I say this with all the affection and love in my heart for you guys, but it sure is good to get away from this place for a while. I thought it would be Blog City over the weekend, and to be sure, we had all the necessary materials:

The aging folks catch up with one another while the Millennial considers analog space.

I count four laptops in that photo (one closed and hiding), plus an iPad. But it’s deceiving. John was working on getting our stupid printer on our wifi network, which is one reason we’re so glad they stop by a couple times a year.

The stupid printer now works. And we didn’t spend the entire weekend laptopping separately. We made several big meals, shopped at Eastern Market, toured the DIA, ate at Good Girls Go To Paris and got up off of our thangs, except when felled by wine. I got four DVDs from the library, in case we felt like a movie, and discovered “Bottle Shock” is worth your time, but “Synecdoche New York” is not. In fact, it’s self-indulgent nonsense, the result of what happens when a quirky, neurotic screenwriter produces several great, memorable scripts (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and then says, “But what I’d really like to do is direct.”

I dunno, maybe you liked it. I didn’t. (Shrug.)

What I did like was this amazing story, which I read all the way through even with guests in the house, a cautionary tale for everyone who is convinced the internet always offers a better shopping experience. Short version: Shopper goes online in search of cheap eyeglass frames, wanders into Crazytown. Somewhat longer version: Bad internet actor finds way to game Google’s allegedly genius algorithm. As I read this more than 24 hours ago, I’m now mainly immersed in the reaction, which ranges from “well, it’s her fault for not Googling more deeply” to overly technical discussions under Google’s hood. Combined with this story today, about not a brain drain, but maybe a brain trickle away from the company, you could get the impression that Google has moved into the next phase of its existence, i.e. crusty old fart-ism. The 21st century, it is so full of wonders: A company goes from shining light of innovation to General Motors in 12 short years.

This pleases me, and has ever since I tried to reach Google with a problem a while back, and discovered it’s as easy as placing a person-to-person phone call to the moon. Everything’s automated, no one has a phone number or even an e-mail address, and if you have a problem with that, screw you and welcome to Dodge City.

And now it is Monday, and guess what? My next-door neighbor has a tree-trimming crew here today. The lead chainsawer is one of those guys who can’t just turn the goddamn thing on and cut a limb. He’s like one of those guys at a red light on a hot motorcycle, who has to go rev-rev-rev-REV and rev-rev-rev-REV every few seconds until you go insane. That’s what I’m hearing now, and so it’s either earplugs or get the hell out and start manic Monday.

Better do the latter. I had a great birthday, and thanks to all who wished me one.

Boy, the Hack Thirty is really presenting some heavy betting possibilities. If you’d have asked me to rank the lazybones of the punditocracy at the start of this project, I’d have had Jonah Goldberg and William Kristol at one-two, or certainly in the top five. But Kristol is on the board at No. 17 and Goldberg at 7, which makes me wonder who, possibly, could top them.

I figure they’re saving Tom Friedman for late in the rollout, but who else? James Lileks long ago slid into irrelevancy and graphomania; have you read his 40,000-word debrief on his fourth Disney vacation, or are you still plowing through his day-for-day, wave-for-wave, blow-by-blow of his National Review cruise? Mitch Albom doesn’t write about politics. Ann Coulter has been reduced to clowning for the gays — those boys loving a good tranny as they do — and only appearing in front of the Barbara Walters ™ SuperSoft camera lens. Kathleen Parker? Maybe, but there’s no way, as awful as she is, that she could punch her weight with Goldberg. This bears watching. Good call on Laura Ingraham, though — the poor gay man’s Coulter.

Truth be told, I think the problem is column-writing itself. Talk about a gig whose time has come passed. I’m glad I had my time in the game, but all I miss is the regular — not generous — paycheck. The best columnists, then and now, have to walk a very narrow line between reporter/observer and opinion monger, and that is hard enough to do in a normal city, virtually impossible in Washington, where everyone with skin in the game (which would be everyone, period) is whispering in your ear and buying you drinks and inviting you to their dinner parties and winking as they slap you on the shoulder. It’s all just a crazy game, isn’t it? Sooner or later even the sharpest minds and pens go dull. Usually sooner.

What do they say about opinions? And right now, the best ones are showing ’em for free on the internet. That’s not a business model, that’s a hobby.

No. 6 just went up. Marc Thiessen. Can’t quibble with that one. Keep it up, guys.

The holiday weekend is in progress, and this will be the last regular blog entry of the week, although with a house full of wired company, I expect we’ll do some mini-blogging here and there, so by all means, stop back. Also, tomorrow is my natal anniversary, and if there’s anything a girl deserves on her birthday, it’s a day off (and some cake). Thanks in advance for all your good wishes, and no, that’s not a nudge to leave any. I just know what good folks y’all are.

