Hank Stuever had a post on his blog yesterday, about a happy time in his life that coincided with a happy time in my life, i.e., working on the college newspaper. And even though his happy time was a decade after my happy time, it sounds as though the technology we used was about the same, and that was part of the fun of it:

I miss layout. It was probably the only crafty, tactile skill I ever mastered — starting in the journalism room in high school. I miss the waxer, the long strips of freshly developed type set in column inches, the bordertape, the pica poles, the photo reduction-ratio wheels, mitering my corners, the Zip-o-Tone, the 20-percent gray screen half-tones, the light-tables; writing headlines from count orders (”they need a 3-36-1 in 19-pica column width, and don’t forget that flitj only counts for half a character”). I miss the monstrous and cantankerous photostat machine. I miss light blue Copy-Not pens. I miss being able to fix a typo with a knife instead of a reset.

Much of that is probably gibberish to most of you, but to me, that paragraph, loaded with all those terms of art, is what separates a writer from a layout artist. I hadn’t thought about Zip-o-Tone (Zip-A-Tone, to be exact — sorry, Hank) since maybe 1978, and just that phrase brought it all back — the late nights at the Post doing just that, fueled on day-old doughnuts and bad coffee, trading jokes and insults. Disco light table! someone would squeal when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on the radio from down Parkersburg way, flicking the switches on and off during the chorus.

But I think I may have covered this topic before. What I meant to point out was this apt comparison later in Hank’s mini-essay:

I think I derived the same joy from laying out a newspaper that quilters derive from quilting bees. It required concentration, measurement, technique, artistry — but it never distracted you from conversations and gossip and laughs with your collaborators.

Yes. Exactly. It’s the craftiness of it. I’ve never been much for crafts, but like Hank, I miss the camaraderie of building something with your hands in a group. I got a little of that during my time on the copy desk; the work wasn’t so difficult you were risking anyone’s concentration by occasionally noting, out loud, “Name Redacted is the worst writer this newspaper has, and I’ll fight any man who disagrees.” We were just Amish ladies stitching squares together.

So thanks, Hank, for that. And yes, I will join your Layout Club. We can put out a newsletter or something, ol’ skool. I may still have some Letraset lying around here somewhere.

J.C. will probably use his admin status to post a photo in comments from those days. He was one of the supervisors of our backshop, back in the day.

So, anything else today? There’s this: You may have heard how the president of the Detroit Public Schools board imploded last week, or rather…[cue boom-chicka-wow soundtrack] maybe I should say, exploded. Mathis was briefly shamed into resigning after the superintendent accused him of playing pocket pool during their meetings, and if you want the gross details, well, read all about it.

I say “briefly shamed” because he had no sooner resigned than he tried to take it back, claiming “health problems” caused him to take matters into his own hands, ha ha. I think Laura Berman sums up the man in a few devastating sentences, here:

After graduating from Southeastern High School with a D-plus average, he got into Wayne State University in a program for the academically unqualified. When he failed to pass an English language writing exam required for graduation, he sued, claiming the exam discriminated against African-Americans. When the exam was dropped, a decade later, he duly received his bachelor of science degree.

Mathis was praised by his colleagues for his coolness under pressure and his lack of defensiveness: qualities that have stood him in good stead over the years, as he faced down challenges to his competency. As he told me in a March interview, his deficits had been written about before. “People make a lot of noise for a while and then it all blows over,” he said.

Maybe he felt compelled to test how low expectations might really go.

And they were already pretty damn low, let me tell you.

With that, an announcement: I’ll be scarce around here for a while. We’re taking a few days’ vacation, and this time we’re going someplace my cell phone contract doesn’t cover, so no mobile uploads. And where might that be? They speak French there, but it’s in North America. Where could it be? Let me put it this way: I told Kate I wanted to take her to Europe, but we can’t afford Europe, so we’re going for the closest equivalent within driving distance.

So: Au revoir for now, and I’ll see you back here Monday.

The New York Times has a front-pager on the fate of Larry King’s show on CNN, which seems pretty cloudy. The web version features a photo of King taken at the correspondents’ dinner this spring, looking 112 years old. I was shocked to learn he’s only 76; I thought he was 91-year-old Andy Rooney’s college roommate or something.

Everybody lucky to live long enough gets old, but not everybody in their eighth decade is old. I met an 81-year-old man at the Economic Club gala last week who looked like he could tow a tanker down the Houston Shipping Channel with his teeth. King, on the other hand, fairly dodders. If his show goes away at the end of the season — the once-mighty ratings colossus is already well behind Sean Hannity’s and Rachel Maddow’s shows in the same time slot — it will have died of nothing more than terminal geezerhood.

I lost patience with it years ago. I don’t even understand why the show is named after King, as all he does is show up, sit there and occasionally announce a commercial break between unchallenged chunks of celebrity blathering. Jon Carroll once called him a tabula rasa, and that, in my opinion, would be a much better name for the hour: Tabula Rasa with Suspenders Man. Tonight, Kate Gosselin!

