I don’t know why you read the newspaper. I read it to fan the always-flickering coals of irritation at the continuing degradation of the language of Shakespeare and Lindsay Lohan.

From a weekend review of “Skinwalkers”:

The werewolves ride into town on motorcycles, sporting dark sunglasses, shaggy but mostly human except for pearly white, canine teeth.

There shouldn’t be a comma between “pearly white” and “canine.” I guess if I looked through my Strunk & White I could find the precise reason, but I play by ear and I say no. That started me thinking about how you use a comma when you have multiple adjectives in front of a noun. I would write, “MaryMarv* lived in a big blue house,” but also “MaryMarv* is an arrogant, elitist asshole.” I’m sure both are correct, but I don’t know precisely why. Some nice English-teaching nun in the readership, tell me. (Here’s my case: There’s no natural pause between big and blue if you read it aloud, and there is between arrogant and elitist. As I said, I play by ear.)

The next case was more irritating. The story was about a teacher at a local school who’s had some public problems with her temper of late:

Those two incidents earned her a one-day suspension and rebuke this year from D. Allen Diver, then the school’s principal.

“Unfortunately, these patterns of berating individuals have happened far too often during my six years at South,” Diver wrote July 11. “I am continually forced to diffuse situations that you have created because you sometimes appear to speak without thinking or have sent e-mails that are inflammatory.”

Educators are sometimes the most enthusiastic misusers of the language, but this one drives me crazy. It’s “defuse,” not “diffuse,” D. Allen Diver, please. I see this all the time. You defuse a touchy situation the way you defuse a bomb. You diffuse a bad smell by fanning a magazine in the bathroom before you leave. My Oxford American says:

USAGE: The verbs diffuse and defuse sound similar but have different meanings. Diffuse means, broadly, ‘disperse’; defuse means ‘remove the fuse from (a bomb), reduce the danger or tension in.’ Thus: Cooper successfully diffused the situation is incorrect, and Cooper successfully defused the situation is correct.

Of course, the reporter was quoting from a letter in a personnel file, but still. Either correct it or ‘sic’ it. (For continued friendly access to D. Allen Diver, I strongly recommend the former solution.)

Refreshed by curling my lip in scorn at the peons still employed in newspapering, I can then go about my day with a song in my heart.

There wasn’t much written about the gay debate Thursday. I know it was called something with “human rights” in the title, but I will think of it as the gay debate, since it aired on Logo, the gay cable channel, and featured gay questioners, and had the gayest audience ever, including the inevitable elderly lesbian couple, one with gray mullet. I had it on in the background while I worked, and have a few thoughts, none especially deep, but I thought it was sort of sweet and earnest — everyone had that “I can’t believe this is happening…to ME!” thing going on. You don’t see a lot of amateur television anymore, especially when presidential candidates are concerned (all Democrats, and I missed the part where they explained why). And the Logo production was decidedly amateur. The set was sort of homemade looking and some of the questioners looked just gobsmacked to be there, and yes I’m talking about you, Melissa Etheridge, and the post-game interviews were conducted by a young man who looked like he got out of high school five minutes ago. But that gave the whole production charm. Really.

Hillary sort of wiped the floor with everyone else, which she’s been doing consistently this season, although Obama and Edwards held their own. But perhaps only on Logo would you hear someone, when asked for a reaction afterward, say, “She looks really good in coral.” By the time the wrap-up turned to somebody I’d never heard of for the “lighter side” reaction, it was probably inevitable that Dennis Kucinich would be called “adorable. …like someone born in a flower.”

As a native Buckeye, I’ve thought of Kucinich a lot, but never like that.

Speaking of Ohioans, caught “The People vs. Larry Flynt” Friday night on cable. It holds up after a decade, and may have even improved with age. I was stung anew at the injustice Milos Forman perpetrates in the name of narrative coherence — he relocates Flynt from Columbus to Cincinnati. So, so wrong. Ohioans know what I’m talking about. Columbus never embraced Flynt, but it tolerated him better than the Queen City, where he was vigorously prosecuted by Simon Leis, one of those crusading, stick-up-the-butt prigs Hamilton County specializes in. When the movie came out, I wrote an essay about living in central Ohio when Larry was in high cotton, and I’d like to rewrite it now, and throw in all the stuff I had to leave out because of the family-newspaper thing. But it needs a news peg. I’ll save that for when he dies, or brings down another speaker of the house.

