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.

For a place where ideas are supposed to be exchanged in a lively manner, most newspaper editorial pages are, well, not.

The one in Columbus, when I was there, was the last stop before retirement, the place for loyal but lame geldings to put their whitening muzzles to the lush grass for the last couple of years, and be asked to do no work more difficult than carrying the children around the pasture, and have I mixed enough metaphors? (I’m told it has since improved. Considerably.) One of the young newsroom guns used to publish an equal parts scathing-and-fun internal critique of the paper, and did a hilarious takedown of Dispatch editorials. At least twice a month the page could be reliably counted on to take note of an approaching holiday, welcome it, and hope it heralded good things. I remember one such headline: Bean Can Day Awaited. Readers, do you know that “bean can day,” in quotes, does not turn up a single result in all of Googledom? Could that aging scribe have been having his own joke, turning in an editorial for a holiday entirely born of his imagination, waiting to see if it would run? I think so. He was like the National Lampoon’s Penthouse parody, where the copy around the centerfold, month after month, was the text of the writer’s resignation letter, never accepted because it was never read.

My friend Leo does his best with what he has to work with in Fort Wayne, and that’s not bloody much, but even in the high-cotton days, I wondered about the paper’s peculiar attachment to certain writers, both local and syndicated. I think we had to have been among the last papers still running the vile Joseph Sobran, years after William F. Buckley himself had cashiered the anti-semitic bastard from the National Review. (Here’s a recent effort, “Sodomy, Abortion and the Forces of Hate,” in which he refers to our “mulatto president” — still swingin’!) And then there was the uniquely awful Thomas Sowell.

I don’t think this takedown of his latest book can be improved upon, so I’ll just link, quote a passage or two, and encourage the rest of you wallow in it the way I did:

Even jeremiads should have their joys; there is something so wonderful about being a writer and a critic that delivering even bad news can be a source of unbearable pleasure. But Sowell takes no joy in anything he has to say: his tone is as dour and depressing as his conclusions. I understand that the man is a conservative, but can’t he crack a smile? Sowell is such a plodder that even sarcasm, conservatism’s reliable and sometimes amusing old ally, is beyond his reach.

This business of dreary writing escapes me. True, writing can be a torment. But then there is the payoff: the unexpected insight, the sly pun, the implication left dangling for the reader to run with. Did Sowell’s research assistants, one of whom has worked for him for two decades, ever hear him shout with joy? Did he ever run into a colleague’s office bursting with enthusiasm about a brilliant sentence that made a whole chapter hang together? I cannot believe it. There is no grandeur in Sowell’s words, no sign of human creativity, no dream or fantasy of immortality. Sowell writes as if called to grim duty.

It’s that good all the way through. I love a piece like this that singles out something you hadn’t thought of but, once it’s pointed out to you, hits you like a sledgehammer. In focusing on Sowell’s unique joylessness, he puts his finger on what’s wrong with so many newspaper editorial pages. Leo frequently pointed out that the death of oxygenated editorial pages tracked with the rise of the one-newspaper town, that the monopoly on print advertising led to the current model of point-counterpoint, on one hand/on the other hand, and what does the future hold? Only time will tell. Whatever. That doesn’t explain how Sowell found such a comfortable home on his page, but Sowell certainly towed toed the ideological line, if also being as boring as dry toast.

Joyless — that’s exactly the word for it. Elsewhere in that story I learned with amazement that Sowell has published 46 books. Forty-six! As Wolfe notes:

I confess to not having read them all. But I have read enough of them to know that Sowell is not one for changing his mind. Although he claims to have been a Marxist in his youth, his published writings never vary: the same themes—the market works, affirmative action does not work, Marxism is wrong, and, yes, intellectuals are never to be trusted—dominate from start to finish.

I’ll say. Ironic that Sowell writes like a mirror image of a good Marxist apparatchik in Stalin’s Soviet Union, ain’a?

While we’re on the subject of writers, two recommendations before I leave:

This NYT piece on the discovery of a major influence on William Faulker — a diary kept by a plantation owner who was an ancestor of a childhood friend — is full of great details, not the least of which is its description of the diary itself:

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

And, finally, another NYT story on another celebrated author, this one 17 years old and German, who is battling plagiarism accusations after her hot book of the moment was found to have lots of cutting and pasting from other sources. This strikes me as a rather ballsy defense, however:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

In other words, the sampler’s excuse, i.e., I took that previous thing, yes, but I made it my own. Feh. People who say there’s no such thing as originality are, what’s the word? Unoriginal.