A li’l bloggage? Maybe:

Another great feature from Detroitblog: The people who live — legally — at the Packard Plant. A touch of country in the city:

Besides Hill’s dog, a shaggy rottweiler named Baby, they’ve got a couple of pet raccoons, and they feed lettuce and carrots to a family of rabbits who moved in during the winter. The pheasants that flock around here have provided food in the past. “We do a lot of hunting here,” says Lott, 47. “You ever ate city pheasant yet? Oh, it’s good eatin’. They’re homegrown.”

Rats run wild, kept in check only by the several cats Hill keeps or the sharpshooting skills of Lott and fellow tenant Greg Erving, 65. “We shoot rats in here all night,” Lott says. They use high-powered pellet guns. “It’s a real war going on. You can hear them fighting amongst themselves. Biggest rats in the city. They’ll come over and rob your food in a heartbeat. They’re bold.”

Thanks to Jezebel (I think) for teaching me about Dickflash. If only I could unlearn it now.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and many happy leftovers.

I was out and about yesterday, and wandered into a mall bookstore — Borders Express. Like the regular Borders, only with more books by celebrities. Man, Barack Obama is the best thing to ever happen to any talk-show host looking for vertical integration. But what have we here? It’s Nora Ephron’s new collection of essays, “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections,” sure to be a best-seller.

I plucked it from the shelf, expecting something slight and breezy. I was not disappointed. Many magazines are thicker, and no, I’m not kidding. A September issue of Vogue — in a recession, even — is the OED compared to this book. I sat down with it on a step stool, to see how many I might have already read in the New Yorker, her periodical publisher of choice. At least one. Then I opened it at the halfway point and started reading. One essay was a list. A clever list, to be sure, but a list. The last two essays are lists, too. The margins are wide, the type is large, and while Ephron is, as always, a funny and engaging writer, it all served to remind me that this is “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” part 2, and “I Feel Bad About My Neck” was a book I felt very smart to have gotten from the library, because I read it in about 90 minutes and saved myself $21.95. I read about half of “I Remember Nothing” in 20 minutes. It costs $22.95.

This mostly hurts because Ephron used to be big, could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any of the big swingin’ ones at Esquire back in the day, as smart about pop culture as anyone, and a lot funnier. She filed memorable essays on feminism, the Pillsbury Bake-Off, Rod McKuen and my personal favorite, an account of the birth of the feminine hygiene spray. My BFF Deb and I were twin Nora groupies, and we both went to see her on her “Heartburn” book tour, another slender volume but with a power-to-weight ratio worthy of a Mexican boxer. Deb saw her in South Bend, and wrote me a very entertaining letter about Nora’s dismantling, from the podium, of a Notre Dame brat who phrased an accusation in the form of a question, essentially charging Ephron with the single-handed destruction of her two marriages. At the appearance I saw, she said that the bread pudding recipe had omitted six beaten eggs, and I went home and made the notation in my copy, next to the passage where it’s woven into the narrative. Of course I could find it in a minute because I’d already read the book about three times and knew right where it was.

It’s not that these essays lack weight. It’s that they lack editing. The piece about egg-white omelettes, a food rant lite, could have gone, but then the book would have been 155 pages instead of 160. So could those lists (152 pages and falling…). And so on. But I guess maybe that’s the point, as the theme of this book, and the last, is aging and how it diminishes you. I really don’t think Ephron’s writing is so diminished, it’s that so much less is expected of her. And her publisher seems to expect very little of us, certainly. I guess we’ll pay $22.95 for anything.

Ephron is older than me, but I’m feeling older these days, too. Friday night I took Kate and a bunch of her friends to a concert — five bands, co-headlined by Anarbor and VersaEmerge, but Anarbor is all they were interested in. My job at these things is to drive, pay for things, hold coats, say as little as possible and stand in the background, a combination human ATM/factotum. I dressed accordingly — jeans, black sweater, black jacket and because I knew we’d be standing in line in the outside chill followed by the usual overheated club, one of my nice silk scarves around my neck. You know, for that little pop of color.

One of the girls lacked a ticket. I left them in line and walked inside to buy one. This is at the Majestic Theater complex on Woodward in Detroit, cornerstone of the Detroit music scene. Three venues, two restaurants and a bowling alley. White Stripes, Von Bondies, Electric Six, Was (Not Was) — you get the idea. A security guard directed me to the bowling alley, where I found a thirtysomething hipster spraying disinfectant into bowling shoes.

“Hi, I need one ticket for the show upstairs tonight,” I said.

