I need to do a limited skinback here. I’ve been mulling something over since Hank brought it up in comments last Thursday, when we discussed the strange case of Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan assistant attorney general waging a one-man war against Chris Armstrong, the gay student-body president at the University of Michigan. Hank said:

Someone I know, a high-functioning autistic man who would certainly know what he’s talking about in this regard, looked at the Shirvell interview and immediately diagnosed a fellow high-functioning autistic man. It’s what happens, he says, when the rigidity and obsessive behavior fails to find an appropriate outlet.

I’ve watched the video a couple of times since then, and I think he’s right. There’s something about Shirvell that’s not quite all there; he seems to have no idea why what he’s doing is at all inappropriate. (It’s hard to judge a person’s demeanor in one of these on-camera interviews, which do not favor amateurs — you sit in a chair, staring into a camera lens while Anderson Cooper yaks in your ear. You have no conventional feedback to tell you how you’re coming across; if you’re lucky you might get a monitor, but not always.) Turning to the wisdom of the crowd, i.e., Googling “‘andrew shirvell’ + asperger OR autism” turns up many other armchair psychiatrists who recognize the same traits they live with every day in a colleague or loved one with this condition. It’s good enough for me. While by no means excusing Shirvell’s behavior, it’s safe to say that outraged umbrage and gaydar jokes here are uncalled-for, and I apologize. Shirvell, meanwhile, has decided this is an excellent time to take a leave of absence. Wise move.

However, I’d like to use this as a jumping-off point for a subject that’s interested me for years — how we deal with, or don’t deal with, mental impairments/illness/less-than-normal brain functioning in our society.

When I was a columnist I wrote a bit about mental health, and I always liked to bat this balloon around with my sources, asking them how we draw the line between eccentric and crazy. “Not very well” was their answer, in a phrase. They often spoke of the frustration of dealing with, say, the very religious family of a schizophrenic patient, who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand things like brain chemistry and psychotropic drugs and 72-hour commitments, but had a very easy explanation in “demonic possession.” Sometimes a person’s symptoms fit very nicely into a particular culture’s drawer, and it takes a while before anyone figures out they have a person on their hands who needs help and support, not reinforcement.

I have no idea at all what sort of family or community Shirvell comes from, but it’s entirely possible that among his tribe, this is normal behavior, even admirable. It’s funny how the internet has made a certain sort of obsession — and what is a blog called Name of Person I Hate Watch but an obsession — not just acceptable but normal. And if people you hang with hate the same people you do, it becomes noble, a cause. And soon no one questions whether Andrew is getting a little too engaged in the cause, he’s just a man with admirable energy and focus.

Maybe we should all undergo a periodic life audit by a panel of friendly strangers with board-certified Common Sense ™. They’d go over a few key documents in our lives, we’d submit to a short interview, and two weeks later the report comes in the mail: Nice work on cutting back on your drinking and increasing your exercise, but you’re starting to become a bore about your vegetarian diet. Watch that.

And so another weekend vanishes in the rear-view mirror. I spent most of it in the kitchen. I’m experimenting with a new food this week — quinoa.

“May I have a pound of kee-no-ah?” I asked the girl at the store.

“I have some keen-wa right here,” she said, handing over a bag. Nicely played. So far I’m finding the Aztec’s magic grain interesting. Yesterday — cold bean salad with cherry tomatoes, mixed greens and quinoa. Today: Fried quinoa in the style of rice. I’ll keep you posted.

Bloggage: When you get to be my age, you’ve already been puzzled by at least half a million success stories, but the one that’s bugging me at the moment is that of Kathleen Parker, who always struck me as the ultimate media chameleon, one of those women who scored the “conservative” slot on op-ed pages back when female columnists were all Ellen Goodman clones, and then switched sides during the Bush meltdown, thereby earning the Strange New Respect award, and — funny how often this happens — a goddamn Pulitzer Prize, and if that isn’t a testament to how slim the pickings have gotten in the op-ed stable, I don’t know what is. Her column always struck me as content-free, I-was-just-thinkin’ culture-war musings on whatever was on the cover of Newsweek in any given month. But she had one thing working for her, something she’s always been willing to trade on. She’s very pretty. An early version of her website had a collection of photos of her, all taken at the same session, a little brainy pin-up gallery of Kathleen with her head cocked, Kathleen leaning her head on her hand and smiling, Kathleen twirling her reading glasses, etc. She once wrote that her mother died when she was very young and her father remarried something like four or five times, thereby confirming another of my long-distance armchair psychological diagnoses — another woman who, like Dr. Laura, could never get dad’s attention, so she grew up to be a men’s-rights advocate and good little defender of traditional gender roles. I may well be full of shit, and if so feel free to tell me so.

Anyway, speaking of puzzling success stories? Parker Spitzer, complete with a wet kiss for the launch by none other than Howie Kurtz. Break a leg, Katie.

