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.

The film challenge came right on time, and was pretty simple: The end of the world. Free-choice genre, no prop or dialogue, only a story about the end of the world. You can see why this would make a Detroit crew feel they were halfway there:

Yes, it’s our old friend the Packard plant. But how can you not use it? If you needed a vast, already-dressed set suitable for the end of the world, duh. So we went there for a few shots.

Our main character is a teenage girl reduced to scavenging the ruined, depopulated city. She lives in a hovel. Our art department constructed one in the basement of another building, a former printing plant converted to lofts and performance spaces. Fortunately, the basement retains that “Silence of the Lambs” feel. I went down there as they were building her pallet:

God, these people are good. (The art department.) It was simultaneously post-apocalyptic and human. That light over the pallet felt precisely like weak winter sun coming through a skylight. It’s such a pleasure to work with people who are good at what they do. Like our makeup guy, Dan Phillips:

Dan used to be an autoworker. Took the buyout, went to makeup school, and is now working pretty often on the many productions going on here. He has some good stories. That’s Robert Young III, in his cameo role as Vacant Lot Corpse, showing off Dan’s handiwork. Photo by Connie Mangilin, another producer.

The film? Haven’t seen the final cut yet. I’ll keep you posted. This is the point in the process where I get crabby and it’s best that I keep my distance. Otherwise I might be striding around the office like a tyrant, channeling my inner newspaper cuss. One of our news editors in Fort Wayne would, when the desk fell behind, call out in his rich southern accent, “People! We ain’t puttin’ up a shuttle here!” I don’t think that would be helpful.

I’m not helping out much here, either. I commend to you today some words by our own J.C. Burns, who has beheld one too many grovels by broken-down, dispirited news executives, and has something to say to both the executives and the bored-bored-bored news consumers they allegedly serve.

I’m off to encounter Busy Monday.

There are stats nerds on this here internet, but I am not one of them. Every so often I run across a blogger who uses their stats program and its tracking powers to hunt down and punish readers who have displeased them in some way — posting IP numbers, sometimes names, in one case contacting some poor shlub’s boss to complain (he had displeased the blogger from a work computer) — but I can’t do that. I even feel bad (sometimes) about blocking Dwight; I ran across a few of his comments while hunting down some old posts, and it reminded me he was once just an occasionally sharp-tongued guy who simply disagreed with most of us, before he became a nasty old troll.

I believe we all have enough forces of evil tracking our every move and dollar spent. We don’t need another. Also, most of the crap displayed on my Google Analytics dashboard is over my head, and I don’t want to bother learning about it.

There is one facet that never fails to amuse, however: the search terms that bring readers here.

Once, early in this blog’s life, I got a nice note from a teacher in Los Angeles. I’d gone through a rough day at work with a knuckle-dragging boss and was feeling lost in self-pity and self-doubt — I’m going to DIE in this awful place, I just KNOW it — when I opened her e-mail. She told me how much she loved the blog, and confessed to having used passages from it in a writing class (my heart, it soared!), and closed by telling me how she found me. She’d been searching “puu-puu platter” and came across something I’d written about Polynesian restaurants.

It was a miracle, I thought, suddenly grasping the truth: I was living in a world without editors, but with search engines. Boss Hairy Knuckles couldn’t hold me back in a world ruled by the Google.

As frequently happens, it didn’t quite work out that way. The Google could hold us both back — and most of the other journalists we knew — by torpedoing our industry below the waterline. But for a writer who always felt misunderstood in Allen County, Indiana, finding readers from around the world was something of a thrill. Still is.

While I never write with search terms in mind, I like to think our discussions here are electic and wide-ranging, small-c catholic in the best sense of the word. You’ll find all sorts of arcane words and phrases batted around here; let’s take a look at a few:

** My name is the first and second most-searched term here in the past month, but guess what numero tres is? Cane rat bouillon, dropped in the comments once by our very own Coozledad, in a discussion we had earlier in the summer about lousy restaurant food. It accounted for 224 visits, and what’s even more amusing is that cane rat bouillon searchers spent three minutes on the site and visited 1.3 pages. Welcome, cane-ratters.