I can never, ever in a million years improve upon this James Wolcott takedown of King, pegged to the last week of June 2009, when Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson all kicked the bucket within days of one another. King is at his best, or worst, or whatever-you-call it when celebrities die. I remember reading this in the car on our way down to Defiance one day last summer, and laughing so hard Alan told me to put a sock in it, I was distracting him from the road. A lengthy passage, but all in one paragraph:

For his June 26 show, he assembled an A-list trauma team to pay their respects: Liza Minnelli, Usher, Quincy Jones, and Deepak Chopra. O.K., maybe Deepak dragged the overall grade down to B-plus, but the next evening Larry gave us Cher, Celine Dion, Smokey Robinson, and Corey Feldman—Cher and Celine on the same show being Christmas come early for the drag-queen community underserved by cable news. For the next two weeks, Larry King Live was wall-to-wall Michael Jackson in memoriam, the guest list and the quality of insight being offered beginning to betray moth holes—in a surreal interview with renowned dermatologist Dr. Arnold Klein, rumored to be the biological (sperm donor) father of two of Jackson’s children, King asked, “Is it true that he wanted to look like Peter Pan?,” to which Klein replied, “I didn’t see him implanting wings on the back of his back or doing anything like that, right?”—until the addled nadir was reached during an interview with Jermaine Jackson at the Neverland Ranch when, as an inside tour was being conducted of the vacated rooms, a shadow crossed the end of the hallway. To those who dare to believe, who dare to hope, it was the ghost of Michael Jackson returning to his place of solace. On YouTube, the shadow was there for all to see. “Plenty of America’s most staggering dipshits saw it,” reported Gawker, “so CNN devoted an entire segment on King’s show tonight to solving the mystery. And the answer to all of this is—A crew member walked [past] a lighting fixture, creating a shadow on the wall. Yep, that’s it, just as any person with moderate levels of oxygen flowing to the brain should have deduced on their own.” I’m not sure how large a percentage of CNN’s core demographic fits the definition of “staggering dipshits,” but it is reassuring to know that the network isn’t ignoring their needs.

But that’s King at his best. Most nights he just sits there, grunting. Wolcott again:

Eloquence is not his thing. He solicits and accepts banal clichés that convert every celebrity death into a crunchy meal, while tossing off non sequiturs that keep everyone guessing. Part of what makes King perfect for his role is that he came out of the Walter Winchell world and thinks in staccato three-dot segments (as witness his widely mocked column in USA Today), equipping him with a built-in short attention span that some believe makes him the unofficial godfather of Twitter. A typical Larry King Live is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject. Sitting across from him may be former Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno—whom Larry mistakenly refers to as “Lou Ferragamo,” corrects himself, then repeats the error—and Marlon Brando’s son Miko, dressed in a festive Hawaiian shirt, followed by a panel exploring “the world of celebrity autopsies.”

There was some talk in the NYT story that the reason Hannity and Maddow are thriving and King isn’t is because they appeal to people on the ends of the political spectrum, who want nothing but an amen corner for their own beliefs. Um, no. It’s because they have a pulse. I can’t watch Hannity — those close-set, beady eyes just creep me out — but Maddow registers with me because she seems to have all of her big brain engaged with whomever she’s interviewing. Of course she goes easy on lefties and hard on their opponents, but even a few lobs are more tolerable than King’s non-engagement. You get the idea he’s thinking about his alimony payments.

Or maybe he’s thinking about his replacement. The story speculates on who might replace him. Katie Couric? Eliot Spitzer? But then, once again, comedy gold:

Mr. King has said in the past that his first choice for a successor is the entertainer Ryan Seacrest.

I’d watch that if he wore suspenders.

OK, another morning when I’d like to get the exercise over with early — it’ll be mid-80s before too long. I leave you with a bit of bloggage:

The non-link between vaccines and autism, as explained by Dr. Andrew Wakefield… in comics! Via Metafilter, where a commenter adds the Jenny McCarthy Body Count.

And may I just say, yesterday’s comment thread was fantastic? I never knew that about Austin Peay, the college whose name rhymes with “pee.” Basset, last night: Back in the, I don’t know, late 60s or early 70s the star of Austin Peay’s basketball team was one Fly Williams… which led to the cheer, “The Fly is open! Let’s go, Peay!” You guys are great.

And now I’m off. Rumor has it Greg Kinnear is shooting a movie in the Farms, so I’m off on bike patrol to gawk.

Hey, pals. I spent the morning writing a column for GrossePointeToday.com, which some of you might enjoy. Here’s the top:

For many years, center-left people like me knew who the bad guys were — the religious right. We learned to recognize their code words, their iterations and mash-ups of “family,” “values,” “faith” and “life.” (They, in turn, knew ours — “diversity,” “tolerance,” “embrace” and the all-important “people of” usage.) I suppose, in the back of my mind, I knew the pendulum would swing away from them someday, but as long as they could get respect from the people who spent my tax money, the watchword was vigilance.

