I swore I wouldn’t write another word about Tim Goeglein unless someone paid me for it, but this is too good not to note. Be not afraid, all is forgiven:

At the weekly meeting of center-right leaders at American for Tax Reform on Wednesday morning, he received three rounds of applause from the packed room, including one standing ovation, as he asked for their forgiveness.

I just knew he’d land on his feet. K Street, here he comes. A happy ending for everyone.

…twenty-seven:

Further investigation by The News-Sentinel has found evidence of plagiarism in seven more guest columns from former White House aide Timothy S. Goeglein.

With that, I’m closing comments on the previous Goeglein posts. This has now achieved wreck-on-the-freeway status, and I just don’t know what more there is to say.

Well, that was interesting.

The Goeglein story passed from the unlikely to the absurd in record time, but who knew there was another step to go, into the surreal? Tim Goeglein plagiarized… the Pope:

On April 6, 2005, Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times: “It was based in the belief that, as he (the Pope) once put it, ‘a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being’ was at the root of the mass movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism,”

In a column published Oct. 18, 2005, Goeglein wrote: “A degradation and pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being was at the root of the 20th century, the twin evils of communism and fascism.” No attribution is given to the Pope or to Cohen in the column.

That’s from my alma mater, The News-Sentinel, to which I take off my hat today. They took what was potentially a grievous embarrassment and made the best of it. The link above takes you to the main story, which has links to the sidebars, but this one — a simple list of the columns and their, er, source material — is the most interesting to me. They’re so strange:

“Foster Park preserves transcendent ideas of beauty that are coming back” – July 5, 2006; “A Wish Came True: An L.A. Museum Displays Klimt Paintings Taken by Nazis and Restored to Family,” by William Booth, Washington Post, April 5, 2006

Foster Park was at the end of my street in Fort Wayne. It’s a beautiful place, with gardens that every year serve as the backdrop for wedding and prom pictures. From the headline, I’d expect a paean to the clematis and tiger lilies. What it has to do with Klimt, Nazis or museums in Los Angeles, I’d like to know. It would be interesting to see the side-by-side on that one. Among others. All the others, actually.

But today I’m trying not to think about the political angle, or the media angle, or whether I’ll ever get to see what he stole from Ben Stein’s Diary, which could hardly be more specific to Ben Stein. Today, I’m trying to understand Tim Goeglein.

If Groucho Marx refused to join any club that would have him as a member, what would he make of a person so desperate to join a club he’d do the one thing that, if discovered, would get him banned from the club for life? Like most journalists, I’ve seen a few cases of plagiarism over the years. They all shared a common thread of desperation. Writers with drinking problems, marital problems, money problems, deadline problems — these were the people who copied and pasted. Some were good people who got in over their heads. Some were lazy. Others were so careless you could only think they wanted to get caught. (One cribbed ad copy from Newsweek magazine. Another, a theater critic leading a trip to/tour of Broadway, sent back reviews lifted from the New York dailies, if I recall correctly.) Anyway, just as in spotting an urban legend you look for the common thread of fear, in a case like this you try to find the desperation. My guess is, Goeglein did what he did to be thought intellectually substantial, a thinker, the sort of guy who can keep up with the Buckleys’ cocktail chatter. But what in the world would lead a young man with so much to lose to risk it all for such a small reward?

As has been noted by the editor of The News-Sentinel, these columns weren’t assignments. They weren’t solicited. There were no deadlines. He wasn’t even paid. Guest columns, in that paper, are offered by readers; basically, they’re somewhat beefier letters to the editor, almost entirely unremarkable. The head of the United Way thanks the community for its generosity, an old woman recalls the good old days, a Chamber of Commerce type encourages support for a worthwhile initiative — that sort of thing. Goeglein was on a pretty leisurely annual schedule of four or five until the last year, when they began appearing more often. I wonder what changed to make him pick up the pace. That’s a subject for his therapist, but I can’t help but note how dangerously close the pilfered pieces were to the originals in the last few years:

“That which has been and that which can never be” – June 6, 2007; “Wilder’s Ode to Mortality,” by Eric Ormsby, The New York Sun, May 16, 2007

“Honoring John Wayne’s centenary” – July 23, 2007; “100 Candles for the Duke,” by Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun, June 20, 2007.

