousandth time, where the bottom of this man’s loathsomeness really is. By WashPost blogger Melinda Henneberger, she notes her (extremely mild) reaction to the Time magazine breastfeeding cover, and Limbaugh’s reaction to it. Ahem:

First, Limbaugh pronounced me “a classic inside-the-Beltway feminist, classic professional feminist. You know what that means.” I do?

“See, TIME Magazine blew it,’’ Limbaugh explained. “You know why it’s not working with the feminist women? Because the woman on the cover of TIME Magazine was too pretty. I call your attention once again to Undeniable Truth of Life Number 24. Dare I speak it again? Brian’s nodding his head yes. Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream. Here is Melinda Henneberger, who’s somewhat trying to be funny here, but in all comedy, there is a grain of truth, and she’s quite upset.

This is what Melinda Henneberger looks like. Just, y’know, for reference.

Finally, Donna Summer is dead, and I won’t apologize for enjoying her music. Disco had its day, it came and went, and sorry, but the Bee Gees were only the worst part of it. Summer wasn’t the best, but she was pretty good. I could never bring myself to hate disco. It was pop dance music, and a huge relief from the self-important blowhard rock’n’roll of the time. (All we are is dust in the wind, right?) And then punk came along and was a huge relief from disco. It all passes away, eventually. Right, D?

Have a great weekend, all.

What a glorious day. Just perfect, pretty much start to finish. I’d planned to get up early for a dawn bike ride, but suffered a 90-minute bout of insomnia after an already late bedtime, so that was down the tubes. But I got away for an hour or so at lunch, and ran errands on two wheels. Stopped at the pet store — the best pet store in Michigan, for my money — for rabbit food, and visited with the baby buns in their big bin. The lady said they have a Flemish giant that they turn loose for exercise, and sometimes he jumps in with the babies. This would be an alarming sight to see, especially for the babies — the sky darkening with something roughly rabbit shaped, and then a bun the size of Spriggy landing in their midst. No wonder they looked so nervous.

Then, to the library to pay overdue fines and look for something for our next family movie night. “High Fidelity” is checked out. Grr. Then down to the ATM for some dolla-dolla-bills-y’all, and back home, not even all that sweaty. I like my Lansing days for the rediscovered joys of officemates and lunch out, and I like my work-at-home days for the bike rides and the chance to get laundry done between phone calls.

Amid all the glory of listening to the birds chirp, and making those phone calls, that was pretty much my day, until Alan pulled into the driveway in this:

Alas, it shipped without the Italian supermodel. But it did have a sunroof, and yesterday was our 19th wedding anniversary, so off we rolled down Lake Shore for an ice cream sundae, and that’s all the fun you can really have when your anniversary falls on a Tuesday, but no matter.

Being online and connected all day, I did collect some bloggage worth your time, however:

One from moi, on one of those crazy urban-farm ideas here in Detroit, only this one has spinach and fish. Hit the link and keep me employed.

My old Columbus Dispatch colleague Julia Keller is leaving the Chicago Tribune to teach at my alma mater. She’s a West Virginia girl, so she’ll enjoy being more or less back home. Almost almost heaven, as we never said in southeast Ohio.

If I read Mark Souder’s stupid column right, he’s mad at Dick Lugar for speaking the truth on election night because it was “ungracious” and slavery and how can you be bipartisan unless you’re partisan first, huh? I consider the day this twit got caught with his weenis in the wrong place proof of a loving and merciful God. Certainly one with a sense of humor.

While we’re on the subject of religious hysterics, a great Charles Pierce piece on the crazy Catholic school whose baseball team refused to play one with a girl on it.

General Motors cancelled a $10 million ad buy with Facebook. Why? Because nobody clicks their ads. Ha.

A note from Kim, of our commenting crew, who is today a job creator. A hirer, anyway:

I have a couple of job opportunities and am wondering if you know of folks either in the NN.C sphere or elsewhere who might be interested. They are in Wilmington, NC and Columbia, SC – my company recently closed on groups of stations in both markets (they were separate deals) and I am at the point of immediately hiring for NC to start up an online-only daily driven by radio. SC will be later this summer. I am looking for a managing editor for both places, and a cops/courts reporter for NC.

