It is finally spring here in Michigan, and we’re trying to make our space a little nicer. The enormously expensive back-strip landscaping is fleshing out nicely, and we’ve added a couple bird feeders. Of course this attracts not only the wrong birds — if I wanted mourning doves, I’d have put on a funeral — but squirrels. My experience firing a shotgun last week leads me to fantasize about more interesting target practice, preferably on those little bastards. The other day I wondered idly what they might taste like.

It turns out squirrel cookery is in Alan’s immediate bloodline. His parents used to go hunting together, and sometimes brought home a bag of them. “I remember my mom would boil them, and then fry them,” he said. Alan’s mom was a humble cook with a limited repertoire, but I give her points for guts and pluck for even trying to cook a squirrel. (Although, to be sure, boiled-then-fried sounds positively vile.) Turns out I’m not the only one giving this critter some thought:

(Squirrel) meat is selling faster than butchers can get it, not least because it is currently nesting season. Ever since Kingsley Village Butchers in Fraddon, Cornwall, began offering grey squirrel two months ago, it has shifted up to a dozen a day.

That’s from the Telegraph. The British can be very strange.

The story goes on to reveal the astonishing price English butchers are fetching for “tree rat:”

At £3 to £4 for one, the shop-bought variety is hardly an obvious answer to keeping the lid on an escalating grocery bill.

Jeez. At current exchange rates that’s almost $7 per squirrel. Alan and I split a one-inch Delmonico from time to time, which at current prices costs us around $14. And for that we can get two squirrels? The dollar is weak, but please.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Via Nervous Rod Dreher, a profile of Marston Hefner in GQ magazine, teenage son of you-know-who:

Marston doesn’t actually live in the Mansion—not anymore, not since his parents split up in 1998 and his mom, the blond Playmate Kimberley Conrad (January ’88), moved into a more modest house that adjoins the property. He’s 18 now, about to graduate from high school, a tall and lanky kid with heavy brows, watchful, slightly sad eyes, and a complexion that says “I spend too much time playing video games.” He has none of his dad’s swagger or mothlike attraction to the bright lights of Hollywood—which you could attribute to a young man struggling to define himself in opposition to his famous father, or to the fact that they just don’t spend that much quality time together these days. Marston doesn’t make it over every day. He’s usually here on Thursdays, though, for…backgammon night?

Nervous Rod thinks the kid is a slack zero, because of course GQ is the last authority in all things, and because he disapproves of Hugh Hefner. I’m a parent, too, and I had a different reaction: Marston Hefner is turning out about as well as can reasonably be expected, a typical child of a parent who blots out the sun, his odds in life perhaps 50-50 — his money will provide him cushion and opportunities, while the essential weirdness of his upbringing and its attendant pitfalls will try to take him down.

And while I’m always happy to see a freelance writer getting some work, I’m less fond of hit pieces against people who don’t deserve it, and while the hit wasn’t aimed at young Marston, he’s certainly collateral damage in passages like this, in which the writer interviews Hef pére:

Did you ever try to explain the fact that, just after the separation, you started dating seven blond women?

“Not really. What is there to say?”

There was never any conversation about monogamy or marriage?

“What kind of conversation would that be?”

What kind of signal does that send?

“I think the signal that it sends, quite frankly, which the boys liked, was that instead of somebody replacing mama, I dated a bunch of girls.”

After about forty-five minutes, Hef appears to be losing steam. I turn off the tape recorder, and he rises from the couch. As he does, he rips the kind of fart that one does not even attempt to hide from. No one in the room blinks.

News flash: Hef was a lousy father, and 82-year-old men fart unexpectedly. Wow. I bet Ronald Reagan was the picture of refinement at that age, too. (And, to be sure, not much of a father, either.)

Let’s just hope they had better taste in picking the mothers of their children.

Nice David Edelstein appreciation of Sydney Pollack, actor.

OK, Friday. I’d looked forward to a long, relaxing bike ride today, and in the last half-hour three e-mails arrived that will see to it I’m desk-bound for half the day. Better get to work. Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you back here after.

My commitment to saving gas is so pathetic as to be comical — I mean, a fair-weather cyclist who works from home is hardly capable of a real sacrifice in fossil-fuel consumption — but I’m trying to approach it with some level of seriousness. And I’ve set a goal: The one-month tank of gas. Fourteen gallons in 30 days.

It’s not that far-fetched. I made it to three weeks between fill-ups recently without making myself a hermit in the bargain. If you can go three weeks, you should be able to go four, right? Here are my main rules and strategies:

1) Combining trips. If I’m going to Royal Oak for a meeting, I try to think of other stuff I can do while I’m out there. I mean, besides eat lunch. If the trip takes me past Costco (and most do), I make a stock-up stop.

2) Telling my dear only child, “Can’t you ride your bike? Lansing’s not that far. ”

3) It’s difficult to shop for a week of groceries on a bicycle, but easy to get a day’s worth. I pretend I’m French and live in a tiny Paris walkup with a refrigerator the size of a shoebox.

4) All shopping excursions requiring the car get a second, third or fourth look. All chances to interact with other human beings I don’t even question. The idea is to save gas, not become a crazy miserly energy tyrant.

5) You can fit more on the back of a bike than you think, if you have the right bungee cords. It does make the thing a little light up front, however. And carrying home certain loads — a few bottles of wine, a big bag of dog food — make you look like a crazy person who lost her driver’s license to multiple drunk-driving convictions. But it’s fun to be crazy. At least people get the hell out of your way.