What I didn’t expect was the emotion I felt watching the strange, bumbling comedy at the War Memorial Thursday night (March 25), where a little-known Grosse Pointe Farms group called Point of Relevance sponsored a presentation by one Linda Harvey, a Columbus, Ohio woman whose group, Mission: America, seeks — quoting from their website here — “to equip Christians with current, accurate information about cultural issues such as feminism, homosexuality, education and New Age influences.” Harvey came expecting to speak to the like-minded Point of Relevance. But they were outnumbered by a crowd of my people, scrambled via social networks and e-mail, holding signs and itching for a confrontation.

As a journalist, I’ve seen many such divided crowds, taunting one another. But I’ve never looked at the other side and felt this: Pity.

You can read the rest here. I’m not much for the cross-posting thing — most of you live elsewhere, I know — but I can’t be two people, people!

Besides, I have some good bloggage today:

Hank found a photo from the White House’s Flickr stream, and got a pretty good blog post out of it. It’s of special interest to those of you who write, for the living or for the love. If you follow his link back to the original on Flickr, you can blow the photo up huge and examine it in detail. It’s worth it.

But don’t stay there — on the White House’s photostream — too long. You can get lost in there.

This letter, “from a doctor who will not comply,” is racing around the internets. I’m calling b.s. on it. From the too-generic name (Linda Johnston, MD) to the suspicious lack of any identifying details (city or even state of practice), to the casual use of questionable statistics (Obamacare creates 150 new government agencies), to the oddly literate, flowing prose, the letter is pegging my meter. The time-stamp on my Facebook call on this was about 8:30 a.m. I’ll apologize if I’m wrong, but if I’m right, I want credit.

And while we’re on the subject of doctors, real ones, I know the one in this NYT story today. Mike Mirro is a cardiologist in Fort Wayne, one of the very very best, and this story is important. Read.

With that, I’m out. Have a great weekend.

The journalism world, such as it is these days, is discussing Randy Michaels’ no-no list. The former radio wrecking ball, now the CEO — I get dizzy just thinking about it — of the Tribune Co. issued a list of 119 words and phrases that must never, ever be heard again on the company’s news-talk station, WGN.

This story is being spun as a monumental case of micromanagement. It is. However, it is nothing new. Every media outlet in the world has a boss who hands down these edicts; it’s one of the perks of the top job — creating a world unto yourself in which no one ever, ever uses the word butt. The only thing that makes this case different is the fact it’s the CEO doing it. In most companies, especially one like the Tribune Co., inevitably referred to as “troubled,” the CEO is — should be — the big-picture guy standing on the bridge looking at the seas ahead, scanning for icebergs, not going below to instruct the coal-shovelers on the proper angle to wear their sailor caps. Not in Chicago, evidently. Ah, well.

Here’s the other thing: Michaels kind of has the right idea, or seems to have backed into the right idea. A big chunk of the entries on the list are the sort of trite journalese that anyone with a sensitive ear hates — clash with police, say, or went terribly wrong, or one of my personal pet peeves, diva. (I prefer the simpler bitch.) Looking at the rest of the list, though, I’m going to assume the smart part of it is simply a case of a monkey banging out the first act of “Hamlet.” Remember, this is Lee Abrams’ other half.

I’m going to further assume that many of these words never made it onto WGN’s air to begin with. Fatal death for instance. An intern might write that, but presumably it wasn’t a routine usage. Ditto bare naked and medical hospital. I looked in vain for controversial, and didn’t find it. He got famed in there, but not all its variations; generally, I follow the rule that if something is famous, you don’t need to remind people.

The list also bans certain words journalists rely on to protect ourselves — alleged, for one. Laypeople hate that one. I think Eric Zorn tackled it after the Flight 253 near-disaster, when a reader complained that we shouldn’t be calling Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the “alleged terrorist.” Zorn said yes we should, because that’s what we do — it’s not the news media’s job to decide when you’re guilty, but a court of law’s. If you don’t like it, you can always move to Afghanistan. Or tune your radio to WGN.

Zorn looked at the list, and the fallout, on his blog yesterday. In his defense, Michaels and his underling point out there’s nothing wrong with striving for clear writing, from the CEO all the way down. Agreed. But please explain, gents: What’s your problem with pedestrian? Is there a better word for a person walking across a street? Or officials? Don’t forget that news writing evolved the way it did because those sentences have to carry a lot of freight. It’s easier for listeners for a broadcaster to say “city officials said” rather than “street department, police and fire and parks and recreation supervisors said.”

With that, I go behind closed doors. I seem to have turned a corner, health-wise, but not work-wise. So you all enjoy Friday, and I’ll see you in the wake of the weekend.