He looked me over for 1.5 seconds and said, “The doors will be opening soon, ma’am, and your son or daughter can get a ticket at the top of the stairs then.”

Oh rly?

I looked him over for 1.5 seconds and said, “How do you know I’m buying for my son or daughter? How do you know it’s not for me?”

He said, “Your ascot?”

I felt bad about my neck. But not for long. Because soon we were upstairs, ticketed, the girls bolting for the stage so as to stand within sweat-spraying distance and me? I went to the bar. There were several other people of roughly my age there. All parents. No ascots, but some remarkable stories — one had driven his daughter all the way from Buffalo, another from Youngstown. To see VersaEmerge, with a female lead singer who reminded me of Natalie Merchant, if Natalie Merchant sang like a cat being strangled. The Buffalo father told me about how much he loves traveling with his daughter and how cool she is and how many shows they see together. When he started buying Crown Royal shots for the bartenders, I excused myself and wandered around taking low-light pictures.

Mostly bad ones, which usually happens when I try to duplicate the Tri-X photography of my early colleagues:

Alan and I disagreed on whether the Magic Stick is a pool hall. I insisted it was, he said it wasn’t. I win, although during shows, the pool tables become the roadies’ area:

And the neon backs me up.

Sorry, Alan.

So, let’s skip to the bloggage:

As Thanksgiving drew nearer, Mr. and Mrs. Albom were discouraged by how many of their lovely invitations to spend the holiday in their gracious Bloomfield Hills home were returned with regrets. It was such a small request — spend five days in the bosom of one of America’s most beloved writers, providing him with column fodder, uncompensated by anything more than turkey. What is wrong with people these days, anyway?

It could be worse. You could be reminiscin’ with Bob Greene.

The crime that dare not speak its name: Term papers for hire — the perp’s side of the story. Seriously, worth a read.

Finally, we had some remarkable weather here this weekend — dense, pea-soup fog that lingered most of the day Friday and returned Saturday. Here’s the view of the water from the median strip on Lake Shore.

Best part? The foghorns.

Have a great Monday.

My old pal Mark the Shark — a lawyer, a Great White — once worked on a recount case. It’s pretty simple, he explained; basically, you recount the easy ones (submitted by machine) and then fight over the absentees one by one. It’s tedious, but it’s like moving a pile of rocks from one place to another. Keep at it, and it’ll get done.

I’m hoping, however, that the Alaska vote-counting takes a good long while. And it likely will, what with ballots arriving via snowshoe-wearing carrier pigeons from above the Brooks Range and all, and the little problem of Joe Miller and his own tea party sharks. Here’s a post from the Anchorage Daily News’ Alaska Politics blog. Scroll down to the bottom, where they’ve posted photographs of a few of the write-in ballots already being challenged by Miller’s sharks. They clearly say “Lisa Murkowski,” every one of them correctly spelled. The only possible problem I could see is perhaps a certain roundness to the lettering that makes a few letters rub up against one another. Also, Miller has imported one Floyd Brown to help him out, Brown being the warlock who conjured the Willie Horton ad for George Bush. Sayeth Brown:

“The stories of manipulation are just almost mind boggling,” Brown said at a press conference called this afternoon by the Miller campaign.

The only evidence that the Miller campaign would provide was an affidavit from a poll watcher in Fairbanks, Rocky MacDonald, who complained that the ballot box at the Tanana Valley Fairgrounds “was unsecured in that the electoral judges had access to the inside of the ballot box with a key.”

“The electoral judges opened the ballot box several times to clear jammed ballots and rearrange by hand the ballots in the box to make space for new ballots,” MacDonald wrote.

Mind-boggling, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The entire process will be tied up in the courts for a good long time, I’m sure. Slate has a pretty good outline of Miller’s arguments. Irony alert: This tea partyin’, states-rightsin’ renegade is relying pretty heavily on federal precedent, particularly Bush v. Gore:

Miller wants election officials to count only those ballots for Murkowski in which the oval is properly filled in and her name is properly spelled. How strong are his arguments? Whether the statute requires proper spelling is a difficult question of statutory interpretation. The reason that Alaska election officials said it did not, and instead adopted the looser standard of “voter intent,” which allows for misspellings, is the Alaska Supreme Court’s long-standing use of a rule of interpretation which reads ambiguous statutes in favor of the voters. (I’ve dubbed this rule the Democracy Canon.) In this case, throwing out minor misspellings would disenfranchise voters for a technicality. I’ve traced use of the voter intent standard in state courts back to 1885, and Alaska has a particularly strong version of it. The state’s courts say that election statutes must be read in favor of allowing votes to be counted unless the legislature has made it unmistakably clear not to read a law this way.