Finally, someone — can’t remember who — already noticed a language anachronism edging into “Mad Men,” that most obsessively policed environment, or so we’ve heard. First, Joanie told someone “it is what it is,” a phrase I’d bet a paycheck hadn’t been invented in 1966. Then, this week, a character requested an “impactful” ad. Say whu-? That neologism is so fresh it’s still in diapers. Matt Weiner? You aren’t all you think you are.

Hope Wednesday is as nice as Tuesday was.

Was it just yesterday I went off on Rant 13B at lunch? That is, Why The Hell Is Facebook Worth $96 Billion? Probably. I deliver it roughly every other week. I don’t get it — a few ads on the sidebar for weight loss? How does it add up?

The only thing I can figure is, the data and privacy and all the rest of it we share with them, so willingly and unthinkingly, is worth a lot. A LOT.

Over time, I’ve been trimming my Facebook apps to the bare minimum I need to interact with people I want to interact with. I’ve had to resist stuff like Words With Friends, but given my problems resisting crap like Angry Birds, that’s probably a pretty good thing. But by doing so, I’ve been spared the mortifying — to me, anyway — updates I get on what everybody’s reading, delivered via “social reader” apps. Did I need to know my friend’s wife has a fondness for Kardashian news? No. Did Famous Journalist really check out a story about Kate Upton’s breasts? Shudder.

Still, there’s a sense, every time I run through my news feed, that I’m selling all my information short.

So it’s with joy, real joy, that I read that social readers are collapsing — the Washington Post’s, but also the Guardian’s and others. There’s a nominal explanation from the WashPost, something about Facebook modules, whatever they are, and I guess it’s plausible. But I can’t help but hope there’s something to it. I love the WashPost like few other newspapers– er, “content providers,” but there has to be a limit. I’ll register at their site, and they can presumably track what I’m reading there, but Mark Zuckerberg can kiss my bum. From casual observation, my opinion isn’t a minority view.

Sharing is one thing. Window-peeping is quite another.

Social media is essential for journalists, but man, I wish it weren’t.

Any “Mad Men” fans in da house? Of course there are. Any guesses as to what it cost to land the rights to “Tomorrow Never Knows” for last night’s episode? (And may I just say, what a great choice. My favorite on “Revolver,” and I didn’t know until today that the things that sound like seagulls in the first few seconds are actually tape squeals. Learn something new every day, etc.) A quarter-mil. Yikes.

We have a local story unfolding here, yet more of the endless corruption shenanigans in local government. Long story short: An overpaid county development officer left her job last fall, willingly, pocketing a year’s salary as severance, which would merely be wrong and appalling, except that the county is bankrupt and laying off less fortunate employees. A few raised a stink, which became a big stink, and throughout it all, this particular development officer has stuck her elegant nose in the air and refused to apologize for any of it, other than to say she deserved every penny because she worked so hard.

Over the weekend the Freep broke a story about some of the outside jobs she held, for alleged nonprofits that existed mainly to guide even more dollars into her overflowing pockets:

Turkia Awada Mullin had only one Cadillac, but she had two monthly car allowances to pay for it.

One was for $500 from her $200,000-a-year job as chief development officer of Wayne County. The other was for $500 or $600 — she couldn’t quite remember — paid by the Wayne County Regional Jobs and Economic Growth Foundation, one of several nonprofit groups Mullin headed in addition to her county job.

Did she really need $1,000 a month to run her car? Mullin was asked last month.

“I think it’s more than that with the mileage I put on it,” she said.

Poor, poor, greedy, greedy baby.

The tower of Monday has been scaled. Let’s hope the rest of the week goes more smoothly.

Good lord, is this weather for real? Ninety degrees on the freeway Thursday afternoon, not much cooler under the trees. Vicious wind, of course — we’re all waiting for the inevitable thunderstorms, and Friday? High of 70. For the Tigers game.

My boss Derek says, “You don’t get gentle showers anymore. Everything’s a cloudburst.” Word.

So. I’ve been more or less deprived of one of my scab-picking pleasures of late. I don’t think Mitch Albom has written more than a dozen columns since last Thanksgiving. He surfaced at one point and said something about finishing a book. He weighed in on Words With Friends and dashed off a few sports columns. But the ones I consider my joy and duty — the Sunday op-ed front-page thumbsuckers about the good ol’ days or kids these days, the ones I hate-read with such gusto — those have been scarce. Until this past Sunday, when he unearthed Ernie Harwell’s rest-deprived bones yet again, by way of announcing his play about the Tigers legend would be returning for a second summer run:

There’s a scene in the play “Ernie” in which the actor playing Ernie Harwell re-enacts the way he broadcast minor-league baseball games in the 1940s, when there was no money to send him on the road.