I spent most of Friday doing something at the last minute. (So sue me, I have a journalist’s heart. We do things at the last minute.) Considering I was judging college journalism, that seemed fitting.

Fifty entries in an SPJ contest. I read every one. I liked many of them. When it came time to pin the ribbons, I felt the usual remorse that so many good entries wouldn’t go away with a prize. I expected all of this. What I didn’t expect was this: How little has changed. I’m not talking about the flag of The Post, my collegiate alma mater, still recognizable after, what? Thirty years of subsequent editorial staffs? (Admirable restraint, if you ask me. The first thing a new editor does in the real world is order a sweeping redesign. Ninety percent of the time, a criminal waste of effort.)

No, I’m talking about the form itself — the student newspaper. By this time, the new media should have swept college campuses. There shouldn’t be a student newspaper, but rather, a completely interactive platform-neutral information stream, processing all the important news on campus — in my day, record reviews, classified ads on apartments and two-for-one pizza coupons — into a seamless garment of data accessible on everything from a laptop to a phone, plus Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of it. Maybe, somewhere, that is the case. All I know is that I saw traditional news stories written in traditional ways, presented in traditional layouts on traditional ink-on-paper. It was more than traditional. In fact, it was retro: At one point, I beheld a headline with a kicker. You know what a kicker is? It’s the little mini-headline that runs over the main head, usually with a rule underneath, usually just a few words:

Swine flu sweeps freshman dorms; vaccination clinic announced. Kicker: ‘Sick as a dog’

I haven’t seen a kicker in professional journalism since Jim Barbieri was writing them at the Bluffton News-Banner. That is to say: A while.

There are two ways of looking at this. One, that colleges are seriously failing journalism students by keeping student papers around at all, like a school offering buggy whip-braiding classes in 1925. Or maybe, just maybe, the newspaper isn’t a terrible way to deliver news in any environment, but particularly on campus, where kids frequently find themselves with 20 minutes to kill between this and that, and a paper is not only an efficient delivery vehicle for the information those students might want, but actually, I dunno, something pleasant to pass the time with.

I’m holding with hope. It’s all I’ve got. Although a word of advice to student journalists: You can almost always make your stories shorter. You’re competing with Twitter, you know.

And now the weekend is over, and I’m facing a two-week sprint unlike many of recent years. Good news: It’s work, it’s paying work, and that’s good. Bad news: Might be spotty around here for a while. But you guys are good conversationalists; you can carry this dump for a few days here and there.

Let’s start with an underreported story, in my opinion: What if health-insurance reform dies, as so many seem to want? What then? The cost of doing nothing. Not cheering.

Or try this: A white sorority wins a step contest, traditionally an all-black show. What then? Metafilter has a nosegay of links, and from watching their performance, I’d say they brought it.

Dear Mr. President, Stop smoking. Try Chantix — I hear it works.

And that’s it for me today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Nathan Gotsch, one of those young squeaky-clean Fort Wayne guys for whom the phrase “you went to Concordia, didn’t you?” was coined, is trying to produce a TV pilot far away from the Man, man. It’s an expansion of his Josh Jennings for Congress spoof of 2006 — he produced a campaign commercial for a fictional character who decided a job in the House of Representatives would be way better than one at Subway. He got a little attention, if “being mentioned on Tucker Carlson’s show” counts as “a little attention,” and I think it does.

Anyway, Nathan got some attention from the Man, and after considering what going the traditional route would entail, decided to blaze an indie trail. He’s put together a budget for a $25,000 pilot production, and is trying to raise the dough via Kickstarter. Here’s his fundraising page.

I read the script and it’s pretty funny. (Funnier than “Reno 911,” anyway.) If you’d like to help Nathan, go to his Kickstarter page, watch the video, marvel at how much he resembles the absolute essence of a Concordia graduate, and, if you’re so inclined, kick him a few bucks. He has a week to raise about $15K. Goad to my fellow Hoosiers, past and present — although the pilot script never explicitly says so, the story’s set in Fort Wayne, and I can assume this would come up in subsequent episodes. However, if it gets picked up, I think we can expect to see Nathan’s crew in Michigan for exteriors shooting, because we have the fat tax incentives. (For now.) So win-win all around for my Midwest playas.

No pressure, just a chance to use a Web 2.0 idea for good, for a change. (You know how Kickstarter works, right? Nathan only gets the money if he reaches his goal. If not, you’re not billed. That way you aren’t giving him cash to drink away his sorrows because he didn’t get enough to make his pilot.)

Given the bummer tone of recent days, let’s make this Twinkle Thursday, and strive for optimism in all things. It’s what Josh would do.

