Our local NPR affiliate carries a show called Soundcheck, and on my drive home yesterday I caught a feature called the Soundcheck Smackdown, which on most days sounds like the arguments between the record-store clerks in “High Fidelity,” only not as funny.

Yesterday’s discussion was over the most influential figure in popular music in the last quarter-century. The host nominated Steve Jobs. Most of the rest of the free world disagreed. I noted many of the comments were yet more of the Steve Jobs hate that some have been expressing since the Apple CEO stepped down from his position, presumably to await the fate coming for us all.

A couple stipulations here: Y’all know I’m a Mac girl. I don’t revere Jobs in any way, although I do respect him. I’m on record as saying, “It’s an operating system, not a religion,” despite how many people want to treat it as such. My loyalty to Macs goes back to when I bought my first computer in 1994, and learned that formatting a floppy in the Windows OS would require a series of commands including colons, backslashes and the like. In the Mac, I’d get a window that said, “This appears to be an unformatted disk. Would you like to format it?” Sold. I knew, when I handed over my credit card, that I was paying a steep premium for that ease of use, but I was a total dolt with MS-DOS, and I knew that if the curtain of Windows was ever pulled back — and it often was, with that generation of PCs — I’d be powerless.

In subsequent years, both systems have improved immensely. But I like my Macs, and will remain a customer. They speak my language.

During those years, I occasionally come across someone who will remark, “Oh, you have one of those toy computers,” when they see the apple on the case. “When are you going to buy a real one?” I sometimes ask them if they’d buy a car you had to raise the hood on several times a week, just to get it started. A computer is a tool I use to do my work. I don’t want to spend time fixing my tools.

But man, ever since Jobs announced his exit from the company’s top office, the vitriol. Much of it has been in comment sections and hence, not credible, but you have to wonder about a person who would cheer the impending death of someone because that person made a product they disapproved of — that wasn’t poison gas or electric chairs.

I’ve been particularly interested in Jobs’ patents, a story that splashed in the big papers the day after his announcement, which I have to figure was planted by Apple. To be frank, I don’t know if I’d like to work for him — while an undeniable nurturer of creativity, he also had the sort of micromanaging style that has always made me nuts. That said, he had enough creative people who would die for him that I imagine he kept it under control when he had to.

What a late start today. Sorry, I’m down at Wayne, meeting with my students and writing in between. So this blog by Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money strikes a chord, about the financial bind too many college students find themselves in today:

I graduated from college in 1982, in the middle of what would turn out to be the worst post-WWII recession until the current mess. But I had no debt, because I went to an excellent public university that charged very low tuition. This, I realize in retrospect, made a huge difference in regard to my psychic as well as economic health. A few years later I went to a top state law school for not exactly free, but for a low enough price that I could earn the total cost of tuition from summer jobs. Today if I had done exactly the same thing I would be graduating with easily six figures of non-dischargeable educational debt at 7.5% interest.

A couple weeks ago, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice now running the state’s Department of Human Services was the human face on a policy change that ripped the food-stamp rug out from under thousands of Michigan college students who had previously qualified for same. In a staggering Marie Antoinette moment, she said those students should “get a part-time job, like I did,” if they had trouble putting food on the table. I meet my students at this urban university, and I am stunned and awed by the challenges they’re juggling to go to school. Part-time job? Most of them are working at least two, and many are full-time workers who wedge classes in around the edges, along with family responsibilities and many others that would, or should, shame a woman who could say such a thing. Never mind financial aid — these young people work harder than I ever did in school. “Get a part-time job?” Why not get a clue instead.

OK, I need a palate-cleanser. I see Mary threw those krazy Kardashian girls into the mix, here if you missed it. The Kardashian Kollection of — underwear, I guess — is for Sears. Yes, they spell it with a K, just like Khloe and Kourtney and Kim. Never underestimate the power of hustling white trash, I always say. Here’s Tom & Lorenzo on one of Kim’s grocery-shopping outfits. (Does she always have her makeup applied with an airbrush? I need to do some research on these girls.)

And with that, I’d best get rolling.

Bad news, which some of you mentioned yesterday in comments — my former colleague Mike Dooley died yesterday, from the sort of health collapse that comes after a life a reporter with an Irish name too often feels compelled to live. In what is perhaps a sad commentary on both contemporary journalism and certainly his last employer, his obit was thin and pallid and captured nothing of the man’s essence, which was robust and funny and unforgettable. Better to read excerpts from his popular column, Dooley Noted, which capture what it was like to sit with him at Henry’s, the bar across the street, and hear his stories. My favorite isn’t in there, about riding the press bus on the Dan Quayle 1988 veep campaign, and schooling the national media on the various smells wafting across the countryside. “They didn’t know bullshit from pigshit, Nall,” he roared at his usual volume, set at a time when newsrooms themselves roared with the white noise of phones, typewriters and teletype machines. “Can you believe it?”

Yes, I can. I also believe the story about the time he passed out drunk at a party, and someone used a Sharpie to draw a map of Ireland high on his bald dome, which he wore for several hours before discovering it. I never like to examine the mirror too closely while hungover, either.

Dooley had been failing for a while, and spent his final days at Parkview Hospital, where his friends and colleagues filled up his Facebook page with notes and stories and Godspeeds. I’m told he read them all, and enjoyed them very much.

And while we’re back home again, more news from the Hoosier State: Hank Stuever put me in his book. My former colleague Robin Yocum put me in his book. Tim Goeglein, if Amazon’s “search inside this book” is to be believed, did not. Damn! What’s a girl gotta do to get some credit up in this joint?

