It’s hard to know how much of this is honest journalism and how much is the cynical kind, perpetrated by editors looking for buzz, so you can take all this with as much salt as you wish, but.

First, New York magazine:

The long-anticipated war of the world versus Wall Street has erupted, and we non–Wall Street New Yorkers are caught right in the line of fire. On the one hand, how can we not share the populist outrage over bankers’ squandering a decade’s worth of profits and still taking bonuses as they bag federal bailouts? Most Americans just read about these guys; we got shouldered aside at the bar by them, and watched their bonuses push real-estate prices beyond our reach. We have greater cause than anyone to loathe the bastards.

On the other hand, until recently, America’s losses were our gains. Those Wall Street bonuses, in part, went to cover taxes that kept our streets clean and safe. They underwrote charity and culture. They supported restaurants, shops, and galleries. They paid the wages of cabdrivers, maids, doormen, and hairdressers. All New Yorkers stand to lose a lot in the austerity plans being imposed upon Wall Street by Washington.

Hmm, yes, I guess that’s true. All New Yorkers will lose a lot if deprived of the rich crumbs that fell from Wall Street’s table. Regrettably, the damage wrought by these greedheads is not confined to New York, and in fact spreads all over the world, to a lot of places where you cannot enjoy the New York City Ballet and related cultural luxuries. And so my sympathy is the proverbial world’s tiniest violin, playing a sad, sad song.

Oh, and please: Do not tell me that not being able to afford a Manhattan apartment is somehow equal to owning a Michigan house actively sending real dollars down the toilet, in large part because of Wall Street’s criminal behavior. Just…don’t.

Next, the cheekier NYT Sunday Styles. Hed: You try to live on 500K in this town. You sense that a story sourced by an author of an “Upper East Side novel of manners,” real-estate agents and the editor of the New York Social Diary is trying to apply the needle:

Private school: $32,000 a year per student.

Mortgage: $96,000 a year.

Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year.

Nanny: $45,000 a year.

We are already at $269,000, and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet.

Oh, my. [Pause for thought.] You know, this story is just here to push my buttons. I decline to have my buttons pushed. If you’d like to bat it around in comments, fine, but include me out.

I’m disinclined to engage with Candace Bushnell’s thoughts on what taking the train over a chauffeured Town Car might say about a banker forced to do so, in part because I read this story today, too, and a similar one, from the New Yorker, on Friday. You can read it at that link, but you’ll have to register; a video distillation is here.) The New Yorker story is better, but longer, and takes a look at how Florida’s “Ponzi economy” was brought to a catastrophic halt by the mortgage debacle, how housing was the engine of a long train representing Florida’s linked businesses, and when the engine hit a wall, the subsequent derailment was felt all the way back to the caboose. Reporter George Packer talks to people all along the socioeconomic spectrum, all of whom are suffering varying degrees of calamity. It was, honestly, the most depressing thing I’ve read in a very long time, although I was cheered to see that the “we all must share the blame for this” rhetoric was called out a time or two. A St. Petersburg Times journalist said the blame for this disaster looks like an inverted pyramid, with Wall Street and politicians at the top, and I think that’s about right. Packer talks to a couple who never went subprime, never treated their house like a cash machine, never overspent on credit cards, just tried to eke out a living near the bottom of the economy, and they are now the ones saying things like, “Maybe I’m a bad person. That must be why this is happening to me.” This, Packer observes, is more penitence than it currently being shown in New York or Washington at the moment.

So that’s what you should read.

A bit of bloggage? OK, a bit:

When Jim Harrison wrote his wonderful essay, “Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport,” he wasn’t kidding. Really:

The day began with fishermen setting down wooden pallets to create a bridge over a crack in the ice so they could roam farther out on the lake. But the planks fell into the water when the ice shifted, stranding the fishermen about 1,000 yards offshore.

One hundred thirty-four saved from their own stupidity, one dead. The day’s temperature: Just shy of 50 degrees. I only wish I was kidding.

My mother’s favorite cabaret singer died this weekend. My mother and thousands of gay men, that is.

Finally, I know I’m very tough on the world’s most overrated newspaper columnist, but in the tradition of even broken clocks being correct twice a day, I give you…(drumroll)…a Mitch Albom column I actually liked. Halley’s Comet will likely appear before this happens again.

Finally, is it just me, or does “Stimulus Package” sound like the title of a dirty movie? Just wondering.

Enjoy your week.