While this isn’t exactly a happy-news sort of thing, I’m calling it out because it makes me feel optimistic about the future — of journalism, anyway. One of our readers, Kim, left it low in the comments of yesterday’s post, but let’s drag it out into the light of day:

Bob (not Greene) and all the other journos out there who have been accused of making it up: Here’s the story we used from a student journalist who was at the boring press conference but paying close attention (and recording it) because she didn’t want to get it wrong. Note the link to actually listen to the state delegate saying the words he now says were “poorly chosen” and misinterpreted. As you might expect, there’s been a fecal avalanche as a result. Rachel M., HuffPost, Sally Quinn – everybody’s weighing in. There’s a movement to skewer the student reporter because she is a student and because much larger, “actual” papers were present and totally missed it. Why’d they miss it? My guess is they were just making the doughnuts, going to a conservative legislator’s press conference about de-funding Planned Parenthood and filing that Saturday feed-the-beast story. Similar to the reason a local delegate who was present as a supporter of de-funding PP did not hear it – she admitted to not paying attention because she was talking to another delegate. Quite a lesson for the student. I’d say for public officials everywhere, too, but that would make me seem much younger than I am.

The story, if you’re not inclined to click through, quotes a state delegate’s interesting opinion about why there are so many disabled children in the world:

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Marshall, well, he now says he didn’t exactly say that:

“No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion. I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents.”

In other words: Shit. And you were recording? Double shit.

I love it when Roger damns with faint praise. In this case, reviewing “The Crazies.”

“The Crazies” is a perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the Zombie Film. It provides such a convenient storytelling device: Large numbers of mindless zombies lurch toward the camera as the hero wreaks savage destruction; they can be quickly blown away, although not without risk and occasional loss of life. When sufficient zombies have been run through, it’s time for a new dawn.

“The Crazies” stars NN.C crush object Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, two actors who class up the joint, although I watched the trailer and it uses the old “no signal” cell-phone trope. As they say in that other zombie movie: One more for the bonfire. (That link doesn’t go to an imdB page, by the way, but to a great “no signal” montage, via John August, which he credits to FourFour. Has all due credit been passed around? I hope so.)

It’s 9:47, which means my Flex Appeal class starts in 13 minutes and I must away. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you, dear readers. So I’m going out to play.

The temperature rose yesterday to a notch or two above freezing, then fell. A dusting of new snow arrived around nightfall. Fog covered everything until it froze, and that’s where it stands now — silver-plated world. Everything is white, not too cold, and the air is so heavy with moisture it can mean only one thing. One or two more inches coming up from the south; should be here momentarily. I’d like to take a walk in it. Maybe I will.

From Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, No. 1: Never open a book with weather. Well, this isn’t a book. It’s the first draft of personal history. And I’m allowed to talk about the weather.

A job I wish I had: Smashing up the ice on the St. Clair River. Seriously. My favorite thing is when the spring rains come in cloudbursts, and the storm drain in front of my neighbor’s house clogs with spring tree-gunk, and I get to wade through the warm puddles with my rake and clear it. Actually piloting an icebreaker through a troublesome jam to send the backed-up water on its way? Bliss. It would be storm-drain clearance on steroids.

Nance’s Rules of Writing: Don’t use stupid, dated, not-very-creative-when-they-were-coined, let-alone-now catch phrases like “on steroids.”

OK, then. I don’t want to continue yesterday’s depressing discussion for too much longer — I mean, in a silver world, you want to be optimistic — but I caught part of “Fresh Air” yesterday, and it seemed to pertain, a little. Journalist David Weigel of the Washington Independent was speaking on the new right, the right on steroids, the super-righty right represented by the teabaggers and CPAC. You know CPAC — these are the folks who were making jokes about flying a plane into an IRS building and killing a 68-year-old veteran (two tours, Vietnam). And of course you know the Tea Party.

I was struck by the portion of the interview where Terry Gross asked Weigel about what the teabaggers believe about the financial meltdown that started the cascading economic catastrophes of the past two years. He said they blame the whole thing on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the Community Reinvestment Act, which is both not surprising and pretty depressing. I’ve said this before and it didn’t originate with me, but this is what we’re moving toward — a media landscape where not only spin varies from outlet to outlet, but the very facts themselves. Wall Street is not underregulated; Barney Frank is the problem. And vaccines cause autism, of course they do.

Here’s the other thing that struck me: How the sorts of wackos I used to hear on my radio show(s) back in the day — the freakazoids who stayed up all night at the card table under the bare light bulb, writing their single-spaced manifestos or letters to the editor or whatever, who would call and rant about the Bilderbergers and the Federal Reserve and the loss of the gold standard and (my personal favorite) Ezra Pound, that genius — these folks are now being welcomed into the mainstream conservative movement. And they have some new entertaining ideas, about the president’s birth certificate and death panels and so on. And a new spokesgal, who is much prettier than they are.

How comforting.

I ran into one of these guys one day, at Best Buy. I thought it was brave of him to introduce himself, although I probably should have recognized him from his public-access TV show. We chatted a bit. He was pricing camcorders, but dammit, none of them had the feature he needed. Which was?