6) Finally — and this is huge in Detroit — I started driving the speed limit. There’s an essay in that, because absolutely nobody in this town, in the state, does so. The default driving style is fast, cheap and out of control, and while it can be fun, it doesn’t exactly make the real-time mileage gauge on the dash track a nice steady number. Driving the speed limit in Detroit is like being an atheist in Colorado Springs. People not only look at you funny, they think you’re with al-Qaeda.

If none of these strategies seem particularly earth-shattering, well, you lived through the ’70s, too. It’s hard to make you younger folks understand how unsettling that era was, and prices aside, it was unsettling. Stations closed at 5 p.m. Some areas restricted sales to every other day depending on last name or plate number. Lines at the pumps stretched a block or more. And it happened so fast — one day gasoline was an expense for most households the way coffee was an expense, and suddenly it turned into a mortgage. I drove to Cleveland with some friends for a day trip during this period, and we delayed topping off the tank. As we turned for home, we entered a strip of gas stations near the freeway entrance, and justlikethat, they all turned off their lights and closed for business, and it was like that all over town. We had to spend the night, like pioneers stranded by a blizzard.

For teenagers accustomed to getting a couple days’ driving out of a dollar’s worth of gas, it was shocking.

A few years later came the big coal strike that led to voluntary restrictions on electricity use, deep into one of the coldest winters on record, and certainly in my lifetime. I think of that era as cold, dark and expensive, and it changed my energy-use behavior forever. I’ve never bought a car without at least considering its gas mileage. I never set the thermostat above 68. I watch my tach as closely as I watch my speed, and shift to minimize RPMs whenever possible.

This sort of era can turn you crabbed and mean; the dark side of thrift is miserliness, a refusal to share in any sort of bounty for fear of a coming shortage. But I’m sympathetic to those caught flat-footed. Many of my neighbors are in the automotive business, and many drive enormous, hulking, high-profit-margin vehicles that are surely running them to the poorhouse, one tank at a time. (Remember, this is the industry that, when confronted with the early Honda subcompacts, offered as competition the Chevy Vega and Ford Pinto.) Many are younger than I am, and don’t remember the fun old days. Ah, well. As my parents responded to my whining then with stern reminders of the deprivations of the war years, so too do I nod in sympathy, as I roll past on pedal power.

How do you save gas without being totally anal about it?

By the way, today I’m having lunch on the patio at the Detroit Golf Club — a planning session for our movie challenge entry, next month. See Rule #4, above. I’m so starved for a non-family human interaction I’d drive to Ypsilanti for donuts with Mitt Romney. (Downside: Again, it’s not even 50 degrees yet. Maybe they’ll have to serve us our coffee in thermal casks.)

A bit o’ bloggage:

In addition to the big essay on conservatism, I also read this in the New Yorker this weekend, about Katie Couric’s travails as anchor of the CBS Evening News. I read it with the same sense of awe I have whenever I think about the evening network news — that somewhere in this country there are still people with nothing better to do at 6:30 p.m. than watch 22 minutes of old-skool network news. So, I think, does Nancy Franklin, who wrote the piece:

The evening news continues to have value for millions of people, but millions more are now turning to the Internet. Increasingly, and in more ways than one, there is an end-of-the-day feeling to the nightly-news half hour—there’s ad after ad for products that treat all the things that go wrong with your body after you’re fifty, and in the broadcast itself there’s the endless use of the tired phrase “pain at the pump,” for stories on fuel prices, and always, in stories about pharmaceutical companies or warnings about drugs, the same shot of pills moving rapidly along a conveyor belt.

Our witty pal Alex once described the overarching theme of network news as “somewhere, someone younger than you is spending your tax dollars on things you wouldn’t approve of,” and that’s word, too. Later:

But I don’t think that people want less news; they want, I believe, the same kind of informed passion and doggedness that TV-news people displayed while covering Hurricane Katrina, and they want anchors to go deep into issues. Who knows, young people might turn on their TVs in droves if news organizations had a few choice strands of Michael Moore’s DNA in them, and pointed out when, say, a public official wasn’t telling the truth. Jon Stewart is a lightning rod both for people who decry the notion that young people get their news from watching “The Daily Show,” and for people who think that his (and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report”) is the only current-events show worth watching. I’m not a Stewartite, but when Dick Cheney denies making certain statements about the war in Iraq and Stewart shows three video clips that prove he’s lying, I think he’s providing a real service to the country, and I’d like to think that that’s what his fans are responding to.

That’s exactly right. I’m late to the Jon Stewart fan club, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see him on a network newscast — it would ruin his magic — but I’d drive an SUV to Ypsi to see him do an author interview before I would, say, Brian Williams. (His dissection of Jonah Goldberg is a minor classic.) Stewart brings a level of honesty to the table that so-called professional journalists either can’t or won’t, because they interpret “objectivity” so strictly that they can’t call a spade a spade. Haven’t they figured out that the people they cover are wise to this? How many books does Scott McClellan have to write before it gets through: Sometimes the people behind the podium? Are LYING. It’s not bias to point this out. It’s, um, journalism.

Well, don’t want to start ranting.

Why newspapers are dying: Because they think there’s no room for ALL the “Sex and the City” movie-premiere fashion pictures. But Jezebel does.

The morning, she is slipping away. Better go select my long underwear for visiting the golf club on the 28th DAY OF DAMN MAY, FOR GOD’S SAKE. Have a good one.

Some broad has a column about Indiana in the Washington Post. “What you need to know,” or something. It’s twinned with a piece by some guy writing the same thing about North Carolina. They both say their states are a mass of contradictions. Meh. I think they need to get better writers.