Yes, Tim has written his memoirs. I don’t think I’ll be reading them, or at least not buying them. This is why libraries were invented — to read books by people whose income you don’t want to support, but you still want to see what they have to say. Right? I did the 21st-century version of standing over the table at Border’s — first checked for my name, as well as any indication I might be appearing in a spectral, nameless form (“blogger” isn’t in there, either, and the only Nancy has the last name of Reagan). Then I flipped around via the Surprise Me function. It seems Tim’s mom took some classes at IPFW (that’s the Indiana U./Purdue branch campus in Fort Wayne), where professors described the American family as a tool of women’s oppression. He majored in journalism, because of his love for Ernie Pyle. And so on. (The Ernie Pyle school of journalism at IU has “ivy-covered walls,” I learned. Not plagiarism, just trite and unimaginative.) So what is this book’s cornerstone? Amazon copy:

Goeglein’s unique insider account of why he believes most of the 43rd president’s in-office decisions were made for the greater good, and how many of those decisions could serve as a blueprint for the emergence of a thoughtful, confident conservatism. From a fresh perspective, Goeglein gives behind-the-scenes accounts of key events during that historic two-term administration, reflecting on what was right and best about the Bush years. He was in Florida for the 2000 election recount, at the White House on 9/11, and watched Bush become a reluctant but effective wartime president.

An apologia for George Bush. Just what the world needs. Fie.

OK, some quick bloggage, and then I must fly:

Another horrifying story out of Mexico. It just never stops.

A typo — no, an editing mistake — on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Appalling. And etched in stone, literally.

A good weekend to all, especially Irene-dodgers.

A former colleague of mine flagged this story on Facebook — from the Philadelphia Daily News, about the ruination of NFL Films, the production arm that made the “America’s Game” series, which you might not watch, but you almost certainly know.

I have zero interest in football and an above-average interest in filmmaking, and even I can see the genius of the classic, ol’ skool NFL Films oeuvre — its irony-free presentation of games with portentous narration and tympani-and-brass orchestral scores, which can make any given Sunday into a clash of gladiators that will be sung in song for centuries. I haven’t watched them all, but I’ve watched enough to know that their signature is as distinctive as Miles Davis’ trumpet playing or Martin Scorsese’s camera technique. Which of course means the new guys have to be brought in to screw it all up.

The story is about how new leadership did just that:

“The thing that has always set NFL Films apart, the thing that has been its trademark, is the slow spiral in the air,” said Comcast SportsNet’s Ray Didinger, an Emmy-winning producer and writer at Films for 9 years before leaving in 2008. “One shot lasting 45 seconds. The ball leaving the quarterback’s hands and being caught. That was the kind of stuff that made NFL Films great and helped make the league so popular. That was their signature.

“But you’ve got these guys [at NFL Network] now with ADD, they’re watching that ball spinning and they’re saying, ‘OK, let’s catch it already. Go, go, go. Catch the ball, will ya.’

“The term that we used to get kicked back at us from time to time was, ‘dinosaur television.’ They’d say, ‘That stuff is dated. Been done before. People have seen it. We’re going to change the way football is presented on television.'”

The usual litany of complaints followed, and you can see how it happened — NFL Films operated without a thought to cost-containment, so someone sold the owners on a plan to save money, etc. (The fact NFL Films was, as Sports Illustrated called it, one of the most effective propaganda organizations in the world, instrumental in building the league into a powerhouse — eh, who can put a dollar figure on that, right?) Then someone else came in, and wondered about those 45-second slow spirals, and the rest is infamy.

It made me think, though. A number of petty annoyances have been piling up — and when that happens, I tend to get a little testy. I’m also aware that some have accused me of being ranty lately, so I want to be sensitive to that. But still, I have to ask:

Is every company in the goddamn world broken?

Two weeks ago, we tried to watch a movie on demand on cable. It froze. (Pause.) Repeatedly. (Pause.) Throughout. (Pause.) Playback. I tried to call Comcast that night. We are experiencing high call volumes at this time, and customer wait times are longer than usual. If the matter is not urgent, please call back at a later time.

I called back on Monday to ask for a credit on my bill. We are experiencing high call volumes at this time, and customer wait times are longer than usual. If the matter is not urgent, please call back at a later time. Tried again Tuesday. We are experiencing high call volumes at this time, and customer wait times are longer than usual. If the matter is not urgent, please call back at a later time.

Forgot about it for a few days, tried again. Guess what? And so on.

If I were posting this on Twitter, I would hashtag it #firstworldproblems. Still. I pay a fortune to this stupid company every month; is it so much to expect a non-Soviet customer-service experience?

(I just tried it again. Huzzah! An operator credited my account $4.99, “as a courtesy,” not because the service I paid for wasn’t delivered. Here, pleb, have a few shekels.)

Meanwhile, if you’d like to watch a classic of the NFL Films genre on your very own computer, try America’s Game: 1968 New York Jets, featuring Joe Namath’s Fu Manchu mustache, the Heidi game and narration by Alec Baldwin.

OK, we’ve gone on too long. Any bloggage?

Via Eric Zorn, how wealthy divorcing women justify asking for $46,000 a month in child support.

Journalism inside baseball, but might be of interest to others: When is it appropriate to state the race of a criminal suspect in a story? For what it’s worth, I generally follow the Society of Professional Journalists standard: When it’s a key part of a detailed description of a suspect at large, yes. When it’s part of a too-general or vague description, no. So, to use the example from the story, this would be a yes: “The suspect was described as a white, between 19 and 24 years old, around 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 180 pounds. He had short blond hair and tattoos on both arms, according to police reports.” A no would be “a black man of medium height and build, wearing blue jeans.” One of our competitors goes for the sneakier variety of racism: “The 16-year-old was released to his 32-year-old mother.”

Oh, if only: The governor of New Jersey talks back to his party’s nut wing.