“Night vision,” he said.

His public-access show was entertaining. This is how he gave web addresses: “H, T, T, P. Colon. Backslash, backslash. T-R-I-P-O-D. Dot — this is a period — C-O-M. Backslash. Tilde. This is the key to the left of the numeral 1, but you have to shift…”

Anyway, they were joking from the CPAC podium about Joseph Stack, the IRS bomber. Had to check to make sure it wasn’t Grover Norquist at the controls, ha ha. Imagine the reaction if– oh, why bother even bringing it up? The liberal media, etc. etc.

I’ll say this: I’m really glad I don’t live in Indiana anymore. I’m sure these folks are all over the place. I see two Don’t Tread on Me flags waving in the neighborhood here, but it’s not a friendly place for the most part, so I don’t feel like I have to smile at them or anything.

Ach. We need to go out with some levity. How about this essay on Rielle Hunter’s “quiet dignity.” Not talking to the media about your stupid life choices qualifies as quiet dignity now? Evidently:

In the early days, Americans came to think of her in the sleaziest terms: the former party girl who used sexual wiles and New Age mumbo jumbo to steal Elizabeth’s husband. Most self-respecting women would feel compelled to say something, anything, in their own defense. And most modern mistresses would do much more than that. A fame-chasing Rielle would have come forward in the first days of her sex scandal, even if it meant defying John’s wishes. She would have talked and talked as the interviews declined in influence, the sad journey from Barbara Walters to Billy Bush. By now she’d have finished her book tour. We’d see her hawking an Internet sex column or sharing Twitpics of Quinn to thousands of followers.

Or maybe, just mayyybeee, she’s holding out for the big payday. Just a thought. Maybe the quiet-dignity meter was recalibrated while I was worrying about the Tea Party, but in my experience, a person who has it doesn’t say things like this:

That same spring, Rielle came to dinner at my home in New York. The Edwardses had just announced that Elizabeth’s cancer was back and was incurable, engendering a national outpouring of support. That didn’t stop Rielle from explaining to the group at dinner, which included journalists from other national publications, that Elizabeth had gotten cancer because she was filled with “bad energy.”

OK, then. Back to the sweatshop! Copy due in two hours!

Since we’ve all decided this recession, the Great Recession, will leave a wide and deep footprint in our national soul, journalists have begun sketching it out. Yesterday on “Talk of the Nation” they were discussing this story in the Atlantic, which I haven’t read and don’t intend to, because it’s February and I’m coping with my usual winter subclinical grumps, and who needs more?

This one, from Sunday’s NYT, sort of snuck up on me, hiding as it was in the Styles section; I thought Sunday Styles was the place you went to avoid reading about strife and misery, but maybe this doesn’t count, although it does to me:

In 18 months, Ms. Lentini went from editing one daily newsletter to still editing that one, as well as the 10 weeklies that generated new ad revenue at no extra cost to her company. Of course, there was a cost: her free time. “It’s, ‘How many plates can I keep going?’ ” she said. “You’re giddy with hysteria.”

She now starts at 7:30 a.m. instead of 9, and works Saturday and Sunday mornings. The night of the Super Bowl, she finished at 11. When she was first hired, she had money to pay someone to fill in during her two vacation weeks. That ended with the recession, so now she doubles her workload the week before vacation. Holidays? “I work most holidays,” she said.

Even while driving one of her daughters to an after-school job as a hair salon receptionist, Ms. Lentini works. “Bridget holds the laptop,” she said. “She’ll say, ‘Mom, you got an I.M. from the photo editor.’ She’ll read it to me, I’ll say, ‘Just put ‘O.K.,’ and write ‘tx’ for thanks. So I can work and drive.”

The story was about the new way we do more with less, and then some more, and some more on top of that, and wondered what might happen when the recession ends, if it ever really does — will we still work this way? My own experience says yes, of course we will; that’s certainly the way it was in newspapers during our long slide, which presaged the general economic collapse. I used to liken it to starving to fit into a two-sizes-smaller dress by prom night or your wedding day or whatever. Diet-diet-diet-celery-water-diet, keep pulling everything in and then comes weigh-in day (quarterly numbers) and whew, you just made it to your goal! Yahoo! [Pause.] Now lose 10 more pounds.

I wonder because I heard from an editor yesterday, pointing out several sloppy goofs in a story I’d handled, and not only was he right, I knew why I made the mistakes: Because I’d edited that story at 1:30 a.m., after a seven-hour shift on my other job. I was still working because I knew I’d have trouble sleeping that night (even though I was exhausted). Why? Because I’m stressed out at how much I have to do. It’s a loop.

I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering. I wonder why we tell our friends story after story about work, its miseries and occasional joys, and yet, so few of our entertainments are about work. (Except for the usual venues — police stations, hospitals and forensics units.) The answer is obvious, I guess: Why pay for a novel or movie about something I live every day? A few years I noticed something: How often the people I met in the pages of a book were independently wealthy, either through family fortunes or early-career windfalls that left them with the means to have novel-worthy midlife crises uncluttered by having to show up at work every day.