But this is it, Indiana — an extraordinary primary in this year of years, so drink it up. I was on the phone with Mark the Shark last week (I was on the phone with a few Hoosiers in the past week; see above), and he was reminiscing about the time he snuck out of lunch at Bishop Luers to see Robert Kennedy’s car drive past, the last time the Indiana primary mattered. Mark the Shark wears hearing aids now. The next time this happens, you could be dead. Drink. It. Up.

Then enjoy the familiar feeling of the day after, when your ardent lover of the past few weeks has moved on and now ignores your number on the caller ID. “Indiana who?” he or she will say, if you get through. “Oh yeah — one of those ‘I’ states.” Like …oh, Iowa.

During my chat with Paul Helmke, we talked about his famous Theory of Horizontal Stateitude, which I believe we’ve discussed here before. To wit: Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are three states divided the wrong way. The upper third of each has more in common with one another than the rest of their own territory, ditto the central and southernmost thirds. The north of each is blue-collar and ethnic (Cleveland, Gary, Chicago), the central a frontier of the Mid-Atlantic states (Columbus, Indianapolis, Springfield, the south a remnant of the Dixie/Appalachia that lies below. It’s an interesting theory, imperfect in parts, but sound as a whole. He reminded me of Indiana’s role in the 1920s-era KKK, which many people see as evidence of a deeply entrenched racism, but that’s too facile. The Klan’s big issue in the ’20s was anti-immigration and stamping out the menace of Popery. When they made a play to take over the state’s Republican party, it was the northern-third party members who put a stop to it.

He also reminded me of the influence of foreign policy on this insulated, heartland area. His family were all Democrats “until Woodrow Wilson invaded the Fatherland,” and all the good Germans turned Republican overnight. “And I’m hearing from a lot of Republicans who plan to vote Democratic in the fall,” he said, over disgust with the Iraq war. Goes to show you things change everywhere, even in Indiana.

So how are the rest of you on this fine spring day? Speaking of demographic and historical influences, I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It read: “Turkey: Take responsibility for the Armenian genocide,” which counts as a sentiment you don’t hear expressed much in other parts of the country. Yesterday, while poking around Sweet Juniper’s related sites, I ordered this from his photo store. It looks as thought it was taken in the Dequindre Cut pre-renovation, although I could be wrong. Title: “Feral dog, Albanian graffiti.” Yes, there’s an Albanian presence in Detroit. Yes, that’s the country where the fake war was in “Wag the Dog,” a place so reliably obscure the writers believed it could pass as “one of those ‘A’ countries,” and it did. Not here.

OK, enough half-assed sociology. On to the bloggage:

The 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of all time might be funny, but I didn’t get beyond No. 50 — for Annuale, the once-a-year period. It seemed unfair to the other ad parodies to have to compare with that one. Love the pink ax.

A survey of newspaper editors around the world reveals they believe the newspaper of the future will be free (congratulations, folks, it already is); have more opinion and comment (groan, because of course they’re doing such a bang-up job competing with the internet on that one already); and that “some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced” (more errors). A limping industry falls into its future.

Celebrity “journalism” is great fun and all, but I miss the days when all we did was take Sean Penn’s picture when he was leaving a restaurant with Madonna. Poor Mischa Barton (a phrase I never thought I’d write).

For those of you who missed the Tom Cruise/Oprah interview last week, Bossy has a recap.

Off to the gym. Be good, now.

It’s standard for parents of children my age to mourn the loss of their Widdle Girl, as the less-widdle adolescent begins to make her appearance. And, truth be told, I sometimes take out the box of baby pictures and get a little wistful. Mostly, though, I look on a successful passage out of elementary-school as an affirmation that at least we made it this far. And then we work, again, on those pesky time-telling skills.

I missed this story when it went around a couple weeks ago: Columnist Lenore Skenazy, who lives in New York City, did a shocking thing.

Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home.

And guess what? He made it. But Skenazy suffered a few wounds of her own:

As she wrote in her column about Izzy’s big adventure: “Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”

Izzy had been bugging his mom for a while to let him try it. The reaction was predictable; Skenazy anointed herself America’s Worst Mother afterward, and I get the sense she was waiting to do so. But so what? I, as America’s Second-Worst Mother, salute her.

Say what you want about Michael Moore, and “Bowling for Columbine” might have been mean to poor old Charlie Heston, but he hit on a very important truth in that movie, and hardly anyone talked about it: Americans are constantly spoon-fed a diet of Fear, and it shows in the decisions they make, including how they raise their kids.

One day last winter, I called Kate at a friend’s house, a friend who lives one (1) block away. I’m sitting at my bedroom window now, and if there weren’t a house in the way, I could see this friend’s house. I told her it was time to come home. Two minutes later, headlights swung into the driveway — my neighbor, dropping Kate off.

Later I said, “Please, just let her walk home. It’s one block. She won’t freeze.” I assumed Kate had asked for a ride because it was cold outside. But no: “Oh, really, I don’t mind. If anything happened to her, I’d never forgive myself.” The chances of something happening in one block are, as Skenazy points out, about the same as being struck by lightning, but ah well.

“What do we pay outrageous taxes for, if not for safety?” I replied. She pointed out that taxes don’t buy safety, and she’s right. But fear doesn’t, either. Sometimes you just have to take your chances in the world. Paul Campos, a Rocky Mountain News columnist, wrote of Skenazy:

Skenazy notes that one acquaintance told her that he requires his daughter to call home after she has walked the one block to her friend’s house, even though they live in a typically crime-free suburb.