Yes, it’s clear Alaska wouldn’t want a man’s vote negated because he lacks letterin’ skills. But we’ll see what we can do.

So, anything else hopping this morning? Not much. We have pea-soup fog out there, and I’m headed out in a bit, driving closer to the lake. I’m hoping to hear some foghorns coming from the water. When conditions are right you can hear them all the way up to my unfashionable neighborhood, but they’re loud enough further east to awaken light sleepers. We’ll see.

Short shrift, I know, but I still feel like crap. So here’s something:

Not to keep coming back to Slate, but, well, Jack Shafer likes the Wall Street Journal’s series on internet privacy as much as I do:

And you thought the Web was “free.” You’re paying with your privacy.

If you don’t have the time, or the subscription, to wade through the WSJ series, he provides a nice summation.

A poem for fall, via Sweet Juniper.

And now I have to run. Have a great weekend, all.

So how did you spend your extra hour Sunday? I read two stories that might have eluded me otherwise, the one about how the USDA is pushing cheese down our throats at the same time it’s fighting obesity, and the one about Courtney Love.

I enjoyed the latter. I guess ol’ Court is trying for a…whatever act this is. It’s not going 100 percent well. This is her after telling a New York Times reporter to wait for her in her hotel room and she’d be along directly:

Shortly after 8 p.m., Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked and leaning on Mr. Kiefer for support. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance — “Not you,” she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her — to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.

After failing in music and acting, Courtney is finding the fashion world is still interested in her, and with shenanigans like this, you can see why. If there’s one thing fashion demands from a woman, it’s total coolness with being naked in a room full of clothed people, and obviously she has that part nailed.

As for the cheese story, I am reminded of the observation of Elaine Benis, after confronting the stuffed-crust pizza: “Will we never run out of places to conceal cheese on a pizza?” Nope, don’t think so. Speaking of which, if there’s such a surplus of cheese, whatever happened to the old five-pound blocks, i.e., guvvamint cheese? Back when the cheese distributions were going on, I knew several people who came into some who weren’t, shall we say, poor enough to qualify. (Easy explanation: Elderly relative who simply can’t eat five pounds of cheese before it dries out, molds or otherwise becomes inedible.) They all said it was the best American cheese they ever ate, creamy and rich and nothing at all like Kraft Singles. Why not make some more of that stuff? Beats paying Domino’s to come up with a new iteration of Heart Attack Lovers’ pizza.

What I didn’t read about: Keith Olbermann. Don’t care. Suspend him, don’t suspend him, makes me no never-mind, as Keith and I have sort of broken up. Of course the whole idea of finding him guilty of, what? Subjectivity? Is totally absurd. This has less to do with journalism than a tuna sandwich. Which makes me think this is about something else entirely. Like getting him to reconsider a contract demand, or something.

And now? I was going to ruminate for a bit on “Winter’s Bone,” an amazing film we caught this weekend, as well as “The Drummond Will,” which was that black-and-white English film at the film festival Friday, but a press release just fluttered over the transom. Police have made an arrest in a year-old home invasion and assault in Grosse Pointe Park, a pretty scary crime for these parts. It only took 11 months to get DNA evidence from the state crime lab. ELEVEN MONTHS. Remember that the next time you watch “CSI” and Marg Helgenberger tells some clown she’ll put a rush on it. So now I have to write a story.

“Winter’s Bone” can wait a day, I guess. But if you get a chance to see it today, take it. It’s that good. Bye.

On today’s to-do list:

Write a little.
Make apple crisp.
Clean at least one bathroom.
See some English film, “the first black-and-white feature shot on the Red,” at a bar in Ferndale, part of the Ferndale Film Festival.

I guess things could be worse. I work a full day (night, really) on Sunday, so I guess I can start drinking on Friday at lunchtime.

What’s “the Red,” you’re maybe wondering. It’s a camera system, and I think the actual name is RED, all caps, but meh. It’s a light, small, low-cost digital alternative to professional film cameras, very big among the indies and, increasingly, the studios. The FAQ. Because you care, right? Anyway, while this sort of thing — fussing over cameras and such — is not my part of the game, it’s a) free, b) includes pizza and c) takes place in a bar. Win, win, win.

Actually, rounding up today’s conversation starters, I see the internet is a rich and fruitful place this morning. Let’s dispense with the small talk and get to cases, shall we?

Sparky Anderson died yesterday, which means it’s time to check in with none other than Detroit’s favorite grief counselor sports columnist, li’l Mitch Albom. Jesus flippin’ Christ, guess what his lead is?

