My ex-sometime-colleague Karen Hensel won her second Peabody Award this spring, which was one of two won by Indianapolis TV stations. Indy is, I believe, a top-30 market; Detroit is 11 (again: I believe). My question today: What do we need to do to drop 19 spots?

To call the local newscasts appalling is an insult to other appalling things, like Karl Rove and smallpox. The least-appalling station appeals to about a 13-year-old intellect; the worst (Fox, of course) aims far lower.

I watch Fox.

Actually I don’t “watch” it. But the 10-11 p.m. hour of my shift is frequently the slowest, and sometimes I’ll turn it on for background noise. It follows the usual model — anchor team of blonde woman/black man, live reports from carnage sites, etc. However, it takes its guiding philosophy from “Showgirls,” i.e, when the question is low road or lower, bad choice or worse, dumb stand-up or dumber, they always happily choose door number two. My favorite segment is the Fox 2 Problem Solvers, their “consumer” report. With all the crime, greed, double-dipping and other shenanigans public and private in this city, you’d think they’d have no shortage of material. And yet time and again the bad guy they’re chasing down the street with cameras and microphones is someone who stole a two-figure sum from the muscular dystrophy fishbowl, or gypped a prom couple out of their deposit on the limo.

The absolute nadir was a few weeks ago, when they ripped the lid off some poor old schmuck who was going around town claiming to be the father of Brandon Inge, the Tigers’ third baseman. They had actual hidden-camera footage of this geezer sitting in a restaurant saying, “Yes, he’s my son!” The worst they could pin on him, besides the self-delusion, is that he promised a school group he’d get them free tickets and never came through. It’s painfully clear the old man is just trying to enliven a boring retirement, and here he has this sneering, snarktastic TV hairdo following him to his car, yelling questions at him. You know those “To Catch a Predator” slimefests on “Dateline,” where you kind of end up feeling sorry for the would-be child molesters? This was worse.

So they cut back to the anchor desk, and the two of them are sitting there with expressions like your dog gets when he hears a funny noise, like they’re trying to figure out the proper reaction, but can’t….quite….do it.

Finally, the male anchor says, “I think he needs counseling.” I loved it.

I’ve written before about missing the simple, entry-level training ground of the Fort Wayne TV news market, where reporters are so fresh out of college you can still smell the spilled beer on their clothes, and they make entertaining, puppylike mistakes such as mispronouncing famous place names, misspelling the mayor’s name in the supers and inserting “controversial” in their scripts every five words or so, just to make sure we all understand they’re covering an important story. I’m learning to love the slicker product of the big city.

One of the stations sent its investigative guy, who is flabby and unattractive and famous for getting roughed up on camera by the mayor’s security team, to a public pension-fund conference last month. It turns out Michigan, which is rapidly turning into Mississippi in terms of its economy and public-sector funding crises, sent the nation’s biggest contingent — something like 20 public servants, traveling on the taxpayer’s dime — to this conference.

Which was in Hawaii. Did I mention that?

Aloha! And there’s the flabby TV guy, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, lei and straw hat, bird-dogging these folks around Honolulu. Amusingly, the conference consisted of morning educational sessions, followed by lunch, followed by afternoons left entirely open for “networking,” i.e., shopping and lying on Waikiki Beach. Oh, it was rich, my friends. Seldom has government waste looked so amusing.

OK, so, do we have bloggage?

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane decided not to pick up Randy Cohen’s “The Ethicist” column, after discovering he gave money to MoveOn.org, revealed in that MSNBC story we were discussing yesterday. The Spokesman-review folks were nice to me when I was writing my Big Newspaper Essay last year, and I’m not going to poke them for it — it’s their paper. But I was struck by one phrase in their blog item on the decision yesterday:

After months of discussion, we were prepared to start this Saturday publishing…

That’s the newspaper business, right there. And you wonder why I’m glad I’m not in it anymore.

Have a swell day, folks. And weekend.

As a rule, reporters hate 89 percent of all “localizations” they’re assigned to do. A localization is when you take a big national story and find the local angle. For all the times it’s worthwhile — local people in New York City on 9/11 describe the scene — most times they’re just lame. Worst of all are man-on-the-street reaction stories, which editors believe capture the rough-hewn wisdom of the common man, but almost always boil down to: Ill-informed Morons Find Their Voice.

But every so often, you get one that’s fun to do:

It may not have been another “Bullitt,” but the Ford Expedition has again made the Blue Oval part of Hollywood history thanks to its cameo role in one of the climactic scenes of Sunday night’s final episode of “The Sopranos.”

You know which one: The Phil Leotardo whacking scene.

The camera then shifts again to the Ford logo, this time emblazoned on the wheel of the Expedition. The wheel begins to turn, rolling slowly over Leotardo’s head, which is crushed with a sickening crunch.