I took a vow around the beginning of the year, which I may have mentioned but probably haven’t: No more copyright infringement. I’ve decided information may want to be free, as the nitwit saying goes, but the people who gather, package, contextualize and otherwise prepare information for public use need to be paid, because otherwise? No more information. So I thought about it a while, and made myself a personal fair-use policy, which is:

I will quote no more than three or four paragraphs of someone else’s writing, and will always provide a link back to the original source. Sometimes I might stretch it to five (I did yesterday, on the Aeroflot story), but that’s rare. Some writers may make that difficult — hello, Mr. Albom, with your stupid one-sentence paragraphs — but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

No more copyrighted music in video pieces, except in short, incomplete pieces. I’ve decided that “short” = “less than 30 seconds,” although I think the legal standard might be less than that — 15 or 20. I’ll ask a lawyer the next time I see one (which may be for lunch today, if Michael’s not tied up). I used a piece of “Optimistic Voices,” from the “Wizard of Oz” soundtrack, in one of my auto-show videos, and cut it off at 29 seconds, which is probably too much, given that the song is only 1:11, but bear with me, because I’m groping toward a solution.

Photos are more problematic. Hot-linking — that is, providing a photo on one site by embedding a link that slurps it from another — is generally considered bad ‘net manners, on the grounds it’s bandwidth theft. I’ve done it in the past, but I’ve decided not to anymore. Wikipedia is very helpful in providing creative-commons pictures, as is Flickr, but honestly, I’m flummoxed more often than not. Presumably Yahoo news photos, which are out there with credit lines, are free to use; certainly everybody does so. But I try to avoid them, because it seems wrong somehow. (Violation of self-imposed rule coming in: One paragraph.)

All of these rules are imperfect and fluid, but I want it on the record that I’m trying. If the new-media economy is going to be based on theft, I want no part of it. I also freely acknowledge I’ve been a sinner in the past, but in the future I’m going to walk the path of righteousness. I’m also paying more attention to the discussion of these issues in the culture, because I’m hoping we see some resolution soon, either through peaceful negotiation (unlikely) or a blood-on-the-floor lawsuit (more likely). Which brings us to today’s news, that the Associated Press has filed suit against Shepard Fairey, described as an “L.A. street artist,” for his use of one of their photos as the basis for a poster you might recognize:

Fairey found Manny Garcia’s picture, he has acknowledged, through Google Images. Then he “remixed” it, as the fashionable term has it, and rode it all the way to the Smithsonian. Now AP is saying, um, no, and wants to be compensated for its source material.

I hope they win. I don’t want to see Fairey sued back to the Stone Age, but I’m growing weary of remixing. The remixers — Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University is the most prominent — pop up on every third talk show these days defending this sort of thing. Remixing is the doorway to the next generation of creativity, they say; free the content and let today’s Photoshop artists, video editors and other nimble manipulators of technology show us the bright, bright future.

In other news at this hour, the original Fairey Obama portrait was purchased for the distinctly old-media price of $75,000, payable to? Shepard Fairey.

Here’s what I want to hear from the remixing crowd: An argument that doesn’t include the phrase “increased exposure.” Because that, they say, is what should be keeping Manny Garcia warm at night, the fact that so many more people have seen his picture than would have before. I guess Garcia is supposed to pay his mortgage with exposure, too, but I’m not sure that’s quite legal tender yet. Some people may live for exposure, but I require regular cash injections. Lawrence Lessig can give his book away because he has a nice secure job at Stanford paying his bills. The AP can distribute its content because it has clients who pay for it. Fairey didn’t pay a dime. He needs to, now.

I’m not a total philistine on this; I mean, I get it. I understand sampling, and collage, and all the rest of it. But when those rappers in the ’80s sampled Van Halen and James Brown, they quickly met the law firms representing these earlier artists, and had to put some cash down in payment for those catchy hooks. I fully acknowledge that use of one piece of art in another can be beneficial to the original artist; I hear most of my new music these days in car commercials and the like. But as an amateur filmmaker I know that if we tried to put a Stevie Wonder song in one of our movies, we’d hear from Berry Gordy. (Someone did that for Zombie Night — used a Beck song in his movie. I asked him about it in the Q-and-A, and he said, “Well, I sent him a letter asking for it, and I haven’t heard back, so I guess I can use it until he says no.” Everyone snickered. That was about the time I started formulating my new policies.)

Copyright violation is theft. We may well need to revisit the old rules that no longer make sense in today’s digital world, but until the rules change, it’s still theft. For a harsher take on what happens when information wants to be free, see this NYT story, about the losing battle against digital piracy in Hollywood:

The files are surprisingly easy to find, partly because of efforts by people like Mohy Mir, the 23-year-old founder of the Toronto based video streaming site SuperNova Tube. The site, run by Mr. Mir and one other employee, allows anyone to post a video clip of any length. As the site has grown more popular, SuperNova Tube has become a repository for copyrighted content. On a recent day, the new movies “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Taken” could easily be found on the site by following links from other sites, called “link farms,” which guide users to secret stashes of copyrighted content spread around the Web.