Finally, a good ChiTrib piece on the death of a lesbian bar. A little melancholy, but not — the story points out that as the gay community is welcomed into the mainstream, it has less use for bars as community centers. Anything that gets people out of the smoky air and into the light can’t be all bad.

OK, I’ve prattled on too long and I have much work to do. Enjoy the weekend.

I think I just shot my writing time firing off a thousand-word memo to the students staffing GrossePointeToday.com. It started off as a general guide to covering small city councils, and, as usual, became something else. When something starts with “be on time” and ends with a little story about how I overcame my fear of the New York City subway system, I know I’ve lost the thread. Ah, well. Someday, kids, I’ll be famous, and that memo will be worth something. If I can stop writing memos long enough to get anything else done, that is.

I’ve got about a million things on my mind at the moment, so let’s fall back on that time-tested trick of lazy columnists everywhere — the three-dotter. I called it Items in Search of a Column when I was doing that sort of thing, but I’m repudiating all ties with my former employer, having learned yesterday that they laid off the last remaining full-time staff photographer, along with two other people, late last week. (What’s more, they called the guy in from his vacation to fire him.) A newspaper without photographers, yes. Reporters now carry point-and-shoot cameras and take their own pictures, the standard bush-league model. When I joined that outfit, it was a year off of winning a Pulitzer Prize and, needless to say, writers wrote and photographers photographed. But that was a long time ago.

I’m changing my resume, anyway. New item: 1984-2004: In a coma. It would be less embarrassing.

…For the record, while I only heard it from an adjacent room, it sounded like the Who sucked eggs at the Super Bowl. If nothing else, it inspired my daughter to ask, “Why do only old people perform at halftime?” Alan: “Because the last time they let young people do it, Janet Jackson showed her boobie.” She did like the laser light show, but for the love of Mike, can we book someone other than the Motown All-Stars or some other geezer outfit for 2011? Just a thought.

…More bad news from my hometown: Casa d’Angelo on Fairfield is closing its doors. “Declining revenue,” etc. Today’s story says it’s a domino effect following the closing of a nearby hospital SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, and the emphasis should tell you what I think of that one. Well, it’s their business, they can do what they want. But it’s a loss for the neighborhood that will no doubt be cheered on by the knuckle-draggers, who have been trashing Fort Wayne’s south side as long as I can remember. They think it’s unsafe, which struck me as ridiculous then and even more so now that my bad-neighborhood meter has been recalibrated to Detroit standards. I used to despair that Hoosiers would rather buy a new house in a subdivision exactly like every other one than a craftsman bungalow for half the price in my neighborhood. Looks like nothing has changed.

…Does anything ever change? Sometimes I wonder.

…My cheer at the Saints victory, which was previously predicated on the simple thrill of seeing a feisty underdog defeat their smug betters, escalated to joy upon watching this video. The fact it irks knuckle-draggers who resent the conflating of a football team with the social upheaval of Hurricane Katrina is just the whipped cream on my sundae.

…I hate the new Facebook, whatever it is at the moment. Someone asked the other day if I’d pay for Facebook. Most days, I’d pay to be forcibly disconnected from it. Even as I continue to use it, yes.

…Jezebel on unretouched Madonna. Thanks, LAMary. I find these photos as impossible to resist as chocolate cream pie in the refrigerator, something Madonna doubtless hasn’t tasted in decades.

And with that, it’s into the shower with me. Sorry for the scrambled eggs, but we have a snowpocalypse under way, and I need to run my errands early.

Alan and I are having one of our occasional squabbles (“The Atlantic is a better ocean! The Pacific is a better ocean!”) over the lede on this story:

DETROIT — The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The story is about Toyota’s sudden-acceleration problem, of course. The driver is described as an “off-duty California Highway Patrol officer.” We both agree that when one is in a car with an apparently stuck accelerator, the first thing to do is shift into neutral. However, I maintain that anyone in a highway patrol would have advanced training in high-speed driving and would know this in his bones, and if he didn’t do so, there must have been a reason — perhaps the car couldn’t be shifted into neutral at speed, I dunno. He maintains I am “overthinking” it, and the guy just panicked and forgot.

And then I realized that this is just about the five-year anniversary of our move to Detroit, and we must be natives for sure now, because we are arguing about cars.