I bring this up to single out and mock the expert quoted low in the story, who said:

But automotive marketing expert Jim Hossack of AutoPacific Inc. said there is such a thing as bad publicity, and he thinks the depiction of the Blue Oval in Sunday night’s Sopranos climax definitely crossed that line. “I don’t think that is the way you want to get press,” Hossack said. “I sure wouldn’t have paid for it.”

If you’ve ever wondered how stupid the management class thinks you are, well, there you are. We’d better not buy that car, Martha. Someday I might be getting out of it and someone could mistake me for Phil Leotardo and put a bullet in my head. I have a lot of gray, you know. I mean, you want to talk lousy product placement Sunday night, the people who have something to complain about are the ones at Nissan, who now have millions of people believing their vehicles will burst into flames if parked in leaves.

Nice shout-out to “Bullitt,” by the way. That movie did for Mustangs what “Risky Business” did for sex on trains.

Once again I have a day loaded with appointments that don’t want to accommodate blogging. (Last full day of freedom before school dismisses for good tomorrow.) I have a big picture/roundup post due for this week, so bear with me. In the meantime, let’s doff our hats to NN.C commenter Brian Stouder, whom you are all now instructed to call Jimmy Olson, citizen journalist. I’ll be back in a bit.

At the risk of taking sides in what must be the episodic-television wuss-out of the decade, let me just say the more I think about the last Sopranos installment, the less I hate it. It was a bold gesture, and a hard truth: Nothing really changes, especially with people who don’t want to change.

Tony and Carmela have arrived in middle age, failures in the one thing they strived to do (besides make money) — raising their children to escape their parents’ lives. Meadow’s on her way to being a mob wife and lawyer, having laid aside the one “pure” career path that would have set her apart. AJ’s the self-deluding, shiftless little shit he was always destined to be. (And how ironic, that by saving him from the Army, they’ve drawn a target on his back that will be hit sooner or later. Never mind Tony and Carmela’s support for the war and the president, but not when it comes to actually fighting the thing. Sure, he’s going to be an officer. And learn Arabic. Right.) In fact, the kids aren’t even sheltered anymore; they both know what DefCon 3 is, and discuss FBI protection at yet another family funeral the way they might talk about parking at the Meadowlands. Carmela has sold her soul so often she’s not even bothered by it any more, as long as there’s another house to divert her attention, or a nice piece of jewelry, or an Hermés scarf. Janice is ready to break up Bobby’s poor orphan children, in the name of being a “good mother,” so the next generation of lunatic killers is well under way.

Paulie’s a whack job, still. Sil’s in a coma. Junior’s getting off easy, wasting away in a poor farm with his glasses held together with duct tape. Everyone else is dead. The envelopes are lighter than a rejection letter. The party’s over, and seven years of therapy didn’t make a dent. Sounds like hell to me. As the song on the jukebox says, Oh, the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on…

I’d say more, but I know you all want to dis–.

[Twenty seconds of black.]

Oh, my, it was a nice weekend. Perfect weather. Alan went on a man-date with himself Friday night. It was fully in keeping with my secret to a happy marriage: Space.

You gotta give one another a little room to be something other than Mr. or Mrs. Better Half. Two become one, but before two became one they were two ones on their own. I was, anyway. So when Alan called late Friday afternoon, at the hour when we begin calibrating the closing of the Features section with whatever I’m making for dinner, and said, “The Sun Ra Arkestra is playing a 10 o’clock show in town, and I want to go,” of course there was only one answer: “Have a nice time.”

He didn’t say “without you,” but there was no chance of getting a babysitter at that hour, and on the subject of Sun Ra, we’ve agreed to disagree. I happily acknowledge I am not cool enough to fully appreciate a jazz musician who claimed to have been teleported to Saturn in 1936, where he was given instructions to drop out of college and speak to the world through his music. The show was at a building in southwest Detroit I’m actually familiar with, the Old Bohemian Hall, a relic from the early 20th century, when your tribe was your life. I did an interview there last fall. There was a scraggly art party going on downstairs, and the interview was up, on the second floor, where there’s a stage about the size of something you’d find in an elementary school. The owner showed me the bronze hooks recessed into the floor, where they set up the gymnastic equipment on Saturdays. I kept looking at the stage.

“You can almost see John Reed up there, talking to the crowd about one big union,” I said. Exactly.