Other parents informed her they don’t allow their children to walk alone to the mailbox.

This kind of thing encourages children to see the world in fear-ridden terms, and to grow up to become the sort of people more interested in having their government protect them from largely imaginary threats than in preserving their civil liberties.

Here’s Rod Dreher, the banner-carrying Crunchy Conservative, a man whose very existence is defined by fear and whining, showing his faith in his fellow man:

John Podhoretz told me once that growing up in NYC in the big bad Seventies, he used to take the subway around by himself when he was not much older than Matthew is now. And that that wasn’t unusual. Nowadays, though, you’d be out of your mind to let your kid do that in NYC, which is vastly safer than it used to be. Or if not out of your mind, at least that kind of behavior would be extremely unusual.

This was in the midst of a big post about how his own children can’t go around the neighborhood unsupervised, but can in his Louisiana hometown. (For some years now, Dreher’s been threatening to go off the grid and retreat to a plot of organically farmed land, to encase his family in the warm cotton batting of no television and homeschooling. I wish he’d just pull the trigger and put the rest of us out of our misery.) Note the twisted logic: John Podhoretz navigated the city safely when it was far more dangerous. Now it’s far, far safer, but if you let your kids do it today, “you’d be out of your mind.”

I live in a suburb so safe that the vandalism of a For Sale sign makes the newspaper. (Seriously: The headline was “Sign bent.”) I may live to regret it, but just for today, I’m going to assume my taxes buy something other than potholes and lousy city government. Fly free, little bird.

(Oh, and about those time-telling skills: Of course Kate can tell time. She just loses track of it. One condition to the freedom I give her is, she has to be home on time. Inevitably, she forgets.)

More on America’s Worst Mother, and her blog, Free Range Kids, where you can read the column that started it all.

So, bloggage:

While we’re on the subject, I wasn’t offended by Miley Cyrus’ back, either.

God bless America? No, god DAMN America! And John McCain asked for his endorsement.

My Indiana alma mater’s circulation: 24,196. One-year drop? More than eight percent. I confess, my jaw dropped.

Back to work.

If you’ve thrown a trout at me lately, or challenged me to match wits in the there/their/they’re test, or compared taste in books and movies, you’ve probably not heard back. I’m getting acquainted with the Ignore button on Facebook. I’m thinking of ignoring Facebook entirely. Don’t take it personally.

I’ve just about decided I’m too old to fully understand the Face (as the kids are calling it), and for once, that’s not a bad thing. I’d rather read a book; pity the soul who’d choose to spend that time on Facebook. Before I joined, I asked people why I needed to, and they all boiled down to “because you can keep in touch with all your friends.” Well, I can keep in touch with them now, and I don’t have to give up my privacy. I was finally convinced by a fellow journalist, who said he used the Face to get a full news cycle jump on the competition for a breaking story. I’m all for that, sure. But once I joined, then I had to learn to use it. The next thing I knew I was adding applications, lobbing Wall posts back and forth and otherwise wasting time. Just what the internet needs: Another way to waste time.

Lately the apps writers have been more aggressive. Someone challenges you to a trivia test, you take it, and to get your results, you have to pass a page inviting your friends to take it, too. I generally unselect everybody and pass it by, but lately they’ve been requiring me to pick a minimum number. Screw that. So: Ignore. Ignore, ignore, ignore. (Like all resolutions, I have problems keeping this one. Added a friend this morning.)

If anyone knows a secret about the Face that I’m missing, I’m interested.

Linkishness:

Via Eric Zorn: A great This American Life piece on the Jerry Springer you don’t know. Even if you think you did know him — and many Ohioans do — there’s almost guaranteed to be something here you don’t. A wonderful listen. Click on “full episode” and listen in QT.

I missed this in yesterday’s Freep — an amazing tale of bureaucratic heavy-handedness, or why you should keep up with what the kids are drinking these days. Detroit authorities snatch a UM professor’s 7-year-old away to foster care because the kid was seen drinking a Mike’s Lemonade at a Tigers game. The father said he didn’t know it was alcoholic (and I believe him).

Short shrift today, but deal — it’s 34 degrees outside and I have work to do.

This is something I read in Sunday’s NYT magazine; the story was about Moody’s bond- and security-rating service:

To get why (Moody’s stratospheric growth) is impressive, you have to think about all that determines whether a mortgage is safe. Who owns the property? What is his or her income? Bundle hundreds of mortgages into a single security and the questions multiply; no investor could begin to answer them. But suppose the security had a rating. If it were rated triple-A by a firm like Moody’s, then the investor could forget about the underlying mortgages. He wouldn’t need to know what properties were in the pool, only that the pool was triple-A — it was just as safe, in theory, as other triple-A securities.

Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody’s in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.

By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and — their capital thus replenished — wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.

Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.

But who was evaluating these securities? Who was passing judgment on the quality of the mortgages, on the equity behind them and on myriad other investment considerations? Certainly not the investors. They relied on a credit rating.

You may have to read this a few times to absorb it. Go ahead. When you’re ready, come back and ask yourself how often you’ve heard someone of late say, “The mortgage mess is very simple — people didn’t pay their mortgages.” I think of this as the Stupid Simple Meme. A SSM reduces a complex issue to something that can be fit on a bumper sticker, and conveniently transfers 100 percent of the blame to the most powerless saps on the stage.

The bankers? They were just doing what comes nacherly — making money. How can we blame a business for making money? That’s what businesses do! And if they did it by churning fees, by ignoring the simplest due diligence in vetting loan applications, by marketing through outright lies? Details, details. The bad people are the ones who didn’t pay their mortgages.