And while we’re briefly on the topic of editing, see Kim’s comment from late yesterday, about outsourced copy desks.

And now I gotta go. I can almost taste the weekend. Hope you can, too.

Sometimes I think you could write an entire local-TV newscast consisting entirely of the words and phrases “controversial,” “what you don’t know can hurt you” and “hidden dangers.”

As I mention here regularly, one of my income streams comes from a part-time job finding news about health care. Five nights a week, I venture out on the internets with a string of search terms as long as your arm. In the several years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen the crisis in newspapers up close, and pals, it ain’t pretty. Fewer daily papers are paying close attention to health care and health care policy at all, and more are running the sort of syndicated garbage that allows them to fill their health pages with story after story about weight loss and, of course, hidden dangers:

Backyard barbecues are a big part of summer fun, but avoiding their hidden dangers is key to staying healthy and enjoying a cookout, a doctor suggests.

What are the hidden dangers? The doctor, from an outfit called Chicago Healers, ticks them off: You could get burned! You could get food poisoning! You might not know how to turn the grill off and on! And oh, the cancer that awaits you!

I saw this Sunday night on the USA Today website. Granted, this was the weekend, and it is the summer, but bishpleeze.

I have always, always despised journalism that assumes I’m a moron. (Except when it’s appropriate.) And in general, I just roll my eyes, turn the page, or click away. But later that night, I had a local newscast on, just some babbling to keep me alert, and the weekend anchor said, “Summer is barbecue season, but before you light that grill, you need to be aware of the hidden dangers that come with cooking outside.” The same goddamn press release! With a graphic! Telling us, yes, you need to cook your meat to a safe temperature, and make sure you know how to turn the grill off and on, and consider grilling vegetables instead, “a healthy alternative to meat.”

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, this same station and hundreds of others like it will run a similar piece about the hidden dangers of leftovers. Did you know you should heat your gravy to a rolling boil before it’s safe to eat? True dat.

On the other hand, there is a way to do fluff well. The Wall Street Journal has a regular feature called “What’s Your Workout,” which on paper sounds ghastly, but is almost always executed well. They look hard for people who manage to cram fitness into hyper-busy schedules, and while there’s always a certain number of douchebags who ride $3,000 bicycles or work with $100-an-hour trainers, there’s also the guy who made a list of 20 workouts he can do in an hour, all with amusing names like “the Rhianna” (paddleboarding) or “Alex McCandless” (stair climbing), then throws Dungeons & Dragons dice to pick one. No re-rolls; what the dice say, goes. It mixes it up and makes the dice the bad guy.

There was another one, earlier this year, about a guy who could do an entire hotel-room weights workout using the wall and his briefcase.

And that concludes today’s episode of Bitching With Nance. This is what happens when you start writing before the coffee kicks in.

No, wait, let’s bitch some more: Remember earlier this year, when we discussed “Modernist Cuisine?” Someone called its author/editor, Nathan Myhvold, a patent troll, a term that was meaningless to me. Until last night, when “All Things Considered” did a shortened version of last week’s “This American Life,” which I’m working my way through now. It would appear “Modernist Cuisine” was supported, at least in part, by its author’s company’s patent trolling, which gives me just one more reason not to buy the book(s), which I wasn’t going to buy anyway. Worth your time.

And finally, a good story that’s a smile all the way through: Detroitblogger John on Fred’s Key Shop, a locksmith business, decades old, in the heart of the city:

“We get these calls from senior citizens that are going senile — ‘You gotta come change my locks, ’cause all the food’s moved around in my cupboards.’ We had this one lady, we were going there to change her locks three and four times a year — ‘Somebody’s been in my underwear drawer.’ You go out there and you change the locks and you don’t really charge them nothing.”

Other elderly people grow too weak to turn the key in their lock and think it’s broken. Murphy says the locksmiths will take it apart, grease it and loosen it, and leave without charging them. “I’m not going to charge some 90-year-old lady because she can’t turn the key.”

They’ve gotten Tigers fans into their locked cars, only to find out they’re broke. They let them go on their word. One showed up at the shop a few days later and not only paid his bill but also brought a case of beer as a thank-you.

“It always comes back, you know, good karma,” he says of the occasional free work. “You get it back if you give it.”

Let that be the parting thought of the day. Give it, and get it back. Someday.

Sorry I’m late today. Tuesdays are nearly as crazed as Mondays, but today wasn’t so bad, as I got to edit an intern’s story about the school board meeting last night, one of the last he’ll do for GrossePointeToday.com, and damn if he didn’t show noticeable improvement over the course of the summer. I can’t work with my interns in a traditional newsroom, where they could watch me work on their stories, observe staff interactions and generally learn the ways of the tribe. I have to handle them via email, phone calls and text messages, only occasionally face-to-face, and that’s a hard way to teach. But check it, the kid hit this one out of the park:

The bad blood continued to boil Monday night (July 25) as the Grosse Pointe school board’s schism widened in the wake of the superintendent search, this time over staffing cuts and the controversial Head Start program for Poupard Elementary.

No chairs were kicked this time, but there was name-calling and accusations. Board member Fred Minturn called president John Steininger a “bully,” while Steininger called out Minturn on missing more votes than any other board member. Steininger turned red in the face while talking about Head Start, as did Minturn. A meeting with a routine agenda ran past 11 p.m., with a full house watching every thrust and parry.

OK, I added “thrust and parry.” He said they watched with “shock and awe.” The fencing term is twee, but meh, it’s better than the other, if only marginally.