Anyway, the place was a mess. It was one of six buildings the owner bought in the ’90s, he said, for a combined price of less than he paid for a Jeep Cherokee a few years later. Of course, the expense in real estate in places like this is not the purchase but the demolition and/or stabilization. You pay $1,500 for the building and put $100,000 into the roof. Alan said it was still a mess, very Fabulous Ruins. The stage lights consisted of a pole lamp with the shades removed, some clip-on work lights from Home Depot and, of all things, a trouble light in a cage, like you use to work on your car. The Arkestra does a bit where they stand up and walk around the hall playing their instruments, and they looked mighty vexed with the un-railed, unlit and crumbling steps they had to use. Did I mention most of these guys are in their 60s and perhaps 70s?

So what was the music like? “Oh, it was good,” Alan said. “Imagine Duke Ellington’s band in tinfoil hats and on acid, and with one guy playing a ram’s horn.” As I said: Not cool enough.

Bloggage:

There was so much good stuff in the papers over the weekend I can scarcely get to it all. Joel Achenbach on Red Meat Politics in the WashPost, along with a satisfying thumbsucker on cultural genocide by someone other than Americans, and the NYT did a short piece directing me to TrashTheDress.com, a website dedicated to a new wrinkle in wedding photography — the post-wedding dress-trashing session. Some gorgeous photographs. I wish I’d done this. Of course, my dress was off the rack and not Vera Wang.

But for pure knee-slapping humor, though, nothing matches the Bambi-vs.-Godzilla clash of this priceless interview of Jack Kevorkian by none other than Mitch Albom. Two of the nation’s leading hucksters of death go mano a mano, but the contest ultimately disappoints:

What do you think happens when we die?

“You stink. You rot and stink.”

No soul?

He laughed. “What’s a soul?”

It’s like watching Strawberry Shortcake in a steel cage match with Ted Bundy.

Regular readers have long ago given up hope of seeing even a glimmer of self-awareness from either of these guys. Kevorkian thought there would be riots in the street when he was sent away these last seven years, and Albom long ago accepted the job as the national expert on death and dying (Good Morning America Division). Still, it would’ve been even funnier if Kevorkian had messed with Mitch’s head a little bit, and instead of saying death leads to “rot and stink,” if he could have given a more Mitchlike answer:

“I think, Mitch, that when we die we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to a bright white light. As we step into the light, we suddenly find ourselves in an old-time drugstore, with a soda fountain. Sitting at the small tables are all your loved ones who preceded you in death; your father is the soda jerk, putting the finishing touches on a root beer float, which he places before you as you sit down. All your dogs, cats and other pets are there, too, waiting to be petted, although I think there’s some dispute about pet reptiles — they may be in a different facility. But definitely the dogs and cats are there. OK. So you sit down, and everyone is smiling at you. You may be confused. If you were taken quickly, say by a car crash or explosion or something, you probably are. You’re all like, “How did I get to this soda fountain, and why is my dad wearing a paper hat?” But you’re not afraid, because you’re suffused with the light, and also you have a nice root-beer float to enjoy. Then, the door opens again, and a guy who looks a lot like Wilfred Brimley walks in. This is God. Yes, God is Wilfred Brimley, but Wilfred Brimley is not God. It will all make sense to you as you experience it. Then–”

“Excuse me for a moment please, Jack. I need to go make some notes.”

It’s another lovely day. Enjoy it.

Connie asked in the comments yesterday what y’all thought of reader comments on individual stories at newspaper websites. I’m on record as thinking they add little and threaten much. (There’s one constituency in Detroit who has made digital graffiti a key part of its message, like the Mark of Zorro, and they’re pretty funny.)

I’m perplexed, although I shouldn’t be, by editors who nod in agreement but wring their hands over how to address the problem. They fill the air with yapping about the brave new digital frontier and its different codes of conduct and attribution and blah blah blah, but the problem doesn’t seem all that intractable to me. For any who may be reading, I’ll make it simple:

First, decide if you’re going to allow anonymous comments, which admittedly runs contrary to the history of letters-to-editors; the usual policy requires a name, address and phone number, and letters are generally verified with a phone call before they run. This discourages pranksters, who would send in letters under, say, the GOP chairman’s name, saying, “I suk! Ha!” It’s sort of a touching ritual, really, harkening back to the “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so” days of Virginia O’Hanlon. But just in my own experience, such double-checking has discouraged not just letter-writing monkeywrenchers, but fake obits and other embarrassing disasters. It didn’t stop two male DJs from getting a photo of themselves in the engagement announcements, with one dressed in drag and heavily airbrushed, but nobody’s perfect.

But say you’re going to allow readers to comment anonymously, in the grand tradition of the internet. And say you’re going to allow a certain level of raucousness short of open hatred, bigotry and weird threats, also in keeping with wild-frontier internet standards. Then your job is still pretty simple:

Moderate your comments.