Fort Wayne can sometimes seem like the end of the earth, but it does get internet service, and has lots of people who might read the New York Sun online and wonder why this piece in tonight’s paper sounds like something they’ve read before. A decade-old edition of the Dartmouth Review is one thing, but the New York Times is quite another. We’re either in Stop Me Before I Steal Again territory, or this is a man who simply thought he’d found the perfect place to satisfy his need to be an intellectual — a paper hardly anyone reads. (As an ex-employee, I sometimes suspected it myself.)

I keep thinking of the first of Goeglein’s columns that I really noticed. It was a few years ago, and it ran somewhere around the week between Christmas and New Year’s (and, as far as I can tell, it’s not on the pilfered list). In it, Tim announced that the coming year would be one of self-improvement for him; he would read “the canon,” great books that form the cornerstones of Western civilization. He wouldn’t have time for the entire canon, of course, but a decent survey, and he laid it out month by month, starting with the Greek philosophers, and so on — if it’s July, this must be Jane Austen. I read it and wondered why he was bothering, because he’d obviously made up his mind what to think of each one. I called a friend, an English teacher, and we had a few chuckles over it, but now I see I should have been thinking like a novelist and not looking for an easy laugh; the column seems, in hindsight, to say so much about the guy and his insecurities. Knowledge and erudition was something you could rub on like a salve; a reading list could be a Charles Atlas course so bullies would never kick sand in your face again. A better mind in 365 days, or your money back.

* * * * *

Enough amateur psychoanalysis. Two more things I have to say before this story gets stale:

One, while I appreciate all the compliments on my “reporting,” I cannot emphasize this enough: 75 percent of this story was dumb luck, 22 percent was Sergey and Larry, and I’ll claim the remaining three. Reporting is making phone calls, knocking on doors, conducting interviews and sifting through documents. From the minute I said, “What a strange name to drop; let’s see what Google turns up” to realizing what Goeglein’s column really was, the elapsed time was under 60 seconds. Drafting a post took about an hour. I let it marinate overnight, and to give my friends at the paper a little notice. This story wasn’t low-hanging fruit, it was fruit that smacks you in the forehead when you walk under the tree. The only reason it smacked me and not you was, it was in a part of the orchard people don’t visit very often. (As I said above: As an ex-employee, this is something I always feared.)

Two, I owe an apology to lots of good writers out there. Jonathan Yardley, from whom Tim swiped pieces of his essay on Hoagy Carmichael, which I was tough on, is one of my favorites. All I can say is to echo what a friend of mine said, one who’d looked at both the originals and the ripoffs: he’d developed his own hybrid prose style, what you kids might call a mashup.

With that, I leave any new visitors to discover my own sad truth, sure to reassert itself in the days to come: Most days, this blog is about perverts in the library, bitching about the weather and things you see around Detroit. Daily life, with links and comments — that’s what this blog is. Ah, you’ll figure it out soon enough. Thanks, you 25,000 additional visitors of the last couple days. And in case you were wondering about that new-media business model, Google giveth, but Google doesn’t necessarily giveth. Total Google AdSense revenues for Friday and Saturday, with all those eyeballs? One dollar and 21 cents. Stop by sometime, and I’ll buy you half a latte.

I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.

I’ve had a lot of fun at Tim Goeglein’s expense over the last few months. Mean-spirited fun, certainly, but my problem with him has always been one of personal taste. In his columns for The News-Sentinel, my old newspaper, he personifies a certain sort of apple-cheeked Hoosier drippiness, which undoubtedly masks a core of white-hot ambition. I mean, he worked at the right hand of Karl Rove, and remains in the White House. But while he works in the West Wing, he chooses to write awful, turgid essays on the wonders of Hoagy Carmichael, deceased operatic composers and his parents’ marriage. I know it’s unfair to expect policy analyses, but it’s maddening to think that here’s this guy, a home-towner, eyewitness to an epochal period in American history, and he gives us Odes to Summer. Why he chooses to do so for the failing paper in a two-newspaper town, one with a circulation that probably barely nudges 30,000 these days, remains a mystery. (I’ve heard theories: He does it for his mother, and He plans to run for office soon, and he’s raising his local profile. Don’t really care, anyway. He’s just fun to make fun of.

When William F. Buckley died this week, one of my first thoughts was that he’d been friends with Tim, and we would almost certainly have a long, overwrought, superlative-packed column coming down the pike soon, and we’d have ourselves a good time giggling over it. When I saw he had a piece in the paper Thursday, the day after Buckley died, I thought for a second the wait was over, then spotted the headline — Education: Ideas worth defending, honesty of reflective thought — and realized, no, this has been in the pipeline for a while.