** No. 4 is fort wayne mediawatch, and fuck those guys. The last time I expressed that opinion, they got all huffy and rattled their wee plastic swords and threatened that if I didn’t stop saying mean things about them, they would write about me on their two new blogs, Why We Hate Nancy Nall and That Stupid Bitch, Nancy Nall. Both are empty, so no link, and besides, why should I drive traffic to them? Let ’em whore for it like everyone else. Moving on:

** cokie roberts interesting nancy nall, which appears to be an accidental collision of those words in the comments somewhere; I haven’t written about Cokie in forever.

** No. 8 is the full Fresian name of our own Connie, whose last name I will obscure so it doesn’t come up in yet another search. The entry was one where we discussed our unusual names.

** No. 16: free crack. Heh. Sorry, folks.

** No. 19: nancynull.com. For the first 16 years of my life, no one ever misspelled my last name. Then one of my friends started calling me Null, and that was that. It obviously unleashed a demon.

After about 25 or so, the searches fall to single digits — of searchers, that is, be they human or ‘bot. Still, the things they’re looking for! Queen Noor plastic surgery and jon meacham tiresome fool (he’s the editor of Newsweek), smashed tits and death of the adverb, drug-seeking behavior and spook beckman.

Every so often I get these community-college catalogs offering various one-off classes. I’ve changed my mind; I’d take one called The Thorough Appreciation of Google Analytics. Someone, please offer one.

OK, that’s it for today, then. Oh no, one bit of bloggage. Fisticuffs at the Washington Post! Platform-agnostic shit content-management system bullshit… I love it:

I have to say something about Henry Allen, a journalism story that’s mostly staying in journalism circles and probably that’s where it belongs, because it has no greater import or anything. I mention it mainly because I always wanted to work for or with Allen, a legendary writer and editor at the Washington Post, whose career ended abruptly last Friday when he scuffled with a writer who was chapping his ass. He literally went down swinging, and while I can’t condone punching one’s colleagues, I can certainly understand the urge to do so, and given that no one was hurt, let’s chalk it up to a final glimpse at a certain Front Page standard of newsroom behavior and leave it at that.

I first encountered Allen, then a superstar of the Style section, when I took a two-day writing workshop very early in my career. It was a strange trip — a hot weekend in late May. My salad-days starter car didn’t have air-conditioning, and I drove from Columbus to Champaign, Ill. with the windows down, wearing a pair of bib overalls with a bikini top for maximum air circulation. It was a long trip, and I arrived windblown and looking crazy, at least if I’m to judge from the looks the desk clerk at the hotel gave me. Things went further downhill when I realized I’d packed all my career clothes but not my career shoes, and had to attend the workshop and networking sessions in jeans and a T-shirt. A few of the young reporters stayed up late the first night, drinking wine in the courtyard of the hotel, asked by management several times to keep it down. (“It’s that girl with the overalls and bikini,” someone undoubtedly said.)

Allen’s seminar was the following day, and what I mainly remember about it was that I fell in love. He quoted a colleague at the Post: “I want to write stories people can dance to,” and I got it immediately. The guy next to me didn’t — I could tell by the look on his face — but I committed the phrase to memory, and use it from time to time when I’m teaching young writers. Prose, even journalistic prose, has rhythm and mood and recognizing it is very much like having an ear for music. It’s hard to teach that quality, but show me someone who understands the phrase — writing you can dance to — and I know I can work with him or her.

From then on, I mainly just sat there and made dreamy eyes at my new hero. He made fun of AP leads and talked about the drive in from the airport, and afterward, I came up to gush. He said he had a book coming out, and could he send me a copy? Who, me? Um, sure…. “Fool’s Mercy” arrived at my apartment a few weeks later, with a note, “Please, run to your library and demand it be taken off the shelves.”