Everyone in that Lexus died, by the way. This just underlines why I am bound and determined that Kate learn to drive on a stick shift, and I don’t care if she burns out a clutch doing so; driving a manual requires you to pay more attention to the task at hand. And there’s another reminder: When we moved here, Kate was in second grade. This time next year, she will be months away from getting her learner’s license. Of course Michigan teens can start driving under supervision at 14 years, eight months. Utter insanity, but that’s how an automotive state rolls. I’m sure kids in Kentucky and Virginia were expected to start smoking at 12, once upon a time, to help the state’s economy.

First of February, today. This is always around the time I notice the light is changing, not so much the time the sun shines but the angle — ask a scientist why, I prefer the poets. The same thing happens the first week in August, when, on lower-humidity days (it never quite gets “low” here), the sun seems distinctly autumnal. As any groundhog will tell you, there’s a lot more winter ahead of us, but today, you can see the high-water mark. And it’s dry.

Both bits of bloggage are old, but not everyone has time to read the internet every day. So here goes:

A Texas politician declines to seek newspaper endorsement, and the newspaper calls this a “major rebuke.” Ha. Endorsements are one of those holdovers from not just an earlier time, but a way-way earlier time, and flat-out refuse to die. The best guesstimates I’ve seen is that in a hotly contentious presidential election year, all the newspaper endorsements in the country might have an influence over 10,000 votes, tops, and that’s being generous. Locally, who knows, but the fact that candidates work so hard to get them, and make such a fuss when they do or don’t, always struck me as sort of pathetic.

Endorsements are based on editorial-board interviews with candidates, followed by a discussion. The publisher usually wins, and the publisher is usually either a pro-business conservative and sometimes a generic center-left liberal. A windy, boring editorial will be published, using the royal “we.” (I sometimes wonder if that royal we isn’t why editorials are so boring; a previous ed-page editor of in Fort Wayne referred to the board as “the page” or “this page,” and solicited columns from “friends of the page,” which is how they were designated: Bob Butthead, Friend of the Page. I once asked why they didn’t ask others to be Enemies of the Page, a far cooler column head if you ask me, but as usually happens when you’re dealing with people who consider themselves not an I but a We, it didn’t go over well.

Anyway, the whole editorial-page structure — Hear Us, Voice of This August Institution — was blown out of the water by the internet, but many of them haven’t gotten the news yet. And so: “Major rebuke.” Now there’s a column I’d read: By Major Rebuke, Enemy of the Page.

And speaking of media institutions that refuse to change, even while the foundations are washed out from under them, Charlie Brooker on how to report news, TV-style. A YouTube link, but funny and worth your time. Wasn’t I just talking about this the other day? If only I’d taken the time to make the video.

Manic Monday is already underway, a day with a perpetually stuck accelerator. Ciao for me, and off to rounds ‘n’ Russian.

I was googling “Brothers & Sisters,” the TV show, trying to find something I once read about it. I tried to watch that show and gave up after about half a season, when it became clear the writers were never going to give up this maddening music-cue thing they do.

The show is your basic prime-time soap, with comic elements. Whenever a comic scene commences, however, the sound editors insert this giggly little piano/string thing, the universal music code for “French farce scene about to commence! Get ready to laff!” I remember a couple years ago, reading an interview with some network executive who said it was necessary to telegraph every punch that way, because they’d given up the idea of any viewer giving any TV show their complete attention, and they didn’t want someone to look down at their laptop during a serious confession-of-infidelity scene and look up to find a zany oops-we’ve-been-caught-having-sex-in-the-cloakroom scene. Too jarring. And so tonal shifts are underlined, perhaps so viewers know they’re watching broadcast TV, not HBO.

So I was looking for that interview, and got distracted by reveries of the Allman Brothers, who — you younger folks might not know this — had a monster album in the ’70s called “Brothers and Sisters,” which combined with “music” would of course turn up in any Google search. And by then I had forgotten that one of the things I wanted to say was, nobody has any attention span anymore, because they’re always multitasking.

There was a trainer at my gym who liked to combine the ab work in his classes with “Whippin’ Post,” which I always thought was appropriate.