Related, the disarray at CNN, from New York magazine:

“They do not recognize a reality that Fox and MSNBC recognize,” says a former senior CNN staffer. “You have to be real showmen and hook into America, which is blue collar and angry. The CNN culture is still very strange. You walk into that building, you think you’re the Jesuits and you’re protecting a certain legacy. They still look at Fox as a carnival—not Fox as a brilliant marketing entity. It’s weird. They’re decades into it, and they’ll protect it to the end.”

Finally I leave you with a recipe. Someone asked me for it and I copied it down, so I’ll share it with you. Never like to waste a good transcription:

This is from the Junior League’s Centennial Cookbook, and don’t draw any conclusions from that — I am as far from a Junior Leaguer as they come, but the book came to the newsroom a few years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find some of those skinny blondes could actually cook.

Anyway, this comes together pretty fast, and it’s one recipe where I don’t mind letting someone else do the prep work — butternut squash are such a pain to peel and dice, I generally buy them already prepped at Trader Joe’s.

Curried butternut apple soup

Puree the soup with an immersion blender. Season and serve with a dollop of cream, if you like. Note: This soup improves with keeping. Prepare a day or two in advance if time allows.

Happy soup! It’s going to be soup weather for sure this week.

Nothing here is the least bit startling to anyone familiar with the Detroit area, but the graphic representation is arresting:

That’s the racial/ethnic breakdown of the Metro: Whites are red, African Americans blue, Hispanics yellow. I don’t think Arabs have a color, or you’d see their numbers, too. If you click the photo itself, you’re taken to the Flickr page where I found it, which contains notes you can mouse over, and see the various neighborhoods/municipalities. (I live in the little comma of red curved in the southeast, on the lake. Here’s a map for Chicago.) Everything, and I do mean everything that happens in Detroit? Is about race. City-suburban relations in particular are like disputes between armed fiefdoms. If we cooperated we could maybe get something done around here. But no.

My partner in GrossePointeToday.com went to a conference earlier in the year, where everyone had to give a presentation on their area. She started with some photos of life around here — the pretty houses, the lake — and finished with one taken a few blocks away in Detroit. The audience gasped. Yep.

In the suburbs, race has its own set of euphemistic vocabulary. My favorite is “changing demographics.” I went to local Republican headquarters to cadge some McCain-Palin yard signs, props for our zombie movie two years ago. The guy who gave them to me said he couldn’t believe all the Obama signs in the Pointes, which he attributed to changing demographics. Because I was in the process of taking his signs for the purpose of making fun of them, I didn’t suggest the alternative, i.e., his ticket sucked, but there you are.

I don’t have much time this morning — more office hours — and precious little bloggage, but what I have is magnificent, a Mitch Albom takedown by someone who’s even more irritated by him than I am. My source on this speculates that perhaps Albom is gearing up to take over Andy Rooney’s job whenever America’s designated lovable coot kicks the bucket. Hmm. Hadn’t considered that. He’s certainly qualified, and he’s precisely the sort of get the producers of “60 Minutes” would consider golden.

Anyway, enjoy. If his editors won’t handle Albom, someone has to. I’ll be back tomorrow.

This past weekend was the reunion of the Knight-Wallace Fellows, all classes; the Running of the Fellows, if you will. Excuse me, but whenever I spend time with those folks, I feel called upon to be droll. Ann Arbor, and Wallace House in general, is a very droll place. Someone’s always chuckling dryly. The executive director is a big fan of editorial cartooning, and every term the New Yorker’s cartoon editor comes in for a visit, as well as Pat Oliphant. Oliphant is soft-spoken and a little shy, and prefers to draw his way through his seminar. One or two are always suitable for framing, and are hung in our little clubhouse:

I didn’t do every event this year, but I missed this guy at the last reunion, and was told I might as well have missed Bruce Springsteen at MemAud, c. 1975, again:

That’s Ralph Williams. He’s a rock star at Michigan, or was until he retired a couple years ago. I took one of his classes back in the day, on the Old Testament. (His lecture on Job had to be relocated to a larger hall, so all the parents could attend.) His “last lecture” packed the house back then, and there’s a reason for that. He is to lectures what ducks are to water. Big, booming voice, expressive hands, amusing asides — give him a topic and he’ll go extemp for an hour without breaking a sweat. I forget his formal topic, but the gist was the complaint of all people who remember what was, confronting what is, worried about what will be — the explosion of information, the dearth of meaning. He read some Thucydides, some Shakespeare, some Gore Vidal, mixed well, baked for 45 minutes and sent us on our way with a head full of intellectual muffins, or something. I try not to worry about things I have no control over, but he did make some thoughtful points, the main being that our democracy is based on concepts that are in eclipse at the moment, including respect for other views and the time it takes to pay attention and learn about the nation’s business. Whereas, just now, I checked three Twitter feeds and my Facebook while I tried to think how to finish this sentence. Clearly I am not cut out for Congress. Then again, at least half of the people who have represented me over the years weren’t, either.