Apologies for lameness today. I had a more substantive, linky post in progress, and then discovered Alan had recommended the subject to one of the paper’s columnists, so I’ll step aside and let the people who provide our health insurance go first.

Do I have bloggage? Oh, a little:

I’ve been reading all I can about the current Wall Street meltdown, understanding maybe 80 percent of it. My econ training is apparently all obsolete now, although maybe not entirely. (One conclusion I’ve reached: If the Fed bails these dildoes out again, I’m becoming an anarchist.) If you’re finding it baffling — investment vehicles based on risky mortgages? ARMs as perpetual fee-generators? — you’re in good company. Slate provides a 101-level explainer, in plain English.

The last rat jumps from the sinking ship of the Bush administration. Tim Goeglein’s prolificacy of late, explained? Maybe he’s auditioning to be the News-Sentinel’s culture writer. Or maybe he was just killing time in his office while the wallpaper peeled off.

Discuss.

* name changed to spare the feelings of regular commenters named Mary. I don’t think we have a Marv yet, but I expect one to show up any minute.

Great interview with David Simon (aka Mr. Laura Lippman), about “The Wire,” of course. But it kicks off with a bang:

NICK HORNBY: Every time I think, Man, I’d love to write for The Wire, I quickly realize that I wouldn’t know my True dats from my narcos. Did you know all that before you started? Do you get input from those who might be more familiar with the idiom?

DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Yeah! Fuck them all to hell!

Enjoy.

(Regrettably, the rest of the interview will cost you eight bucks. I won’t spend it, but I feel I got my money’s worth already.)

We took a little road trip today, and I was watching the mile markers click by when I suddenly started thinking about my brief and intermittent career in talk radio. Yes, people, I sat behind a microphone for a while and said, “Jean, you’re on the air. … Yes, Jean, it’s you. You’re on the air. …Jean, please turn down your radio.”

I started at WOWO, the 50,000-watt AM powerhouse that is many people’s sole knowledge of Fort Wayne; at night, its firehose of a signal reached 23 states and three Canadian provinces. Snowbirds could listen to Komets hockey games in Florida, and a DJ there once received a letter from a soldier in Vietnam, who picked up the station on one of those weird atmospheric hop-skips that AM signals do now and again. But my show wasn’t on at night. WOWO was a music station that ground to a halt at 2 p.m. five days a week for a single hour of “In Touch” with your host, Nancy Nall. At 3 p.m., we waved goodbye to everyone and the music started again. If it sounds like the sort of programming only a madman would try, well, you’re right. Even stranger was the station management, who hired me after I had written a four-day-a-week newspaper column in their very city for nine years and only discovered I wasn’t Rush Limbaugh after I was on the air. Admittedly, it was probably a mistake to keep that guy on the line for five minutes arguing about the Confederate flag, but at least it stripped away the last veil from the station manager’s eyes. I quit after about four months, when I was handed a memo strongly suggesting I keep my personal opinions to myself, “the way the most successful hosts do.”

I really didn’t like the gig, anyway. People speak of the intimacy of radio, but it’s a one-way street. I always closed the show feeling bummed out that I lived in the same community with some of these bitter lemon-suckers, like the guy who called every day to talk about the Federal Reserve, and the old people who bitched about Social Security with the tone of toddlers who’d missed their naps. The program director wanted every reasonably sane caller to get on the air, and so no matter what we were talking about, anyone could change the subject. (It was educational, however. I never knew all that stuff about Ezra Pound and his time in the nuthatch until Federal Reserve Frank brought it up one day.)

After I quit I vowed never again, but a few months later I got a call from Mark the Shark, who asked me to co-host his Thursday-morning show on WGL, another station in town, this one with an all-talk format. It was run by an entertaining but odd couple who could pinch a penny until Abe Lincoln begged for mercy. They’d recently instituted a one-hour show for the 8-9 a.m. slot, with a different host every day. Each one had a measure of prominence in the community and tended to be Republicans. Mark, a Democratic city councilman, was added for balance. He was — is — very smart and very funny, and his show was a bright spot in the week, so I thought what the hell.

(What did this gig pay? you’re wondering. WOWO, a temple of progressive ideas, including that people should be financially compensated for their work, paid me $25 per show. WGL paid us, the celebrity hosts…nothing. One year we all got a half-pound box of DeBrand chocolates for Christmas.)