(Recalling that note, I wonder who might be the source of this Amazon reader review, penned by A Customer: “This is a novel that has taken the art of shaping the reader’s worldview and raised it to the level of physical intervention. By that I mean that Mr. Allen has discovered techniques of using English syntax to alter synaptic relationships within the brain itself, possibly permanently. He may have gone deeper, as well, functioning as the analog of a computer hacker as he cracks the DNA code and blithely rearranges the human genome with untold consequences for generations to come. Were this novel some outre exercise in modernist befuddlement, the danger would be minimal, but Mr. Allen’s darkest motives are masked by a brisk yet poignant thriller populated with haunting personalities. As such, it may pose the severest test the First Amendment has faced since the founding of our republic — a book that is what the law calls ‘an attractive nuisance,’ but a nuisance on the level of Jacob-Kreutzfeld syndrome, the human equivalent of “mad cow” disease. It should not only be banned, but all of its known readers should be rounded up like cattle and incarcerated pending central-nervous-system biopsies. Meanwhile, it remains available to an unwary citizenry from Dryad Books, of 15 Sherman Ave., Takoma Park, Md. 20912.” I have a sneaking suspicion.)

I still take “Fool’s Mercy” off the shelf from time to time, to soak in his graceful prose style. Is it a great thriller? Probably not enough plot, and characters a bit too three-dimensional. But there are some wonderful descriptions, and, well, it was sent to me personally by the author. Those books are always special.

The story linked above said Allen, a 68-year-old former Marine and Vietnam vet, was moved to violence by the reaction of a reporter whose error-ridden “charticle” he was criticizing:

(Allen) gave pretty much the same sharp-elbowed spiel to both Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Hesse responded by asking for the story back so that she could iron out some of the wrinkles.

Roig-Franzia responded by saying, “Henry, don’t be such a cocksucker.”

Boom.

Oh, well. As is noted in the story, this is a new era in journalism. Chicago Sun-Times writers don’t pee off the ledges into the river anymore, either. It doesn’t mean we can’t miss the good ol’ days, at least a little.

Enjoy retirement, Henry. Write another novel. I’ll buy it. And I’ll still pay any price to hear whatever writing advice you might give at another University of Illinois workshop.

So. Up until 2 a.m. last night, but with an E-day school holiday, got to sleep clear until 8. They say you can count the hours of sleep Roger Penske gets on one hand, and that he is master of the power nap. He’ll announce, “I’m going to grab 40 minutes,” put his head down, fall asleep immediately and awaken 39 minutes and 59 seconds later.

My role model.

My other role model is Elmore Leonard. What does it say about me when my role models are old men? Vigorous old men, but still. The next thing you know, I’ll be asking for a Viagra prescription.

As you can imagine, yesterday was in the crazy-busy, and today will be the same. With that heedless extra hour of sleep I had to cut something, and today it was: Gym. Haven’t done that in a while. (Where’s my medal?) But if I’m ever going to learn Russian I have to give my homework the respect it deserves, and today I have to write 10 sentences, using the genitive singular. I’m inspired because I watched a Russian-language movie Friday night, one of the few truly indolent me-times I get in the week, and I understood more of it than I thought I would. It’s like I’m trembling on the brink of another leap in understanding, and I want to nurture it along.

The film? “The Italian,” or, as imdb.com insists on transliteration, “Italianetz.” Worth your time, even with subtitles.

One of these days it’ll be you folks I cut loose. Don’t assume I’ve been kidnapped or anything.

One brief item of bloggage: Eric Zorn finds the new GOP in North Carolina. Cooze, is this one of your neighbors?

Someone is remaking “Red Dawn.” I know, I know: why? It’s perfect the way it is. What could ever top this mid-’80s Cold War paranoid fantasy? What’s the new story, now that the Evil Empire has been defanged and we still have the memory of those indelible performances — Patrick Swayze, at 32, playing a high-school boy; Ron O’Neal as an alternate-reality Che Guevara; and who can forget Harry Dean Stanton behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp, hollering “Avenge me, son!”