Not that it was a total disappointment. I started to read, and a name jumped out at me — “Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey,” described as a “notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth.” Now, I’m sure Tim’s spare brain space isn’t cluttered, as mine is, with “American Idol,” the internet and what’s-for-dinner concerns. Certainly string quartets waft through his paneled study, where he reads and thinks under the mounted ibex head, far from the vulgar buzz of pop culture. Surely he can acquaint himself with notable professors of philosophy at Dartmouth while I watch the Oscars. But this name was so goofy, just for the hell of it, I Googled it. And look what I found.

Tim:

A notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in the last century, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, expressed the matter succinctly. His wisdom is not only profound but also worth pondering in this new century. He said, “The goal of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

He meant that, I think, in quite a large sense. He did not mean that you had to master all the specialties you can think of, but rather to be an educated man or woman, you needed to be familiar with the large and indispensable components of our civilization.

This does not mean you should not study other cultures and civilizations. It does mean that to be a citizen of this one, you should be aware of what it is and where it — we — came from. It can hardly be challenged that the United States of America is part of the narrative of European history.

“What is a College Education?” by Jeffrey Hart, writing in the Dartmouth Review (cite is unclear, but from the URL it appears to be from 1998):

A notable Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey often expressed the matter succinctly, “The goal of education,” he would say, “is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

He meant that in quite large a sense. He did not mean that you had to master all the specialties you can think of.

He meant that you need to be familiar with the large and indispensable components of your — this — civilization.

This certainly does not mean that you should not study other cultures and civilizations. It does mean that to be a Citizen of this one you should be aware of what it is and where it came from.

It can scarcely be challenged that the United States is part of the narrative of European history.

My, my, my. Tim Goeglein, director of the White House office of public liaison, is a plagiarist.

Not an accidental or delicate one, either. The piece (Tim’s) goes on:

It can hardly be challenged that the United States of America is part of the narrative of European history. Europe is overwhelmingly the source, and some parts of Europe more than others: Our language, literature, legal tradition, political arrangements derive, demonstrably, from England. This Britain-America connection is central.

There have been many ways of answering the question: What is Europe? A handy way to think of the matter is the paradigm of “Athens” and “Jerusalem.” In this paradigm, those terms designate both the two cities we have all heard of but also two kinds of mind. The tradition designated “Athens” is associated with philosophy and with critical exercise of mind, with reason. The tradition associated with “Jerusalem” is associated with monotheism, with faith.

Hart:

It can scarcely be challenged that the United States is part of the narrative of European history. It owes little or nothing to Confucius or Laotse or to Chief Shaka or to the Aztecs. At the margin it owes a bit to the American Indians, but not a great deal — corn, tobacco, some legendary material. But Europe is overwhelmingly the source. And some parts of Europe more than others: Our language, legal tradition, political arrangements derive, and demonstrably so, from England.

There have been many ways of answering the question, “What is Europe?” But a handy way to think of the matter is the paradigm of “Athens” and “Jerusalem.” In this paradigm, those terms designate both the two cities we have all heard of, and also two kinds of mind.

The tradition designated “Athens” is associated with philosophy and with critical exercise of mind. The tradition associated with “Jerusalem” is associated with monotheism.

Note that Tim leaves out the gratuitous swipe at non-European cultures. Well, the original was written a few years ago, and times have changed. But other than a word here and there — Hart likes “scarcely,” while Tim goes for “hardly” — these two great minds think alike. A lot alike:

On the side of Athens, you would want to learn something about Homer, who in many ways laid the basis of Greek philosophy, and you would need to meet Plato, Aristotle, Socrates — the three greatest Greek philosophers — as well as the Greek dramatists, historians, architects and sculptors.

Over in Jerusalem, you would find the epic account of the career of monotheism as it worked its way out in history. The scriptures, like Homer, have their epic heroes — Moses most dramatically — and like the Greek tradition in some ways, they refine and internalize the epic virtues. Athens and Jerusalem, reason and faith, interact, and much flows from this interaction that results in the fullest expression of the educated man and woman.

The intellectually exciting thing is that with Athens and Jerusalem as the foundations, you would follow all of this down through the centuries, through Virgil (the great Roman poet), Augustine, Dante (who is perhaps the greatest poet of Western culture), Shakespeare (who is probably our greatest playwright), Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Voltaire, Goethe and on to modernity. “The best that has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold called it. The mind of Europe as T.S. Eliot put it, “from Homer to the present.”