But it was fun! Mark was fun. We had a blast. It wasn’t depressing, there was no station management micromanaging anything. We just took calls and drank coffee and laughed for an hour a week, and then we both went to the office.

It soon became evident, however, that we were working in some strange stratum of radio. Those of you who mourn the lost spontaneity of what was once an unpredictable medium? You should have been there. Shows came on the air and went off — we were cancelled twice and rehired a few months later for no apparent reason other than the time change, always a headache for Indiana broadcasters back when the state ignored Daylight Saving Time. Piles of old equipment, seemingly from the ’30s, grew in the hallways under a coating of dust. There was a station cat and, for a while, a dog. Every show was prefaced by a mad dash to find headphones that worked, essential in talk radio. The station owners were regular callers to the shows, dialing in from their offices, I suppose. Everyone shared one producer/engineer/screener, who was the host of the show that came on before ours. I tried to keep a file through the week of topics to discuss, but we rarely opened it. We just talked for a few minutes and then went to the phones.

This was sort of the model for all the shows in this slot, which was called “Windows.”

Every so often we’d go out for donuts with the station owner and his wife, Frank and Connie, afterward. Frank would tell stories. There was one about a day-long negotiation for a major military contract in Egypt — Frank sold radio communication systems, too — and it was really getting heated between Frank and the European head of Motorola and some other swell in a Bond Street suit. (Frank was probably wearing one of his best outfits, perhaps the shirt with mustard stains with the pilled polyester pants.) During the break, one of the Egyptians showed off his new business cards, very nice engraved ones, etc. So did everyone else, and then Frank pulled out his. It had his name and phone number, and running around the edge of the card the services he offered: “Virgins converted,” “Revolutions fomented,” “20-minute oil changes,” etc. The translator ran through the phrases, and all the Egyptians crowded around, laughing — they all wanted one, too. Frank got the contract.

And it wasn’t just our show, either. There was a show called “Roman Around the Dial,” hosted by Andy Roman. I found a website that gave his tenure at the station: August 1998 – August 1998. In about his second week, his producer called in sick, and there was no one to fill in, which meant he had to screen his calls live. After about the third call from someone who wanted the ad department, he went off on a rant about this cheap station and he can’t even get a damn call screener, but he went on the air anyway, because he’s a professional, and, and, and… Hold on, the phone’s ringing. And it’s Frank! Saying, “Why didn’t you come down to my office and ask me, I can run the board. You don’t need to be so immature.” Andy went buh buh buh and cut to a commercial; when the show came back on, Frank was hosting, and Andy was on his way back to Cleveland or thereabouts.

The only time you hear radio like that anymore is when someone stages it as a stunt. And people think making jokes about the Pope is outrageous.

There were other shows, many of which gave the impression the hosts had been dragged in off the street, shown which buttons to push, and thrown on the air. There was one called “Grumpy Old Men,” everything about the show revealed in its name. And there was the Jennifer and Nancy show. Not me, another Nancy. She had a voice like one of Marge Simpson’s sisters, and Jennifer was either a moron, or just played one on the radio. They made Mark’s and my “Windows” hour sound like the McNeil-Lehrer report. “Remember saving foil?” Jennifer reminisced one day, after taking note of how poor people just didn’t know how to economize. Jennifer had saved foil in her marital salad days, when her husband was in medical school. I waited for the slightest flicker of understanding that two college-educated people, one in med school, might experience poverty a little differently from those for whom it’s a multi-generational condition, but no. The unexamined life, ah.

One day Jennifer was handed a breaking-news traffic report: There was a major accident on I-69 at the 110 mile marker, and motorists were being urged to find alternate routes. She read it, paused, and then went off on a housewifey tirade about these stupid things called “mile markers,” and why do the police always talk about them? What’s a mile marker? Who knows what they are? How is this information helpful in any way? And so on.

“We’ve got Bob on the line from a car phone. Go ahead, Bob.”

Bob explained what mile markers were, how to find them, what their relationship to exit numbers was. Then he said, “I swear, you two are the dumbest people I’ve ever heard on a radio show. How can you function, being so stupid?” Jennifer and Nancy thanked him for the information and blundered on, oblivious. Now, whenever I see a mile marker, I think, “there’s a mile marker” and recall Jennifer, Nancy and Bob. Good times, good times.

So, bloggage:

What happens when you screw up one big corporation? You get hired in Detroit.

Hey, Mrs. Giuliani! How do you like your new one? (Orifice, not husband. Vanity Fair ripped her one.)

