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.

Two newspapers, same story. First headline:

DaimlerChrysler more than doubles first-quarter profits to $2.6 billion

Second headline:

Chrysler loss near $2 billion, mostly on restructuring

Both headlines are accurate. The first reports profits for the DaimlerChrysler Corp., the second for just the Chrysler group, a subtlety that may be missed before your morning coffee. Not that anyone gets both papers anymore, it’s just amusing in a wry, bitter kind of way. It kind of reminds me of the period at my old newspaper in which unemployment numbers were reported as employment numbers. Six percent weren’t out of work, 94 percent had jobs! Always look on the bright side of life, as the crucified man said.

If that seems like a really stupid way to report the news — 250,000 Metro Toddlers Not Mauled By Pit Bulls Today — well, join the club. Someday I’m going to write something about my experience working in journalism’s minor leagues. All those years have to be worth something. It’ll have to be fiction, since most of it is so unbelievable in the first place. Who, for instance, would swallow the idea that an editor could seize upon highlighting — yes, yellow bars of color over significant blocks of text, the way you marked up “Silas Marner” in high school — as a way to serve readers? This was an idea an editor of mine had during the grim years in the ’80s when we kept getting readership studies that people were spending less and less time with us; at that time the figure was something like 17 minutes. The editor thought, OK, if you only have 17 minutes, we’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version.

The bosses liked the idea enough to print up a few dozen copies and run it past a focus group, where it flopped like a fat kid off the high board. The papers were gathered up and destroyed, and one of my great regrets is that I didn’t steal a copy for posterity. But I saw one, I swear I did, just like Winston Smith with that newspaper photo in “1984.” Part of the problem was that newspaper stories, written well, should essentially be the highlighted version of events. We don’t write about what the city council members were wearing, or the pleasantries they exchanged, or the jokes they made about the weather, all of which you can get on the local-government cable channel. We report the important stuff that happened, i.e., the highlights. And the standard inverted-pyramid style, with the important stuff in the top few paragraphs, is a form of highlighting in and of itself; you always write a story knowing that most people will only read part of it.

But the highlighted version we gave them was different. (I may have a highlighted-text tool in my HTML editor, but if so I can’t figure it out, and I’m not going to call my web guy and bug him about it. Just imagine the bold words are highlighted.) It ran kind of like this:

City Council passed a sweeping anti-smoking ordinance at their Monday-night meeting, in front of a boisterous crowd more suited to a football game than a government meeting. Supporters cheered, and opponents jeered, as the council voted 7-2 in favor of the measure, which bans smoking in most indoor public places, including bars and restaurants.

I suggested if we were going to do that, then maybe we should go all the way and write our stories like those ads you used to see on buses and in the back of Seventeen magazine: If u cn rd ths msj, u cn bcm a sec nd gt a gd jb. Talk about your bold measures! For some reason, no one liked this idea. I never was management material.

Oh, well. We went down swinging, even if we didn’t land too many punches.

I was going to give you some tasty bloggage today, but my husband just walked into the room and said, “Oh. Hey. Happy anniversary.”

For the first time ever, I’d forgotten about it, too. In case you’re wondering, it’s 14 blissful years since we were joined together by a gay Methodist preacher in the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. If that strikes you as a lousy place for a wedding, you weren’t there. (I forget what exhibit was hanging in the gallery where we did the deed, but I do remember Alan checking on it, because it was preceded by a photography show — self-portraits of some woman with colon cancer, featuring her colostomy bag. That might have sent us to a nice park somewhere.)

Anyway, happy anniversary to us. I’m knocking off early.

Some people got to discussing grace — as in “the prayer before eating,” not “the love of God” or “elegance of movement” — in the comments yesterday. It reminded me of one of the pitfalls of not raising our child in any religion, i.e. she can’t say grace when called upon. On the summer to-do list: Teach her one or two.

At camp with the girl scouts a couple weeks ago, we were asked to “take an attitude of respect” for a short blessing before every meal. A different troop was called forward to lead us each time, and some smartass Brownies called for the Addams family grace:

Na na na nah (snap fingers twice)
Na na na nah (snap fingers twice)
Na na na nah (sing three times then snap fingers twice)

We thank the Lord for giving
The food we need for living
Because we really need it
And we like it too!

Note to self: Not that one.

We said a grace in our house, on holidays and special occasions only, that I have come to think of as “Catholic grace:” BlessusohLordandthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceive
throughChristourLordamen, and a lunge for the mashed potatoes. Grace is frequently said at breakneck speed in Catholic families, because families tend to be large and if you don’t move fast, you go hungry. In Alan’s Methodist family, they say Protestant grace: Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen. I know it’s Protestant because I later found it cross-stitched onto a set of placemats made for our family by my mother’s Lutheran aunt. Anyway, no one makes the sign of the cross first. It always bugged me because it rhymes. Prayers shouldn’t rhyme. (Google attributes it to Martin Luther, the famous rhyming heretic, but that sounds like a crock. What’s the German version?)