I had a dream about Sparky Anderson a few days ago. He looked old and his hair was brown, and I called to him, but he didn’t recognize me. Only after I said my name did he smile.

And then it ended.

Any armchair Freudians want to take a crack at that? I mean, no wonder the guy is a monster. Even his subconscious tells him that his name brings smiles to the world. Although Mitch doesn’t quite get it:

I’d been wondering about that dream because Sparky doesn’t usually show up in my REM cycle. And why was his hair brown? Sparky? The original White Wizard? Then, Thursday afternoon, I heard the jarring news: At age 76, Anderson, one of the most colorful, charming, perfectly suited managers baseball ever produced, had died in California.

Now he’ll start thinking his dreams are telepathic. Although can even a dream get through to Mitch? Who, once again, finds the death of an old man “jarring.” I ask you. Although, given how close Anderson’s death was to Ernie Harwell’s, he really can’t resist a different angle:

It would be fitting to ask Ernie Harwell — he and Sparky walked together every morning on road trips — but we lost Ernie this year, too, and it seems like some heavenly roll call is taking place in our town.

The Two Baseball Legends You Meet in Heaven — I smell box-office boffo! (Actually, Albom is at work as we speak on a play about Harwell. Which is probably why Sparky’s obit clocked in at under a million words.)

Moving on, has everyone heard the Cooks Source story by now? After all, it’s nearly 24 hours old, a graybeard in internet time. Here’s the gist: Writer discovers a piece of hers, published some years back on the internet, now exists in ink-on-paper form, in a magazine called Cooks Source. She e-mails the editor and asks for a) an apology, and b) a small donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. She gets, in return, the back of the editor’s hand, in one of the stupidest reactions to a reasonable request I’ve yet heard in journalism, and friends, that is saying something. Anyway, the internet got angry. You don’t want the internet angry. Edward Champion has a good one-page summation. Who edits this rag? Tim Goeglein?

Every boy should have a mother like this.

Have you heard about the president’s trip to India? Have you perhaps heard that “34 warships” are steaming there even as we speak? I have. I read it on the dumber conservative blogs. Guess what? It’s not true. I know how shocking that is to some of you, but there you go.

And with that, I’m getting dressed for a brutal workout, followed by a shower, followed by that movie in Ferndale, followed by apple crisp. Because it’s the weekend, suckas. And weekends are for apple crisp.

Calvin Stovall is a former colleague of mine, now editor-in-chief of the Binghamton Press in New York. He recently lowered the Sword of Justice upon his newspaper’s comment sections. You think your life is sad and pathetic? Getta loada this:

We had to remove racist and insensitive comments on a story about the birth of the first baby of 2010 in Broome County, born to a black woman. Just Monday, I had staffers take down comments on a story about a motorcyclist killed in an accident involving a school bus and a minivan in Kirkwood.

During the past three weeks, I banned three people for life from our site because of abuses, including attacks on one another and racist comments. They returned to the site under different usernames. We confirmed who they were and blocked them again, and we will continue to do so until they get the message that they’re not welcome on our site.

First, imagine being the sort of person who feels the need to comment on a first-baby-of-the-year story. I’d imagine being banned for those shenanigans would be the Scorsesean camera-pulls-back moment that momentarily puts you outside your life and allows you to briefly observe it from, say, a high corner in your room: Yep, that’s me all right, rockin’ the Dell laptop. Boy, the way I type really rattles the card table, doesn’t it? And that bare lightbulb — none of those socialist twisty things for me! Kiss my ass, Mr. born-in-Kenya Obama!

(On second thought, you always run the risk that, once outside himself, your readers will like what they see.)

Internet eggheads are always telling lamestream journalists that they have to jump into their comment sections. Many of them run sites where the comment sections are kind of like our own here at NN.C, rich and smart and, to continue my oft-used Cheers metaphor, a place where everybody knows your name, there’s a fire in the hearth and the bowls of peanuts are always full and warm.

There’s another kind of bar out there. It’s where alcoholics line up to get a drink at the earliest possible opening hour. It smells bad, no one talks and the toilets frequently overflow. This is what newspaper comment sections are. I really can’t blame someone like Calvin, who has enough to do just getting the paper out, from wanting to engage with the sorts of pinheads who would, once banned from the worst bar in the world, try to sneak a way back in, re-registering under new user names, so that people can hear their thoughts on the skin color of the first baby of the new year.

Partly it’s a function of size — the more people you let in, the worse it gets. Our own community got some new members after the Goeglein affair, but I think the quality stayed high, even as some of our best people left (farewell and adieu, Danny, Marcia, Gasman, many others) and were replaced by newcomers. I sometimes find myself at a loss for words when people ask what this blog is about. Is it political? Sometimes, but that’s not its purpose. Pop culture? Same answer. Personal, a diary? Kinda, but not really, no. So what is it? It’s just a place where I drink my morning coffee and work the kinks out of my fingers, but even on days when I’m not particularly present, the best reading is in the comments.