Later, folks.

As predictable as the “politicization” of the Minneapolis bridge collapse are the condemnations of it — the finger-wagging, more-in-sorrow-than-anger pleas for just a little human decency:

There can no longer be any such thing as a tragic accident in our country. We apparently no longer have the ability to witness such a horrific event, learn from it, and move on to simply do things better and try to reduce the chances of similar, future horrors. A sacrifice will be demanded, initially, and it shall be found. Inevitably the first goat led to the alter will turn out to be some low to mid-level functionary from the City Engineering department or something similar.

Of course, not all are so gentle:

Shame on the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman and the rest of the left who are laying the blame for the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge on GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. We don’t even know the number–let alone the names–of people killed. Doesn’t matter to Coleman and his ilk. Take any shot to smear a Republican.

You could argue whether laying blame at this point of the recovery is helpful — although I read the Coleman column in question and it’s hardly over-the-top; this is the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, after all. Here’s probably the most pungent passage, and it comes after several paragraphs of sorrow, gratitude to the heroes and the rest of it:

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

How ironic is it that tonight’s scheduled groundbreaking for a new Twins ballpark has been postponed? Even the stadium barkers realize it is in poor taste to celebrate the spending of half a billion on ballparks when your bridges are falling down. Perhaps this is a sign of shame. If so, it is welcome. Shame is overdue.

I hate to be the turd in the birdbath here, but this is a perfectly reasonable point to make, and now’s the time to make it. Everybody I’ve talked to about this has said some version of the same thing: “I can’t believe it hasn’t happened here yet.” Minneapolis is a haven of prairie progressives here in the Midwest; good lord, they have light rail there. I was last there in 2004, and compared to Detroit, it’s Munich. (They tax the pants off their residents, but Michigan/Wayne County/Grosse Pointe Woods taxes the pants off me, too, and I don’t feel like I get all that much for it, other than a halfway-decent school system and sidewalk snow removal. Many city employees, on the other hand, get city-provided cars. My congresswoman leases a Cadillac at taxpayer expense to travel around her district, but she has yet to stop by.) I expect a bridge to fall in Detroit any day now.

To politicize, I guess, means “to bring politics into the situation,” but politics is the term we use for the process of making public policy, and the building and maintenance of infrastructure is about as close to the heart of public policy-making as you can get. It’s not very sexy; you don’t get a Bridge to Nowhere every legislative session, but to say politics shouldn’t be brought into this discussion is simply fatuous. Here in America’s rusting heart, we see on a pretty regular basis what happens to sewers, roads, bridges and electrical grids when they’re 100 years old or older — the steam pipe that exploded in midtown Manhattan last month, the combined sewers that overflow into rivers, the rural section roads that have to be widened and resurfaced to accommodate the suburbanites pouring farther and farther out into exurbia, the schools that have to be retrofitted to make them ADA-compliant. Take your pick.

And Coleman is right that too many legislatures have spend too much time, and way too much money, on showy projects like stadiums and other sports venues, which serve to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy while providing little to the people who pay for them other than the opportunity to take the family to a major-league game and pay hundreds more for the privilege.

So, yeah, it’s time to talk politics. Time to start the drudgery of figuring out what we need to fix and how much it will cost and how we will pay. Nothing wrong with doing it before the funerals, even before the bodies are recovered. The matter is urgent.

So, let’s keep the bloggage light after such a leaden kickoff. It’s Friday:

National treasure Jon Carroll on the question of accessibility* in poetry. I always wonder how hard he sweats his writing, because it all sounds so breezy and effortless:

There is always ferment in the world of poetry, probably because there is rarely money in the world of poetry (absent the eccentric bequest), so turmoil is the only recreation available.

Lance Mannion, who graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, can tell you a thing or two about poets, and that is Word.

I should check Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny’s blog more often. He challenged his readers to name the film that’s the source of this image, and offered as a lure his undying respect. I knew instantly — thank you, Jeff Borden, for making me see it — but someone else had posted it in the comments. I still get the undying respect, I hope. (I’d hot-link to the image — his bandwidth is paid for by Premiere magazine, I assume — but budgets are tight all over the print world, so you’ll have to click through yourself. Then hit his ads. I’m doing this every day on my favorite blogs now, and so should you.)

