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.

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.