It’s really not difficult at all. Every comment made on this site comes to me as an e-mail, and I’m able to edit or delete any with a click. (Not that I would; I love you all too much.) As I’ve stated before, first-time commenters have to be approved, but once you’re in, you’re in, until you change your e-mail address or IP number, which is why Brian Stouder’s are always being shunted to moderation; the guy must float around Fort Wayne clattering every keyboard he can find. Admittedly, a major metro is going to get more comments than little ol’ me, but editors keep whining about how overstaffed they are — just find one copy editor and put him or her in charge. Instruct this gatekeeper to be lenient but not to the point of libel or offensiveness, to not get all bent out of shape over spelling or grammar errors, to allow most through but not every single one. Most newsrooms are staffed, if not around the clock, for most hours in the day, and when there’s nobody there to give a thumbs up/down, let the comments sit in a holding queue pending approval.

Hark! I just remembered I’ve recovered some of the data I lost when my last PowerBook died, including the letter I wrote to the Freep editors on this very subject, the one that never saw the light of day (or was even acknowledged, ahem). That’s OK — I knew it was too long, but I wanted them to know some people were actually reading their website and reacting to it. Ah, well. Let’s look it up.

(Pause.) God, I hate the way I write sometimes. It’s as though when my brain is thinking “this is for a newspaper” my voice goes through a pomposity-enhancer: “…with no small amusement”? Kill me now. But here’s the example I cited then:

…How confusing, then, to read this on the Freep.com website, in the reader comments on a story explaining the death of Andrew Anthos, a gay man: “Bet he was used to getting attacked from behind.” This was followed by words of wisdom from MBW: “There is something inherantly (sic) dysfunctional about any guy who puts something in his mouth that has been in his rear end for the last 20 minutes.” MBW goes on to condemn the bisexual, too, who nightly confront the question, “Do I want hair pie or balls on my face?”

I quote these comments with no small amusement, knowing that if this ever appears in ink-on-paper form, this colorful language will be rendered in a less-offensive gray. So how about another example, from a story about the selection of Corperryale Harris as Mr. Basketball: “How many 40 ouncers and drugs did his parents use when they came up with that name????” Wrote another: “Doctor, my husband.. err, boyfriend.. err, person I met one night and I are having trouble naming our newborn son… I want to name him corper, but he wants to name him ryale, what are we to do?” Ha ha!

Any copy editor used to working fast should be able to weed out stuff like this in a thrice. Ditto the libel of our dear Connie. I thought editors were supposed to be thinking outside the box, for god’s sake. How hard does it have to be?

OK, then. For those of you who cannot live another minute without knowing what salad was on yesterday’s menu, go ahead and exhale: Fruit. Because once in every summer a girl should get to use her melon-baller.

As Dave Barry probably wouldn’t say, “The Melon-Ballers” would be a great name for a band.

Yesterday was a good day. A trifle hot, but good. Although I had one of those moments, when I left the house, a camera-pulls-back moment of standing outside myself, looking at this person who claims to be me:

Dumb outfit from Lands End? Check. Bag carrying mother’s tools of caution and preparedess, i.e. SPF 30 sunblock, boring swimsuit (also from Lands End), digital camera, goggles and novel for slow periods? Check. Inoffensive side dish appropriate for both children and fat-gram-counting women carried in, Jesus Christ, a Pyrex Portable? Check. Twenty extra pounds? Check. Who is this person? She could pass unnoticed through any suburban shopping mall; in fact, she’s growing invisible. Would anyone who saw her believe that she’s watched people cook heroin in a spoon, listened as an insurance man confessed a fondness for casual at-home nudism at a Rotary lunch, likes to listen to hip-hop really loud in her navy-blue station wagon? Probably not. I should read some more John Cheever.

Have a good weekend!

A few weeks ago I mentioned the awful columns of Tim Goeglein, special assistant to the Worst President Ever, who writes for my alma mater. However, for some reason his stuff isn’t archived, so I couldn’t quote from one. Readers, we’re in luck — he has a piece in the paper today.

This is the first sentence: Though summer does not officially arrive until late June, we Americans are confident the summer season really arrives Memorial Day weekend and extends to Labor Day.

This is the last sentence: It is a stunning question indeed.

It’s not much better in between. Note camouflaged reference to the late Pat Buckley. Why do I do this to myself?

If you think of life as a box of chocolates, not in the Gumpian sense of you-never-know-what-you’re-gonna-get but in the “one small, sublime pleasure after another” sense of this …horrible metaphor — well, let’s start again, shall we?