I never know what to do when people inform me the world is in grave danger. Wring my hands. Nod sympathetically. But mostly I go make a cup of coffee.

I stopped at Ikea on the way home, and didn’t go to the dinner that night. The required energy level ultimately gets wearing, so I just went shopping. Ikea was full to the rafters with people who were not speaking English, so many that I suspected one of those overnight shopping excursions from a European capital, like they used to have to Gurnee Mills. But I think they were new Americans of various sorts — university people, immigrants, others with an eye toward making fortunes here after they’ve found a cheap couch. Which reminded me of another chat I had in Ann Arbor, with a business professor. She is one of those people with a brain like a computer; ask her a question, she blinks twice, the hard drive spins behind her eyes and she gives you a concise, informed answer.

She also has no obvious emotional triggers. I recall, seven years ago, asking her about Burma. Fort Wayne was at the time, and still is, absorbing large numbers of Burmese refugees, and the U.S. was going its usual route — economic sanctions and lots of talk about tyranny. She blinked twice, the hard drive spun, and she said China, while no fan of the military junta that rules the place, was going ahead and forming trade partnerships, in the interest of having a friendly neighbor between it and the Bay of Bengal. Guess which one would likely prevail. (The Obama administration took a turn away from this policy last year. GOP, help me out — was this part of the Apology Tour?)

Anyway, she marveled at how many of her students — masters candidates, mind you, at a top-10 business school — are amazingly ill-informed, read little news, either in newspapers or offline. She said she recently discussed exchange trading in class, how a person who is buying and selling commodity contracts has to be well-informed in general, has to know how a storm brewing here might affect the harvest there, what the stress of a natural disaster might do to a shaky ruler (speaking of Myanmar), etc. The class response? Crickets. Bottom line: Expect further rug-pulling by Asia, and learn Chinese.

Which seems a good time to skip to the bloggage, highlighted by one of our own college students:

Eighteen-year-old Indiana University freshman dies after aspirating vomit. Why yes, he’d been drinking. (At Ball State, if that sort of thing matters to you.)

Jon Stewart, national treasure, and why he is funnier than you. (He has writers. A lot of writers. And good ones.)

Speaking of someone who probably wasn’t snoozing through b-school, Gretchen Morgensen talks sense about the continuing housing mess, and the arguments against “let it crash.”

Speaking of which, I’d better go attend to my so-called career before it does the same. The week awaits.

Almost forgot: Why I do not follow sports. It just breaks your damn heart, every time. If that isn’t a completed catch in the end zone, I’m Sarah Palin.

Not to belabor a topic, but:

Poking around the web yesterday between students, I found a long story from the Fortune magazine archive on the Oddly Familiar Case of the Agees in Boise. It suggests that the Cunningham-Agee co-prosperity sphere is a complicated entity, and what happened during their time in Idaho wasn’t something that summarizes easily into a paragraph or two, although if you have to bottom-line it, as the CEOs say, this probably works for a nut graf:

A few things are obvious. Agee nearly wrecked the company and thoroughly destroyed his already shaky reputation as a corporate manager. In the simplest terms, he tried to turn Morrison Knudsen — a bridge, dam, and factory builder — into a railcar and locomotive manufacturer, and failed spectacularly: Last year the company lost $310 million on sales of $2.5 billion. Important customers became disillusioned with Agee — one called his railroad business plan “cartoonish.” Top executives mutinied. William P. Clark, a former Reagan adviser Agee put on the board, conducted an investigation that prompted Agee’s dismissal. A score of shareholder suits have been filed against Agee, the company, and the board.

But the very next sentence acknowledges:

This isn’t a tidy tale of good and evil, though. Behind the devastation of Morrison Knudsen is a complicated mix of ancient feuds, foolish gambles, and personal insecurities. There are clashing cultures, religious fervor, bad luck–even the terrifying specter of a black rose.

OK, I’m reading the rest. And I did. And I could almost see it from Mary’s side: She was raised by her priestly co-parent to go forth into creation and, armed with the secular world’s golden ticket to power — her Harvard MBA — do something different. Do something good. No, do something Good. Capital-G good. And on her very first job, she falls in love with a married man and watches while he ruins her career, drags her name through People magazine while at the same time giving her an express pass (which she stuffed into her purse with her golden ticket, and sorry for this metaphor salad here) to another sort of life, filled with luxury and private planes and trips to Lourdes and the Vatican, no small thing for a religious girl. I bet she saw the latter, the papal audiences and the like, as payback for her professional ruination.

On the other hand, no one forced her to sit for all those interviews with People, which she was doing as recently as just a couple of years ago, when her daughter graduated from — where else? — Notre Dame. And then I found this passage:

In 1991, Mary was diagnosed with a form of cancer–non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she told the Detroit Free Press the following year. Despite four lumps in her neck, she refused biopsies and chemotherapy. Mary says that on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, the lumps disappeared. (“I believe the angels went before almighty God and said, ‘This woman is doing something good. Give her a chance,’ ” she reportedly said.)