Once again, thanks to all you readers, silent and otherwise. I lift a glass to you, and the next round is on the house.

So, election day. I haven’t voted yet, but I will. There aren’t a ton of seats at play locally, but there are some — governor, state house and senate seats, and my local school board. The latter races have kept me hopping over at my other site, and just because there’s never enough to do that you can’t do a little bit more, yesterday’s police rounds were ridonkulous, a side effect of Halloween, I guess. Reading over my report, I’m kicking myself for not connecting the “29 minors” rousted from an underage drinking party to the Chilean miners, somehow — that could have generated some yuks. But in a week when the file offers you an actual scene from a Cheech & Chong movie, you take the low-hanging fruit.

So, off to the gym and the polls. No real bloggage today, but there’s this — the awful, no-good health care law that’s actually bringing health insurance to small-business employees.

Civic duty! Onward!

Quite an evocative photograph in the Daily Telegraph this weekend. I love pictures like this, which flip the perspective from the usual view; there was one of Ryan White, the grade-school AIDS patient, back when he won the right to go to school — this skinny little boy facing a wall of photographers and reporters. How do you feel, Ryan? Great, thanks. I’ve never been 100 percent proud of my business. That was one of the bad days.

The news peg is, what? The president is seen interacting with an iPad, I guess. But the story is in those faces, especially of the two young women. I don’t know about you, but it would freak my cheese to see that sort of thing on a regular basis, which I imagine he does. That’s when you need a good consigliere, or a good wife, or someone who knows you as you and can tell you who you really are. Which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not still going to start believing what you see. No wonder Bill Clinton stumbled.

So. I’m starting to wonder about the Washington Post op-ed operation. I’m wondering about all of them, actually, but this Charles Murray troll bait over the weekend got on my nerves. I guess it was supposed to be funny (although there’s not a wink or smidge of self-awareness anywhere in it), or maybe publishing it was just supposed to be buzzy — there are close to 800 comments on the thing, so hey, mission accomplished.

Toward the end of the piece, Murray lays out the failings of the fancypantsers in a series of paragraphs which I won’t make you read; fortunately Gawker has boiled it down to a list. A few key questions:

Do you have any idea who replaced Bob Barker on The Price Is Right?
Have you ever watched an Oprah show from beginning to end?
Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? Or a Harlequin romance?
Would you be caught dead in an RV or cruise ship?
Have you ever heard of Branson, Missouri?
Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club?

My answers: No, no, hell no, sure why not, of course and yes. I once opened a Left Behind book in the library, to see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t get 12 pages into it, although I skimmed some of the rest, just to make sure it sucked all the way through. It did. So here’s a message from an elitist aimed at all you proles: Your taste in literature sucks. If you’re spending time in Branson when you could be in Vegas, you’re a fool. I have a secret wish to take a cruise vacation — at least if I could locate my deck chair far from the proletariat — but I could never persuade my husband to accompany me. (He’s an elitist with claustrophobia.)

Here’s Murray’s concluding paragraph. You tell me if he’s trying to be funny:

The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

The isolated pot calls the ignorant kettle black? That’s rich, pals.

How was your weekend? Mine felt…productive, I guess. Got my exercise, restocked the pantry, did the laundry, neatened this and tidied that. Watched some catchup on “Boardwalk Empire,” which I am loving. A few weeks back, on one of the elitist NPR shows I love to listen to, “Sound Opinions” I b’lieve, the show’s music director was a guest. He talked about finding songs of the period (1920s) and re-recording them with contemporary artists. Last week’s episode closed with Loudon Wainwright III singing “Carrickfergus,” the old Irish ballad which is probably not of the 1920s, but dovetailed perfectly with the episode’s subject matter — the first St. Patrick’s Day in Atlantic City post-Volstead Act. It was so sad and beautiful I’ve been humming it ever since, because if there’s anything an elitist like me enjoys, it’s having a song in my head that’s not by Toby Keith.

OK, I’ll stop now.

BLoggage? Oh, surely you’ve seen Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things by now, but just in case you haven’t… Very funny.

And that’s it. Must commence Monday madness. I hope your own is tolerable.

Well, this is very sad news. My former Columbus Dispatch colleague and friend Mike Harden died yesterday. Cancer of the throat and chest made quick work of him; he was only diagnosed in June. But he stayed in the traces until the end. “Semi-retired,” i.e., writing as often as Maureen Dowd does, he filed his last column on Sunday. It was about playing Scrabble with his daughter in his hospital room. A humor piece.