I can’t answer those questions. All I can say is, thank God Michigan is giving out these fat tax incentives, so the “Red Dawn” crew can come to Detroit and blow shit up:

(If you’re impatient, drag the playhead to the 40-second mark.) I don’t know what other American city would let you get away with that. Fortunately, we have a lot of empty buildings to spare.

On the downside, sometimes a post-apocalyptic wasteland behaves like one.

A little Googling tells me the updated story involves a military invasion of the U.S. by the Chinese. There’s a blog, too, with some great deets. A military convoy was photographed rolling down one of the downtown freeway legs on Sunday, something you likely haven’t seen in Fort Wayne lately.

I’d like to see the Chinese try to take this city. Of course, first they’d have to want to. I envision a scene like Tiananmen Square, only in reverse.

OK, enough small talk. Count me among one of the 1 million subscribers who will miss Gourmet magazine. It hurts even more because I’m a latecomer; I only started subscribing it a year ago. Before then, I thought it wasn’t my cup of expensive tea, but I was stupid not to trust that anything Ruth Reichl put her hands on would be worth my time. Far from being a snooty festival of luxury, it’s a well-written tribute to food and food culture, and the recipes are wonderful.

Kim Severson, another food writer I’d follow anywhere, takes a look at the death of Gourmet in the NYT today, and I think she gets to the heart of it right here:

Although it was easy to paint Gourmet as the food magazine for the elite, it was a chronicler of a nation’s food history, from its early fascination with the French culinary canon to its discovery of Mediterranean and Asian flavors to its recent focus on the source of food and the politics surrounding it.

In the decade since Ruth Reichl took over as editor, she underlined everything from the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida to dishes like chicken and dumplings that could be on the stove, simmering, in 15 minutes.

That’s what I’ll miss about it, anyway. It really chaps my ass that Gourmet had to fold so that Vogue and Anna Wintour could live to fight another day.

Finally, I took Kate to see “Whip It” over the weekend, another shot-in-Detroit movie that seemed worth our time, and it was, although I’ve now come to see the PG-13 rating as the enemy of parents everywhere. It’s funny — after we came home and Kate went to bed, Alan and I watched the R-rated “Adventureland” on cable, and the latter, while more explicit in its F-bombs and so on, took much of the same material (young-adult sexuality, in part) and treated it with more respect and less snickering than the PG-13 “Whip It.” It’s not that one was exploitive and the other one not, it’s just that “Whip It” had several scenes and dialogue exchanges that seemed tacked on to avoid a straight PG and make the film edgier, somehow. All I know is, I feel more protected by lead actresses who refuse to take their bras off on camera than the MPAA ratings board.

Other than that, however, it was a pretty good little movie, exploring female empowerment through roller derby. I know Jeff Borden’s a big fan, and I had a twinge, remembering our departed Ashley Morris, whose wife Hana was a New Orleans roller girl. (Ashley chose her stage name, and crowned his wife, a native of the Czech Republic, “Soviet Bloc.”) Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore and Kristen Wiig do most of their own skating, and those girls certainly tear it up. I almost — not quite, but almost — forgave the cheesy product placement Barrymore snuck in there. Did you know a roller girl can never wear too much Lash Blast? Now you know.

After two nights, I think I’m finally caught up on my rest for the next few days. Sorry to be getting here late again, but ah well. Now to the giant pile of copy I’ve been putting off editing. Next time you see me, I’ll be cross-eyed and ink-stained. Have a good rest of the day.

For a brief shining moment in 2005 or so, Kate and I had a shared TV ritual — “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy,” 7 to 8 p.m. in my market and probably yours, too. It was fun, and it was educational. Then she discovered “America’s Funniest Home Videos” was on opposite, and that was the end of winning $400 on Civil War trivia. Although I’ve tried to make the best of it.