That was Tim. This is Hart:

On the side of “Athens” you will want to learn something about Homer, who in many ways laid the basis of Greek philosophy, and you will need to meet Plato, Aristotle, the Greek dramatists, historians, architects and sculptors.

Over in “Jerusalem” you will find the epic account of the career of monotheism as it worked its way out in history. The scriptures like Homer, have their epic heroes, and, like the Greek tradition in some ways they refine and internalize the epic virtues. “Athens” and “Jerusalem” interact and much flows from the interaction.

You will follow all of this down through the centuries, through Virgil and Augustine, and Dante, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, Moliere, Voltaire, Goethe and on to modernity. “The best that has been thought and said, “ as Matthew Arnold called it. The mind of Europe as T.S. Eliot put it, “from Homer to the present.”

Interestingly, Jeffrey Hart himself is quite the character, another aide to a president (Nixon, Reagan), a spiritual and intellectual brother to Tim. As for the Dartmouth Review, well, most people know the story of one of the first high-profile right-wing student publications, that gave an early-career boost to Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, among others. (Tim went to Indiana University.) All accounts paint a picture of a dedicated academic who, you’d think, would frown on one of academia’s most serious sins. I look forward to hearing his reaction, if any.

I mentioned at the top of this post that I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. (I stole that line, by the way; it’s Nora Ephron’s opening for her devastating profile of Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Now that I’ve given credit, it’s not plagiarism, it’s an homage. See how it works?) I feel bad because my old buddy Leo Morris, who edits the op-ed pages, is going to bear the brunt of this — the investigation, the uncomfortable announcement to readers, the search through the archives for more time bombs, the embarrassment of being took by someone any editor would trust, a self-styled intellectual and senior White House aide, for crying out loud. But either this stuff is important or it isn’t, and I say it is.

UPDATE: Thanks to the Kenosha Kid, in comments, who finds more evidence of unattributed sourcing, in the Hoagy Carmichael essay linked above. The rifled pockets were those of Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Way to pick an obscure source, Tim.

UPDATE 2: Since we’re getting some outside linkage today, a word about comments: I have mine set for “first-timers go to moderation,” and after that, you’re in. So if you’re a newbie, feel free to comment, but if it doesn’t appear right away, don’t keep trying. I’ll stay close to my computer today, but I have to run a few errands today, too, and will be out.

UPDATE 3: Tim comes clean. Thanks, Natalie, for the tipoff.

UPDATE 4 (and it’s hardly noon yet): Thanks to commenters Adam Stanhope and Grytpype Thynne, who did the work on the operatic composers piece, down in the comments. (Click here to go there directly.) I am reminded of a recent scene from “The Wire”: “You think the first time he gets caught is the first time he does it?” Apparently not.

UPDATE 5: And MOOOOOOOORE.

UPDATE 6: OK, this is funny, the News-Sentinel’s response. The subhed should be, “Nall? Never heard of her.” Oh, and keep following our bird dogs, Adam Stanhope and Grytpype Thynne, in the comments. I can’t keep up any more and I have to step out for half an hour.

I know nobody cares about this stuff but me, but for some reason Because good, clear writing is the cornerstone of democracy and even human freedom itself, I keep scratching that itch about columnists qualifying their opinions. So I Googled the phrase “don’t get me wrong” in G-News — 2,517 results. Sixty-four hits on “‘i’m not saying’ AND ‘i am saying’.”

Go forth and write clearly, grasshopper. Say what you mean, and be brave.

(A small rant for the journalists in the room. The rest of you, go visit the LOL cats.)

Alan Mutter, who calls himself a Newsosaur, starts off our discussion with the proverbial “one wag” comment:

“How many people have to read a story before it goes in the paper?” asked a senior editor at a major metropolitan daily who is struggling to sustain the quality of his news report in an era of shrinking resources. “If we have to economize, the editing process is the place. Why do we have all these people processing stories after a reporter writes it? They are not producing anything that will get us traffic on the web.”

No, I guess they’re not. But they are saving your ass from getting it sued off. Also, from becoming a laughingstock. Also, from having your bargain-basement, straight-out-of-college reporting staff embarrass you in print by misspelling the mayor’s name. For starters.