…The piracy problem, however, does seem to weigh on him. He removed a copy of the movie “Twilight” from his site after a reporter pointed it out to him recently. “I think about getting sued every day. If that happens it will definitely take us out of business,” he said.

Good. Take him out of business. When professional filmmakers are driven out of business by piracy, we can all watch YouTube videos of laughing babies. Can’t wait.

Anyway, that’s my policy and I’m sticking to it. Any thoughts?

Our lonely quest for accuracy remains unfinished, so let’s put this at the top of the blog today, so our vast and influential readership sees it, first thing:

A commode is not a toilet.

It’s true that the word is a euphemism for toilet in many places, including the American south. But the one purchased by ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain for his office likely supported his tabletop cigar humidifier, a Baccarat crystal decanter, a solid-gold dildo or perhaps his latest golf trophy, but not his overpaid ass.

This is a commode:

Thanks, Wikipedia.

No one, including his editors, tells Mitch Albom anything other than “yes, sir” and “great column, sir!,” so we’ll write him off, and let him snicker, you can’t justify $35,000 for a commode — yes, a commode …

But David Brooks has the best editors money can buy, so what’s his excuse? Ahem:

Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

The Wall Street Journal, run by well-paid journalists who presumably know their Louis Quinze from their Louis Seize, explained it very well a few days back, but still, the confusion persists.

The WSJ is good enough to provide the original itemized list of Thain’s office furnishings, and you’ll note the commode is for the reception area. Think about it.

And that will be our last word on the subject, until someone screws it up again.

While we’re on the subject of language, however, let’s take a look at what the ex-governor of Illinois is doing. Oh, look. He’s lashing out:

CHICAGO — Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich today lashed out at lawmakers who booted him from office, calling his removal a “hijacking.”

Someone is always lashing out in the newspaper. “Lashed out” is straight journalese, the language reporters and editors speak amongst themselves that no one else does. Let’s use the miracle of Google to see its awesome power of description:

Drunk George Tenet lashed out at Bush’s neocons…

Noam Schalit lashed out at Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government on Wednesday…

Pictured: The moment Sharon Osbourne lashed out at reality show contestant…

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lashed out Friday when quizzed about the flap over a landscaping crew working at his home…

Kanye lashes out at Britney’s return to VMA…

Lashing out is done so often in news stories, and describes such a wide range of behavior, that the term is effectively meaningless. Follow that link to Sharon Osbourne, and you’ll see a proper lashing out — she’s throwing a drink in some slut’s face. Whereas Mitt Romney, whom you wouldn’t think has a lashing-out bone in his body, got tagged after responding to a question with another question: “If I go to a restaurant, do I make sure all the waiters there are all legal? How would I do that?” the former Massachusetts governor asked.

Of course, the first is from the Daily Mail, the second from the uptight L.A. Times. When in doubt, always trust a Brit. They know their lashing.

So. Kwame Kilpatrick was sprung from the slam shortly after midnight this morning. Of course he had a security detail, ineptly described in the Freep as “self-important, well-dressed men,” but the writer gets a pass — he was on deadline. I’m amazed at the politics of security details in this town; it really seems to be a badge of honor. (The superintendent of schools gets security as part of the position’s compensation package.) Kwame in particular appears to love rolling like Suge Knight, which I always found amusing, because the guy played college ball and packed on the usual few dozen retirement pounds, and hardly looks like a handy mugging target. He likes multiple vehicles and a big carbon footprint — his private posse last night went for no fewer than five SUVs. I guess Fidel Castro gets more, but in a place like this, it just reads as TGFW. Too Ghetto for Words:

The security guys, some wearing bow ties and long coats, others with Bluetooth-like devices in their ears, made it seem like the ex-mayor would be getting into one vehicle parked illegally in front of the jail.

For 20 minutes before Kilpatrick appeared, they stood next to an open door and kicked at the icy snow piled on the curb. It was a bush-league feint reminiscent of the body-double stunt Kilpatrick’s Detroit Police Executive Protection Unit employed last year during one of the then-mayor’s court appearances.

Instead, Kilpatrick walked about 100 feet to the west and entered the Suburban.