“You know whenever you see a kid, a father and a baseball bat, something’s going to happen, and it’s going to be a shot to the junk,” I say, figuring it’s best to introduce film-analysis skills early. (You can say the same about trampolines positioned near basketball hoops.) Some parents teach their children what Chekhov said about guns and first acts. We work with the material we have.

It’s amusing, isn’t it, how AFV, as it’s called, predicted YouTube? (And how YouTube predicted “Ow! My Balls!”) Did you know there are more than 19,000 YouTube videos tagged “treadmill?” The treadmill, any fan of viral video can tell you, is even more predictive of wacky hijinks than baseball bats and fathers. Sometimes video makers don’t play fair. This one, for instance. There’s no reason for that treadmill to be on. This is like Chekhov writing a character who says, “May I leave my loaded gun here on this table? Make sure no one touches it. It’s loaded. And it’s a gun.”

Lately, it’s babies. Babies and Beyoncé.

I blame YouTube for ruining my attention span. It boggles my mind when I see people posting webcam videos of themselves talking about one thing or another, specimens that regularly clock in at eight or nine minutes. If I know one thing in this world, it’s that no one wants to watch you yak for eight minutes. Even “leave Britney alone” came in at under three.

Of course, when it comes to viral video, this is the only one you need to watch today:

HT: Sweet Juniper.

Not much for you today. Fortunately, Roger Ebert’s on the job, presenting his long-awaited recollection of O’Rourke’s, his old Chicago watering hole:

O’Rourke’s was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago’s Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out in back. From the day it opened on Dec, 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

Our place in Columbus wasn’t so colorful, but it was pretty fun — the Galleria. It was on the ground floor of an office building, and you entered through an indoor, well, galleria. I won’t try to match Ebert, but when I sift through my misty watercolored memories of the place, I remember Tim May, one of the sportswriters, looking through the window to see a homeless man shuffling by to use the bathroom. This was in the very early ’80s, when the public mental hospitals all closed justlikethat, and suddenly we were seeing homeless people everywhere.

“Someday I’m gonna write a book about those guys,” he said in his Texas drawl. “I’m gonna call it ‘Wrong Turn,’ ’cause somewhere along the line, those guys took a wrong turn.” He never wrote the book, but I still think that’s a tremendous title, and if I ever have occasion to use it myself, I’m going to credit Tim.

Off to the gym. I did Pilates yesterday, and am still waiting for the ab soreness to settle in. Sit-ups aren’t called sit-ups in Pilates, they’re called roll-ups. That’s because you do them very slowly, one vertebra at a time, and if you think that’s easy, try it sometime. Ouch.

Ruby the rabbit is turning out to be less pet by far than a dog or cat, but still amusing. I keep her close by, to monitor her chewing and miscellaneous destruction, but also to observe her wacky antics. She likes to climb to the tops of things, then jump up and down for the fun of it. Yesterday she interrupted a nap by placing a single paw on my back three or four times — hey, you awake? Lately she’s fond of long grooms, followed by mini-naps in fluffy-ball position, and then an extended paper-shred project. She prefers the paper be nice and crackly. I knew maintaining all these newspaper subscriptions would pay off one day.

The only bedroom I let her in is the guest room/office, which has a white bedspread (camouflage). I keep a couple of cheap blankets up there, and she likes to burrow and dig in them. She photographs better against the darker colors of the downstairs:

Why do we keep pets, anyway? Because we like carrying on conversations with them in squeaky voices? That’s my theory today, anyway.

You should hear the conversations Ruby and I can have over a bundle of carrot greens. You’d be …horrified.

Ugh. Another short night of sleep, another early meeting. I don’t feel capable of anything approaching serious discussion yet, so your loss, toots — sometimes you get what you pay for. How about a cavalcade of idiocy?

Everybody’s seen this by now, but the classics stay fresh forever: Ernie Anastos, anchorMAN! Stay classy, New York City.