The disaster in New Orleans? It was the fault of the people who chose to live below sea level, and the deaths were a natural result of people who simply refused to leave. (Are you listening, the Netherlands?) Granted, not everyone had Ashley Morris yelling in their ear for the last three years, but I’m still amazed at how many people shrug their shoulders at what happened there, who say it was simply inevitable, an act of God, something no levee could have held back.

(In case you think I’m only singling out right-wing Simple Stupids, the left has them, too: Remember “the cure for homelessness is housing”? Yeah, even 20 years ago it seemed a little pat.)

I have a new rule: Whenever anyone says, “It’s really very simple…” about a complicated problem, I stop listening.

Anyway, why bother? VRSA is going to get us all, and remember, folks: It came…from…Michigan! Mm-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

(What is VRSA, you ask? Why, it’s MRSA, only with a V, for Very Very Very Scary.)

Actually, that story is worth reading, if only for yet another fascinating Detroit factoid:

Metro Detroit has a history of antibiotic resistance. Illegal drug users 20 to 30 years ago injected antibiotics with heroin in a misguided effort to avoid getting contaminated by dirty needles. As a result, many local bacteria developed resistance to penicillin and its relatives, such as methicillin.

Can you tell it’s Grumpy Monday around these parts? The weather has turned — and just as the redbuds were emerging, dammit — and we’re promised two-thirds of a week when we’ll be lucky to see 50 degrees, joy oh joy. We spent the last day of mild temperatures opening the cottage, which was both uneventful (no squirrels came down the chimney and decomposed under the pillow, like last year). Unfortunately, the shared dock has become a real problem. What was originally agreed upon as a sensible policy — two boats per cottage, back when a boat was an outboard with a 10-horse motor on the back — is now ridiculous. When did a recreating family of four come to need a ski boat, a pontoon and two Jet-Skis? A pox on all their houses; when gas goes to $5 a gallon maybe we can have a little water to actually swim in. I kept my head down, raked leaves and scrubbed things. There’s something about cleaning that empties the head and calms the spirit. Add a leaf fire, and things get just about perfect.

Bloggage? Oh, a little:

A few weeks ago I wondered what would happen to a newspaper if you took away paper, ink, trucks, Teamsters and the like. Answer: The Capital Times of Madison, Wis., which becomes an online-only paper very soon. Future: Very very murky. (This was the plan for my alma mater, derailed when Knight Ridder derailed itself. Never happened, but I will still watch this transformation with interest and, i fear, dread.)

The photo with this story kind of startled me, because as soon as I looked at it, before I even registered who was in it, I said, “Oh, huh. Indiana.” It has to do with the color and height of the cloud ceiling, something about that color of brown, I dunno. For a second I even thought it was Fort Wayne, and if pressed, I’d have said it was on Pontiac Street, beside the old Rialto theater. No, it was Anderson, but still: Indiana. Weird.

Not much, I know, but hey — it’s Monday. Give me some time to get rolling.

The Grosse Pointe News was sold last year, its longtime family ownership getting out while the lifeboats were still above the waterline. It wasn’t a very good paper when they owned it. It’s safe to say they set a pretty low bar. Our friend JohnC stopped subscribing when he couldn’t figure out what was happening at a big economic redevelopment project three blocks away from his house — they just couldn’t seem to explain it in a way he could understand. This was par for the course.

They also had lots of eccentric touches. There was a column on the editorial page, called Offering From the Loft. It was written in the first person. But there was no byline. Ever. It was the mystery column.

Needless to say, they honored the traditions of small-town journalism, the three Bs — boosterism, b.s. and bad writing. They sent one of their best guys to write about the Annie Leibovitz photography show at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This was his lead:

Sho’ as grits ain’t groceries theys doins t’night at Po’ Monkey’s Lounge.

Huh? Eight paragraphs of apostrophes later, here’s the nut:

Po’ Monkey’s place is among 70 of Leibovitz’s photographs gathered as “Annie Leibovitz: American Music” at the Detroit Institute of Arts through Jan. 7.

I’m being a little unfair. In the triple-A minors, they really don’t have the editors to rein in the writers who want to do stuff like this. But it isn’t too much to expect an editor who knows what the main issues are in a cluster of five municipalities encompassing 50,000 souls. I don’t expect a multi-part series on racism, but I do want them to stand up to the police departments once in a while. In return for their cooperation in sharing public documents, the police require that no names be attached to their reports. This isn’t entirely unjustified — there are many times when it would only cause more trouble for the involved parties, and there needs to be some sort of policy — but in the pages of this paper, it gets ridiculous. Last week’s police briefs contained a reference to police being called to “a high school on Vernier Road.” There is only one high school on Vernier Road. Like that.

After the paper was sold to a local businessman, I hoped a little fresh blood might enliven it a bit. Not a chance. It’s even worse. The Offering From the Loft might have been a puzzle, but at least it was written by (I think) a soul residing somewhere in this zip code. Now the editorial pages are full of syndicated material and canned op-eds from the Mackinac Institute for Public Policy, a conservative propaganda outfit. Local news coverage is weaker than ever; the police briefs are frequently the only real “news” in the paper, and yes, they’re still not identifying public buildings.

This was the lead on yesterday’s guest editorial, headlined “Broadcasting Rights Applied.” It’s by James H. Quello, a former FCC commissioner:

The recent Federal Communications Commission Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on localism released with the report and order regarding revised Form 355 — mandating more detailed programming and ascertainment than ever required before — represents a grossly untimely and blatant government mandated violations of the First Amendment.