Sigh. Well, politics at the other end of the American class spectrum doesn’t seem any prettier. I read the New Yorker’s story about the brief political career of Caroline Kennedy and came away with two conclusions: New York dodged a bullet, and Lawrence O’Donnell is a gold-plated asshole. You’d think we’d have moved past the era of Kennedy brown-nosing, but nooo. Here he is on the woman who did get the job:

Now Caroline Kennedy has had her moment and flubbed it. Paterson has appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, a second-term congresswoman from Hudson, near Albany. “Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”

Good god. Now there’s a lash-out.

OK, off to Gymville. I feel like shit, but I’m soldiering on. Have a better day than mine doubtless will be.

I had Sunday lunch at Lance Mannion’s rooftop aerie in Fort Wayne many many years ago, back when Lance was an assistant professor teaching freshman English at Ball State. Among the guests were a couple of his colleagues, and one told a hilarious story that Lance now has zero memory of:

A third English department colleague was having lunch at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis. He had just bitten into his Big Mac when a woman approached him and said, shyly, “You’re John Updike, aren’t you?” The guy telling the story mimed the action perfectly — the sandwich held to his mouth, the glance up at the woman standing next to the table — and the English professor’s reaction, which was to put the burger down, wipe his hands on a napkin, chew a bit to clear his mouth and then reply:

“Yes. Yes I am.”

The woman, needless to say, was delighted. John Updike! Eating at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis! What are the odds? About the odds of a man misidentified as a famous writer being an actual English professor with a deep familiarity with that writer’s work, that’s what, because he carried on a conversation with the woman for several minutes. She said things like, “I know most critics say (this book) is your best, but I always liked (that book) better,” and he replied, slyly “This is just between us, but (that book) is my favorite, too.” It turned out she had a copy of one of his novels with her, and presented it for signing, which he did, along with a warm personal note. By the time she excused herself, I’m sure she felt she’d had a Celebrity Brush With Greatness for the record books, the sort of thing you hope for when you spot one of your heroes out in the wild and almost never have. Now that we’ve entered a time when everybody has a blog, I’m Googling “‘john updike’ + mcdonald’s + indianapolis” to see if maybe that woman is sharing the story, but so far the only references I get are to Lance’s blog, when I prompted him to tell the story a few years back, and my own, when I alluded to it. It’s sort of suspicious that Lance had no memory of this story; I recall it bringing the house down that day, and now I’m wondering if it’s just a figment of my imagination. No. My imagination isn’t that inventive.

Some prime bloggage today. I have something you journalists are going to love. The rest of you will love it, too:

Rotary-dial phones! Those old modems with the cups! You’ll notice one of the participating papers was the Columbus Dispatch — that’s because the service provider for all this was Compuserve, based there. I can still summon the sight of the copy editor whose job it was to handle the upload, and Kirk will remember his name, but I don’t. I sent this to someone this morning, who replied: It’s like a slasher movie; THE INTERNET’S IN THE HOUSE!!!! GET OUT!!!! IT WANTS TO KILL YOU AND YOUR PROFESSION. Man, I’ll say.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune sends me a lot of love, and I don’t send enough of it back, but it’s not guilt that prompts me to recommend his bloggage of Blago, which has been truly inspired — from an over/under estimate on use of the word “people” in a particular interview (he set the bar at 23, which turned out to be waaaaay low, as the guv dropped the p-bomb 73 times), to this analysis of yet another set of pet phrases. This particular public embarrassment was made for blogging, and you could do far worse. Go see Eric today.

In the Department of Other Shoes, I hesitate to link to this because it won’t mean anything to readers outside of Detroit, and those who know about it don’t need the prompt, but: As usual, the sex scandal is only the appetizer for the money scandal, as we are finding out in regard to city administration. This place makes Chicago look like Minnesota.

Short shrift today, but we’re in the midst of another snowstorm — it does, literally, look like Minnesota at the moment — and I have to go deal with it. New question: Will the snowblower fling the dog poo from the driveway, left there because the snow’s too deep for the little guy to find his usual grassy spots? I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s how the morning was scheduled: Take Kate to school, then home to repack the mojo bag (mobile journalism), swing by the mammography center for the annual you-know-what, then break free in time to catch the unveiling of the third-generation Prius at Cobo. And it all would have worked if there hadn’t been a fire alarm at the cancer hospital where the mammography center is located, which threw the proverbial monkey wrench into things. But it was probably useful, as there’s nothing like standing out in 20-degree cold with a bunch of cancer patients to make you decide things like Priuses (Prii?) aren’t all that important.