Which sort of brings me to this story from the New York Times’ Department of News You Already Knew, about how kids today are addicted to the internet. As an abusive parent in this regard, defined as “one who declined to buy the data plan for her child’s cell phone, and who also activated the parental controls feature of the computer’s OS,” I read with keen interest:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

It’s the texting that makes me insane. A true moderate, I equipped Kate with the moderate plan — 1,500 per month, which feels like all the goddamn texts any normal person would need, don’t you agree, my fellow geezers? Well, you should pay closer attention to your kid, who thinks nothing of texting “yo” or “‘sup?” or “hey” nine million times a day, and I am not kidding. Objecting to this is like saying with all this long hair, you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

I told her if she went over 1,500, I was taking it out of her hide. And no data plan until she gets a job.

After all, I don’t want to happen to her attention span what’s happened to mi– Shiny object! New tab in Safari! Tangent! So let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh? (I pronounce that blo-GAHGE, by the way, from the original French.)

Detroitblog finds a sterling example of that unique American character — the graphomaniac. (Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Why do you think we have tabbed browsing and the internet at our fingertips, fool? If this were a TV show, I’d be playing stern music right now.) Don’t miss the guy’s website.

It so happened I was at John King Books, Detroit’s spectacular used-books treasure house, looking for a couple of volumes that will aid in my horse-eating project mentioned last week. You want to know where graphomaniacs’ work goes to die? Check the local-history shelves at your own town’s version. They are distinguished by their lengthy subtitles (“Officer Down: One Man’s Heroic Crusade Against a Corrupt Police Force and Its Enablers Among the Legal Community, Particularly the Prosecutor’s Office — You Wouldn’t Believe”) and their equally lengthy dedications to the many kind helpers they had along the way to publishing their opus, which no publisher would touch, because it’s simply too hot.

There’s one at my local car wash, or was the last time I visited. I love this car wash, which takes advantage of the few moments you will spend there to push every imaginable sort of impulse purchase at your face. Greeting cards, scented cardboard air fresheners, bulk lots of utility towels, one-size-fits-most floor mats, laminated study guides for everything from the SAT to the periodic table — I have barely scratched the surface. But there, on a table next to the window where you watch them finish your inside windows, is a little pile of books. Self-published, natch. Title: “My Wife Has Cancer.” I can’t bear to pick it up. I hope it was therapeutic for someone.

An odd and an end from yesterday: You Cincinnatians, does Zino’s still have the greatest pizza in the world? We used to drive down from Columbus for that stuff. It’s the big red onions that does it. And Bob (not Greene) wondered if the Kim who commented yesterday had a last name beginning in L, because if so, he thought they knew each other? She does; you do. Contact me privately if you want to catch up.

It’s a new medium, so the growth curve is spectacular: The Chinese folks who brought you the animated Tiger Woods story tackle the Leno-O’Brien-NBC story. And it is awesome. If I were a young journalism student, this is what I’d be studying.

And now, to commence what is, theoretically, my work. If I don’t get distracted.

FWIW, I don’t think Harry Reid needs to fall on his sword for having used the word “Negro” approximately 40 years after its sell-by date. As one of our commenters put it yesterday, it’s hard to get older people to change their language, citing the nursing-home residents she works with. They insist on using such unfashionable terms as “colored girl,” for instance. Reid isn’t that old, but he’s old enough to have seen a few of these memos come down the pike, sometimes literally so — my paper was an early adopter of “African American,” at a time when even many black people weren’t using it, and it frosted my cookies, too.

That was a different time, though. I’m speaking of the late ’80s, when these things changed in far more formal ways, before it was one of those internet things that just appeared overnight, like Lolspeak or FAIL. There was a cadre of people in my newsroom — I believe their organizational title was the Committee for Chapping Asses — who curried favor from higher-ups by policing our pages for Wrongspeak, and no infraction was too small to generate a passive-aggressive finger in the face.

“I notice that when you slugged that story” — renamed a file, for you civilians — “on the Sino-Japanese trade talks, you called it SINOJAP,” one memorable exchange went.

The accused explained that yes, under our system for naming story files, we were only allowed about eight spaces to indicate to the database manager what the story was actually about, i.e. SHOOTING, or CITYCNCL.

“You need to know that JAP is an unkind term for certain Asian-Americans…”

“Yes, I know about World War II, thanks, but as you well know, we frequently abbreviate words in slug lines, and anyway, the only people who even see that are editors, and are you seriously implying that I had some racist intent here?”

“No, but this is something you need to be sensitive to. Other papers now abbreviate Japan as JPN. Thanks.”