I was thinking of the things I like best in life the other day, John Coltrane blowing his horn in the back of my head, and thought that somewhere in the top 20 or so would be this: Discovering a great work of art — and yes, I’m lumping “popular entertainments” in with that, go ahead and mock — before you know anything about it. We talk stuff to death in this country, and so much of it is just hot air. The other day I surfed past “Cast Away” on cable, and thought for the millionth time how it might have been to see that movie without knowing beforehand that Tom Hanks survives a plane crash, lives for a matter of years on a deserted island, escapes the island, is rescued, returns to his life and realizes he’s lost the love of his life for good, all of which was revealed in the film’s trailer and advertising. I think it would have made for a better movie. Maybe it’s just me.

(Roger Ebert’s review of “Cast Away” deals with this question, and guess what: The film’s own damn director thinks giving away the store was the right thing to do, comparing the marketing of a film to McDonald’s. No wonder he’s such a success.)

Anyway, it made me think of the night I rented “Sunset Boulevard” at the video store, knowing nothing other than this was a classic movie I’ve never seen and that Gloria Swanson says, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.” Imagine what it was like seeing it unfold that night, just an ordinary weeknight in Fort Wayne, Indiana, one I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I felt like that guy in that speaker ad from the ’70s; “Sunset Boulevard” blew my hair back.

Many years ago, I was living in Columbus, Ohio, browsing the mass-market paperback racks at my local Little Professor, looking for something to read. I don’t remember what prompted me to pick up Kem Nunn’s “Tapping the Source,” but I did, and ever since I’ve wondered why I could pass Nunn on the street and not know who he is. Most capsule descriptions describe it as “surfing noir” or “Raymond Chandler does ‘Endless Summer,'” and these work well enough, but how the book worked on me, a kid who grew up in a time when California was, quite literally, the promised land (promised by the Beach Boys), was something else. It captured perfectly the sense Midwesterners of my generation (OK, change that last phrase to “I”) had of southern California as a place of beaches and sunshine and cool people, along with the inevitable adult realization that it wasn’t.

The back cover said it won an American Book Award for Best First Novel, but for me, it was like the book existed in the Twilight Zone. There were blurbs on the cover from Elmore Leonard and Robert Stone, hardly obscure blurbers, and I couldn’t find anyone who’d read it. Authors like Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis were in every gossip column, but where was Kem Nunn? I’d say, “Sure, ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ was enjoyable enough, but have you read ‘Tapping the Source’?” and people would look at me blankly: Who’s he? And these were people who read books.

I reread the book every year or so, to see if it held up. It did. I found other novels by Nunn, to see if they were as good. They weren’t. Good enough, but “Tapping the Source” was lightning in a bottle.

Well, eventually the internet happened, and I did a little poking around, and discovered what Nunn’s problem was: He lived in California. He got his MFA not at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop but UC/Irvine. Evidently the book had been sold to the movies, but the movie never happened: …cursed by a movie deal that saw his fantastic first novel, “Tapping the Source” altered beyond recognition until it reputedly become the core of the movie “Point Break,” with which it has very little in common. I’ll say. Both stories feature surfing. That’s about all they have in common.

Anyway, I figured Kem Nunn was an elaborate figment of my imagination until one night near the end of “Deadwood,” the series, and I saw his name in the writing credits. So that’s where he ended up, I thought; well, at least he’ll make some money. And then, elsewhere on HBO around the same time, Ari Gold, Jeremy Piven’s character on “Entourage,” made some reference to the script for “Tapping the Source.” I can’t recall the line, but it had something to do with the mythical quality of the script, and may well have been yet another of the ten thousand Hollywood in-jokes on that show. But it seemed to be evidence that Nunn was not only still kicking, but might be under contract to HBO. And that is good news.

Turns out, he is. I’m holding in my hand an advance-screening DVD of “John From Cincinnati.” Co-creators: David Milch and Kem Nunn. Lucky, lucky me. I’ll give you a full report. Alan said, “All I know is, there’s no character in it named John, and it has nothing to do with Cincinnati.” Well, I appreciate the Buckeye reference, if no one else.

(Bonus mnemonic: Cincinnati has its name misspelled more than any other American city, and yes, I’m including Albuquerque, which people at least have enough sense to look up. Here’s my trick for remembering how to spell the Queen City: 1-2-1. One N, then two Ns, and one T. No double Ts, people! One T!)

UPDATE: I should read the L.A. Times more often.

Quick bloggage: I’m indebted to TV writer David Mills, who blogs as Undercover Black Man, for keeping track of what he calls MBPs, or Misidentified Black People. He contends, and he’s convinced me, that African Americans are misidentified in the news media more than any other group. (Page through that MBP link, and you’ll see the rather overwhelming evidence. The latest: Fox News confuses William Jefferson and John Conyers. Well, they do all look alike.

Yeesh, but I have work to do. Later, all.