Who knows what a parry is? I took a few fencing classes, so I do: It’s the deflection of a blow, particularly in sword fighting. (I always scored the first point in my matches, because I came out after en garde with a quick poke to the chest. My parrying skills lagged, however.) Here’s another term I looked up recently: flotsam and jetsam. I know what it means — trash, basically — but why do they always go together like that? It has to do with maritime law. Flotsam is floating debris of a shipwreck, and is distinguished from jetsam, which describes that which was intentionally thrown overboard, or jettisoned, frequently in times of distress. I guess the distinction comes in when a court is sorting out claims on wreckage of value. But when it’s all afloat around the site of a sunken ship, it’s pretty hard to tell apart, so the words go together.

And that has been your dose of Arcane English Usage with Nance, for this Tuesday. I should have a show on public radio.

OK, Oslo. Let’s talk Oslo. Or rather, let’s talk after-Oslo. I’m going to refrain from piling on Jennifer Rubin, as richly as she deserves it. If you write a column, or a blog, sooner or later this will happen to you, unless you are an extraordinarily careful person, and if you are, you likely don’t have a column or blog (at least not one supported by someone else, that you get paid to write). It’s happened to me, and it’ll probably happen again. The internet wants immediate reaction and analysis, and if you provide it, sooner or later reality will bollix up your hastily jumped-to conclusions. Besides, Stephen Colbert took care of her last night, and that’s a place — at the end of Colbert’s sword — I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So I’ll give her a pass out of sisterhood, and instead make a few random observations:

Some are calling this guy a Norwegian Tim McVeigh, and that sounds about right. Also, he seems to be quite the autodidact, and named several American writers and websites that he found to be really on the beam, including Pamela Geller’s batty belfry, Atlas Shrugged, among others. It reminds me of the time, many years ago, when the talk-radio station I dabbled at (can’t really call it “work”) used to run an overnight show by some lunatic who raved about the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rothschilds, the Federal Reserve — you know the type. I didn’t hear this call I’m about to describe, but my partner Mark did: One night a guy called and, with chilling certainty, told the host he was on his way to Washington to get things done on that front. He said he was carrying the right tools for the job, if you catch his drift, etc. The host, suddenly confronted with apparent evidence that someone out there was taking his carnival act seriously, started buh-buh-buhing, stammering and trying to keep two far-apart plates spinning — the one that contended every word out of his mouth, about stopping these bastards before they take the country down, was God’s honest truth; and the one that said this isn’t the way to do it, which ran counter to his fiery rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, etc. Mark, who keeps a sardonic twinkle in his eye most of the time, thought this was quite the entertainment. I don’t know how the call ended, but no one was assassinated in Washington that week, so I guess the caller changed his mind.

Anyway, when that happens — when a crazy person has taken your rhetoric and run with it — it seems that responding is a delicate matter. How not to do it: Sarah Palin’s poor-me act after Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting in April, Geller’s shrieking. How to do it: Bruce Bawer in the Wall Street Journal, who writes:

It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo. …In Norway, to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter, inviting charges of “Islamophobia” and racism. It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.

Good to know.

I said yesterday I was hoarding links. Many have already been posted in comments, but lots of you don’t read those, so apologies if some of them are old to you. In no particular order:

Via Moe and Cooz, Charles Pierce in Esquire on the bomb that didn’t go off. A great, worrisome read.

Another great read, from Michael Kruse at the St. Petersburg Times, one of the last papers that does this sort of thing: How a woman can disappear in plain sight. Not news for anyone with mental illness in their family, but worth your time.

Neil Steinberg posted this on his Facebook yesterday, an oldie from 1997, but still fresh, as a case study in corporate cluelessness, the tale of how Quaker Oats wrecked Snapple. (Remember the Snapple lady, who read customer letters in commercials? She was fired by Quaker. Their “beverage consultant” told the company, “Not everyone in the country starts the morning with a bagel.” Gee, I wonder what that meant.)

A truly spectacular newspaper-correction story.

One of the best Tom & Lorenzo posts ever, on Cathy Cambridge’s wedding gown.

Finally, worth a complete click-through: The insides of refrigerators, a photo essay. Includes one from Fort Wayne, but no clue who it might be.

And that is it, and that is all, and this is me, getting back to real work.

Here’s something I see more often these days — a lament for dangerous playgrounds. Frequently the argument has an undercurrent of hostility; I recall one by a father of two that basically boiled down to, these kids today could all use a few more broken arms, but I’m sorry, I can’t find it now. Most of the people advocating it seem well-intentioned enough, although I note they tend to live in the land of the anonymous “some” who are ruining childhood, but not for attribution.

That many of the Some may be made of straw and live in the Land of Oddly Articulate Taxi Drivers occurs to me, yes.

Here’s how the argument goes: Children’s playgrounds are being, or have already been, ruined. By lawyers, by — finger quotes — experts, but mostly by Some, who want to take all the risk out of childhood, and hence, all the fun.

There’s some truth to this, at least to the bare fact of ruination, although I wonder how much it has to do with risk and how much with money. But I’ve seen some pretty wan playgrounds in my time. The one at a nearby elementary school in Fort Wayne had a single piece of equipment on it — something that looked like a folded slice of Swiss cheese, with a total height of maybe five feet. I gather you climbed on it. Not that I ever saw a child do so.

But something else happened along the way, and playgrounds started getting fun again. When I was a kid, I played at the elementary at the end of my block. There were four or five different playgrounds, sized for the range of grades, and if I remember correctly, they were basic — swings and monkey bars and slides and see-saws, anchored to asphalt. If you fell, you fell hard, although that was rare. But it happened. My major dread of the playground was being dumped from the high position on the see-saw; I had a friend who specialized in it, with a truly perverse timing that suggests she had a bright future in torture of all sorts.