You should have heard him the day an artist drew a cartoon of a mosquito as a kamikaze pilot. But those were the times. There was a huge blow-up over whether residents of the United States could be called “Americans,” seeing as how that was that excluded residents of other countries on the North and South American continents. You could no longer write about homosexuals, or even gay people; it had to be “gay and lesbian,” every reference, all the time. If we hadn’t been located in the ultraconservative Midwest, I’m sure it would have blossomed to “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and transgendered.”

Some of this stuff was easy to swallow; I believe you should call people what they want to be called, at least in polite relations, so OK, fine, you’re now African American, go with God. Other tiffs were more about the person doing the correcting than anything else; see the great abbreviation battle above. And some was just stupid, as the trend for making all those who endured a disease or traumatic experience not sufferers or victims but survivors. Mostly what I objected to was being told, as a writer, what my word choice had to be, usually by little weenies who couldn’t write an amusing text message, let alone 700 words of snappy prose.

And I didn’t like when the rules were enforced through robotics, although it did lead to some interesting items in Columbia Journalism Review whenever governmental bodies proudly reported their budgets were “back in the African American,” or when an outdoors writer (inevitably a dork freelancer who had enough trouble coming up with alternative ways to say “big fish”) was told he had to find a new word for certain bass lures, because the computer wouldn’t let him use the word jig anymore.

In his days as a police reporter, Jeff Borden noticed you could peg a cop’s age — and sometimes much more — by how they filled out their reports. The oldest would write MC (male colored), the middle-aged ones MN, and the youngest MB, and the hard-core racists MU (male usual). Orwell was right. Language matters. But that’s something I’m sure Reid knows by now. Peace be with him.

Slate looks at the same topic. Great headline: Watch what they say, not who they do.

I’m growing to hate Mondays, the busiest day of my week. Upside: By Wednesday, you feel the week entering a glide pattern. Not this one, though, with a big story due at the end of it and other kamikaze mosquitos buzzing around my head. I don’t have any more bloggage today, although maybe you’d like to discuss the a-bornin’ career of Sarah Palin, Foxy Gal…whatever it is she’ll be doing now. Finally, an excuse to buy a real wardrobe!

UPDATE: From the Department of Too Good to Wait Another Day, the sad-but-not story of the death of Mighty Joe Rollino, yesterday in Brooklyn.

Just wrote a long piece of something and threw it away. It was heedless, and I need to be more heedful. Google Alerts make finding something to be offended by way too easy, which is why I use them judiciously. I Googled my name the other day and found a hidden gem — a comment left on a blog three years ago that blamed me for the steep circulation slide suffered by my former employer during the nearly 20 years I worked there. That was good for a laff. I knew it was my fault, somehow. It wasn’t the industry-wide decline in all ink-on-paper news, or the idiot publisher’s plan to cut costs by severing the subscriptions of several thousand out-of-county readers, or anything else that went wrong in the long slow decline of newspaper journalism. Glad we’ve found a culprit.

I’m wondering why things haven’t stabilized or recovered in my absence. You people who still read it will have to answer that one. The last time I looked at it I got embarrassed. No wonder so many former employees fudge the details in their bios.

So you folks will have to fend for yourselves today. I can offer you a cheesecake recipe, which I bothered to type last night (oh, of course it’s everywhere on the web, but I didn’t know that until after I typed it) for e-mailing to Mindy, who was despairing at finding a recipe for a classic dry, dense cheesecake. I clipped this out of Esquire magazine around 1980 and have made it several times, but not for a while. Esquire contended it represents the Platonic ideal of cheesecake, and credits it to a famous New York City deli. Notes follow:

Lindy’s cheesecake

To serve, remove the top of the pan very carefully and cut into wedges.

Me again. Now I see why I haven’t made this lately. All that fussing with the crust! It’s a lot of work to make something everybody leaves on the plate, but you need it to keep the filling from running out the cracks in the springform. If I were doing this today, I’d scrap the pastry for graham-cracker.

I’d also forget that ridiculous 550-degree oven. Most home stoves don’t go that high, and you can get the same result — the nice brown top — at 400.

But this is a hell of a cheesecake. It’s the citrus zest. Enjoy, if you end up making it.

Bloggage? Just a little:

You learn something new ever day. Something I learned yesterday: The Presbyterian College sports teams are known as the Blue Hose. Good thing they’re Presbyterians and are genetically unable to see the humor possibilities.