Because I have several appointments today, because I slept badly last night, because I haven’t had my coffee, because all I want to do is go back to bed with an old Travis McGee novel and drift off into sweet, sweet oblivion for another couple of hours, it’s all-bloggage Tuesday! Feel free to carry on a lively discussion in the comments; I’ll be back eventually.

Last week’s garage-sale find:

What am I bid for a new-with-tags, XL, apparently never-worn commemorative T-shirt, from the 1997 Stanley Cup celebration? The image is a front-page reproduction of the old JOA News/Free Press Saturday edition. That’s Steve Yzerman with the cup. I recall that victory because we went on vacation in northern Michigan the following week, and were reading the Detroit papers when two members of the team were seriously injured in a post-victory car crash. To call the coverage “hysterical” would have been a grievous understatement. One of the injured players lingered in a coma for some time, but the beast had to be fed, every day. We were there during the “others who survived comas and head injuries offer their thoughts” stories. People speak of beating a dead horse. This story was a smear on the pavement by the time it went away, I suspect.

Alicublog reads the loons so you don’t have to, and I’m grateful, because I’d rather he tracked “Knocked Up” and the ululating approval of the culture warriors. Also, he’s funnier.

James Lileks won’t have to take his chances in the job market with the rest of us, after all. Good for him. It’s hard for me to say that, not because I’m jealous, but because he remains such a clueless nimrod. Ahem:

But this business has been insulated for so long from this sort of agita that it’s really like the Pope introducing merit pay into the College of Cardinals. There’s a reason they call it the Velvet Coffin, after all. There’s something about the journalism profession that makes some of its members feel like secular academics, if you know what I mean. …The union confers a form of tenure. People expect to leave the craft before the craft leaves them.

Dear Jim: Some of us spent a career in the newspaper business without ever being a member of the Newspaper Guild. I, for one, never referred to my job as the Velvet Coffin, nor did I ever hear any other person in my newsroom(s) do so. A few even called their jobs as reporters or editors “the thing I do before I go to work at the Estee Lauder counter, or The Gap, so I have hopes of paying off my student loan before I’m 40.” (Of course, since we worked in smaller markets, we were all talentless hacks, and deserved it.) Most of us worked for significantly less than $92K per annum, and much of it involved work on weekends, nights, holidays and other inconvenient times. And many had nothing you could call “a form of tenure,” as a quick look around YOUR OWN NEWSROOM should tell you. Ah, well. I understand you haven’t been spending much time there for the last zillion years. Maybe in the future, with your continuing income, you can buy a clue. In the meantime, please, shut your piehole. Or go cover a plane crash, if that’s not beyond your capabilities.

As if.

But let’s end on a high note, as D at Lawyers, Guns and Money recalls the 33rd anniversary of Ten-Cent Beer Night at Cleveland Stadium, a one-time-only affair:

During the first few innings, tipsy fans tossed smoke bombs and firecrackers at each other. By the second inning, a topless woman had leaped onto the field and chased down one of the umpires for an unwanted kiss; another streaker joined the Rangers’ Tom Grieve as he circled the bases following his second home run of the night; a father and son team ran into the outfield and dropped their pants. Meantime, golf balls, rocks and batteries rained down on Texas’ players throughout the game. At one point, someone heaved an empty gallon of Thunderbird wine at Rangers’s first baseman Mike Hargrove. As the game neared its conclusion, the evening descended into total chaos. During the ninth inning, the Indians managed to tie the score and placed the winning run on third base. At that point, a fan ran into the outfield to steal Jeff Burroughs’ glove. When Burroughs began chasing the fan, Rangers’ manager Billy Martin, along with several of Burroughs’ teammates, rushed to help out — several of them, including Martin, carried bats.

I feel like I was there.

Last week the Freep had a story about the outgoing Detroit school superintendent — “outgoing” because he’d been fired in March — still driving a Ford Explorer that was part of his compensation package. So far, so good, your basic tawdry story of a public servant declining to unclasp the teat when told to, but, as so often happens here, the punchline to this joke was buried far down in the story. The Explorer is one of two cars the superintendent is entitled to use, the other being a Lincoln Town Car with a security detail attached.

Yes, the superintendent of schools rolls with muscle. The board member quoted said he had no problem with that, because there were some crazy people at those school board meetings. A few weeks ago, a member of the audience threw a handful of grapes at the board after a vote she disagreed with. (Question: Does the superintendent’s security detail pledge to take a grape for the boss?) But maybe for good reason: Yesterday the outgoing supe was indicted, in Dallas, for miscellaneous financial shenanigans. Was a yacht involved? Oh, of course: Sir Veza II, if you’re keeping score at home.