By the time Kate was born, the playground had changed. The “playscape” had come on the scene — sprawling constructions that mimicked kid-size castles, with spiral slides, swinging footbridges, climbing walls and all manner of things you could swing on, jump from and otherwise exhaust your energy and imagination.

A few of our favorites: Planet Westerville, near my sister’s house in suburban Columbus; Kids Crossing and Foster Park’s playground in Fort Wayne; and a Kids Crossing clone here in Grosse Pointe Woods’ Lake Front Park.

One thing all these playscapes had in common was some sort of soft footing underneath, usually wood chips, although I’ve also seen sand and shredded rubber. I honestly never gave these a thought, other than to be grateful for them. It seemed like, oh, progress, the way a padded dashboard is progress, and seat belts, and bike helmets.

I’m now informed I was all wrong. Modern playgrounds destroy children’s natural risk-taking impulses:

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

Excuse me, but New York Times? What a crock of shit. I can go a long way with this movement — yes, kids must take risks to grow; no, playgrounds shouldn’t be made entirely risk-free — but when you need to tuck “stunted emotional development” in there, hiding behind that big “may,” I’m going somewhere else to play.

The story goes on with the usual reporting; a Norwegian psychologist consults her clipboard and identifies “six categories of risky play” and then we get to the inevitable sources for these types of it-seems-one-way-but-it’s-really-not stories — an evolutionary psychologist. The more bullshit I find in the world, the more I can trace back to evolutionary psychology, the talk radio of soft-science scholarship.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

I always wanted to use “posit” as a verb. So here goes: I posit that all this hand-wringing over too-safe playgrounds is perpetrated by a handful of people who really don’t like children all that much. As I said before, it’s important that kids take risks and try new things, but this barely disguised yearning for them to fall from the top of the monkey bars and break bones is deeply hostile. To them I say: OK, your kid goes first. And if you don’t have any, shut up.

Somewhat related, an old treat found while Googling: Sweet Juniper’s Jim on the unique nature of Detroit playground culture.

Let’s hop to the bloggage, so I can get dressed for weights class:

I do not use special soap on my crotch. There, I said it! Nevertheless, Vagisil would like to sell me some, using some lamely “provocative” viral videos they want everyone to post on their Facebooks and be outraged by. I look at these and think, More good voice work for actors. Huzzah.

I used to be lonely, in my discussions with fellow Elmore Leonard fans, when the topic of film adaptations would come up. “Of course, ‘Get Shorty’ was the best adaptation of a Leonard novel,” someone would say, to nods all around. No! No! I screamed inwardly. “Get Shorty” was a huge improvement over all that came before, and a breakthrough, but no way it’s the best, because that title belongs to “Out of Sight,” and this guy agrees with me, so er’body just shut up.

So, two videos:

You wanted to tussle; we tussled. My favorite scene from “Out of Sight”:

And a video I worked on with my summer interns. I’m not much of a video producer, and it’s hard for me to teach this stuff, because I barely have a handle on the technology, and what I see in my head is so different from what appears on the monitor. Still: The assignment was to do a slice-of-life video aboard a Mackinac racer. We were invited out for a Thursday night of fun-type racing. Took two small cameras, the Flip and the GoPro, mostly handled by the interns. And virtually all the audio turned out like that in the first 10 seconds — spoiled by a persistent roar of wind. (Cheap mics are the bane of cheap cameras.) I fixed it by going back a few nights later with my good USB mic, going belowdecks, and reconducting the interview in acoustically cleaner conditions. My critique of the video is: Too many cut-off heads, too few detail closeups to cut away to, not enough of a narrative arc — it plays like a sketchbook. On the other hand, given the raw materials, I don’t think it turned out too-too badly. Tell me what you think, and have a great weekend. Stay cool.

I can’t let fishfly season go by without at least one photo documentation:

That’s from a few days ago, the typical leavings of a single night. They’re pretty much done now, but they had one last hurrah last weekend, when the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was playing on the shores of Lake St. Clair. It was a two-night gig. The first night they played the first half of the program and took intermission while night fell and the hatch came. Within minutes, the insects covered the players’ music — they’re attracted to anything white — and, it’s safe to say, were probably arousing a wide gamut of emotions among them, as well as the audience. The following night they dropped the intermission and shortened the program, so as to get everything wrapped before the disaster movie started.

Stupid goddamn Mondays. I worked, on something, all damn weekend. Except for Saturday night, when we went to the Concert of Colors down at the orchestra hall for the Don Was All-Star Detroit Revue. It wasn’t bad, and if it skewed old, well, that was the audience. Martha Reeves was the finale, still workin’ it after all these years. Her voice is shot, but she was able to shake it on down for “Dancin’ in the Street,” helped along by a vigorous horn section and the love of the crowd. They rolled out a cake for her 70th birthday, happening that very night, and she didn’t look entirely thrilled about it. Kate came with us, which I thought was game of her. I am shlepping her to Cleveland on Tuesday for the Warped Tour, so she owes me one.

Warped will not be held in an air-conditioned orchestra hall, either. In fact, the forecast for the rest of the week is for temps in the 90s. Groan.

So as I must away, a brief bit of bloggage and we’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Why there are more typos in books. Duh:

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of fulltime copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

I have an RSS feed that picks up every mention of Grosse Pointe on Twitter, excluding “Grosse Pointe Blank,” a cult movie that will live forever in film geekdom. It blew up overnight with a story in the Detroit News, about our school district’s rejection of a Head Start program at one elementary. But all the tweets were from automated feeds aimed at stock traders. I couldn’t figure out why, until I remembered the elementary principal’s name — Penny Stocks. A useful reminder how much of what we now rely on to tell us what people want to know is run by robots.