I considered bagging the m’gram entirely; I hadn’t been called yet, and so wasn’t in the position of the woman who’d gone in just ahead of me, left standing in her winter jacket over the gown, her bra and shirt in a plastic bag. But I couldn’t leave the company, and I’m not sure why. There was a woman trying to calm a young girl who obviously had a host of serious disabilities, quietly having a panic attack over the honking of the alarm. There was an old man in a wheelchair, heaped with blankets. And last out of the door serving our stairway was a young woman holding a baby, escorted by two others who were carrying an IV stand. The tube ran into the heaps of blankets and fleece keeping the two of them warm, and I didn’t know who it was attached to, but from the way the little party was acting, I suspect it was the baby. Do babies get chemo? Is it even possible for a kid not even a year old?

It cleared my head, certainly. The alarm was silenced after about 15 minutes, and after about five more, we were able to return to our individual appointments, but by then the schedule was FUBAR. I was freed from the Big Squeeze exactly 15 minutes before the Prius was scheduled for unveiling, and even I can’t drive that fast.

Fortunately, others were there. The new Prius looks a lot like the old Prius, but it’s supposedly bigger, faster, this-er and that-er.

As a consolation prize, how about a Tesla?

This is the Silicon Valley supercar, the all-electric totally hot totally green sports car. You need Steve Jobs’ salary to buy it — it costs well over $100K — and, well, it’s had a few problems. Daniel Lyons wrote about the car in Newsweek a few weeks back:

Tesla Motors didn’t just set out to build an electric car. It set out to teach Detroit a lesson. Back in 2003, when these guys from Silicon Valley were launching their company, they didn’t apologize for knowing next to nothing about the automotive industry. In fact, they took pride in this. They were rebels, disruptors, technogeeks operating at Internet speed—and they were convinced they could do better than the lumbering, clueless Big Three. Tesla’s lead investor, Elon Musk, a charismatic Web entrepreneur who made a fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, last year boasted to BusinessWeek that “Silicon Valley is the best in the world at everything it does.”

They must sell hubris in bulk at Whole Foods. Today, the Tesla, in Lyons’ words, is:

…a classic Silicon Valley product—it’s late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned. Tesla’s first 40 roadsters went out of the factory with a drivetrain that needs to be replaced. (Tesla will do the rip-and-replace for free.) Its second car, a sedan, has been delayed until 2011. Tesla, based in San Carlos, Calif., has raised $150 million and burned through almost all of it, plus millions more put down by customers in the form of deposits (the company won’t give an exact figure). Now, hit by the downturn, Tesla has laid off 20 percent of its staff, closed its Detroit office and borrowed money to stay afloat.

“The best in the world at everything it does.” I love people willing to say things like that on the record. You just know the followup stories will be even better.

Jalopnik really is the go-to source for auto-show blogging, at least for photos. (The Free Press and News provide a more holistic picture for Detroiters.) You can see the foxy model from my picture yesterday on Jalopnik’s, taken at the reveal of the Maserati Quattoporte. (Quattroporte means “four models.” No, wait. Let me check.)

I don’t know if I’ll make it back downtown after all. Things wrap up tomorrow at lunchtime, and then it’s Industry Days, the Charity Preview and finally the hoi polloi gates open Saturday.

A few people have asked about the pictures. Yes, they were taken with my new camera. (If you click the photos, it takes you to the Flickr page, which tells you the exact model, and if you click that, you get taken to another page that gives you everything from the price range to a selection of other Flickr pix taken with the same model.) Yes, most of them were shot on point-and-shoot settings. (I did a few on the Sports setting, to raise the shutter speed for moving rollouts.) Yes, it takes very nice pictures, but — don’t fail to consider the show floor is engineered to produce beautiful pictures, with artful lighting, lovely staging and an army of polishers who stand ready to banish any dust mote that dare show its face. Which is to say the camera is great but it’s not just the camera.

OK. I still have some paid work to do today, so I’d best get to it. A good afternoon to all. Be back whenever.

I’m not an unqualified Christopher Hitchens fan, but I found myself nodding along with his column in the current Vanity Fair, pegged to the 20-year anniversary of the ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” His nut sentence is this:

I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari’a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.

It’s an interesting piece, and stirs a lot of memories; I haven’t given Rushdie much thought since he emerged from hiding a while back. I haven’t read him, and so my mixed salad of known-facts about the guy is mostly from Page Six — his apparently bottomless thirst for hot babes, plastic surgery on his droopy lids and, of course, what I remember from 1989. Pat Buchanan was one of the sneering conservatives who said, essentially, big deal, calling him a “trendy leftist” who would, “if the ayatollah has his way,” hear “the swish of a scimitar” before departing for eternity. The rest of the column was padded out with finger-wagging at a writer who dared to criticize a religion. Hitchens recalls that was a common reaction on the right, while on the left was mainly fear, until Susan Sontag wrangled PEN to his defense — and it took some wrangling. Arthur Miller is named by Hitchens as one of those who preferred to remain silent until shamed into speaking up.