I always called Mike the best columnist you never heard of. A gifted writer and compassionate reporter, he was a throwback to an earlier era, before newspapers embarrassed themselves trying to be a “product” that you “use,” and were content to be something to read. He always told me the role model for his life’s work was Jim Bishop, another guy you’ve probably never heard of, but take my word for it — he used to be big. It’s the papers that got small.

Mike told stories, most often about other people, sometimes about himself. He could make anyone’s story interesting, and frequently noble. He wrote a piece about a day in the life of a neonatal intensive-care nurse that I used to read to writing students, although it frequently left me a little choked up, particularly the part about how the NICU staff handle the babies who are about to die. They’re taken from the warmers, disconnected from the tubes and monitors, held close and rocked by the nurses until the end comes. It’s the sort of killer detail a former Navy medic wouldn’t miss.

Vietnam is most likely where Mike honed the cynicism every newsman needs, and while he was capable of enormous empathy, he was never mawkish. He knew that the best way to tell a sad or sentimental story was just to tell it, that if the facts couldn’t speak for themselves or you had to pimp it up with bullshit rhetorical tricks to drag out a few sniffles, you were selling your readers short by insulting their intelligence. A musician and songwriter in his spare time, he had a lyricist’s way of getting to the point without too much dithering.

But he wasn’t all about dying preemies. He could be very funny, and wrote many one-liners I can quote to this day. On the subject of teaching his children about the birds and bees, he considered and rejected a textbook, because “trying to understand sex by reading a book is like trying to understand jazz by touring a saxophone factory.” And he wrote the single best description of what it’s like to write a newspaper column four or five days a week, one I’ve repeated more times than I can count. It was, he said, “like making love in a burning building — you get the idea it would have been so much more memorable if only there’d been more time and fewer fireman at the window.”

A column is basically a short essay, but once in a while he tried the longer form. He wrote a piece for Ohio magazine that remains the single best description of the Ohio State Fair I’ve ever read (granted, it’s not a mission many writers take on). And one of my absolute favorites was this one, “I Remember Woody,” which I dug up after…well, I’ll get to it in a moment.

It’s a marvel, this piece, published a month after Ohio State’s legendary football coach died. (Lest you think he took that long to work on it, I’m fairly sure this appeared in the paper’s now-defunct Sunday magazine, which had a three-week lead time, so it’s more likely he batted it out on the usual schedule, giving himself a day or two, tops. From its wonderful Western-movie open to its Scorsesean finale, it is the experience that every Central Ohioan had with Woody Hayes, carrying you through from childhood worship to adolescent scorn to adult reconciliation, and the reason I remembered it only recently was this companion piece, i.e., Mitch Albom’s blurtage on the death of Bo Schembechler in 2006.

You could almost make this a writing-class exercise: Two legends, two writers, two obits. Compare and contrast. For starters, this is a textbook lesson on the use and abuse of the first person, on economy of language, on organization and craft. Mike’s is half the length of Mitch’s and packs 10 times the punch. In Mike’s piece, every detail, every anecdote, is freighted with meaning and subtext, is visual — you can see the men, the armchair coaches, gathered around the Philco on football Saturdays, second-guessing their hero, see the crowd of student protestors jeering Woody during the nightmare spring of 1970. Whereas Mitch, as usual, mostly reminds us who had the magic access, and even with all that time spent at the great man’s elbow, he still couldn’t find a decent quote with a magnifying glass:

Bo was passionate about what he did. “Some of the finest people I know are football coaches,” he once told me. “They’re smart. They’re tough. Good thinkers. Hard workers. When I say I’m a football coach, I’m damn proud of the fact that I’m a football coach.”

Now, for extra credit: One of these writers is paid $250,000 a year and won the Red Smith Award, the other considerably less. Take your best guess and pass your papers forward.

Well, I could go on all day. I won’t. But I will say this: In Mike’s piece, you can see his instinctive knowledge of what makes a truly compelling portrait — not just the light but the shadows. Beginning art students learn it’s the chiaroscuro that gives a drawing dimension. So in that spirit I’ll tell you Mike was imperfect as a writer and person. He could be a little windy and ponderous at times. He went through slumps. But newspapermen, unlike many other writers, have the obligation of daily deadlines, and the disadvantage of having their bad days on display to 200,000 readers, not crumpled in a wastebasket somewhere. However, day after day, column after column, he defied the conventional wisdom of contemporary editors: A story about an old lady? What does she do? She’s afraid of leaving her apartment because she lives in a bad neighborhood? What utility does that have for suburban readers? Mike’s business card could have been four words long: Good stories, well-told.