Huh. It goes on:

The excessive burdensome additional governmental FCC requirements are counter to the urgent need to update regulatory and ownership rules of the past.

I read the whole thing twice. I have no idea what he’s talking about, or why I should care.

But there was still room for more suckitude, and it came in a King Features syndicated column from National Review editor Rich Lowry, who in 500 words or so tells us what Detroit’s problems are. In the interest of brevity, I’ll boil it down to one. Ready? “Liberalism.”

OK. The decline and fall of Detroit is a big, big story, an epic, encompassing so many titanic themes Cecil B. DeMille couldn’t get his arms around them. Economics, race, class, hubris, fear, greed — I could go on. It has defeated greater storytellers than Rich Lowry, but few have dismissed it with such a casual wave of the hand. I’m all for vigorous commentary on Detroit’s problems, especially by one of its closest neighbors. But is it too much to ask that it not be by a syndicated scold who, I’d be willing to bet, has never even set foot here? (It wouldn’t be a big bet; Detroit does a fair amount of convention business, and there’s a good chance Lowry overnighted at the RenCen at some point in the past. But the guy grew up in D.C., went to college in Virginia and lives in New York. So much for boots on the ground.)

But wait! Here’s a local column about Detroit’s problems. The writer objects to the mayor’s friends collecting money for his legal defense. She tries that “humor” thing all the blogs are about:

People who know me well, know I am a good cook and I enjoy it, so I deserve that $150,000 kitchen. I’m creating a “Karen’s Kitchen Kache Fund.” Anyone who wants to donate can.

It goes on from there. It doesn’t get better.

It’s unfortunate that this week’s issue arrived with the annual subscription-renewal mailing. It’s not expensive. I hate to cancel any newspaper subscription; they’re all struggling. But at some point, you have to make a statement about what you’re willing to pay for, and I’m drawing the line. I might reconsider if an editor can explain to me, in two concise sentences, what that FCC editorial was about and why they ran it. Otherwise, we’re letting it lapse here.

ADDED: No writer tackling Detroit should have to make weak jokes when reality is so much funnier. Note the photo. Note the caption. Note the goddamn TIARA.

OK. While we’re on the subject, a little more media bloggage:

I didn’t flip Wednesday night’s debate on until more than halfway through, so I missed the fun part. Thank God for Jon Stewart, because if he hadn’t had video I never would have believed it:

I mean, not even. I am ashamed for Charles Gibson. George Stephanopoulos isn’t really a journalist, but Gibson has no excuse. (And he’s a Michigan fellow! Argh.)

OK, time’s a-wasting. It’s a gorgeous day, and I’d like to enjoy it, even though it’s now Leaf Blower Season. My neighbors two doors down employ a lawn service that does every task with extra-loud leaf blowers. Seriously. They’ve been down there for a solid hour, drowning out the birds. Think I’ll ride by and glare at them.

Have a great weekend, all.

How important are facts in fiction? I guess it depends on the reader. Since I moved here I’ve been working my way through the vast canon of Detroit-based crime fiction, with varying levels of satisfaction. Loren Estleman’s Amos Walker series is almost uniformly a pleasure to read, although I’ve learned not to try to solve the mystery as I go along, because he’s going to pull a big rabbit out of his hat in the penultimate chapter, and you might as well just go along for the ride. Elmore Leonard is, of course, sublime from beginning to end. Donald Goines, not so much. Everyone else falls within that spectrum.

I’m currently sampling “Detroit Noir,” one of the Noir series, collections of short stories based in and around specific cities. (Sorry, Hoosiers, “Fort Wayne Noir” is not in the pipeline, although there is a Twin Cities Noir, which I hope features lots of killers in earflap hats.) It’s not bad, but it could have used another layer of editing, the kind that changes “Manoogian Manor” to “Manoogian Mansion” and corrects what was, for me, a total momentum-stopper in the one story set in Grosse Pointe, a line where “the sun dropped behind the Yacht Club.” I tried to figure if there was any point at which two people could sit in a car and watch the sun set behind the landmark Moorish watchtower, and came up with, “Not until the earth reverses its orbit.” The Yacht Club sits on the western edge of Lake St. Clair and enjoys some fabulous sunrises, but for sunsets, you’d have to be out in the water somewhere.

That kind of stuff drives me crazy. In “The Sporting Club,” Thomas McGuane sets his story in 1968 and has two characters go to the dedication of the Mackinac Bridge, which happened a decade previous. I see this stuff all the time. I know many authors aren’t journalists, and I know some ironing of the truth is permissible, but I wish they’d respect certain ironclad truths, including the construction dates of major pieces of infrastructure and the direction of the earth’s travel around the sun.

That is all.

“Detroit Noir” is pretty good, however. I hope there’s another one.

So how was your weekend? Mine went like this: Taxes errands taxes dinner w/JohnC taxes and now, soon, IRA deposits. I hate doing my taxes, but I love TurboTax, the only financial software I use. Every year, it gets better. It now inhales much of my 1099-misc data directly from my bank while I sit there filing my nails. My sole complaint: It keeps a running total of your payment/refund. At one point I owed $14,000, an utterly meaningless figure — I had told it all of my income, and none of my payments — but having a figure like that hovering in the corner makes you want to put off doing your taxes another few days.