And that’s it for me. Thanks to the several of you who sent nice notes about my “subject and theme” post day before yesterday, and said it helped you get past obstacles in your own work. I’ve been feeling a little draggy about this self-imposed blog obligation this summer, and told a friend the other day I needed to get a few strokes with a kind hand rather a riding crop, and that did it. Re-energized, I’m back in the game.

* stupid spelling error fixed; thanks, Brian.

Jim recommended this Salon piece on editing in the comments of the previous post, but it’s so good I’m promoting it to the main page.

Fave passage:

To people not in the business, editing is a mysterious thing. (Actually, it’s mysterious to most bloggers, who despite having been in existence for less than 10 years, probably outnumber every writer who ever wrote. But more on them later.) Many times over the past 20 years, people have asked me, “What exactly does an editor do?”

It’s not an easy question to answer. Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons — sometimes all while working on the same piece. Early in my editing career I was startled when, after we had finished an edit, a crusty, hard-bitten culture writer, a woman at least twice my age, told me, “That was great — better than sex!”

Gary Kamiya gets the byline. Enjoy.

Sorry for taking the day off. Had an early appointment in Detroit Wednesday morning, a day that promised to be brutally hot (and delivered), with an ozone alert to boot. Curtail your driving, the radio warned. So I took the long way home.

It might have been an environmental misdemeanor, but until you’ve worked at home, you don’t know how important it is to just get the hell out of the house once in a while. I followed Woodward to Jefferson and took a lap of Belle Isle, which is being readied for the Indy Grand Prix Labor Day weekend. I’m not sure what the exact course is, but if it’s what I think, there’s one sharp turn pretty near the water, and I wondered what the chances of a spin-out ending up in the river might be. That would be so awesome.

But mostly I looked at the landscape. We’re deep in the Big Dry now — haven’t had a significant rain in weeks and weeks. A shower here, some drops there, but little more than that. It’s making everything look tired and zapped. In Grosse Pointe, people water constantly, even the median strips are sprinklered, so it’s still fairly lush, but in Detroit, not so. In the car with Kate, I’ve taken to pointing out dead trees — the emerald ash borer continues its sawdusty reign of terror — and they’re more common than P.T. Bruisers. Especially in Detroit, where they can’t keep up with removing dead buildings, let alone dead trees. (Wait until we finally do get a thunderstorm, and they come down on power lines.) One of the many incongruous sights in this city is a profusion of green growing over a crumbling ruin, like the “ghetto palms” that sprout on roofs and through cracks in pavement. It seems to make a statement about the implacability of nature and the impermanence of everything else, but when nature can’t keep up anymore, it’s sort of creepy.

Today will be hotter, we’re told. Oh, I can’t wait to see my electric bill this month.

Last night was taken by the tragedy in Minneapolis. Whenever there’s a breaking story like this, the first thing the over-cabled household does is look for the channel with the least offensive anchor presiding over it all. CNN had Paula Zahn, whose passive-aggressive style requires her to mention children on that school bus seen “with blood on their faces” and no other explanation. So I switched to MSNBC. Keith Olbermann can be insufferable in many contexts, but I liked him doing breaking news; he prefaced every fact with a million caveats — this just in, unverified, we don’t know if this is true, chaotic information streams, etc. Given how much of breaking-news info turns out to be b.s., it’s nice to hear a little honesty. One other thing: Olbermann has a command of the English language that’s getting rarer every day. Yesterday I heard a radio host speak of “accolations” instead of “accolades,” and of a body being “interned,” rather than “interred.” One of the bridge-collapse witnesses said he’d crossed the span moments before, “and that’s too close to call.” Of course he was upset, but he meant to say “too close for comfort.” I don’t blame the guy for flubbing the common expression, but does it have to go on the newspaper website?

(Note to non-journalists: You fix that by lopping the last two words — “…and that’s too close.” The quote is still accurate, and it makes more sense. Or you don’t use the quote.)

It’s unseemly to quibble like this when there’s been a tragedy of such magnitude. As I write this, it’s nine confirmed dead and 20 missing, which suggests the final death toll will be around 30. Just an average day in Baghdad. And a final note: Much of the early TV coverage concerned the children on the school bus, and rightly so. We’re hard-wired to protect children; they are, as the great philosopher Whitney Houston tells us, the future. That’s one reason I was so stunned to learn that, in actuarial terms, the death of a child is nothing much. I learned this from a man who’d had a child drown at his summer camp, and participated in the wrongful-death settlement. Kids, for all their innocence and potential, for the injustice of having them taken from us, for the devastating pain it causes their survivors, the insurance companies don’t really pay a lot for them. Their father or mother, yes, especially if they’re sole support of a family. But you don’t pay for potential. This is the market at work.