When I read statements like this — As you can see from the chart* below, a half a dozen reasonably well compensated people – or more – are likely to lay hands on an ordinary story bound for the pages of the typical metropolitan daily — I always wonder what I did wrong. I’ve worked at two dailies, one large, one midsize that became small during my time there. First of all, we can quibble over “reasonably well compensated,” but we won’t. Half a dozen editors? On a good day, at full staff, for a Sunday front-page story, maybe. And where are these papers whose reporters can be trusted to put stuff in the paper without multiple layers of oversight?

* The chart has a typo. Snicker.

The following is the full text of a police story submitted to the metro desk at a major metropolitan daily, back when my one of my old pals worked there. (I had to go to the basement and go through old files to find it, so be grateful.)

A mad dog died and an East Side family was happy Monday night, police said.

A pit bull terrier had terrorized three girls and two women Sunday and forced the girls up on a kitchen table to flee from the animals snapping jaws, Anthony King, 30, of [address redacted] said Monday night.

King said the neighbors dog had lurked in the basement apparently ate some drano and charged up the back stairs and into their second floor kitchen Sunday.

An autopsy showed the dog was mistreated and suffered stomach lesions, King said.

“The growling, foaming, spitting, dog chased the kids up on the kitchen table, 5th District Sgt. Joseph Hoellar said.

Like author Stephen Kings Cujo the King family feared the dog was rabid.

“We were concered the dog was rapid, King said.

Family members tricked the dog to go into a locked room while the family waited for police.

The dog went into a final fatal frenzy and when the officers arrived the dog died, Hoellar said.

King praised police who calmed his screaming children.

“The really calmed down the kids and handled the situation nice. The police were so wonderful and handled the situation so nice we want to give them some recognition, King said.

King said his wife, Priscilla, his mother-in-law and his three daughters aged, 4, 5 and 11 fled from the mad dog.

The dog owner was in a hospital and the wife of the owner apologized to the family, King said.

King praised officers Charleen Branski and Timothy Oddsen,

The end. An isolated case, you say. Perhaps. (As I recall, the reporter didn’t last very long. But, I remind you, he was hired in the first place. He’s probably teaching middle-school English now.) This is what he wrote, typos, unclosed quotations, semiliterate sentence construction and all. This is what he turned in to his editors, his my-work-here-is-done statement. This.

Not all reporters are this bad. But more are than you might think. In my experience, the number who check spelling, style, grammar, facts or anything else dwindle by the day. Their mantra is: That’s the desk’s job. Alan had a sorta-intern once (he was on staff, but spent a summer in Features refreshing his creative batteries) who, after being assigned a story on mud-racing, turned in a set of notes. Seriously: A SET OF NOTES, transcribed. Random impressions, a few quotes, incomplete sentences. And he worked on this story for a month.

I could go on: I once edited a first-person column describing a lesson on firing an AK-47. The writer referred to the thing throughout as a “gun,” to the stock as “the wooden part at the back of the gun” and the forestock as “a wooden handle in front of the trigger,” etc. And, let me remind you, I was the third person to handle this story before it went into print. I can only imagine the letters we would have gotten. (As for me, I sent an e-mail to the reporter, sketching out the venerable Marine parade-ground chant.)

I could go on all day, but like the growling, foaming, spitting, dog, you might fear I was rapid.

Mutter’s post goes on to point out:

While it would be heretical at most major news organizations to “railroad” stories from a reporter’s keyboard directly into print, several publications, including a few surprisingly large ones, are allowing reporters to point, click and post words and images directly to the newspaper’s website. If the work is good enough to slap on the web without further human intervention, why isn’t it good enough to go directly on a web press?

I see what he’s saying, but he’s making the wrong argument. Anyone who’s spent time in a newsroom knows that half the people with “editor” in their job title don’t edit much at all. They’re in charge of thinking outside the box, long-range planning, going to meetings, organizing the redesign of the obit page. (Rumor has it that when the new Gannett sheriff arrived at the Detroit Free Press, he regarded one of these souls across the table at a meeting and said, “Tell me again what your job is?” There’s a wakeup call.) For my money, you could can one-third to one-half the designers at any given newspaper, but they may have different ideas. Anyway, my point is: You don’t take eyes off the copy, especially when you’re originating the copy. Editing is quality control, and quality is all we have.