(Yacht names in indictments are like pulling your jacket up to hide your face from photographers on the perp walk — they just make you look more guilty. Last week Terry Gross interviewed someone who’d written a book about Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the crookedest ex-congressman in all the land. The yacht Cunningham was living on, the very kind favor extended by a defense contractor, was called The Dukester. Is that a guilty name or what? Note to self: If one plans to accept a yacht in lieu of dirty money, have the sense to name it something dumb and innocuous, like Tranquility Base, or Windsurfer. Even Liquid Refreshment is tempting fate.)

I remember in Fort Wayne, when the superintendent sent flowers to some woman on his expense account; we wrote stories for days and days, which prompted letters to the editor for more days and days, wondering how long the taxpayers of Allen County were going to carry this sort of outrageous spending and blah blah blah. I wonder what they’d do with two cars, a security detail and an indictment? Faint dead away, I expect.

Kind of a mixed bag today, appropriate for a day promising temperatures in the upper 80s. Lord knows I have work to do, but I spent some time yesterday contemplating two personal essays detailing bad experiences — Jon Carroll’s account of being kept awake by drunken Sherpas in a Nepalese teahouse, and James Lileks’ disappointment with a meal at a Thai restaurant.

If that’s all I told you about the two pieces, which one do you think had a higher probability of bugging the crap out of you? The first one, of course. Just the setup sounds like something you’d hear from J. Peterman — Seinfeld’s J. Peterman, that is. Ah yes, Elaine, I recall when my bride and I honeymooned on Everest, and the teahouse we bunked in was invaded by partying Sherpas imbibing rakshi, their native moonshine… And yet, you read the column, and not only do you not get that feeling, that cry-me-a-river-asshole feeling of a person complaining about having an exotic experience in an exotic land you will never, ever visit, much less be able to write sentences like this about: “We were four weeks into the journey when we came to Pangboche, a charming town at 14,000 feet…” You not only don’t get the feeling, you sympathize. Poor Jon and Tracy in that smoky hut! Rude Sherpas! The least they could have done was expand the hole in the ceiling. It’s the kind of story I wish I could tell, but never could, and not because I’ve never been to Nepal. I lack the self-effacement gene.

But I’ve had many bad meals in restaurants — who hasn’t? — and yet, reading Lileks whine about his own, which involved being served chicken thighs in his curry, instead of the expected white meat, left me thinking this guy should change his name to Babbitt and get it over with. (Let’s leave aside the plain fact that the thighs are where the flava lives on a chicken, and that many Thai recipes call for thighs by name [Lefty and Righty, perhaps]; some people just don’t like dark meat.) I think it’s the ridiculous, out-of-proportion hostility over what was, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal, the sense that Lileks brought not just a gun to a knife fight, but a high-powered sniper rifle, which he used on the restaurant owner long after the fight should have been concluded, digested and sent into the sewer, so to speak.

Your impressions may differ. Share them if you like. Oh, and be advised that the Thai-food anecdote comes about halfway through the big wad o’ text. And since you’ve been so good, here’s a bonus Jon Carroll story, headlined “The Afghans Next Door” but should have been called “Canapés for the Revolution,” which was in the subhead. Cheese puffs?

Fred Thompson is running for president, some say. It’s a pity that James Wolcott already summed him up in a phrase, when he called him a grumpy old dog farting on the front porch.

A few days ago I wrote about architectural salvage in Detroit. Well, not all of it is salvaged — some just gets thrown in the woods, as Detroitblog points out.

And that is all. Good day to everyone.

Spring is here, which means it’s time for the Derringer clan to do its semi-annual flirtation with divorce. Yes, it’s boat-launching day. I thought this event had lost its drama once we got the kinks out; last year’s launch, and even autumn’s melancholy take-out, went better than expected. But this year lingering knee pain complicates matters, and the temperature is predicted to be a blazing 85. Will this day end in cursing, tears and lawyers? Tune in tomorrow.

Two bits of bloggage, one short, one long:

Like dripping ice, like descending smog, there was karma all over the building Tuesday night — and still the Red Wings almost shook it off, they fought to the choking finish. But in the end, it was covered in feathers and spoke with a beak. This, friends, is the kind of prose that makes you a national treasure.

The Yak is the Detroit Free Press’ big furry animal. Its job is to encourage children to read the paper, via its ongoing feature, Yak’s Corner. When the Freep and my ex-employer were both Knight Ridder papers, we ran Yak’s Corner, too. I guess, in the Freep sale and subsequent dissolution of KR, the Yak was not considered corporate property, because it’s still in the Freep.

One time, to promote the feature at some convention-center show the paper was involved in, the Freep loaned the Yak costume to our newsroom in Fort Wayne. It arrived in a big case on wheels, and was taken to the managing editor’s office, whose job it was to find an occupant. She needed someone who was both slim and had nothing better to do on the weekend, and found her ideal candidate in Name Redacted.