So, bloggage:

I read the Daily Telegraph every day. How did I miss this? Fifty must-watch web videos. They’re a tad Brit-centric, but the must-sees of all this TV are David Attenborough’s lyre bird segment and, of course, the Mike Tyson montage. God, that guy was an animal. I don’t know why more of his opponents didn’t just shit their pants and faint at the sound of the bell.

A nice deconstruction of yet another legacy of the Bush family, Clarence Thomas. It concerns his legal arguments, not his video-rental habits.

Roy has a cold, too, but it didn’t stop him from appreciating the most recent 6,000-word geyser of crap from Camille Paglia. This one’s a gem. Read.

Off to stare at the punishing sun and mutter.

Many years ago, when there was still money in a newsroom budget for training, our paper flew in a couple of editors from Philadelphia to talk about so-called narrative reporting — the long-form pieces you’re likely to find in Sunday editions. Not the eight-graf government meeting stories, but pieces with a longer or wider reach that seek to tell a bigger story. Semi-regular commenter Kim teaches this stuff, so maybe she has a better capsule definition.

What I recall most vividly from that day was the subject/theme discussion. Some writers have a really hard time understanding what a “nut graf” is — the explanation paragraph that answers the readers’ “so why should I care” question — as well as why you need one, and why the best nut grafs encompass the theme of the story in some way. So they went around the table and had each of us think of a narrative project we’d like to write or have written, and asked two questions: What’s it about? What’s it really about?

What’s it about? It’s about a couple who had a kid with a terrible genetic disease, and it was really breaking them down, and then she got pregnant again and they considered aborting but decided not to, figuring God wouldn’t curse them twice, but the second child was born and it had the same disease. What’s it really about? Coping.

The first question is the subject, the second is the theme. The story can be big:

What’s it about? The Rwandan genocide. What’s it really about? The paralysis of moral actors in the face of great evil.

Or small:

What’s it about? These two guys, lifelong best friends, who’ve spent all the lives chasing Bigfoot sightings, until one got discouraged and switched to 9/11 conspiracies, and they stopped speaking. What’s it really about? Craziness and friendship.

See how it works? The first question is easy, but if you can’t answer the second, you’re going to get into trouble, because at some point you’re going to get stuck and say what the hell, and if you don’t know what you’re really writing about, you won’t be able to go on. Sometimes the answer is a little vague — craziness and friendship may only appeal to those people who enjoy good stories about people — but the theme is the glue that connects the problems of two little people to the rest of the hill of beans we call this crazy world. (Umm…) Only a few of us are Bigfoot chasers, but we all have friends we’ve fallen out with. Anyway.

There’s always some smartyknickers who says, “But my story doesn’t have a theme,” like that makes them special. These are frequently the ones who disdain writing classes of any kind, preferring to spend shoe leather on reporting rather than time discussing these sissy topics. That’s perfectly fine, reporting is essential, but frequently in a long-term project they’ll spend a few weeks reporting, then disgorge a bunch of facts onto the computer screen and tell their editors it’s their job to make it readable. To them I would point out the “Godfather” paradox. If you wrote the story of the Godfather narrative, the lead would be something like, “Michael Corleone has emerged [note that passive voice, a fave of the shoe-leather school] as the heir to the crime family founded by his father, Vito, after a series of suspected mob-related executions last night in New York and Las Vegas.”

But when you consider the theme(s) — and there are so many in the Godfather story that you can’t count them on all your fingers — then the story becomes operatic, mythic. You’ve got the corruption of evil, fathers and sons, the tendrils of family and blood, the futility of trying to outrun your past, the immigrant story in America, and on and on. Why do you think people still watch this movie? Because Moe Green gets shot in the eye? Grow up.

It’s been my experience, as a writer and an editor, that when you’re blocked on a piece of writing the problem is one of two: 1) You haven’t done enough reporting; or 2) You don’t understand the theme. What’s it really about? Does this paragraph illuminate that? If not, you’ve lost your way. The subject is the path, the theme lights the path.

Does this make any sense at all? I hope so.

I’ve been struggling with several pieces of work all summer, and yesterday I had a sitdown with myself and tried to take my own advice. What’s it about? What’s it really about? I realized I’d never really asked myself the second question, and when I did, it was like a door opened, or a wall fell, or something. The light came on. It all got easier.