Granted, that’s a big “reportedly” there, and granted, out of context it’s impossible to know whether this line was delivered with a wink, a wordier version of somebody up there likes me! It’s the “almighty” in there that makes me think she was serious, and with that? Well, I stopped sympathizing. I think it was MMJeff who posted something on Facebook a while back, a cartoon of someone in the midst of a terrible calamity, the caption reading, “Remember, God loves you very much, and has a wonderful plan for your life.” But this is, in a nutshell, what bugs the crap out of me about these folks. Because if you believe that — that guardian angels plead your case before almighty God, who grants up-or-down cancer reprieves like some celestial caesar — than you have to accept the flip side, that on Christmas Day 2004, He looked down from heaven and said, “Eh, I’m drowning a few hundred thousand of these yo-yos. What the hell, most of them are Hindu anyway. Let’s have a tsunami!”

And when you start accepting that, that the Lord truly works in mysterious and extremely fucked-up ways, then it’s just a short hop to my neighborhood, where God, if he exists at all, is so unknowable he’s like a version of the crazy guy down the street with a plate in his head, Boo Radley with a lot more power. Or as my friend Lance Mannion says, “Any God that would destroy the World Trade Center to reveal George Bush’s true purpose in life isn’t worth worshiping.”

So, bloggage. Parents, everything you fear about sending your children to college is true. Seen yesterday at Wayne State:

It’s a movie, of course, rated R for “strong crude and sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, drug and alcohol abuse.” That’s entertainment.

Via Roy and Scott Lemieux at LGM, a new blog I’m enjoying: Gin and Tacos. Or rather, ginandtacos.com. Worth reading all the way through, but this post on the anti-vaccine movement spoke to me in particular, mainly because of the map. I dunno the design thinking behind the microscopic type, however; maybe begone, grandma.

Finally, a correction: Steven Slater’s story cannot be verified. Repeating, Steven Slater’s story cannot be verified. This is kind of major.

Eating breakfast, heading out for another redonkulous day. Enjoy your weekend.

It is, at the moment, blowing about 30 miles per hour. So the local police sent out a text alert to tell all subscribers that it’s windy. Police are never happy about sharing information with the stinging little gnats who share it with the rest of the community, but these alerts — touted as a valuable community-information tool — are turning out to be the guy who sends you that thing everyone was sending around two weeks ago, today: Hey, have you seen this issue of the Onion, the one they did after 9/11? It’s awesome!

Earlier this summer a restroom weenie-wagger turned up in one of the parks, peed on a little boy and slipped away. I got the text alert three days after the story had been in both dailies and both weeklies. You can see why I deduct my cell service as a business expense.

The po-pos here aren’t so bad, though; it’s just hard to get the idea of “urgency” to stick with people who don’t share your particular definition of it. Journalists in general love urgency; it’s our dirty little secret, how much we love to pound our keyboards on deadline or take dictation over a two-way radio, and– I’m dating myself, aren’t I? Alan worked Friday night, and came home with a nail-biter about how the pop-music writer nearly didn’t get his review of the Eminem/Jay-Z show in the paper, because 42,000 Twittering/texting/Facebook-updating fans had hogged all the extant bandwidth. He couldn’t get a foothold on the groaning, overloaded data cloud, and as minute after minute went by and the presses began straining to start, he–

I interrupted: “Why didn’t he just dictate?”

“What?”

“Well, he could call to tell you he couldn’t get his story uploaded. It couldn’t have been that long. I would have told him to dictate it to me. You could get it done in 10 minutes, easy.”

It’s been seven years since I’ve spent any significant time in a newsroom. My husband? Just sighed.

I still think it could work. It’s not a thousand-word analysis on the midterm elections. It’s a few paragraphs about a hip-hop concert. You could rattle off half of it without even hearing it: “Forty thousand fans roared their approval when Lady Gaga appeared on a special throne set apart from the crowd.” (This is true, but a pas de deux with Flickr has turned up no photo proof.) And so on.

Dictation — and its impish twin, rewrite — is one of those things that’s gone for good, along with other antique technologies like using a cell phone for talking. But I think it’s relevant. What is a TV reporter giving an ad-lib standup from the scene of breaking news but dictation by a prettier person? I’ve said this before: I’m interested in how the newest news-carrying technology (the web) uses the language not of old technology (newspapers), but of even older technology (really old newspapers). I can exclusively reveal this because sometimes I watch TMZ, which uses as its framing device a newsroom meeting, everybody sitting around pitching their stories to the boss. And even that is old, because the people are smiling and happy. Today’s newsroom meeting is a grim affair of reading budgets and waiting to see whose turn it is to have a bucket of shit dumped on their head; as my funny fellow Fellow Rob said as we left a Detroit Free Press morning meeting back during our magic year of sabbatical, “Have you ever seen so many miserable people in one place in your life?”