OK, rant over. March along with me: This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun…

We finished photography on our student film Saturday. It was 27 degrees, and we all stood around blowing on our fingers to keep blood circulating for the last shots. Our batteries kept failing in the cold, and at one point I took a near-dead one and stuck it in my bra on the chance a little warmth might bring it back to life. When we needed it later, it had miraculously recovered to near-full capacity. Make of that what you will, but I feel justified in claiming my breasts can now generate electricity. I think I’ll put it on my resume.

Good thing we finished, though, because this was Sunday’s weather:

You need a day like this every so often, an excuse to stay inside and gather linkage for your stupid blog. Let’s make it an all-bloggage Monday morning, because it’s winter break and I’m not fully awake yet.

Sunday’s fields were rich and fruitful, starting with a story that got barely briefed in the local fishwrap but, thankfully, much wider coverage in the WashPost — the horrific multiple fatal in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The Fast and the Furious meets … reality, I guess. People have been illegally racing cars as long as there have been cars, but when I started reading the story, I assumed it was an out-of-control racer who spun into the crowd, not a bunch of people standing in the middle of the road, neatly screened by tire smoke. What a nightmare.

There seems to be a bit of this going around — illegal racing ending in multiple funerals, that is. I was never a gearhead, and the only place I ever saw this sort of drag-racing happen was on a freshly paved but still unopened part of a new freeway in Columbus, just days away from its ribbon-cutting. (Ohio readers? It was Rt. 315, and now you know the truth: my middle name is Methuselah.) It was motorcycles, and I’m not even sure anyone was racing, just winding it out in a convenient place. Still: shudder.

The WashPost also provides a wonderful, funny summation of the Detroit mayoral scandal, by ex-Freeper Neely Tucker. He reprints a number of the text messages in question, and now seems as good a time as any to point out what’s bugged me about this since the beginning: How complete they are. With the exception of the inescapable LOLs, even figuring the parties had devices with QWERTY keyboards, they don’t sound like the way two people who know one another well — exceptionally well, in this case — actually text-chat with one another:

CB: “I’m feeling like I want another night like the most recent Saturday at the Residence Inn! You made me feel so damn good that night.”

Somehow, she neglected to give the street address. It’s like bad expository dialogue in a movie.

Which is a good transition to Gene Weingarten’s column, yes, also in the WashPost (my new favorite Sunday paper), written entirely on his cell phone:

on the few occasions i do text message, the only concession i make is that i dont use capitals or apostrophes or question marks or hyphens because they take an extra keystroke and when one is typing with ones thumbs one wants to conserve keystrokes. it pains me to realize that mankinds signature anatomical adaptation, the one that distinguishes us from the lowly beasts, has been pressed into service for such a moronic chore. its like using a stradivarius to hammer a nail.

so, texting is stupid. but do you want to know what is stupider. to get this column published, i have to email it to myself every 30 words.

A man I could love (and who bears a striking resemblance to Detroit’s mayor, at least in that hat), Patrice O’Neal, says he likes to eat like Caligula:

I made thigh-meat gumbo with some kielbasa. For some reason, when the recipe calls for chicken breast, I use thigh. I’m a thigh-meat dude. Thigh is just the best meat — I don’t get chicken breast. I think it’s a publicity stunt that we’ve convinced people it’s delicious. Chicken is legs and thighs — they’re juicy.

Are you listening, James Lileks? Unlikely.

Barack Obama made me a mixtape. What has Barack Obama done for you lately? HT: Eric Zorn. Keep reloading for endless fun.

Finally, a housekeeping note: I’m getting spam-bombed. At least two dozen spam comments a day are slipping the main net and landing in the moderation queue, which is not a huge headache, but since they come to me as e-mail first, it’s just a pain. So we’re going to start closing comments after one or two weeks, since the vast majority of the spam attempts are sent to old threads. This means approximately nothing to 99 percent of you, but if you’re the sort who likes to catch up every six months, you may not be able to join the conversation. Send an e-mail instead.

Go commence the week. I need about a million cups of coffee first.

Danny wondered if I was planning to post today, or just lie around the house eating leftover V-Day cupcakes. The answer is: Get out of my face, Danny. I have four hours to write a story, shower, run downtown to check out a coffee table going up for auction tonight and strategize our bid (not to mention gird my loins against every gay couple in the tri-county area, because it’s mid-century and FABulous), pick up Kate, take the dog to the vet, primp for a girl’s night out, etc. But before I commence this whirlwind, I’m having a last cup of coffee and giving you something to hang your comments on, Danny, because that’s the kind of gal I am.