A friend of mine works for the Palm Beach Post, and once told me the paper’s older, conservative readership dictates that they be downright prudish in their discussions of any story with a sex angle. You could read the entirety of the Bill and Monica clip file, for instance, and never know what, precisely, the two did together, as it was always referred to as simply “sex.” Well. Looks like they changed their policy. At least on the racy internets, anyway.

Look, free crack! And it’s not addictive at all; you can quit anytime you want. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

You get in every morning, naked, and it makes you feel warm and good. So of course it’s out to kill you.

Meeting. Bicycle. Back later.

The first great-books club meeting of the year was yesterday, although maybe that’s pushing it. We don’t read any great books in toto, we read selections from them, in a master text called “Great Conversations,” which the library, the sponsor of this shindig, provides. There was dark talk of budget cuts affecting this year’s schedule, but so far — fingers crossed — we’re hanging in there. Members of the group may have to lead a session or two, should we lose our librarian, but we’re ready for that. I signed on for “The Chilean Earthquake” by Heinrich von Kleist, a work and a writer I had never even heard of before, and so much for that English minor, eh?

Anyway, when I joined the group I was hoping for a raucous bunch of table-pounders. I got five retirees. Ah, well. It’s also where I found my Russian teacher, after we read a selection from the “War and Peace” and she revealed she’d just finished her second read of the entire novel — in the original language. And the retirees are always interesting, especially when they make small talk. One recently tuned in to WJR and heard Mark Levin, who is apparently a talk-show host who makes Rush Limbaugh sound like Walter Cronkite. I have to take someone else’s word for this, because I can’t listen to commercial radio anymore. I force myself to take in a little on the weekends, because if it weren’t for the XM they play at the gym, car commercials and these few brief hours of weekend exposure, I wouldn’t hear new music anywhere.

I draw the line at talk, however, no matter when it’s on. Just can’t do it, and when I hear Rush or Sean or someone else drifting from an open window or the UPS truck, my default setting is the same one I employ when I pass a homeless person muttering about motherfuckers. I assume: Crazy. Avoid eye contact. Do not engage.

My book-club friend, a nice lady who was most engaged by the tangent we took on left brain/right brain issues, was horrified by Levin. WJR is a community institution here much the way WOWO is in Fort Wayne, but like lots of AM stations, it’s had to stake out its position in right-wing talk. They generally go for the A-team national shows with lots of local-local hosts, and I notice they sneak Levin on in the evenings, when the rational part of the nation is watching TV and only the insane ones are down in their basements, radio on, cleaning their guns or building birdhouse after birdhouse under a bare light bulb. (And hey, check it out — Dr. Laura now has the coveted 11 p.m.-1 a.m. slot. How the mighty have fallen.)

It’s good to see someone else is horrified. Although less comforting to know more people are seeking this stuff out.

I’m short on time today, and want to say a little about Mary Travers, the latest in this year’s long, long line of obituaries. I can’t exactly mourn her passing — what has Peter, Paul and Mary been since 1970 or so? — but I’d like to at least take note of what she was a part of. “A Mighty Wind” had a mighty fine time mocking the early-’60s folkie era, but I was a young child then, and these were some of the earliest records I can recall choosing myself out of the pile and putting on the turntable. The world won’t mourn the last New Christy Minstrel who leaves the earth, but for all the fun you can poke at it, this was some great music. It was also maybe the last time that overtly religious traditional music was heard in the public square. (I’m not counting “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and you can’t make me.) The first PP&M record is a little work of art in a time capsule, and today, while we’re marking the passage of the blonde, lots of people will call your attention to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Meh. This is the only PPM record you need, and this is its best single song (side one, track one, I believe). Yes, it’s the one that was used on that “Mad Men” episode last season. Enjoy, and RIP Mary Travers:

I’m wondering if I need to stop paying attention to politics for a while. It was a beautiful weekend, and while checking e-mail Saturday I surfed over to Memeorandum to see what was going on with the teabaggers. Michelle Malkin’s blog proclaimed the march at 2 million strong. I rolled my eyes, shut down my browser and went back downstairs to think about what to do with the pattypan squash I bought at the farmer’s market.