Blah blah blah about the ticker-tape feeding the radio play-by-play — you saw it in “Bull Durham” — and then this:

When asked what he did if the ticker-tape machine broke, Ernie replies that sometimes he’d make up a distraction, like a dog running on the field. And he’d have that dog racing back and forth, eluding escape, until the machine was fixed.

Of course, when the ballplayers came home, their wives would ask, “What happened to that poor dog?” And they’d say, “What dog?”

The audience always laughs. It is a sweet moment. A reminder of a simpler time, when broadcasting was about imagination — for both the listener and, at times, even the announcer.

“It is a sweet moment.” OK, sure. Then we get a Bob Greeney detour into the NFL Draft broadcast, of which Mitch disapproves, because it’s not sweet and narrated by an old Georgian, and finally we get to paragraph 13:

The play about Ernie, which I was honored to write at his request, reopens this week at the City Theatre in downtown Detroit, across the street from the Tigers’ ballpark.

Shucks, people. He didn’t want to write it! Ernie asked! Would you have turned him down? But really, what an amazing trick. He starts out relating a “sweet moment” in “the play ‘Ernie'” and only mentions it’s actually his own play after a couple hundred words. But he’s not done:

It is rare that a stage play runs for long in our city, rarer still that it returns for a second season. It’s extremely rare that people view it multiple times. I think the reason folks return for “Ernie” is the same reason we couldn’t wait to hear him talk about “the voice of the turtle” when he opened his broadcasts every season. It meant renewal. It meant familiarity.

Because it couldn’t possibly be you, could it, Mitch?

I hope this means the little man is back. It would be such a long summer without him.

So, a little bloggage?

In the words of young Alvy Singer, upon meeting Joey Nichols: What an asshole.

My colleague Ron had some good stuff in Bridge this week, on schools’ failure to adequately prepare students for college, although if you ask me, it ain’t the schools’ fault. (Hi, mom ‘n’ dad.) And Peter Luke had a good column about the difference between Michigan Democrats and Republicans that contains a few striking parallels between the two parties in other venues, as well.

A great read about the power of one dedicated nerd against an archivist who went very, very wrong.

And speaking of archivists, another good one.

The auction of “The Scream” makes some people want to do the same. Jerry Saltz:

With dapper white men and tall, thin white women making little finger signals while holding phones, speaking to strangers in Dubai or Russia or Beijing or Mitt Romney’s garage, the painting was sold “to an unknown telephone bidder” for $119.5 million. Thus, a great work of art that had been all but lost to us, hanging in a private Norwegian home for more than a century, made a brief public appearance and then was sold off to another private owner, probably to disappear for another 100 years. We will likely never see this work of art again in our lifetimes. The Scream is a part of art history and should hang in a public collection, probably in Norway, and not just decorate a California den or a dacha in the Ukraine, waiting to be fodder for the next auction. (Needless to say, no museum was in a position to spend that kind of money.)

Eh. I’m happy with my Coozledad original.

A great weekend, all.

Monday, Monday (da dahh, da da dah dah). So much to do (da dahh, da da dah dah). Instead have some links, while I go take a shower so I can leave at 6:30 a.m. for Lansing, and here my singalong collapses somewhat. Fortunately, the links aren’t terrible:

Laura Miller at Salon stretches a bit to link Thomas Kinkade to George W. Bush, but not too-too far — they both peddled kitsch, after all. I didn’t know — or rather, I knew and then forgot — that the painter of light showed evidence of a serious drinking problem, and his premature death may well have been a result of same. His empire of kitsch seemed to be in financial trouble, but that’s nothing new; as a feisty interior decorator back in FW told me years ago, “Once he started whoring himself out on QVC, it was all over.” The story contains a link to a 2001 Susan Orlean profile of Kinkade. She visited the Knight Wallace Fellows my year, and revealed she’d made a bet with him, that “a major American museum” would have a show of his work “in (Kinkade’s) lifetime.” It was for a million dollars, too. I guess this means Orlean wins, but I don’t know how she’d collect. Anyway, it sounds like there’s not much left in the kitty.