Jeez, I sound like an old fart whittlin’ at the cracker barrel. Time to move on.

As I slept very very badly the night before, I turned on that Alex Gibney doc on HBO last night to keep me company while I worked. “My Trip to al-Qaeda,” based on Lawrence Wright’s book “The Looming Tower” and stage show derived from it, wasn’t Gibney’s best work, but it was very good, and I’m sorry more of you don’t get HBO, so you could watch it. I was reminded anew of my reaction to the book, the way it underlined how many our reactions to 9/11 — from the invasion of Iraq to the Patriot Act to the current lowbrow sideshow over the so-called mosque at Ground Zero — were pretty much by the book dictated by Osama bin Laden himself. He said, “Please don’t throw me into the briar patch,” and that’s what we did. Meanwhile, even the smart Republicans I know still refer to “Obama’s apology tour,” suggesting everyone’s taking their talking points from Fox News these days.

Why do we have such a hard time grasping situations more complicated than a bumper sticker? It’s depressing.

Bloggage?

A memory of his mail-carrying days, from our own Coozledad. I’m stealing his description of the local weekly newspaper, “a sort of support group for people suffering from ideopathic morbid ineducability.”

Zorn says he saw the Daley exit coming when the city failed to get the Olympics.

The Baltimore Sun uses the word “limn” in a headline. As a former copy editor, I see the appeal immediately — a four-letter word with a head count of three.

Off to work. Office hours and a haircut today. Oh, and an interview, too.

Dr. Laura is resigning, to spend time in a place where she can speak “what’s on my mind, and in my heart,” and use the N-word whenever she wants, and otherwise live in a land free of criticism of any sort, where all the eyes are smiling and every pair of hands applauds every word that comes out of her empty skull. Which is to say, Santa Barbara.

I wish I could feel happier about this. I would have been over the moon if this had happened a decade ago, but face it — this lady is at least that long past her sell-by date, and this exit is sort of pathetic. She must be grateful to at least get to go out via Larry King (of course) and not in a press release that would run in the back pages of a trade magazine, picked up by the AP for a “where are they now” feature.

I first tuned her in after reading a respectful profile of her in Newsweek magazine. Kate was a baby then, and Laura Schlessinger was getting a little positive ink out of being a radio therapist who didn’t hold your virtual hand and say there, there — she would kick your ass and tell you to take some responsibility. This was a new thing at the time. I was working partly from home, trying to maximize my time with my wee one, so I thought, OK, let’s see what this lady’s about.

The respectful profile must have gone to her head, because she was already screechy and insufferable, and getting more so, seemingly by the day, a by-the-book fame monster and narcissist. This was during…what was her thing at the time? Oh, right: Orthodox Judaism. No more of that secular wishy-washy shit for her, she was going to stay kosher, and be more observant than any Jew in the world. Another Jewish woman called in: She had three kids under 5; would it be OK to dispense with the leave-your-oven-on-all-day thing for Shabbos, just until the children were old enough to leave the oven alone? No! No, you may not! You either get with Judaism all the way, or you get out! The world has enough compromisers! God says no work on Saturday, and if the rabbi says turning the oven on is work, then you learn to submit!

I listened to this, and thought, “I’d bet a thousand bucks this crazy bitch drives to the synagogue.”

You might wonder why I kept listening. I have a weakness for insane people who live their insanity publicly, and try to dress it up as something else. True (and doubtless retold) story: I first heard Rush Limbaugh months before he broke out nationally; our local talk station was run by the two cheapest people in the world, and they were among the very first to take a chance on this new talker. I listened for five minutes and said, “This is a fat guy who cannot score with chicks.” For Dr. Laura, I said, “Sounds like someone is still chasing daddy’s approval, and the fact daddy is dead and buried isn’t going to stop her.”

Some time later, I read another profile, in which Ms. Laura revealed her father once said she was nothing special to look at, that her sister was the lucky recipient of her mother’s great-beauty genes, and she’d never turn a man’s head. Imagine my smug satisfaction at learning Laura was estranged from both her mother and her sister, and that she had gotten her big break in radio by sleeping with a man decades older than her, the one who took those nude photos of her. Although I shouldn’t have been smug. It’s no great talent to read an open book.

I mentioned the male who spawned this creature was already dead by then. With her utter lack of self-knowledge (which is not the same thing as self-obsession), that means our Miss Laura will always be chasing the next thing. She shed Judaism sometime after she discovered yacht racing, which often happen on Saturdays, and G-d considers trimming sails work. She gave up hectoring working mothers after her own kid grew up, and started hectoring wives. (If your husband is unhappy, it is YOUR fault. Etc.) And when her kid turned into a monster, she… Well, I don’t know what she did. I had long since stopped listening, and as I said before, she now runs in the wee hours, and ultimately, who gives a shit? She has her millions, her sailboats, and if she hasn’t much of an audience anymore, it isn’t for lack of trying.