I recall damp, tedious, writer-ly sort of protests, public readings of the book and one of those “I am Spartacus” displays for the cameras in New York City. I remember Lance Mannion, then my friend in Fort Wayne, said Bush the Elder should proclaim that any move on Rushdie would lead to us bombing Qom. (Lance, I confess: I was taken aback.) Mostly I remember being bewildered by any religion that could lead to those angry, screeching protests we saw around the globe at the time. Well, I guess we learned, didn’t we?

The most depressing thing about Hitchens’ column is how effective the fatwa was. Rushdie lives, to be sure, but others connected to the book were killed by Muslim lunatics, and even today, the mere threat of similar violence can loosen the sphincters of every editor and executive producer in earshot. I was writing my Big Long Essay About Newspapers at the time of the Danish cartoon blow-up. My ex-editor in chief was quoted by her editorial-page editor explaining her refusal to print the cartoons or let the ed-page editor link to them on his blog: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Oh, snap! Somewhere Ben Bradlee is jealous.

Well, anyway — a good read.

Sorry for the late arrival today. It was a sleep-deficit catchup morning, which means I’m already behind. While we’re on the subject of the media, however: I had to force myself to read this blog entry about a certain blonde huckster with a very large Adam’s apple and her battle with a quote-news-unquote department, but I’m glad I did, even though it’s a Department of the Obvious sort of thing. (The headline is “grow a backbone” instead of “grow a pair” because it’s from Conde Nast and some pottymouth blogger.)

Now, off to shovel snow. Lance Mannion, stop by to help! We’ll discuss Rushdie!

A question for any nascent media ethicists in the house:

Is the photo array on Page One of today’s Wall Street Journal (pdf file, no subscription required) brilliant picture editing or some sort of cruel joke? Steve Jobs’ health is absolutely fair game for news coverage, but the iPods give the series an undercurrent of dark humor that makes me a tetch queasy. Thoughts?

Because I need another time-waster like I need another time-waster, I recently bookmarked the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new aggregator. Yesterday, Herself speaks on Princess Caroline, in a piece called “Caroline: The Reasons Why.” (How new media! In the 20th century, I was taught that was a redundancy — reasons or why, but not “reasons why.” But never mind that.) After a few hundred words of shivs to the ribs — calling her an “endive salad,” living “a parochial, socially timid life centered on Manhattan’s most cosseted enclave,” Brown decrees: “The Kennedys, blindsided by the success of pea-picking, penny-ante, polyester-wearing provincials like the Carters and the Clintons, were never all that delighted when Bill Clinton’s wife commandeered RFK’s old Senate seat.”

Jeez, you’d never know the Kennedys are only three generations from bootlegging shanty Irish trash, would you? And get that “commandeered,” too. Someone tell Hillary: All that listening? Wasted time.

Then she winds up with a bang:

The hope for Caroline’s troubled candidacy now is that another dynastic story than her own may provide her next act. When The Washington Post’s Phil Graham was the manic, magnetic media king of the New Frontier capital, his wife Katharine was drab and invisible in the background. When her husband died in a suicide, she stumbled uncertainly at first. She was inarticulate, she lacked charm. No one really imagined that she would run The Washington Post herself. Then she found, just as Caroline has with politics, that printer’s ink coursed through her veins. Yes you can, she thought. And yes she did.

I have to admit I’d love to see Princess Caroline get the seat just to watch that transformation. Perhaps that’s what the governor is betting on.

Wha-? That’s what we’re looking for in a senator? A narrative? A reality show? “A transformation” to watch? Does anyone give a shit about policy anymore? And what does Katharine Graham have to do with anything? But the Daily Beast was only getting started. Next was “Lance for Senate?” in which the cyclist takes a break from comeback training to open up to Mark McKinnon, who, it should be noted, sits on the board of his foundation. Not that you’d notice from the questions:

You are such an inspiration to so many people. Who inspires you?

What drives your competitive nature?

And, of course, the biggie:

Is there a future for Lance Armstrong in politics?

But that’s nothing compared to the answer:

If you feel like you can do the job better than people who are doing it now, and you can really make a difference, then that’s a real calling to serve, and I think you have to do that. I felt a strong desire to come back and race right now because I felt we had a place and I could have a real impact and that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t think you want to enter political life unless you really think you can really have an impact. Don’t do it for a bet, or a dare or for your ego. Or for any other competitive desire you have. Do it because you can get in there and change people’s lives. That’s why you do it. So, there will come a time, or not, that I say to myself, “You know what, I can help affect change.” And if that day comes, then absolutely.