I know I pay too much. There are probably dozens of deductions I am entitled to and don’t take. I stay squarely on the right side of the law and probably pay more than Donald Rumsfeld, but there’s no valuing peace of mind. My receipts aren’t creatively embellished. I really do keep a mileage log. If I were audited I would surely spend a few sleepless nights, but at the end it’s entirely possible I’d walk out with a refund. (Not bloody likely, but you never know.) I don’t even hate the IRS, too much. Someone has to be the bad guy.

Early in my career I wrote a story on some tax protesters in Columbus. They were followers of Irwin Schiff, and two of the dumbest telephone installers I’ve ever met. One had a Filipino mail-order bride and the other bragged about how much he wanted a Corvette, so he quit paying taxes and bought one. The latter was en route to federal prison when I left town, the other the subject of keen interest by federal authorities. They both thought they had stumbled across the greatest loophole in the history of tax law — that the income tax is voluntary. P.S. Irwin Schiff is in jail. Wesley Snipes should be.

Not much bloggage today, but a fun one. Find the No. 1 song on the day of your birth. It’s like the rock ‘n’ roll zodiac. Mine was “Jailhouse Rock,” which I consider a good omen. Like being born in the Year of the Dragon. Imagine being born under “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” That would suck.

Off to the bank to “save for retirement.”

Stayed up late last night to read the Chris Matthews profile in the NYT magazine, a rather astonishing document, all things considered. Matthews comes off as a loud, crafty, needy, insecure, boastful toad who’s every bit the sexist shitheel you suspected he was, only utterly unaware of it. I say “all things considered” because the NYT generally doesn’t truck with this sort of thing. Here’s the lede:

Whenever Chris Matthews says something he likes, which happens a lot, he repeats it often and at volumes suggesting a speaker who feels insufficiently listened to at times. “Tim Russert finally reeled the big marlin into the boat tonight,” Matthews yelled — nine times, on and off the air, after a Democratic debate that Russert moderated with Brian Williams in late February at Cleveland State University. Matthews believed that Russert (the fisherman) had finally succeeded in getting Hillary Clinton (the marlin) to admit that she was wrong to vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution in 2002. “We’ve been trolling for that marlin for what, a year now?” Matthews said to Russert.

Comparing Hillary Rodham Clinton to a big flopping fish will do nothing to stop criticism — from Clinton’s presidential campaign, among others — that Matthews and his network, MSNBC, have treated the former first lady unfairly. But this didn’t keep Matthews from bludgeoning the marlin line to death in the postdebate “spin room.” “Russert caught the marlin; he got the marlin,” Matthews shouted to a school of downcast reporters who had been hanging on every canned word of Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn.

The spin room is a modern political-media marvel whose full-on uselessness is perfectly conveyed by its name, but Matthews appeared in his element. He wore a dreamy smile, walking around, signing autographs. As he went, Matthews seemed compelled to give his “take,” which is how he describes his job each night at 5 and 7, Eastern time, on “Hardball” — “giving my take.”

It goes on from there. It doesn’t get nicer. Matthews has bugged me for years and enraged me for most of them, but by the end I almost felt sorry for him. The era of the cable shoutfest is waning, and he hasn’t figured it out yet. The appeal of listening to two or three blowhards is pretty thin in ideal conditions, and when you can surf on your laptop to eight or nine smarter amateurs’ “take,” or watch the considerably more entertaining “Daily Show,” it goes utterly flat. And when you’re sitting with your laptop in front of the TV, and the comparison is right there in your face, it’s even less appealing. This gets it, I think:

Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Matthews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.

Nothing illustrated Matthews’s discordance with the new cable ethos better than an eviscerating interview he suffered through last fall at the hands of Stewart himself. Matthews went on the “The Daily Show” to promote his book “Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success.” The book essentially advertises itself as a guidebook for readers wishing to apply the lessons of winning politicians to succeeding in life. “People don’t mind being used; they mind being discarded” is the title of one chapter. “A self-hurt book” and “a recipe for sadness” Stewart called it, and the interview was all squirms from there. “This strikes me as artifice,” Stewart said. “If you live by this book, your life will be strategy, and if your life is strategy, you will be unhappy.”

Matthews accused Stewart of “trashing my book.”

“I’m not trashing your book,” Stewart protested. “I’m trashing your philosophy of life.”

(Can I just say that a book titled “Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success” will probably be in Hell’s library. The only book I want to read less is “Big Russ and Me.” Or anything by Mitch Albom.)

Funny how these things change, how you go to bed in the summer and wake up and it’s autumn. The temperature’s the same but the wind has just a hint of north in it, the slant of the light is just a little different, and you know a new season is coming. Being able to feel those changes early on is a good skill to have, but once you get to a certain level of success, the world conspires to keep you in the dark. I once read a story about Bill O’Reilly’s sexual-harassment problem, and someone described the thin-air culture of national-TV anchors, how they go through their life trailed by squadrons of young women — interns, assistants, relentlessly ambitious climbers — whose job it is to make sure these hothouse flowers stay happy, hydrated and at the top of their game. They go, essentially, to a Graceland-without-walls, with the entourage saying, “Yes, boss” at every turn. No wonder they can’t feel the air.

I imagine reading Sunday’s NYT magazine will be like having a broken window in the house in January, however. At least at the Matthews’.

OK, I’m running late and trying to get to the gym while simultaneously listening to a “Fresh Air” podcast that explains the national economic meltdown in simple terms. I am but human, and so I’m going to cut one activity short — this one. Enjoy this bloggage, which finds the roots of Indian curry and Mexican mole in medieval Islamic cuisine. Mmm, mole.

Back in a bit.