I’m one of the worst crowd-estimators in journalism, in keeping with the long tradition of people who are good with words being stupid with numbers. I always avoided making crowd estimates in stories I wrote, and when I was pressed to do so, fudged with time-tested phrases like “a packed hearing room” or “scores,” or else found a less numerically challenged source to give me a number. But even I know 2 million is plain and simple balderdash. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com explains how the whopper came to be — the very short answer: Someone lied to Malkin — and adds:

Malkin herself did not lie; she merely repeated a lie. It does not particularly call into question her character. It does, however, call into question her judgment. The reason is that if there had in fact been 2 million protesters in Washington yesterday, there would have been no need to lie about it — the magnitude of the protests would have been self-evident. I was in Washington for the inauguration, an event at which there really were almost 2 million people present — and let me tell you, it was a Holy Mess. Hotels, charging double or treble their usual rates, were booked weeks in advance. Major stations on the Metro system were shut down for hours at a time. The National Guard was brought in. At least 3,000 people got stuck in a tunnel. Essentially the entirety of the National Mall, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, was dotted with onlookers. Heaps of trash were left behind. The entire city was basically a warzone for a period of about 20 hours, from midnight through mid-evening.

“It does, however, call into question her judgment.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the problem with journalism as practiced by mere mortals, but it’s especially the problem with mortals who are proudly partisan, who scoff at “objectivity” as a fiction, etc. I’m not one of those journalists — and lately, I should add, I don’t consider myself much of one; I feel like I’m on a floe that has broken away from the main icecap and is steadily drifting away — who worries what will happen to Journalism when all the newspapers have been hollowed out or killed. That’s because I already know (and excuse me if I’ve said this before; I think I’ll be saying it for a long time). We’re headed into an age when we will flock to the media source that flatters our own prejudices with a unique set of facts. We had that for a long time, in fact; although nearly everybody here is too young to remember when even middling cities had multiple dailies to reflect every reading niche, from labor to plutocrats. You could even make the argument that the vaunted value of Fairness and Objectivity, which in J-school you learn was handed down from Mt. Olympus, is really just a cold-eyed business tactic, that once the Workers Daily and the Plutocracy Times folded, the net needed to be cast a lot wider and the masthead slogan changed from Screwing the Proles since 1851 to Shining the Light of Truth.

Most reputable crowd estimates put it in the “tens of thousands,” perhaps as many as 100,000. The Daily Mail in London, relying on “Mail Foreign Service,” went with “up to two million.” Damn liberal media.

This isn’t really about politics, anyway; it’s about numeric shenanigans. I love Silver’s blog because he’s that rarity, a genius with numbers and more than competent with words. I love stories that make a splash because someone challenged numeric conventional wisdom. One of the Denver papers won a Pulitzer in the ’80s for pointing out that the numbers of missing and abducted children were wildly inflated, that if every face on the milk carton belonged to a kid who’d been snatched by a stranger, virtually everyone in the country would know someone whose child had suffered such a fate. And yet, we repeat these whoppers over and over.

Oh, well. It was a lovely weekend. Spent a chunk of it at a local block party, which featured a DJ. I took a moment to marvel how it only took a cute dance to turn “Y.M.C.A.” from a tune about anonymous gay sex in a public gymnasium (as Garry Trudeau amusingly put it), to a song adorable toddlers tumble to while their parents look on and snap pictures. Which Village Person are you? I think I’m the construction worker.

If a woman this size shook her tennis racquet at me, I don’t know if I’d feel in fear for my life, but I might tremble a little. What a whiny baby; she deserved to lose that one. And what is it about tennis that seems to breed these uniquely awful tantrum-tossers?

And speaking of rude…

So another Monday begins? The Magic 8 ball says yes.