I was in a grumpy mood pretty much all day yesterday. Would have happily gone 15 rounds with anybody over anything, but I confined it to one nasty email. It started when the lawn service showed up at one next-door neighbor’s house, followed by the carpet cleaner on the other. We finally get a couple of perfect summer days, the sorts of days when you glory in the breeze blowing through the open windows, and then you have to close them all BECAUSE YOU CAN’T HEAR YOURSELF FUCKING THINK.

The worst of the noise was over in an hour. Still. And guess who just showed up five minutes ago? The lawn treatment service, which squirts their potions from a truck-loaded tank, powered by a generator. Just slammed the windows shut again. Get outta my way.

But because I was grumpy, I can totally see why the comment thread on this TPM story about the end of the Minnesota government shutdown immediately fixated on a typo/usage error in the first graf:

Lawmakers on Thursday evening announced they had reached an budget agreement to end the shutdown.

For my money, that’s a typo. Someone wrote “an agreement on the budget” and an editor changed it to “an budget agreement” but forgot to make the a/an change. Someone carped. Someone else responded, and lo, we got ourselves a convoy:

…agreement is between the indefinite article and the NOUN – not the ADJECTIVE. I know is sounds odd, but it is definitely correct. 😀 (remove the word ‘budget’ to see my point). I know we were all taught that one went by the initial vowel sound of the adjective (whether an actual vowel or a soft ‘h’ sound, as in ‘historian’) – but this usage has come to be accepted as well.

The hell you say. After a few people piled on saying the same thing, the original offender doubled down:

Modern usage references ALL agree on the usage rule that I gave you. It may not ‘sound’ good to you – or to me – but it is accepted and used throughout the professional publishing world. And being a published author myself, as well as a historian who reads upwards of 12 professional journals a month, I can assure you that the ‘vowel sound of the adjective’ rule has been dead for a good 20 years now.

Oh, bullshit, and don’t pull that “published author” crapola on me. If it appears in “professional journals,” it’s because those things are, first, written by professionals in every field except writing, and lightly edited, if at all, by grad students working for peanuts, who concentrate on headlines and cutlines and don’t give a shit about a/an agreement. I’m so glad these arguments take place on the internet, because if I’d read it yesterday in the frame of mind I was in, I’d have smashed a beer bottle on a table and started waving the broken neck around.

I’ll bet $50 this guy is an engineer. They know everything. True story: Guy I know was trying to teach another guy I know how to pilot his — the second guy’s — brand-new boat. First guy said: “It would be unwise to drive the boat there, because even though the water looks just like the water in the middle of the lake? Frequently at the end of a natural point of land, there will be shallow water stretching for some distance beyond it. It’s called a shoal, and–”

“I’m an engineer, I know what I’m doing.”

(muffled thump belowdecks)

Well, I’m a writer, Mr. Published Author, and I say it’s either “a budget agreement” or “an agreement on the budget,” and I say the hell with it. Two dozen comments later, they finally got around to discussing it — the budget agreement — on the thread.

The lawn-treatment guys are gone now. I feel much better.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a bit lately — the true weight of comments left on the internet. The old rule of thumb in newsrooms is that every phone call equals 10 readers, and every letter, 100 — or something like that. If you get a few phone calls about something you’ve published, it’s probably no biggie. If you get a pile of letters, it is. I’m starting to wonder, however, if comments left on Facebook and other websites actually go in the opposite direction, if they might equal a fraction of a person who cares. Let’s call this unit a “shit,” as in the phrase “give a shit.” One phone call = 10 shits given, one letter = 100 shits given, one web comment = .3 of a shit given. Some people seem to have little else to do.

Which seems as good a time as any to go bloggage-ing.

You remember Saul Steinberg’s famous map of the U.S. for the cover of the New Yorker? An updated version of the same idea. My favorite is the driving distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It’s not opening until August, but “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is already on heavy TV-commercial rotation, and I totally want to see it. The trailer makes me laff ‘n’ laff. Go, monkeys!

And thanks to Coozledad for finding this.

Finally, remember Velvet Goldmine’s daughter Phoebe, and how y’all chipped in to send her to summer leadership camp at Yale? Guess where she is:

You all are good people. And Phoebe’s dad looks exactly like his brother, whom some of you may know as Mr. Lance Mannion.

OK, a long-awaited weekend is nearly here. So I’m off to join it.

I guess the Wall Street Journal thinks of its Saturday Review section cover these days as the place for the essay-as-sharp-stick. First the Tiger Mom, now this: “The Divorce Generation,” a cri de coeur from Generation X:

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

OK, Susan Gregory Thomas, I’m in. Tell me about it. And she does, and it stings — it’s no fun when your parents split up, no matter what. She deals a few anecdotes off the deck, standard procedure for a personal essay, and then starts down her own story’s path. I had a feeling what was coming, thanks to the subhed (“Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn’t always work.”), but I was willing to come along for the ride.

One aside here: I understand the existential pain of the Gen-Xer, really I do. People think of the baby boom as this monolith of demography, but it isn’t. When we talk about baby boomers, we’re really talking about the early boomers, those born, oh, 1946 to 1951, say. The ones who were old enough to actually experience the ’60s as we commonly think of them. The year of my birth, 1957, was technically the peak of the boom, but we were the little siblings of the leading edge. Sally Draper was an early(ish) boomer; I was Bobby Draper. They were psychedelia, we were disco. My older siblings worried about being drafted, we led the New Traditionalism, reviving everything from prom to Greek life on campus to blackout drinking. And so on.

So I get that Gen-X-ers feel neglected by the media, by history, etc. But I will also say that when it comes to pouting and resentment, man, some of these folks really peg the needle. And being a world-class pouter and resenter myself, I know what I’m talking about. But for now, let’s not go there; this is just in the interest of full disclosure.

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages.