Redacted tells the story better than I do, but the bottom line is: It was a disaster. The suit was claustrophobic, and the children were horrible; they especially liked running full-tilt into the poor Yak, trying to knock it down. Or they’d beat on the suit with their fists to provoke a reaction. Imagine being inside this thing — hot, sweaty, trying to see out the fur-screened peephole, besieged by brats who will probably not grow up to be daily newspaper subscribers. The Yak had an escort, the teenage daughter of an editor also in attendance. After a good deal of this torture, Redacted started to feel the suit closing in, so to speak. She turned to the escort and said, “GET YOUR MOM,” only it sounded like “Mmmf mfuf mmmffm” and so the escort did nothing. “PLEASE, PLEASE GET YOUR MOM” came out “MMFF MFFM mfmfuf mffmf” and the torture continued. Finally, the Yak bolted from the hall, ripped the head off the costume, climbed into her car in a state of barely restrained panic and vomited down her shirt.

This would have been a sight to see. I only wish my life was this cinematic.

I mention this only because whenever I see a video like this one, I think, “If they made me do that, I’d puke, too.”

Back later, with pictures.

Today’s question:

What was your wedding like?

I ask because I want to know how the generational divide works here. We got married late in life, planned it ourselves and spent a little less than $5,000, at the time about half the average cost in the U.S. and enough to buy two — but only two — Martha Stewart-style wedding cakes at current prices. I thought it was a pretty nice wedding, but then, I was the guest of honor. There were things I’d do differently today, but on the whole, I thought it worked OK. I re-learned the most important lesson of any party, whether it’s for a bris, a marriage, a wake or a kegger — it’s not the food or the booze or the flowers or the table decorations, it’s the guest list. You can throw a great party for practically nothing, if you have the right friends. (And I’m not talking about getting your friends to design the invitations, although that’s a big help.) Which is one reason I’m so baffled by the MegaWedding phenomenon.

I’ve been to one of these affairs, and it was very nice, but it was the first of my experience that had a theme. You wouldn’t think a wedding would need a theme — Bob and Sue Get Married would seem to do the trick — but this one’s was Candy. The execution was sly and clever. The invitation came in a box made of white chocolate. Table assignments were on all-day suckers. The entrance to the outdoor area where they did the deed was flanked by giant “bouquets” of licorice whips, suckers and the like. There was an intermezzo course of cocktails named for candy bars. The tabletop candles sat in glasses crusted with rock candy. The placemats were peppermint-swirled. Toward the end of the night I picked up a lovely petit-four and nearly broke a tooth. It was a souvenir candle. Whoops, too many chocolate martinis.

And while I remember all of it vividly, when we talk about that weekend, we inevitably recall the elderly guest who had seemingly spent his entire 401(k) having his face lifted, contoured with implants and, I don’t know, buffed to a high sheen. Which is not to say a theme is unimportant, just that people were talking about the guy with the facelift. (Note: I hope they’re not talking about the drunk who tried to eat the candle.)

All this by way of pointing you to this interview with Rebecca Mead, author of “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.”

Mead’s book is said to be the first to tackle the American wedding racket the way Jessica Mitford did the funeral industry, which I find astonishing. Granted, I was long in the tooth and a practiced cynic by the time I tied the knot, but I hope, for the future of our country, that most brides-to-be could see through the naked greed and polished b.s. of so much of what you’re peddled between the she-says-yes and the I-dos. I recall one small item among many. It was a collection of small rings of not-particularly-precious metal, each attached to a ribbon. You — or your designated pastry chef — baked them into a cake with the ribbons streaming out. This cake was to be served at a bridal shower, where each bridesmaid would grab a ribbon and pull, thereby revealing her destiny. (Each ring carried a different symbol.) According to the advertising, it was said to be the hot new “tradition,” but all I could see was a cake that would be a pain in the ass to bake and then disintegrate when six girls yanked its guts out. Crumbs everywhere and a ruined dessert — that’s a wedding for you.

But then I recall the brides I’ve known who fell into real depressions after their weddings were over, after they returned from the honeymoon, opened all the gifts, put them on the shelf and said, “Now what?” It’s like nobody told them a wedding is followed by a marriage, which lasts a lot longer and features hors d’oeuvres only occasionally.

In the interview, Mead mentions In Style Weddings, the special edition of the consumer magazine that always features a celebrity bride on its cover. She doesn’t mention that for the longest time, this particular match was cursed — several consecutive couples broke up before the ink was dry. Even the zillion-dollar cake couldn’t save them. Imagine that.

So, bloggage before a busy day gets up and running:

Bill Maxwell left the St. Petersburg Times in 2004 to teach journalism at Stillman College, an historically black school in Alabama. It didn’t go well. The story is very sad.