Now she can sliiiiide into full retirement and comfortable obscurity, there to await the death of her much-older (ha ha!) husband, and god-knows-what from her horrible son, and then, finally, the rancid breath of the Reaper himself. “It’s time, Laura,” he’ll whisper, as he will to us all. What will she say in reply?

“Daddy? Is that you?”

Bonus, as we move into the bloggage: Note how weird her lower face looks in this clip from the King interview. Is that fillers, Botox, or both?

Speaking of women who cannot get enough attention, finally, the Taiwanese animators meet a subject worthy of their art — $P. An absolute, can’t-miss classic.

A harsher look at James Kilpatrick, from one of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ stable.

And now the coffee is kicking in, and I feel — damn! — pretty good. Have a great Wednesday.

James J. Kilpatrick died Sunday, I see. Younger people will recall him as a cartoon, the basis of Dan Aykroyd’s “Shana, “Jane, you ignorant slut” sendup of “Point/Counterpoint,” the back-and-forth exchange at the end of “60 Minutes.” Older ones, based on the obituaries I’m reading, would be forgiven for thinking “no big loss,” given how vile his stances were in the heat of the argument:

Mr. Kilpatrick popularized the doctrine called interposition, according to which individual states had the constitutional duty to interpose their separate sovereignties against federal court rulings that went beyond their rightful powers and, if necessary, to nullify them, an argument traced to the writings of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John C. Calhoun.

…At times, Mr. Kilpatrick went beyond constitutional arguments. In 1963, he drafted an article for The Saturday Evening Post with the proposed title “The Hell He Is Equal,” in which he wrote that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.”

But 89 years of life is long enough to grow, it seems:

Mr. Kilpatrick ultimately acknowledged that segregation was a lost cause and re-examined his earlier defense of it.

“I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930,” he told Time magazine in 1970. “I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.”

Yep. I’m kind of a softy on James J., because I once wrote him a letter disagreeing with one of his columns, and he wrote me back, on his personal letterhead, no secretary’s initials at the bottom, acknowledging my points and respectfully differing. I wish I still had that letter. Respectful disagreement — what a relic of a different time.

I don’t want to excuse Kilpatrick’s earlier support for segregation and the like, although one thing this book project taught me — and I think I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it again — is that history is both the up-close, day-to-day details and the long view, and as long as progress is being made, we’ll probably be OK. Segregation embarrasses conservatives today, because it reminds them of how many of their number were on the wrong side, so I guess there’s some pleasure in rubbing their noses in it from time to time, but ultimately, what’s the point? If Jack Kilpatrick can change, anyone can.

I used to read his columns when they came in; he wrote two or three times a week for probably a few hundred newspapers. I know syndicated columnists still exist, but I don’t read any of them anymore, at least not outside their home papers. He wrote about politics and language — an Ask Mr. Language Person without the humor — and, from time to time, country life. Those columns were datelined “Scrabble, Va.” and were about the nest of wrens under the eaves or whatnot. It takes a little bit of talent to make life’s mundane details into something others want to read, and read again the next time. (She said modestly, surveying her audience of dozens…) In the grand scheme of things, he was a successful journalist at a time when that was both easier and harder than it is today.

Here’s something that struck me from the obit: His first wife died in 1997. He remarried in 1998. Ha. Another man lost without a woman. I have a friend who tells his wife, “Honey, I love you and all, but if anything ever happened to you I’d be standing on the sidewalk in front of the funeral home, proposing marriage to random women walking past.” The most powerful men I’ve known know enough to be humble around their wives, because their wives make their lives possible. They run the house, get the dry-cleaning done, balance the family checkbook, pay their husbands an allowance. I saw one at a charity event, drooling over a silent-auction item. He turned to his spouse and asked, “Can I afford this?” Ask if they’d like to come over for dinner, and he says, “Ask the boss. I show up where she tells me to go.”

I’d hope that Kilpatrick would be offended by a dumbass like Jonah Goldberg, but you never know. For now, it doesn’t matter.

Bloggage, while we’re on the subject:

The Newtster, crazier than ever after all these years. As my friend Lance Mannion points out, why is this allegedly “brilliant” scholar still getting respectful coverage from the D.C. press corps?

Everybody’s seen this by now, but just in case you haven’t: A few other things in the “hallowed ground” penumbra of ground zero. I think Olga’s Salon & Spa should change its name to the Hallowed Ground Grooming Institution. Classy!

As someone who’s driven four-cylinder cars forever, I’ve never understood why they’re so often ignored by Detroit car buyers. (Even my fellow Passat drivers around here are all sporting V6 badges on the trunk.) Some respect, please.

Time to take Kate to the orthodontist and, oh yeah, write a syllabus. Later, all.

Mitch Albom got the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press Sports Editors this month. It’s a lifetime achievement award, the sort of thing you get with your gold watch and appointment with the death panel. Mitch, at 52, is probably covering the gray in his hair but nowhere near retirement, but hey! That’s entirely in keeping with his career! By the time Mitch hits what would be retirement age for you or me, we’ll all be watching white smoke pour out of the Vatican chimneys as he’s elected the first Jewish Pope. George Clooney will be working as his houseboy. And so on.