Which is to say, I have to get back to work. In the meantime, bloggage for the faithful reader.

Kate will be joining this outfit in a few years: The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation, dedicated to helping people recover from the pain of petting-zoo mishaps. Yes, a joke, but a semi-amusing one. Make sure you mouse over the logo. Via Metafilter.

What’s Chelsea Clinton up to these days? The NYT finds out. The short answer: Turning into a clone of her mother.

First the Swede, now the Italian: Michelangelo Antonioni dies. I loved “Blow-Up,” did you?

As for Tom Snyder, I thought David Letterman appreciated him best when he recalled the night Snyder had some chef on the show, and the two of them whipped up a little snack, and Snyder was stirring a bowl of something with a butt in his mouth. A real individual.

Is it all about death today? No. It’s also about sex: After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers (at the University of Texas) have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

Off to let my theme light my path. Have a good day.

Did you know that if you use Google Chat — and I do — it saves a copy of every single chat you have? I didn’t, until this morning:

10:17 AM me: The headline of the week comes from the Daily Mail:
I WENT TO THE DOCTOR WITH A COUGH AND ENDED UP HAVING A LEG AMPUTATED
Runner up:
Burns: eeeewwwwwww.
me: BABY’S LIFE WAS SLIPPING AWAY WHILE MIDWIVES WERE BUYING A TAKEAWAY
Next runner-up:
WOMAN TRAPPED ON FAULTY SUNBED FOR THREE HOURS
10:18 AM Burns: life is too gruesome sometimes.
me: “The son is working for the Daily Mail, it’s a steady job but he wants to be paperback writer.”
Burns: paperback…writerrrrrr…
rrrrr.
oh yeah
doo wah

That was from May 2006. What will the biographers of the future do with this information? Is there nothing Google doesn’t know about us?

I feel stupider already.

I don’t feel good today. Woke up with a cold. I hate summer colds. They make me write short sentences. So don’t expect much.

In my spare time I’m noodling around with a piece of fiction that requires me to channel the writing voice of one of my characters. The character is a blowhard, and crafting a distinct voice for him is harder than I thought it would be. If only I could get the Allen County GOP chairman to write more guest columns for the Fort Wayne newspapers; they’re textbook lessons in blowhard-y prose:

It’s time to put an end to the wave of speculation and rumors surrounding the Fort Wayne mayoral campaign. The Allen County GOP stands steadfastly and whole-heartedly behind our candidate for mayor, Matt Kelty. We will work diligently to spread his message and to make him the next leader of our city.

All political parties at some point suffer from a schism caused by a primary in which two or more qualified candidates seek the nomination. This obviously leaves some of the party’s members with bruised feelings. I deeply respect people who have yet to come on board; however, they should realize that the train on the track to victory has left the station. I am very hopeful that these individuals will be waiting at the next stop as the Kelty train heads toward the November election.

The chairman is a lawyer, and lawyers tend to talk — and write — as though they’re paid by the word, with a $100 bonus for every adverb they can sneak in:

Kelty is a man of integrity and character whose message deserves more attention than it gets. Too much has been said about the primary election and who had his or her picture taken with whom. Conspiracy theorists have speculated about supposed smoky backroom deals; these accusations are entirely false and reflect unfamiliarity with the primary election process.

Never use one complimentary adjective when you can use two; never use a simple and unshaded word (“false”) without an unnecessary modifier (“entirely”).

Can’t forget those passive-voice hoedowns:

With the Republican and Democratic candidates having been selected, the county parties now become involved. I have arranged with Republican Party stalwarts meetings where we have fostered camaraderie between the party and the 2007 GOP slate, headed by Kelty, and I’ve asked entrepreneur extraordinaire Don Willis to set up focus groups between Kelty and influential members of the party.

I could go on, but you amateur editors out there have the links and can make merry all you want. Writing is hard, and not everyone has a knack for it. It’s as much in the ear as anywhere else, and you either hear the music or you don’t. Miles Davis knew which notes not to play. If only everyone could write like “Kind of Blue.” The chairman should listen to “So What” and try again.

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” — Stephen King.

Awk. Back to bed.