People have known it’s possible to hack those flashing highway signs for some time. Someone hacked one on I-94 night before last to read, “Trayvon (is) a (big racial slur that sometimes trips internet filters).” What a world.

How my colleague Ron French almost killed Mike Wallace (sort of). A good one.

Finally, a supercut of various famous actors’ first screen appearances. Because why not.

By the time you read this, I’ll be sleepin’. Or drivin’. Happy Tuesday to all, and let’s hope it goes fast.

We’ve been having some terrible restaurant luck lately. The last couple of Easters, we have been meeting Alan’s sister for a meal halfway between our places, i.e. Toledo. The place we went last year went out of business, and this year’s choice, a boîte in the hipster district called Manhattan’s, should do the same. I hope they serve a great cocktail, because their brunch was an overpriced festival of disappointment. Fortunately, Toledo has a fine zoo, and that’s where we spent the afternoon, looking for the meerkats but not finding them — their exhibit was being remodeled. We did see the baby elephant, whose name is Louie. And the usual complement of beasts large and small. Alan was in search of the monkey house of his childhood memories, and we finally found it. It had been renovated into a food court, and the old cage-type setup is perfect for housing junk food-eating people, if you ask me.

Maybe Manhattan’s should investigate a rehab.

Otherwise, a fine weekend. One of my Facebook network, a professional photographer, posted a socko picture he took early Saturday morning, one he said he’s been trying to capture for four years. If you live around here, you know this weekend was exceptionally clear, and the moon was full Friday night. Another one.

That was a hell of a “Mad Men” last night, ain’a? I’m impressed by how well they’re conjuring the ’60s so far this season. Say “the ’60s” and it’s easy to default to hippies. It’s much more, and we forget how the drumbeat of urban violence really began to get loud around this time. Discuss, if you’re so inclined.

As many of you know, eight years ago I was fortunate enough to be a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, a sabbatical year for mid-career journalists. The fellowship was named for its major benefactors; the Knight was the foundation, and the Wallace was Mike, who died this weekend. He came to town every year, to meet the fellows and hobnob around his alma mater, where he was much-loved and respected. He didn’t come our year, however. Charles Eisendrath, the fellowship director, apologized on his behalf: “The bad news is, Mike had to cancel. He’s crashing deadline on a story. The good news is, he’s 86 and crashing deadline on a story.”

And so I didn’t lay eyes on him until a few years later, when he came in for a reunion to celebrate some milestone or another. I didn’t talk to him, as he was the sort of guy who is surrounded by people clamoring for his attention, and what do you say to Mike Wallace? That was great, when you nailed that guy that time, maybe. I haven’t watched “60 Minutes” in years, and when I have, I’m struck by what a throwback it is, but the fact remains, it’s a classic, and classics don’t change because everything else does. For many, many years, it was the gold standard, and Wallace was the most important reporter they had. I’m sure, in the days to come, some bold gnat will sneer about his early days as a pitchman for Fluffo shortening, or some vapid actress interview, but the fact remains, when it counted, he cast a long, long shadow.

Such a strange story in the Freep Sunday, a Rochelle Riley special on the aftermath of a case everyone who was paying attention in 2005 knows about — a mother and her two sons, killed instantly by a drunk driver. The case was especially egregious in the details: It happened at midday. The driver was utterly shitfaced. He hit her car, stopped to make a left turn into the dentist’s office, at an estimated 70 miles per hour. There wasn’t a single skid mark to indicate he tried to slow down first. He was driving a Yukon, she an Accord. So, so awful. All Gary Weinstein’s chickens and their dam in one fell swoop.

This was in 2005. The driver, Tom Wellinger, was tried and convicted of second-degree murder, and is serving 19-30 years in prison. So what’s the story about? Forgiveness.

Now. If you know me at all, you know I am a world-champion grudge holder. If you were filling out brackets for this sport, you’d be smart to have me and David Simon in the final four, perhaps with an Albanian and Sicilian blood-feuder. It’s not that I’m incapable of forgiveness. I just don’t like the version peddled today, in which you forgive someone who has wronged you by hugging them on Oprah’s set and then adding them to your Christmas-card list. This seems crazy to me. This is the forgiveness I practice: I decide to put stuff behind me. And then I move on. But I reserve the right to not like the other person forever and ever.