I always have a day like this after I’ve applied for a regular full-time job, which I did earlier this week. I’m not counting on hearing back from them, however, because one thing I’ve learned about myself in the last three years: I am box office poison. Like Joan Crawford.

In my pile of “stuff to write about eventually” is a copy of a book sent to me around Christmas by NN.C reader and sometime commenter, Michael Heaton. “Truth and Justice for Fun and Profit” is a collection of 20-plus years of columns and stories for The Plain Dealer, which you Midwesterners should immediately recognize as Cleveland’s daily newspaper (unless you’re from rural Indiana, and you know it as Wabash’s daily newspaper [no, it’s not the Cannonball, although it should be], in which case you’d be wrong, because the Wabash Plain Dealer has the city in its name, whereas Cleveland’s daily is just: The Plain Dealer, and just in case you were wondering, yes that IS the best newspaper name ever).

Anyway, Heaton’s book isn’t the sort of thing you just pick up and read straight through, but it’s great kitchen material — pick a short piece and read it while you wait for the sauce to reduce. Although it has a way of making the sauce reduce too much, if you catch my drift. You can burn your cheese toastie getting through “In the Valley of the Lost Boys,” a magazine-length piece recalling the glory days of an old-school bachelor colony, falling to (what else?) real-estate developers.

The book mostly makes me wistful, though — writing like this is why I got into newspapers in the first place. It’s reminds me that once upon a time the Features section was where a good writer aspired to be, before corporate bozos turned it into a forgettable mishmash of smart-parenting thumb-suckers and 10-day-old Paris Hilton gossip roundups.

Oh, well. Plug delivered. Follow the On the Nightstand link for buying info. (And please, don’t be put off by the “Foreword by Joe Eszterhas” line on the cover. We won’t hold that against him. Besides, when the One Great Scorer comes to write against the man who gave the world Sharon Stone’s coochie on the silver screen, he’ll have to put one thing on the plus side: He came back to Cleveland.)

And if Michael ever reads this, he knows why I finally got around to writing about it today — his father, legendary PD sportswriter Chuck Heaton, died Thursday. Ninety years old, surrounded by family, he crossed the river under the best circumstances possible. Wherever he is now, I wonder if he’s privy to what’s going to happen to the business he gave his life to. I hope, if he has any say in the matter, it’s not all bad. Michael, my condolences. It’s never easy.

Off to my fun-filled day. You happy now, Danny?

For the making-of featurette* included with our student-film project, I shot a little video with my Flip:

I call your attention to our awesome camera dolly, a DIY project made from PVC pipe and skateboard wheels. Our director is friends with the folks at InZer0, a local sci-fi series/maybe-a-movie production, and borrowed it from them. It knocks together with a rubber mallet (or your shoes), and the stand slides noiselessly. With it, we were able to do a cool little tracking shot of our talent, Teresa, walking down a hallway, checking doors on either side, with nary a bobble.

As a compromise with the Hollywood version, it’s pretty adequate to our uses.

I have a memory of one of my showbiz-nerd friends telling me the first Steadicam rigs cost $100,000, so I went online in search of other cheap compromises for low-budget filmmakers. Not surprisingly, there are zillions. I think I know what the universe is trying to tell me: It’s time to indulge my long-held dream of producing pornography with real scripts, and a real story. Something to keep ’em in the seats after, you know.

See the dolly shots and the dolly track — in Genesis’ “Invisible Touch” video. Not made from PVC, because it’s Genesis.

(*Note: There is no making-of featurette.)

Bloggage: Just the other day I asked Kate if she’d like to play hockey. Now, I’m thinking she might be better off playing, oh, chess. Oh, and in re: our earlier discussion about the relativity of luck? Check this out — a guy gets hit in the neck with a skate in a freakish accident, severs his carotid artery, leaves a red smear across the ice to remind everyone in the arena of their own mortality, and guess what his doctors say? This:

Vascular surgeon Richard Curl, who assisted Noor, said the cut was about an inch-and-a-half deep and also as wide. Doctors were astonished the skate blade did not hit any other arteries or veins or cause any further damage.

“Luck,” was a factor, according to Noor.

Thought for the day: Everything is relative.

Eric Zorn interviews his old college buddy Gerry Prokopowicz about the latter’s new book, “Did Lincoln Own Slaves?” A sample:

Q: Given that the Q&A format is often recognized by discerning readers as evidence of a lazy writer who doesn’t want to struggle with transitions, why did you choose that format for your book?