My “Jersey Shore” nickname: The Rack. Fitting. Find your own. That site also has a Tiger Woods mistress generator. Here’s mine: Congrats, your Tiger Woods mistress is Melody O’Brian from Duluth, MN. She is a 19 year old business executive. You know she’s telling the truth because she knows about Tiger’s tattoo.

Best of luck to day to our own mild-mannered Jeff, having sinus surgery today and likely out for a while.

To work for me.

I’m going to miss the group of Wayne State students we have working for GrossePointeToday.com this term. They’re smart, energetic, capable, everything a hyperlocal website needs. What’s more, they’ve given me something every editor wants over time — improvement. It’s a pleasure to handle their copy.

Every so often people ask what I tell journalism students about their prospects for a career in journalism. Over time, I’ve developed a short speech. It goes like this: “I don’t know what your future holds for your chosen field. Recent events would suggest the outlook is grim. The very best of you will probably get work somewhere in journalism, but most of you won’t have it easy and some will strike out. Change your major while you still have time, but stay in this class to learn to be a better observer, a sharper questioner, a less credulous media consumer and a more careful writer. They are skills that will serve you in any field you choose.”

How does that sound? I can’t lie to them, but I believe what I tell them: Studying journalism will, if nothing else, make them better news consumers, and brother, we need those more than ever. Last night at the gym, I grabbed the last treadmill for a 20-minute speed-walk to nowhere, and found myself face-to-face with the TV tuned to Fox News. Glenn Beck was on, and even the closed-caption Glenn Beck is hard to take. G. Gordon Liddy was pimping gold during the commercial breaks, alternating with Beck pimping his book. I considered for a minute when the last time I heard gold touted as a serious investment option outside of the apocalypse-now media. The early ’80s, I guess, the time of runaway interest rates and dark mutterings in corners about Krugerrands vs. Maple Leafs. Which reminded me of a police report I saw recently, in which the officer noted the homeowner’s loss to thieves: One Rolex Oyster, several coogerands. I can say with authority that journalism has taught me to spell the South African gold coin correctly.

(Although I always have to check. Two Gs and one R, or the other way around?)

And now it’s time to go. Editing copy put me behind, and now I’m off to the gym and various holiday/maternal obligations. Lucky for me I got a whole extra hour of sleep today and Alan made coffee so strong I’m risking v-fib. Today’s question: How much of your formal education have you left behind in your life?

I don’t know if any of you had a chance to read J.C.’s rant yesterday, on his blog, about the public self-scourging news executives are given to these days. In particular, this passage set him off:

Tom Rosenstiel and others pointed out [that] those journalists and news organizations that don’t drop the pose of lecturer and learn how to genuinely engage the audience will be lost.

The pose of lecturer!? Perhaps you’re confusing that with, uh, reporting the news.

We’ve all known one of those people who’s inclined to be apologetic — takes all the blame, defers all credit to others, calls herself no great beauty, calls himself only half-bright. And sooner or later, we all discover there’s a very fine line between self-effacement and cringing, just as there’s one between bold confidence and Donald Trump. I think John found it in the news executives who fret over “lecture-based journalism.” I can’t remember where I first heard that expression, of “old” reporting as a lecture and “new” reporting as a conversation, but it was a few years ago, and I think it was from none other than Jimmy Lileks, who only took a few more years to allow comments on his own blog. Heh. Indeed.

But that’s not important. The idea is that somehow journalists aren’t really journalists until they engage readers in “the conversation” and stop “lecturing.” Well, OK. I mean, I get it. But I think, in getting it, too many editors and publishers are forgetting about professionalism.

I swear, I don’t think for even a minute that I’m a screenwriter, but of late I’ve been in a screenwriting state of mind, and have rediscovered John August’s fine, fine screenwriting blog. Yesterday he had an item about a startup company called Scripped, prompted by an interview with one of its founders, who seemed to be saying that the problem with screenwriting today is that the people who do it make too much money, and the way to fix this “problem” is to make free screenwriting software available to all, and open it up to real-time “collaboration” with other users who fancy themselves the next Richard LaGravenese. Sunil Rajaraman says:

Two problems are solved with web-based screenwriting software. The first is collaboration. Many of the scripts of the films we see in movie theaters have undergone dozens of rewrites before they make it to the screen. For example, for the original of Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck put the screenplay together with more anecdotal stories about South Boston and friends they grew up with. Characters were eliminated from the screenplay and it underwent a very detailed rewriting process. Who knows how many writers had their hands on that screenplay before it was made — and it eventually won an Oscar. Collaboration is made easier with web-based software…. That goes for people collaborating across different locations. Let’s say you are working with writers in China or India and you are here in the U.S. Scripped makes it easier to share drafts, track real-time changes and so forth.