…No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn’t the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort “went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.” Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

The boldface is where she started to lose me. Never mind quoting a marketing study; never mind the “one of the most” fudge words. Has this woman read American history? Un-parented and un-nurtured children were as common as ticks for most of it. Pioneer-era orphans wandered the woods like feral monkeys. The boom periods of modern cities in the early 20th century were marked by children roaming the streets while their parents worked or drank or otherwise suffered as infantry troops in the industrial revolution. It’s one reason the social-work movement was born. I’m sorry her father was neglectful and her mother preoccupied with her own misery, but presumably she had enough to eat.

And then we’re off down the path of her happy marriage, with the ominous clouds bulking on the horizon, and before too long, I see where she went wrong:

When I had my first child at 32, I went into therapy for a while to sort through, among other things, just why the world—as open and wonderful as it had become with my child’s presence—had also become more treacherous than I ever could have imagined. It wasn’t until my daughter was a few months old that it dawned on me that when the pediatricians and child-care books referred to “separation anxiety,” they were referring to the baby’s psyche, not to mine.

The thought of placing her in someone else’s care sent waves of pure, white fear whipping up my spine. It occurred to me that perhaps my own origins had something to do with what a freak show I was. After hearing about my background for some time, my distinguished therapist made an announcement: “You,” she said, “are a war orphan.”

I know this woman. I’ve met her many times. To some extent she’s like all of us with our tender newborns, terrified that if we let them out of our sight for even a moment, they will burst into flames. But the hormones ebb, and we get over that. We learn that other caregivers are not just convenient, but necessary for the long journey to begin — the child’s long journey, that is, to independence. Even as infants, they profit from interaction with others.

She reminds me of a friend’s sister-in-law, who actually endangered her daughter’s muscle development by refusing to not only let others care for her, but to even put her down, so she could crawl and toddle and explore the world. She was ordered by her pediatrician: Lighten up.

OK, let’s cut to the chase:

I had married the kindest, most stable person I’d ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.

In other words, she lived for her children, and stopped sleeping with her husband. In spite of everything.

John Rosemond, the parenting expert, gets on my last nerve these days. My newspaper ran his column for years, and I watched him evolve in that time from a reasonable moderate to a right-wing scold, but the core of his advice is still sound, and it boils down to this: Attend to your marriage. Do what you need to do to keep it appealing for both parties, and the kids will take care of themselves. In fact, they’ll do better than if you make them the center of your world. Be authoritative and confident, but most especially, love your spouse. Susan Gregory Thomas concentrated on her comfy nest and forgot about her husband. It happens. It’s maybe a natural reaction to being the children of Don and Betty Draper’s divorce. She overcorrected.

Which leads us to the second divorce story of the day, Bethany Patchin’s:

In August 1999, Bethany Patchin, an 18-year-old college sophomore from Wisconsin, wrote in an article for Boundless, an evangelical Web magazine, that Christians should not kiss before marriage. Sam Torode, a 23-year-old Chicagoan, replied in a letter to the editor that Ms. Patchin’s piece could not help but “drive young Christian men mad with desire.”

The two began corresponding by e-mail, met in January 2000 and were married that November. Nine months later, Ms. Torode (she took her husband’s name) gave birth to a son, Gideon. Over the next six years, the Torodes had four more progeny: another son, two daughters and a book, “Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception.”

You read that right: Four kids in six years, from the book of Duggar, Chapters 1-5. Full quivers, full households, full hearts. Until, oops, reality intruded:

In 2006, the Torodes wrote on the Web that they no longer believed natural family planning was the best method of birth control. They divorced in 2009. Both now attend liberal churches. Ms. Patchin — that is her name once again — now says she uses birth control, and she even voted for Barack Obama for president.

“I was 19 when we got married,” Ms. Patchin said by telephone from Nashville, where she and her former husband live and share custody of their four children. “And I was 20 when we had Gideon. My parents weren’t anti-birth-control; they were pretty middle-ground evangelicals. So I kind of rebelled by being more conservative. That was my identity.”

The Patchin-Torode co-prosperity sphere learned some hard lessons: That children are stressers, and that having four so close together — they came as two sets of Irish twins, and yes, she was nursing when the younger ones were conceived — is particularly so. Also, that having to postpone sex so often isn’t good for a young couple. As Torode put it:

“Wanting to make love to your spouse often is a good thing, but (natural family planning) often lays an unfair burden of guilt on men for feeling this,” the Torodes wrote. And it is “a theological attack on women to always require that abstinence during the time of the wife’s peak sexual desire (ovulation) for the entire duration of her fertile life, except for the handful of times when she conceives.”

In other words, viva modernity! Sometimes God’s plan involves birth control.

I feel bad for both of these couples. I feel bad for their kids. I wonder if it’s possible that we’ll ever find a happy medium that doesn’t involve swinging past it, clinging to a pendulum. But I think I like the Patchin-Torodes more. Or maybe I just haven’t read their first-person essay yet.

I’ve gone on too long, I fear. Any bloggage?

Nope, I think I’m tapioca on that front. Post some of your own if you like, but me, I’m off to work.

Joel Achenbach, the WashPost blogger, is on vacation this week, and his substitute has gone spelunking in his career, via Lexis-Nexis. She posted a story of Achenbach’s from 1985, which was Twitter-flagged by the editor who handled it, none other than the legendary Gene Weingarten of the Miami Herald; from its tone and length, it can only be from Tropic, that paper’s Sunday magazine.