A: I got it from your columns.

You know how Michael Moore is, like, fat and evil and a propagandist and not interested in the truth at all? You know? I’m sure his ideological opponents will show the proper way to do things when “Expelled,” their documentary on intelligent design, debuts later this year. They sure got off to a good start with PZ Myers. What’s the ninth commandment again? I always forget.

Finally, Wireblogging continues over at The New Package. Come join the discussion.

More coffee, shower and work, in that order. Be still, heart.

This isn’t a lesson you have to be a writer to learn, but just in case you haven’t, let me lay it out for you:

One person’s poetry is another’s profanity. Context is everything. It’s stupid to argue why black people can call one another nigga and white people can’t. The language you use at the bar, at the frat house, at your grandmother’s dinner table, at church, at the office is likely going to vary widely.

So get over whether or not David Shuster got a raw deal from his employer over using the phrase “pimped out” to describe what Chelsea Clinton’s parents may or may not be doing in re: their daughter. He perhaps thought he was being hip and young and with-in and down with the kids, and Hillary Clinton objected. This cannot possibly come as a surprise to anyone with half a brain. You say tomato, I hear to-mah-to. Let’s chalk the whole thing up to experience.

To be sure, popular discourse has become much more, er, popular in the last 20 years. Again, you don’t need me to tell you this. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are situations where, “boy, is that guy a brainless schmuck” is far more eloquent and to-the-point than “Mr. Shuster displays a shocking lack of couth,” but while “schmuck” is a wonderful word, it means “penis” in Yiddish, and if you start throwing it around like confetti, sooner or later you’re going to meet someone who’s offended by it.

As a woman of five decades, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the casual use of the word “pimp,” if only because it’s the first syllable in “pimple,” and the fewer of those in the world, the better. But really, what a repulsive image to aspire to, that of a badly dressed man who sexually exploits women for profit. I’ll accept the word as a synonym for cheap flashiness, as well as a crude synonym for “to aggressively market for money,” but otherwise, it’s just sort of gross. And again: Context is everything. “The Daily Show” can do a story on FLIFs and no one bats an eye, but if you’re supposedly a legitimate cable-news talent, you’d better not go there. Or maybe you can go there in 2009, but not 2008. Or on Tuesday, but not on Monday. I imagine I’ll live to see the day Anderson Cooper can call the president a douchebag on the air, but it hasn’t arrived yet. (Not that Anderson would say such a thing; he’s too well-bred.)

So let’s retire the discussion before it gets tiresome. Oops: Too late.

Final note: Guess who said, in 1998, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” Answer: You’re soaking in it!

OK. I’m writing this on Sunday. At this very moment, I’m supposed to be on Belle Isle, shooting the final scene for our video class project, but we cancelled. The temperature is 7 degrees and the wind is blowing at, no kidding, 45 miles per hour. It seemed cruel to make two nice actors, not to mention everyone else in the class/crew, torture themselves in such conditions, particularly given the compensation everyone’s getting, which is: Nothing, plus a sandwich. So we’re shooting the indoor scenes later in the afternoon and will pick up Belle Isle when nature stops being such a cruel mistress. That’s showbiz.

But this leaves me more than the usual bit of time to scrape up some bloggage for you pimps, and here you are:

If that damn German polar bear gets any cuter, I’m moving there.

Great idea to spice up your social life: Detroit’s Guerilla Queer Bar, a movable feast that, once a month, descends unannounced on a different nightspot. In January, they chose Carl’s Chop House, one of those ol’-skool downtown steakhouses that’s been dying since forever. Earlier in the month, the owner went before city council and asked to take the place topless. From this week’s Metro Times:

The bar area is packed, with the customers laughing and bartenders hopping, filling drink orders and collecting tips. The piano player is in full swing, making the trip from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” to Matchbox Twenty and back again, with a brief stop at Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen.” Carl’s ambience is so varnished-wood-and-carpet, it’s kitsch. If you haven’t been, it’s worth a trip. Except for the addition of a dance floor in the main dining room, the place hasn’t changed much since the days when Jimmy Hoffa would cut deals in the conference room upstairs.

What a great idea. What will those creative queens think of next? Quick, buy modern furniture.

You know how your mom told you to always wear clean underwear, so the people in the emergency room wouldn’t think you were trashy? She didn’t know the half of it. Bonus giggle: The name of the club.

Groan: Work. And so the week commences.