Over time, I’ve reached a sort of peace with Albom — I only get my dander up when he wanders off the sports pages. Which is often. But this isn’t one of those times. Let the APSE give him whatever award they want. I don’t even work for newspapers anymore. They made their bed, and they can lie in it, the feebs.

Then, yesterday, someone sent me this, from Deadspin. Snicker:

…the Happy Meal theology of (Mitch) Albom’s books that would’ve made Jonathan Livingston Seagull want to fly into the nearest wind tower.

I know it’s not just me who hates him. I once batted around the idea of a separate Mitch blog with another Detroit writer, or maybe even pitching a column to the Metro Times, in the grand tradition of Bobwatch, the Chicago Reader’s Bob Greene snarkfest. Among sportswriters, however, I’ve always assumed the dislike of Albom was based far more on jealousy than anything else. The number of sportswriters I honestly respect as writers, period, is pretty low, and I’ll bet the overwhelming secret thought most of Mitch’s colleagues entertain is this: Why didn’t I think of this shit first?

However, Deadspin lays out a pretty good collection of arguments as to why this award is the equivalent of Pia Zadora winning a Golden Globe. Its cornerstone is this Dave Kindred column about why Albom’s 2005 transgression — lavishly covered at the time, I won’t go into it here — ought to have disqualified him for this sort of laurel forever.

Well-argued, but as I said: That’s the APSE’s business. I was more interested in following the other links, especially this one, for which I reserve a comment I know many of you find offensive, but I cannot help myself: Jesus fucking Christ. If I recall correctly, Mitch’s 2005 shenanigans cost this man two weeks’ pay in the final arbitration. I guess not everyone can hold a grudge as long as I can.

Oh, well. Deep breaths. All better now.

Some of you may have noticed these new entries are arriving later in the day than they usually do. I’m sleeping later, plus I’m getting hammered with work from my hyperlocal site. Which is good for me, but may necessitate another schedule rejiggering, because I can’t keep this up.

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Not quite OID, but close: Little girls set up lemonade stand, which is robbed. (Note to self: GREAT MOVIE SCENE.) In what newspapers love to call “an outpouring,” they’re finding this is probably the best thing to happen to them, ever.

Coozledad, remember when you said you found a worthless eHow article on burning pellets in a wood stove? One of the writers speaks:

“I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’

“Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,” she said, referring to one of Demand Media’s high-traffic websites, on which most of her clips appeared.

Finally, a sweet story for cat lovers. Because you know what a softy I am in my tiny black heart.

Happy Thursday. Where did the damn week go?

It’s a perfectly lovely morning here, the last few days’ oppressive humidity blown off, the sun gleaming, the air deliciously cool. So you know what that means:

The people across the street are having some trees trimmed this morning. Yes, a wood chipper. I am going insane.

This is the downside of work-at-home self-employment. Well, that and the lousy money, and the lack of health insurance, and no one to bat ideas around with. I could probably think of a few more, but, well — the wood chipper just fired up again.

Sorry. I shouldn’t complain.

Having a bit of difficulty getting started this a.m. Or rather, I got started pretty early on other stuff, and can’t shift my head into blogspace. It seemed I missed a lot in my absence, including the whole Weigel thing, which I still can’t quite wrap my head around. The WashPost hires a blogger to cover the conservative movement, encourages a blogging voice, and then pushes him out when he becomes, what? A little too blogalicious? Because he trashed Matt Drudge? In writing? Well, OK. I get it. You can’t go around making smart cracks of the sort people make every day, at least not in writing. Because that would prove…something, I dunno.

For the record: I’m in favor of a more open exchange of ideas and even insults. If that means a lot of “biased” people get to keep their jobs, then so be it. I liked Weigel’s columns while they lasted. Have we figured out who dimed him? I’m still catching up, but this…

“It seems like he spends a lot of time apologizing,” said Penny Nance, the chief executive of Concerned Women for America, one of Weigel’s conservative critics. “The problem is Concerned Women for America and other conservatives resent the idea of the Washington Post or other major news affiliates hiring people who hate us to be the ones to report on us. David Weigel has already shown great distaste, if not downright disdain, for conservatives, so it’s difficult for us to take the Post seriously when this is the person the Post hires to cover conservatives.”

…caught my eye. In other words, we want to approve who covers us. The line for ring-kissing forms to the left. I can’t add more than Scott Lemieux at LGM, so I won’t.

And with that, I think I’d best get back to work. We’re obviously off the rails here. Apologies, and I’ll try to come to the table with a little more sentence-crafting savvy tomorrow.