The second problem online software solves is access to writers. If you give the software away for free — it is very cheap to provide the software — you can attract all sorts of talent that would have otherwise not been interested in screenwriting. All of a sudden, they are looking for free screenwriting software on Google. A plethora of options are available. By creating access to more writers, the software becomes a mechanism to aggregate talent.

I don’t know much about screenwriting. I took two university classes, wrote one feature-length screenplay for one class and rewrote it for the other. I’ve written four short scripts for which no one will ever give me an Oscar. I’m at work on another feature-length piece, which faces the usual overwhelming odds of even being read, much less produced. I’ve never earned a dime from it. It’s strictly a hobby that I do to give me and my friends something to goof around with. But if everything I know can be carried in a very small basket, I must know more than Sunil Rajamaran, who apparently raised venture capital based on the idea that the cost of screenwriting software is somehow a major discouragement to people who might otherwise be inclined to try it. I paid $49 for my copy of Final Draft, the industry-standard software. Granted, that was at steep university discount, with further markdowns for a coming new version, but even today, full retail is only $200. Apple’s word processor, Pages, contains a screenplay template and, as August points out, you can write a script on anything from MS Word to a typewriter.

What’s more, August further points out, the “Good Will Hunting” story is untrue, and even if it were, what’s the revelation? That many people get their hands on a script under consideration? You don’t say. Writing is rewriting? Stop the presses. It’s not uncommon for a script headed for production to be rewritten a dozen times or more. I learned this from reading the New Yorker, not as a secret handed down by the faculty mandarins at the University of Michigan. Sometimes a rewrite improves a script; other times it ruins it. My rewrite professor liked to pass out early drafts of “The Truman Show,” when the story was set in New York City and Truman was a greasy creep who jerked off in public. By the time the cameras rolled, it was set in Seaside, Florida, and starred Jim Carrey as a sunny charmer. Hooray for Hollywood.

But this idea, that collaborating with other Scripped users in China or India is the key to your successful career, touches on something else I found through August’s site, and wraps up with what the news executives are saying, too — the difference between professional and amateur. August posts the text of a lecture he gave three years ago on the subject. It’s long, but it’s worth reading, because he makes a powerful distinction between the two, to wit:

When we say “professional,” I think what we’re really talking about is “professionalism,” which is this whole bundle of expectations about how a person is supposed to act.

Exactly. It’s not about whether you get paid. It’s about whether to take your work seriously enough to hold yourself to a certain set of standards. He points out the key difference between people who care enough to give a crap and those who don’t, in this passage:

When would you choose to be an amateur? Well, probably the moments in which you obviously suck, either because you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re just not very good at it. Or at least in the moments when people are criticizing you. You’d say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m only an amateur.”

You’re basically saying, “Don’t judge me.”

And here’s where this indirect proof falls apart: People will always judge you. You can’t control that. You can’t control what scale they’re going to judge you on, or which criteria are most important.

Exactly. For years, journalists who have been following the top “citizen journalists” have noted this difference. Say one screws up, gets pinned to the wall on a mistake or undisclosed conflict or whatever. Sooner or later, they try to wriggle out by throwing up their hands and saying, “Hey, I don’t get paid for this. I’m just a blogger.” They essentially undercut their own status, while at the same time asserting their right to be both outsiders and insiders. Read my reporting, but don’t hold it to your bullshit MSM standards, because I’m an amateur. They can assert whatever they want. But a professional shouldn’t do that. (I say this fully aware that I’ve done it myself.)

So I guess I’d join with J.C. in telling the news executives of the world to stop worrying so much about changing the lecture to a conversation, and just do your damn jobs. Take pride in them. Man up. Listen to feedback, consider it carefully, but stop cowering under it.

I’ve gone on way, way too long on this. This piece could use a rewrite, I see now. But I have to take a shower and get some work done. If you’ve come this far, how about a punchline?

Don’t judge me. I’m an amateur.