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.

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.