I was sitting in the midst of Bitches Brew Revisited, one of the opening-night concerts at the Montreal Jazz Festival — excuse me, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal — when it occurred to me why jazz is so popular here: Because French Canadians are basically French, and the French can be reliably counted on to embrace anything most Americans hate. It makes them feel superior. Perhaps they are superior. They’ve certainly got the charming-city thing figured out. “Bitches Brew,” I’m not so sure. There are moments in that record that feel like genius, others more like the emperor’s new clothes. That’s when your mind wanders.

So I’m starting a list: Things the French Love that (Most) Americans Hate. So far: Modern jazz, sweetbreads, politicians with wandering peckers. Let’s leave Jerry Lewis off for now. Dig deeper.

And yes, we had a fine time in Montreal. You are free to disagree with my contention that French Canadians are “basically French.” I’m aware that to a Parisian, a French Canadian is a knuckle-dragging, fur hat-wearing lummox. A former editor of mine was French Canadian on his mother’s side and spoke the language, and told me a story once of riding in a taxi from the Paris airport, chatting up the driver, who complimented him on his graceful usage while simultaneously disparaging those blockhead Canucks who massacre it every day in his taxi, and… Suddenly this is sounding very much like a taxi story, I realize.

Whatever. I did enjoy being immersed in a different language for a few days, because it reminds you both of how very much you know and how very much you don’t know. I pointed out to Kate several times that faking it through a foreign country isn’t so hard, that much of it is non-verbal puzzle-solving and other tricks. The elevator button for the hotel lobby says R instead of L, but it’s nothing you can’t figure out. Besides, it’s so amusing. The Lonely Planet guide said that even in France, stop signs are red, octagonal and say STOP, but in Quebec, they’re red, octagonal and say ARRET. Still, if you know the red octagon part, you can figure out the rest. And it’s fun to speak fake French, and speculate on why it’s the language of diplomacy; my theory is that it sounds much classier to call someone le sac du douche than just a douchebag.

More stories to come as the week wears on. For now, just this one, transitioning into the bloggage: We were questioned closely at the border, entering Canada, about our plans for the week, and whether we were going to stop in Toronto for the G20 conference.

“The G20 is meeting in Toronto?” I asked. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought, as journalists, you would know about the half billion we’ve spent on security, the anarchist protestors, and all the rest of it,” the guard said.

Shamed! I was shamed. To be sure, the G20 is one of those things I pay attention to when it’s going on, but criminy, buddy, the pregame is sort of the definition of a local story. Nevertheless, once we were in the Globe & Mail circulation area, it was hard to avoid, and coming home Saturday, we stopped for dinner in a suburb of the big T, and watched the violence on live TV. It looked pretty bad, but I’m just going to throw this out there and see what you think:

Police love nothing more than expecting trouble. It gives them a big, big bargaining chip to present to their municipalities, in return for a blank check. When the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Fort Wayne, the sheriff’s deputies fell out in a long row behind a line of riot shields that were so new you could practically see the stickum where the price tags had been. Riot shields are not normally gear the Allen County Sheriff’s Department uses, and I’m sure that was only the beginning. News that the world’s anarchists are coming to your city is music to a cop’s ears, as it represents huge overtime checks, helmets and gas masks and, for the bullies, a license to swing a club.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t rather be patrolling a pleasant summer day in the park. I’m just saying there’s a time in every job when you’re needed, and that feels good to everyone. I’m not saying I agree with the contentions in this rather paranoid article — short version: that, in need of a reason to use all that new equipment and justify its expense, that the police started their own riot — but it’s interesting to think about. The stuff about the shoes is intriguing.

I don’t know what the total damage in Toronto will be. But if half a billion in advance spending couldn’t stop it, maybe a different approach is called for next time.

Full-on bloggage today:

A story for Pride 2010, via Hank: After 45 years, a wedding. Also, an 89-year-old Stonewall vet sits it out this year.

The Back of Town blog — the “Treme” people — gets some love.

The Texas GOP comes out against oral sex. Way to nail down the swing vote, guys.

Susan Ager came out of retirement to write a very long account of her recent brush with endometrial cancer in Sunday’s Free Press. I know the lady had — has — a lot of fans, but I was rarely one of them. She didn’t even rank on the Albom Scale of Irritation, but she could get on my nerves. I can take or leave Sunday’s story — it’s certainly better than most of what they run on that space — but can I just say something? When I was a columnist, I got a certain amount of fan mail, and it wasn’t all from Brian Stouder. But when I published reader letters, I cut that stuff out. If someone wrote me a letter, told me how much they liked my column and then commenced to ask a question about something else, I cut right to the question. So when I read stuff like this…

(The surgeon) smiled at my bedside and said, “You’re meeting me for the first time, but I’ve known you for years through your work.”

…I cringe. What happened to self-effacement? There was a DetNews columnist who did the same thing. When she was off sick, she’d come back and write a column about how sick she’d been, peppered with reader notes about how much they’d missed her beautiful face smiling out of the newspaper. I ask you.

And now I ask you for leave, because, as usual, Monday is a killer.