One of the many things to admire about “Office Space” is how well it captures the existential misery of life in a cubicle farm, from the chirpy receptionist to the passive-aggressive boss to the ritual of the office birthday cake. You can almost taste the cheap frosting. My favorite sequence in “Up in the Air” is when the three main characters sneak into another company’s Miami team-building party; there’s something about the way the m.c. greets all the members of the best! sales staff! in the southeast region! that sent chills down my spine. (Not that I’ve ever been to such an event. In journalism they just bark, “Back to your oar, 42.” The Miami sojourns for Knight-Ridder were known as Prick School.)

And yet, existential misery is preferable to unemployment, isn’t it? The new normal will be no Miami at all. And no health insurance. The new model for freelancing is Crowdspring, which puts a high gloss on the feeding frenzy. It works like this: You post a project, saying, “I will pay $300 for a logo for our start-up business. It should convey the idea of “bookishness,” but be really smart and sorta techno and have blue in it. Show me what you got.” And then dozens of starving designers (or writers, if that’s the project) do the work and submit it. You pick your favorite and pay your pittance, and everyone else goes home hungry. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

If you have a job, you’re grateful. If you have a job you like, you have rubies and diamonds. Pause a moment to appreciate it.

The Daily Telegraph asks a number of writers to list their Top 10 rules for writing. Part one here, link to part two in part one. Will Self made me laugh:

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Now, I must go to work. (Which I like very much. I only wish it paid better, especially when there’s eight inches of snow atop my aging roof.)

Yay, Mitch Albom is reporting from Haiti.

Will there be stupid one-sentence paragraphs?

Do you even need to ask?

Who will be in the photos?

Could it be Mitch Himself?

Again: Grow up.

Actually, in mellow moments, a state of mind I strive to reach more frequently, I wonder if Mitch is the world’s happiest man these days. I wonder if, as so often happens in life and three-act screenplays, whether the brass ring he was chasing hasn’t revealed itself to be cheap paint covering zinc and not that shiny at all. I had a drink not long ago with someone who admired Albom’s early work in Detroit, and says he really was a different guy, once upon a time. He had wit and style and — this is key — enough of a bad-ass inside him to occasionally be naughty. Then he saw the opportunity to cash in by warming hearts. There’s always a buck to be made in the heart-warming trade. Ask the people who make greeting cards and much of the advertising inflicted upon us during events like the Olympics. In Mitch’s case he made many, many bucks, and now look what’s become of him.

If I went to Haiti, I’d hire the roughest, toughest fixer I could find and ask to be taken on the Full Carnage Tour. I’d want to see voodoo ceremonies and makeshift hospitals and squatters living in rubble piles. Mitch has to go to the Caring and Sharing Mission, where he will write about the Noble Poor, Who Are Down But Not Out, Because They Have Love. Just a scan of the subheads makes your teeth hurt:

“Seeing the miraculous,” “Feeling joy and pain,” Doing what we must” — has a story ever announced itself to be more joyless? Could there be a single thing in there you feel you haven’t read before? Haiti is poor. Haiti is tragic. Haiti is our responsibility. Haiti is yet another opportunity for Mitch to warm your heart and tell you again what you already knew — it’s bad, but others are on the case, fighting the good fight, and yes, you can write them a check — while simultaneously throwing in little details of what a good guy he is:

It does not take long to settle in here. I put down my bag, blow up an air mattress and place it on the floor of the pastor’s quarters. That’s it.

Millionaire Mitch sleeps on the floor. That’s how poor Haiti is.

I wonder if, late at night in his counting-house, surrounded by his treasure chests full of gold or bales of cash or in his cashmere underwear personally woven by his investment advisor, if he ever looks out the window at the moonlight on the snow and thinks, This job used to be more fun. When your whole life is one long Good Deed, when you walk into every public event with that half-smile of smug self-effacement (yes, it exists), when you sit behind a microphone and say things like, “No, no the real heroes are the people who do this work every single day. I’m just the guy who tells the rest of you about them” — is there ever a small voice inside that says, You are so, so full of shit. Go ahead, tell them that, Mr. Modesty.

No, I didn’t think so, either.

Here’s my heart of hearts speaking: When I learned Warren Zevon was a friend of this man, my opinion of Warren fell by 37 percent. That’s saying something.

Oh, well. There are still honest writers in the world. Roger Ebert responds to the Esquire piece. Says he’s not really dying all that fast, and that his cholesterol is excellent. Which is sort of funny, when you think of it. Ebert gets the Tom Sawyer experience of attending his own funeral and hearing what all his friends have to say about him. What a lucky guy.