Lance? Do you have any idea what a senator does? It may surprise you that the job description doesn’t include “getting in there and changing people’s lives,” although that might be a by-product. I really would have liked to see the unedited version of this, before the “how do you keep yourself so awesome” questions were excised.

I actually might like to see him run. I’d love to see the look on his face when someone yells at him, “How did you manage to keep your doping from being discovered?” from the press pack. Not that he’d ever get close to it. Princess Caroline and Sarah Palin showed you don’t have to do that. At least not when you have Mark McKinnon and his notebook nearby.

And just because we’re on the subject of celebrity, don’t miss this Defamer post about how Owen Wilson’s Rolex watch helped save him from suicide. Thanks to LAMary for sending it along; we’re both at a loss for words.

All is not lost, however: Dana Milbank in a priceless account of the RNC chairmanship race. Stay classy, GOP!

You meet the strangest people on Twitter. The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party is running for chairman of the national committee, and modestly tweets that his “Blueprint for a GOP Comeback” is “pretty darn good, if I say so myself.” Hmm. Well, that throws the gauntlet, doesn’t it?

We cannot continue to lag behind on this (new media) front. I have used every resource there is to communicate our message in Michigan. I Twitter; I blog; I vlog. I have a Facebook page. I am LinkedIn, and I’m a regular on YouTube. I learn from my teenage age sons about the newest ways to reach young people. I am committed to taking New Media to the next level at the RNC and creating an environment that encourages young people to compete to present the best ideas and the most innovative messaging.

Good for you, Saul Anuzis. Young people don’t care if you write “teenage age sons,” because traditional usage is so MSM. Actually, that passage sort of depresses me. I’m not sure I want someone at the top of the RNC spending all his time on Twitter, blogging, vlogging (a term that I cannot bring myself to speak aloud; is “video blogging” so much more onerous to say?), Facebooking and Linking In. I’m sort of sour on social networking these days. I’m thinking, what’s the damn point? I am networked nine ways to Tuesday, and most of it is an utter waste of time. Work gained from LinkedIn, despite vigorous effort? None. Facebook? Fun but ultimately less entertaining than the worst episode of “30 Rock.” Twitter? I keep trying to Tweet or whatever, but can’t shake the feeling Twitter is for people who find Facebook too intellectually challenging. As for video blogging, if I wanted to watch Ann Althouse drink wine and watch “American Idol,” or two homely eggheads discuss the Top 10 U.N. Stories of 2008, there’s already a place for it, and it’s called public-access cable.

I think I’ve reached my tipping point in the media revolution. The vox of the populi reveals itself more, day by day, as hot air and blah blah. I no longer read Jeff Jarvis (not that I did much, anyway), for fear of hearing of yet another skill I have to add to my media toolbox: Oh, now I have to report, write, summarize in 140 characters, shoot and edit video, podcast, video blog, regular blog and something else? Well, that leaves lots of time for thought and analysis. I was chatting with a friend in the dead-tree media world the other day, and he said, “We tried video. We cut a reporter free, trained him, turned him loose, and you know what? It takes him three days to do the video equivalent of a 12-inch story, only it’s not as good. He used to be able to write two of those in one day. Tell me how this is an improvement.” I couldn’t do it, except to add that I could probably do a story like that in one day, but he’s not hiring, anyway. It’s still a good question.

What exactly is the point of all this connectivity, all these channels to tell the world what we’re cooking for dinner? I thought I’d get Kate a cell phone by now, but her friends would bankrupt us sending text messages all day. (Typical text message they send to one another: “wazzup?”)

Anuzis isn’t a tool, however:

We were once the party that America trusted on national security. But when intelligence failures and poor planning led to unexpected challenges in Iraq, America lost faith in our party. We were once the party of fiscal responsibility. But when members of our own party led the way in pork barrel spending, which led to the fattest federal budget in history, America lost faith in our party. And we were once the party that had convinced America that we “shared their values.” But when Republican after Republican was exposed as a hypocrite who said one thing on the campaigntrail and behaved a different way in their personal life, America lost faith in our party.

That’s what you have to work on. Content! Content! The medium is not the message.

And so our new year begins. I drank my New Year’s champagne on Friday night, taking down the Christmas tree and eating tomato and mozzarella paninis (thanks, brother Chas, for the panini press for Christmas). Against all odds, I have high hopes for 2009, and I’m not sure why.