Now it’s his epitaph. Farewell, buddy. Take good notes.

I need to check out the right-wing Catholic blogs more often. Otherwise, it might have been even longer before I learned that Joseph Sobran, an embarrassing oddity for the ultraconservative commentariat, died late last week, succumbing to kidney failure and what sounds like a cascade of other health problems brought on by him being such a p.o.s.

You’ve probably never heard of him. I’ve only heard of him because my newspaper carried his column, one of the relative few that ran him at his peak and the tiny handful that hung on after Sobran broke with William F. Buckley Jr. and was fired by the National Review. It was bad enough that we bought his phoned-in paleoconservative dreck when he was respectable, but after Buckley called him out for praising an unapologetically racist magazine, and Sobran retaliated by saying his mentor was a tool of the Podhoretz clan and more concerned with getting seated at the right dinner parties up there in Jew York, well, he crossed the line into embarrassment.

If you paid absolutely no attention to any of this when it was happening in 1993, I’ll try to make this tie together with what we were talking about yesterday. Because while it’s no doubt way too generous to call Sobran crazy, he was one of those right-wing shitheads who took radical and offensive positions in part, I am sure, because he just liked being reviled, and was somehow able to make the revulsion read — in his own mind, anyway — as resentment for a brave truth-speaker. Such as? Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. William Shakespeare was a fraud. The Clintons were white trash. And the Jews were indirectly responsible for 9/11, by shaping U.S. Middle East policy to favor Israel. And so on. The last time I looked him up, he was referring to Barack Obama as “our mulatto president.” Classy.

After his cashiering from polite salons, he was free to do things like give speeches to the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denial group. He spent a lot of time in this keynoter claiming he has no animus for Jews. As for what Hitler did, well…

Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don’t read German, so I can’t assess the documentary evidence; I don’t know chemistry, so I can’t discuss Zyklon-B; I don’t understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, “Holocaust denial” is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that’s proof enough.

…Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it’s safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today’s mainstream press.

If the president says he was born in Hawaii, I take him at his word. After all, I wasn’t there.

Sobran’s passing was barely noted in respectable conservative journals, ignored by the blogosphere, and, as I mentioned before, acknowledged sadly by right-wing Catholics. Apparently Sobran considered himself a faithful and devoted servant of the Roman church, albeit twice-divorced and not enough of an expert on chemistry to formally acknowledge the slaughter of 6 million of God’s chosen people. I think even they were embarrassed by him.

I wonder what his last days were like. Where did he get his money? How did he live? In such cases, it’s useful to remember that there’s a very good chance he spoke to groups like the Institute for Historical Review because their checks cleared. (Boy, there’s a short film ready to be made, eh? “The Old Conservative in Exile.” Shiny suits, pilled cuffs and dandruff just play better on the big screen.)

Whew. I need a palate cleanser. How about a feature borrowed from Zorn, Fine lines?

Add the butter. One of the many reasons that restaurant food often tastes better than the stuff we make at home is that restaurant cooks do not know your cardiologist and have no real interest in your long-term enjoyment of life. They cook for this moment and for the fleeting feeling of delicious transcendence they can offer a diner. Next time, you can use less. This first time, add all four tablespoons.
– Sam Sifton on a pork ragu

Our symphony orchestra is on strike. Gloomy Gusses here think its death is inevitable, that a world-class orchestra is simply something we can no longer afford:

There are lots of numbers here, like there are in just about any labor dispute. But, at base, there are only two metrics that truly matter in the first DSO walkout since 1987 — changing consumer demand and the 21.3 percent decline in Michigan’s median income between 2000 and 2009.

That nation-leading collapse, a sickening number for the ripple effect it delivers to everything from home values and wage levels to public tax revenues and, yes, support for the local orchestra, goes further than just about anything else in describing what’s happening to the DSO. It’s also what will affect public and private institutions, businesses and communities, here for years to come.

Orchestra musicians can walk picket lines for the next year and it won’t change the fact that the economic profile of their geographic home has changed dramatically, if not irreversibly, in ways that peers in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco simply haven’t seen and probably won’t.

As much as it pains me to say, that’s probably true. Although it was also true during the Depression, and the DSO hung on then. With help. You know how Francis Ford Coppola got his middle name? Well, his daddy was a flutist in the Detroit Symphony in the 1930s, and never forgot the group’s sugar daddy, whose financial support kept the place afloat. It could still happen.

Let’s close with a bookend, then. I have work to do:

“If a guy is anti-Semitic and no one is listening, is he still anti-Semitic?” — Paul Shaffer

Happy Tuesday, all.