Got all that? Anyway, it’s from 1985, 26 long years ago, another era in the newspaper biz. The internet was confined to college campuses (and only the faculty offices of the computer-science department, at that), the Herald and its parent company, Knight-Ridder, were absorbing workers jettisoned from Viewtron, a failed experiment to deliver the news via computer, still a rare appliance in American homes. There would be a few more glory years in the newspaper biz yet, where a smart editor could find a local story (the opening of South Florida’s first sperm bank), assign a smart young writer (Achenbach), and come up with this long, meandering story about how it works and who the people are behind it, told through Achenbach’s visit to the facility, and his attempt to make a deposit.

I know a guy who had performance anxiety at a sperm bank — he tells it as a very funny dinner-party story — so every word of the long opening anecdote rings true:

Do sperm scream? wonders Mr. Posterity as he sits in the sperm bank. He is alone in a room so bright he cannot find a shadow. In his hand is a large cup. The doctor has asked him to produce within 15 minutes. He has already wasted five.

…The doctor at the sperm bank has been thoughtful enough to leave a girlie magazine in the room (it’s the only thing in sight with any trace of color). But when Mr. Posterity flips the pages he can barely focus, the Girls of Texas are bending over backwards to help him in this wretched moment, but all he sees is paper.

…Voices come from outside the door. It is the doctor and another person, laughing at something, probably something not very funny. Mr. Posterity makes a mental note that the door does not lock. He is trying to be cool about this whole thing, but he wonders if perhaps a lock would have been a good idea, a lock and chain and a hefty deadbolt, and maybe the room could have been down a long hallway or in the basement — jeez, he could have just mailed it in, no hassle.

Eventually cold logic takes over, and Mr. Posterity steels himself, realizing that there would be no greater humiliation than to exit the room with nothing to show for his time. He had vowed to be productive. He had vowed to be manly.

And so . . .

When he leaves the room he is wearing his dark shades. He is not proud. More than ever, the cup seems needlessly vast, a virtual bucket, mocking him. This is a tense moment and he wants to look slick, but the cup is proving awkward, he isn’t sure how to hold it. He decides to grip it close to the stomach, the way he holds a Bud at a party.

This is why I got into the newspaper business, to be able to write like this and get paid for it. This is what newspapers used to do — some of them, anyway. We would publish pieces like this on a Sunday, and no one would ask, as they would in later years, “But what’s the utility here? Can we include a sidebar on the sperm bank’s hours and rates? This seems awfully long. Are we being self-indulgent here? I mean, really, who cares?”

No one asked those questions because this was a Sunday-magazine piece, and that’s what Sunday magazines did. They gave people lounging in their living rooms, drinking coffee, surrounded by sections of the fat newspaper, something to read they wouldn’t get Monday through Saturday. Maybe people were busy then; I’m sure they were, in fact. But we figured, hey, Sunday — if it’s going to run any day of the week, this is when it should run. These were, to some extent, the experimental John Cage pieces. They required commitment from readers, a more sophisticated reader’s eye. They assumed at least a few Monday-morning phone calls, from some pissed-off old lady or evangelical, who simply cannot believe that in her newspaper, which she pays for, the thing she invites into her home, there’s a story about a reporter with a several-hundred word lede drolly detailing how he jerked off into a cup. And so on.

The day was dawning, however. If the Herald editors had looked to the east, they would have seen a pinkening sky as the new era approached. Or, to switch metaphors abruptly, Pandora had already opened the box, and the harpies were pouring out. Competition. Declining literacy rates. Something that was called, in meetings, “time starvation.” Falling ad lineage. The last ones out of the box would be the bean-counters, the number-crunchers, the people who could put an essay like this through an analysis and say, yes, while personally they had enjoyed this immersive visit to the sperm bank, really, research shows that the average reader only spends 17 minutes with the paper, maybe less, and was this really where the paper wanted to put its resources? When there was real news to cover?

For a while around this time, everyone wanted suburban readers, those wealthy boomers spending like drunken sailors on everything from home improvements to cars to dinners out, and so came the birth of Neighbors, zoned editions pegged to the compass points of individual metro areas. No one at Neighbors would scorn your suburban town board meetings, no sir, and we covered the crap out of them, but that didn’t pay off, either. Sunday magazines went first — rotogravure printing, long deadlines, scarce advertising, and those nice people at Parade and USA Weekend were offering their product practically free. Neighbors came later. Cut, cut, cut, trim, trim, trim. Retiring employees weren’t replaced, others were bought out, some laid off. Cut, shrink, deny, sell, consolidate, reduce. A new publisher arrived in Fort Wayne. When Alan, the features editor, met her, she asked how many staff he had in his department. Eight, he replied, and she made a face, like, are you kidding me? There are three now.

You’ve heard all this before. I’m oversimplifying. I’m telling the story from only one perspective. It’s boring. It’s ancient history. It’s water over the dam and under the bridge. Both Weingarten and Achenbach still have jobs, still write long-form pieces rich with style and detail, only they do them at the Washington Post, one of the tiny handful of papers that still swings for the fences from time to time. There’s still lots of good writing out there, and a lot of it — I’m always struck, on a day like today, how much I can be distracted by great pieces, on the web, in books, in Kindle Singles. I have too much to read, really; it’s hard to get work done sometimes.

But this one took me back. I should look forward. So that’s that.

Let’s get to the bloggage, which is scarce today:

According to one blogger who found this yesterday, it is “comedy gold.” I’ll say: Marcia Clark opining on the Casey Anthony trial, calling it “worse than O.J.!” Considering the O.J. case was booted in large part because of Clark’s prosecutorial missteps, that’s a pretty big contention. (If you haven’t read “The Run of His Life,” Jeffrey Toobin’s account of the O.J. case, I highly recommend it. Marcia might gain some valuable insight.)

The stolen babies of Spain. Taken, it seems, as political retribution, later just for cash, with the help of doctors, nurses and nuns. Unbelievable.

Outta here. Have a great Thursday.