One of Gene Weingarten’s chatters Tuesday says what I was thinking yesterday:

Billings, Mont.: Thought your Bell in the Metro story was good and all, but your Great Zucchini story from two years ago was the best thing you’ve ever written. Was that story submitted for a Pulitzer?

Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten: It was. And I was only recently reliably informed that it got real consideration, but was ultimately rejected because it was perceived as not serious enough.

I’m not surprised; the Pulitzers are like that. It strikes me that of the journalists I’ve known who’ve served on Pulitzer juries, they tended to be at either best-or-worst ends of the spectrum, so it figures they get a few wrong. The Great Zucchini story was a work of storytelling art. I urge you to read it; it’s that good. And while the Joshua Bell story that earned Weingarten the big P was great, it was something you could stand at the beginning of and see all the way to the end. When I told Alan what the story was, I said, “They got this virtuoso violinist, Joshua Bell, to be a subway busker in D.C. and watched how people reacted.” He replied, “And they ignored him, right?” He didn’t know anything about the story; he just guessed that if you put a virtuoso playing a Stradivarius in a busy Metro station at rush hour, he’s not going to draw a crowd. The telling of the story is wonderful, but there’s no real surprise.

But the Great Zucchini had a huge surprise halfway through. You thought it was about one thing (a story about a children’s party entertainer), and then it turned out to be another thing (the common roots of fear and humor). Let’s see, what did win that year?

Jim Sheeler of Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo.
For his poignant story on a Marine major who helps the families of comrades killed in Iraq cope with their loss and honor their sacrifice.

See? Serious enough.

Oh, well. It may be like Paul Newman winning an Oscar for “The Color of Money” when he should have won for half a dozen better performances that preceded it, but it’s all good. (Bonus: I’ve linked to it before, but just in case you’re having a slow day at work and have some time to read it — Tears for Audrey, another Gene-sterpiece.)

Yesterday I mentioned writers who don’t get the web. I think Weingarten gets it. I don’t know another columnist who could pull off what he does every week with his live chat, and I think every single columnist should give it a try sometime. I’d love to know what the traffic is for that.

OK, then. Found this via Leo, and oh my, what was I saying about that word just a couple weeks ago?

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving (John) McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Whoa! I know Mrs. McCain favors girly clothes and high heels. If that didn’t call for a shoe to be slipped off and applied, heel-first, to Mr. War Hero’s forehead, I don’t know what would.

You think this story is true? It’s getting a lot of blog attention, but then, we’re allowed to say “cunt” right out in the open, whereas a newspaper won’t even say “the c-word.” It’ll be “an insulting name related to her gender,” and most people will think, “Oh, well, once I told my wife to stop being such a little bitch during an argument; it could happen to anyone.”

I’m fortunate to live with a mellow soul. My dad was a grump, and he could curse, but he generally saved his profanity for inanimate objects, bad drivers, circumstances beyond his control and the like. I can’t imagine him using such a word on my mother, and to do so in front of witnesses? I like to think I’m as tolerant of human frailty as the next gal, but that one required an instant correction, as the dog trainers say. With a shoe.

This week has been seductively beautiful. I’ve been out and about on the bike every day; for once I’m caught up with my library accounts because hey, returning books is a good excuse to ride two miles. Next week, not so much, but oh well. I’m still looked on as something of an oddity around here, where driving half a block is not considered wasteful or slothful, only vigorous support of the local economy. One of my doctors is a cyclist, however, and at my last appointment we made small talk about the cost of being one in the Motor City. He’s been pulled over three times in the last year, he said; twice for running stop signs and once for resembling a person last seen stealing CDs from a car. While I teach Kate to obey stop signs on her bike, sooner or later she’s going to figure out that, for cyclists, a stop sign at a quiet intersection with no cars in sight can safely be ignored. You’re traveling slower, you have the advantage of eyes and ears, and you can’t hurt anyone but yourself. With all the piss-poor drivers I see on a daily basis, I guess it’s a credit to the low crime rate around here that police even bother to bug cyclists about such infractions. (And you should see my doctor, a white-haired soul in his late 50s who looks about as likely to break into cars as the Pope does. Please.)

OK, I’ve run dry. How about some bloggage making cruel fun of the pain of others? Here you go.

Ken Levine’s back with his “American Idol” recaps this season, and he correctly puts his finger on what was wrong with last night’s, which was nearly unwatchable:

While Syesha Mercado was screeching out some faux inspirational song that strung together every “I believe/Catch a shooting star/There’s time for every soul to fly/Reach within your heart/Strive to be the very best/Anything is Possible” bullshit cliché (and every one of those lyrics actually WAS in that song), Doug Davis, a young pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks took the mound and pitched the game of his life…knowing that in two days he will undergo surgery for thyroid cancer.

THAT’S inspirational. THAT’S real.

Disclaimer: I do not watch “American Idol” voluntarily. I watch it because my kid watches it, and while one day I will take her to see Iggy Pop, that day has not yet arrived.

This week’s theme was “songs of inspiration.” Every single one sucked, although the leadoff singer did have the advantage of menace:

Michael Johns sang “Dream On”. Most inspirational songs are not angrily shouted at you. Okay, okay, I’ll dream on. Don’t hurt me!

Three-day eventing isn’t for sissies. I watched an Olympic-caliber cross-country phase in Lexington a few years ago, and just being a spectator made my knees shake.

Someone actually makes a semi-amusing ad for special-event mass transit, and Catholics are outraged, so the ad is pulled. Someone make these pinheads direct traffic, then. The ad lives on, where else? On YouTube. Be subversive, and laugh at the Pope.

Me, I’m off for a bike ride.