Give me your best predictions for the next 12 months in the comments. I’m going to bed and having a busy Monday, so I won’t be back until afternoon sometime. Peace out.

Greetings to all on 1/1/09. My resolution is the same one every year — Get your shit together — and I suspect I’ll have the same success I had last year. My shit remains scattered all over the place. Why do I do this to myself? I only wish I knew.

But since January 1 is always associated with fresh starts, clean closets and deep cleansing breaths, I thought I might start with the four or five draft entries to NN.C that linger in my WordPress drafts folder. These are abandoned entries, things I started but never finished, or at least never published. A couple of them are obvious; it was plain, once I set it down in prose, that the old Morrises joke that went around my social circle one summer (remember, Borden?) wasn’t funny at all, and really required alcohol to sell, but I never trashed the draft. It might be the only existing account of the Morrises joke! I’ll use it somewhere. Others I’ve already thrown away, because the world already knows how I feel about Mitch Albom, and underlining it isn’t necessary.

But here’s something I’m going to go ahead and copy/paste here. From the embedded link within, it looks like it dates from 2006. It’s about one of my favorite things about newspapers — the little inside jokes that somehow make it into every issue — and since 2009 will probably be the year at least one major U.S. city loses its daily, now’s the time.

So best of luck to all in this new year. (And please, will someone sit down with Dick Clark and have a heart-to-heart with him, before another year passes?) Below, something from the notebook:

When I returned to work following my fancy-schmancy journalism fellowship, only to discover my new assignment would be the 5 a.m. shift on the copy desk, I wasn’t exactly pleased. But — this part is complicated and not interesting to anyone but me — it would do. And honestly? Once I got back to work, to my enormous relief and equally enormous shock, I found I still cared.

I still wanted to do a good job, that is. I still cared that the stories I handled were as good as I could make them. Reporters who wouldn’t check simple facts still bugged me, as did editors who let sloppy prose pass by unmolested. And to some extent I fell victim to Copy Editor’s Disease, in which I became enormously nit-picky.

For example: I edited the movie grid, and for several weeks running, it included “Around the World in 80 Days.” Each title had a one-line description, and its was “A man travels around the world in 80 days.” This drove me insane. I always changed it to, “An adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel.” That there was probably not a single reader who would appreciate or even know about this change bothered me not in the least. It just seemed important, and if you can’t see why, well, you’re not my colleague, buddy.

So, then, you can maybe see why I was so tickled by this Jack Shafer piece in Slate, about the folks at the New York Times who write the one-line descriptions of movies that run in the TV listings. Only they do more than just describe; they’re a micro-mini review, too:

The capsules spend 20 words—and usually fewer—to pass informed judgment on movies. Even if you never intend to watch any of the films, the capsules make for good morning reading. Consider this taut kiss-off of The Matrix Revolutions: “Ferocious machine assault on a battered Zion. Stop frowning, Neo; it’s finally over.” Appreciate, if you will, the efficient setup and slam of the 2 Fast 2 Furious capsule: “Ex-cop and ex-con help sexy customs agent indict money launderer. Two fine performances, both by cars.” And for compression, it’s hard to better the clip for the Julie Davis feature Amy’s Orgasm. It warns potential viewers away with just four syllables: “Change the station.”

Good newspapers are full of stuff like this, little gems inserted by smart people who are frequently working in below-the-radar jobs that the folks who run the place don’t even think about. The Columbus Dispatch’s College Preview column ran in agate and was supposed to be a pretty dull agate-type spacefiller on what the Saturday football schedule had in store, until they turned it over to someone who didn’t do dull agate well. (Actually, several people.) Instead, they gave them art in very small type. Here’s a sample, previewing a Florida-Tennessee matchup:

Jocks in Socks: A tongue twister by Dr. Seussaphone. Jocks. Socks. Blocks. Knoxville. Jocks in socks knock blocks in Knoxville. Which jocks knock whose blocks in Knoxville? Why the Gators of Steve the Fox, sir. Chicks built like bricks come. Hicks in stick shifts come. Chicks come. Hicks come. Chicks and hicks from the sticks come. Vols take licks like sick hicks from sticks. Please, sir, Vols don’t like taking licks in Knoxville. I’m so sorry, says Steve the Fox, but you Vols I vow to knock. Here’s an easy game to play. Here’s an easy win today. Who beats whose butt? Steve beats Vols’ butts. Steve beats Vols and Fulmer’s full butt. Beats Phil’s full butt? To a pulp, sir.

By the time the suits caught on, it had developed a readership.

Content always wins.