The man who made his bones wearing a stupid bow tie, name-dropping philosophers and making a who-farted expression on a thousand Sunday-morning news-chat shows says loathing for Sarah Palin is born of “snobbery.” Now that’s bein’ ballsy, George Will!

Back to the mangle for me, folks.

From the number of times this story turned up in my Facebook feed yesterday I have to assume everyone’s seen it by now, but not all of you stay online all day, so what the hell. It’s about Roger Ebert, and what his life is like now that he’s lost the ability to speak, eat and drink. (He lost his jaw to cancer four years ago, and reconstructive surgery has been one failure after another.)

Ebert posed for a picture; with his imperfectly fixed face, that requires no small amount of courage in and of itself. I’m glad he did, not just because it’s better to show one’s broken face than to hide it, but because even a face that’s half-gone can still show the man within. Look at the eyes, squinched a little in what looks like merriment, although you can’t say for sure at first glance — the mouth has been shaped by surgeons into a simulacrum of a smile, and maybe that’s what leads your impression. But once you read the story, you know: This is a man who smiles, who still smiles, who in fact seems to be smiling much of the time. He’s angered not by the fate of his physical body, but by the same things he was angered by before, that anger us all — petty bullshit, money-grubbing, spotty internet service.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.

I came late to my appreciation of Ebert. I was a Siskel partisan, once upon a time. Siskel was like me — snooty, irritable, a fan of Art. Ebert, the tabloid critic, was more of the hoi polloi, giving three and a half stars to action movies, space epics and other crap. It was a while before I realized he was as difficult to please as any discerning arbiter, but he knew enough about movies and why people see them to judge them as individuals. “Con Air” is not “Citizen Kane,” but he didn’t see any reason to rub anyone’s nose in it if they preferred action to Orson Welles. Mostly, I was in awe of his productivity. It’s pretty common — or was — for large newspapers to have an A critic and a B critic, the latter of whom was sometimes a freelancer. The A critic does the big-movie reviews and most of the related stories, roundups and the like, while the B critic sweeps up behind him or her, or just lightens the load. It’s not unusual for half a dozen movies to open on a summer weekend, ranging from blockbusters to art-house fare, and that’s a lot of stuff to see, consider and review in a week. Five years ago, I changed planes in Chicago on a Friday and picked up a Sun-Times. Ebert had bylines on six reviews, and I believe they covered that range of ambition. His take on the barrel-bottom straight-to-video entry was as considered, and as respectful, as his thoughts on the $200 million tentpole playing in all the multiplexes.

Respectful doesn’t mean boot-licking, by the way. Like my old screenwriting teacher Terry, who was also a critic, he walks into every film expecting to enjoy himself. (That’s what the audience does, after all; why would you pay eight bucks to be punished?) To the extent that the film fulfills or disappoints that expectation is what he bases his reviews on. It seems like a small thing. It isn’t. You might think you’re a movie fan, but imagine what it would be like to be required to see everything, and then write about it afterward, to have to form an opinion, support the opinion, and then present it to a general audience in a more stylish way than merely saying whether it was awesome or sucked.

Now imagine doing it for 40 years or so, never losing your enthusiasm, and in fact adding to your workload with extra assignments like his Great Movies series (which began as a Sunday column, swapped off every other week with the music critic, who wrote about the Great Albums), and the TV show, and the teaching gigs, and the film-festival work, and all the rest of it.

Now add cancer and facial mutilation, the literal loss of your voice. Tell me how you feel about it then.

The fact Ebert is still at work in any capacity, much less at full speed, is nothing short of a miracle. His last extended leave, when he nearly died, he missed months of movies. When he came back, he resumed his old blistering pace, and then watched the movies he’d missed, a few at a time, writing reviews of them, so that the record would be complete. I think he knows what his opinion means to the moviegoing public. I don’t see a lot of movies in theaters, but I try to catch up with the bigs eventually, and I never feel like I’ve watched it all the way until I’ve opened the laptop afterward to see what Roger thought of it.

Lord knows he’s not perfect. I disagree with him on many films, and his fondness for Spike Lee will always come between us. But in every other way — expertise, attitude, practice — he is nothing short of a hero.

Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled “Go Gently into That Good Night.” I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Years ago, I was watching the cultural kerfuffle over “The Passion of the Christ,” probably on Amy Welborn’s blog, because that was the sort of thing she wrote about a lot, back then. Ebert gave the film four stars, but the review is hardly worshipful, and he states outright that “it is the most violent movie I have ever seen.” I mentioned this review somewhere in her comments sections, and someone else retorted, Roger Ebert is an old man and he’s dying. His opinion no longer matters, or words to that effect. This was before his illness had taken its most serious tolls (he’s fought it for years), but I was amazed by not only the cruelty of that remark, but its utter ignorance. Roger Ebert’s opinion not only still matters, it will matter for a long time after he’s gone. If that isn’t the best epitaph a writer can hope for, I don’t know what is.