Excuse the obvious weak witticism, but it seems as though the wheels have come off the Tour de France. Painful as it may be for fans like Danny and ex-champs like Saint Lance — who is no doubt nervously contemplating his future as a saint, once his “I never tested positive” starts to sound like “they had to drop the charges because there was a typo in the warrant” — I say: Good. Let the wheels come off. It’s time. The whole sport — lots of sports — seems to be soaked in chemicals, and if we’re going to pay anything but lip service to the idea of getting them clean, there are going to be a lot of downhill wrecks in the Pyrenees, so to speak.

When I was a lucky, lucky journalism fellow at the University of Michigan a couple-three years ago, we were privileged to have Dick Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, as a seminar speaker one night. It was an eye-opener, to say the least; it’s safe to say Pound has few illusions about just how dirty amateur and professional sports are these days. During the question period, someone asked why we don’t just call off the war on drugs in sports. Let them take drugs that grow their legs longer and hands larger and shrivel their testicles and whatever else, as long as it’s transparent. Pound was unimpressed with this argument, and pointed out the obvious problems, and then mentioned the biggie: What would you do about kids?

We forget it’s not only jerseys and sneakers that youthful admirers of athletes go in for. When I was in high school — and recall, I graduated in 1975 — there was a boy on the football team who seemed to explode over the summer, turning into the Incredible Hulk in a matter of weeks. It was an open secret he was taking steroids, and everyone knew where he got them — from his father, the doctor. When I started going to the gym after college, one of the trainers gave me the rundown on how the bodybuilders got their drugs: They went to Scioto Downs, the trotting venue, and spoke to certain veterinarians.

If a high-school kid from an upper-middle-class family is willing to take drugs, if a no-name bodybuilder with no hope of competing with the likes of Frank Zane will medicate just to impress girls (or other guys) in bars, then why even doubt that a pro, with millions on the line every day, would do it?

As for the other sports scandals of the moment — NBA officials working for the mob, dog-fighting aficionados in the NFL, what-evuh — I just throw up my hands.

[Pause.]

Just got off the phone with Lance Mannion. We were discussing “Mad Men” and went off on a tangent about how faces, and bodies, change through the decades. He didn’t think “Mad Men” got the faces quite right, although they certainly nailed the set design. The latter is so nailed it’s almost distracting — you find yourself saying, “Hey! A puu-puu platter!” insted of listening to the dialogue, but I expect that will abate with time. Faces and bodies change gradually and we don’t notice them until we do. Look at a picture of the crowds at Woodstock — everyone is skinny but untoned, the way people used to be when obesity was rare and thin was simply average. (I will give “Mad Men” this, though — a scene in a burlesque club featured a woman who not only stripped, but had a few rolls of fat at her waist. Once again, I miss my era.)

Anyway, this sort of comes back around to the Tour de France (I think). If we really flush drugs out of sports — and I’m not sure we can, or can even come close — we’re going to have to recalibrate not only our record books, but our eyes. The upside: Baseball players that look like Babe Ruth again.

OK, bloggage:

I’m not sure why Tim Goeglein is so prolific of late. When I worked for the paper, it seemed he only submitted his stupid guest op-ed columns three or four times a year, and here we’ve had three or four in that many months. Someone in a past comment thread speculated he’s keeping his name in front of the public in preparation for a run for office, but I’m not so sure — the subject matter’s all wrong. Of course, as a loyal soldier, he’s destined for the wingnut-welfare gravy train, but I don’t know which car he wants to ride in. Last month he lamented the tragic underappreciation of his favorite operatic composer, and this month he turns his attention to…John Wayne?

If we could scale down the pantheon of 20th Century actors to those with screen personas so resonant that their images remain available via plaster busts and lamps still sold in novelty stores decades after their deaths, John Wayne, whose centenary is this year, shares that particular down-market upper-tier.

Ummm, OK. Whatever. That’s his lead, by the way. I’ve never seen a John Wayne lamp, have you? I guess “down-market upper-tier” is a joke.

Wayne’s big-hearted, tough-guy screen personality was just as much a creation as a few others, but the boy who was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa 100 years ago, was seeking validation that did not exist in his disturbing home life when he was growing up.

I’m not sure what he’s saying here. That a movie star’s “screen personality” might not be a 100 percent organic reflection of their actual personality, just like “a few” others? Stop the presses.

There’s more, but lord, I don’t have time for this crap. Just know it contains the phrases “mitigation-free,” “near-perfect baroque cohesion” and “an out-of-door sort of spirit.” I don’t think Garry Wills is losing any sleep tonight.