Because what else can you do? It’s been my experience that when you get seriously fucked over, it’s pretty rare for the fucker to come back later and say, “I did a terrible thing to you. I apologize, and I ask your forgiveness.” Nooooo. They go on about their lives, eating ice cream and otherwise not being bothered by the face they see in the mirror every day. Life could hardly go on, otherwise. Because we’ve all been that fucker, sometime, to someone. We might not even be aware of it.

But this new brand of forgiveness is the hot thing now, and it’s the bass line of this piece by Riley, which promotes a film project called Project Forgive, being produced by a woman who knew both men at the center of this story — Weinstein the widower and Wellinger the drunk driver, and here’s where I start to look around for the nearest exit:

“There are two Toms,” she said (of the killer), “Tom, this man who killed a family and is in jail, and Tom, a beautiful, loving family man who happened to make a horrific mistake.”

Sure, that guy. Stories at the time indicated this beautiful man was on an epic bender at the time, with a blood-alcohol content around .4. Riley picks up on this ironic detail:

The saddest twist of fate, she said, was that Tom Wellinger’s immediate family had flown to Michigan the day of the accident to stage an intervention over his drinking.

It was scheduled for the next day.

That is not the saddest twist of fate, sorry, no. The saddest twist of fate is the three dead people, and have you ever been to an intervention? Frequently, the person at the center says, “No, I’m not checking into your little rehab center. In fact, I’m leaving right now” and walks out of the room. But she’s going somewhere here, and it’s in the direction of forgiveness. Then this mushroom pops up in the middle of the copy:

(Weinstein) also attributes much of his success and life philosophy to Landmark personal development seminars, something that he said chased away many girlfriends but intrigued the woman he eventually married. (His wife) attended a seminar with him and eventually became a Landmark leader.

What is a Landmark personal development seminar? There’s no explanation. So I went a-Googling. And wow:

If, like me, you are not in the habit of sharing highly personal tidbits of your life with 148 strangers for 13 hours a day, three days in a row, then let me, uh, share with you what that experience feels like. It feels like intergalactic jet lag, or like someone has pumped your head full of a global weather system, heavy on the cumulonimbus. Some of the 148 strangers were crying so much, they looked as if they had been boiled.

And wow:

After nearly 40 hours inside the basement of Landmark Education’s world headquarters, I have not Transformed. Nor have I “popped” like microwave popcorn, as the Forum Leader striding back and forth at the front of the windowless gray room has promised. In fact, by the time he starts yelling and stabbing the board with a piece of chalk around hour 36, it’s become clear that I’ll be the hard kernel left at the bottom of this three-and-a-half-day Landmark Forum. I have, however, Invented the Possibility of a Future in which I get a big, fat raise, a Future I’ll Choose to Powerfully Enroll my bosses in, now that I am open to Miracles Around Money.

And an even bigger wow:

Though it’s hardly a secret, Landmark does not advertise that it is the buttoned-down reincarnation of the ultimate ’70s self-actualization philosophy, est.

Dragging that around in your backpack — to borrow an image from “Up in the Air” — you almost have to find yourself confronting your wife’s killer in a jail cell, and asking after his kids.

“I want him to speak so that the world will know he’s not a monster,” Weinstein said. “My understanding is that he’s not. I can appreciate that people who know what happened to me think I should be vindictive against him for what he did. But I don’t come at it from that point at all.”

Again: Wow. I can’t figure if this is brilliant or not. If I’d done something like Wellinger did, I think a fate worse than death would be to have my victim’s survivors embrace me like this. To care about my family. To tell people I’m not a monster. Maybe this is jujitsu. But there was a strange undercurrent to this story. Some things can’t be forgiven in that way.

Or maybe I’m just in dire need of a Landmark personal-development seminar. Has anyone here done one of these?

How was your weekend. We saw “The Hunger Games,” about which I’ll have more to say tomorrow. In the meantime? Bloggage:

For you photography nerds, inside the 3D conversion of “Titanic.”

Thirty-six billions dollars’ worth of student-loan debt is held by people 60 and older. (Speaking of wow.)

Remember when college riots were sparked by politics and anger over national policy? Yeah, me neither.

Monday awaits! Another slog of a week, but one I’m happy to participate in.