Even though I was raised Catholic in a WASP-y neighborhood, I really didn’t experience the untracked territories of grace until I started eating with my best friend Becky’s family. Her father was a United Church of Christ minister and her mother was southern, which meant a certain hybrid style — a prayer in which hands weren’t folded in front of us but joined around the table. I’m not a hand-holder under any circumstances. Remember Larry David in the prayer circle on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” trying to get away with no more than a fingertip of human contact? That’s me. But her mother was a great cook, and it seemed a small sacrifice to make in the name of being a good guest.

And then the Jesus Revolution came to our little suburb, and all of a sudden we were into the free-form prayer, to which there’s only one reaction: God help us all.

One night, in the very earliest days of the televangelist era, I was asked to stay for dinner at my friend Jeff’s house. Jeff was heavily into the then-unknown Jim and Tammy Bakker, particularly Tammy. (Of course Jeff was gay; do you even need to ask?) We would talk to one another in Appalachian accents for long stretches, asking one another to cast out the demons of multiple sclerosis from a lady in Iowa who was holding her hands on the TV in hopes of a cure. So we sat down at the table, and Jeff’s mother said, “Did I forget anything?” and I said, in my best southeast Ohio hillbilly twang, “Nope. All we gotta do now is thank the Lord.” As soon as my tongue touched my palate to form the L sound, I remember that Jeff’s father had recently become a born-again Christian, and was inclined to be a real pain in the ass about it. Too late!

“Yes, let’s,” he said, smiling beatifically, reaching for the hands on either side of him. And he commenced to make a long, long, long extemporaneous prayer, asking that not only the food and the company be blessed, but that God protect Scott (another son) on the long cross-country journey he was preparing to make, and thanks for the lovely weather, and have we mentioned how happy we are to all be together around the table and —

This was too much for me. Jeff’s hand, holding mine, was crushing it with the effort of not laughing, but I was defeated and started snorting, high up in my sinuses. Would he never get to the goddamn amen? My eyes filled with tears; I’m sure my face was purple. By the time it was over, I had to throw down my napkin and rush to the bathroom to shriek into the towels, which sort of spoiled the mood. It remains the single most mortifying social faux pas of my life, and queered me on non-denominational Christianity once and for all.

My parents’ ashes are interred in the same cemetery where Jeff is buried. He’s just two doors down from Woody Hayes, so his family plot was easy to find. The last time I was there, I saw his father’s name had been added to the stone. I’m not much of a knee-bender, but I stood for a moment and threw out some silent vibes of apology.

So, bloggage? Yes, bloggage:

It’s customary to refer to the local constabulary as “(name of city)’s Finest,” but I bet they don’t say that in Dearborn, not anymore. A cop lifts some pot off a suspect, takes it home to make brownies, eats the whole batch and then bitches out on the maryjane rollercoaster. The 911 call, embedded in the page, will make you feel 17 again. Make sure to stick around until he asks the score of the Red Wings game.

From the Why Didn’t I Go to B-School file: Pasadena website outsources city council coverage — to India.

The weekend, it’s here! Have a good one.

I don’t know if there’s a way to search how many times I use words ending in “ly,” but I’m taking a vow today: No more adverbs. OK, fewer adverbs. OK, just no more of the bad ones.

Which are? The ones that appear in newspapers these days. The big three chapping my ass at the moment are “deeply religious,” “wept openly” and my current bete noire, “visibly shaken.”

There was an upset in the mayoral primary in Fort Wayne Tuesday. A reporter describes the scene at GOP headquarters:

Peters, who had the backing of the majority of Republican elected officials, left Republican headquarters on Main Street visibly shaken. “You don’t embark on a process like this without feeling you’ll prevail,” he said.

The first sentence writes the check; the quote bounces it. The candidate in question is a veteran pol and corporate HR executive, something of a career bureaucrat, and I bet the last time he was visibly shaken was when the Hurryin’ Hoosiers were upset at Assembly Hall. Yes, he was the favorite, but “visibly shaken,” to me, means he was pale, trembling, confused, teary, whatever. And if he was, then say so, dammit.

“Wept openly” — there’s another one. I suppose it’s possible to hide one’s weeping, behind your hands or in a bathroom somewhere, but if you’re in a position where you’re visible to others, your weeping is pretty open. You’re not fooling anyone with that “I must have something in my eye” trick, you know. “Wept unashamed” is better, if you have to point it out. (I had an editor once, Richard the Fabulous, who had the most deadpan sense of humor on the planet. He liked to say, “I wept openly” in describing some cheesy movie he’d just seen; it was code for “boy, did that suck.”)

“Deeply religious” — we all know what that means. Crazy religious.

I’m not the first one to say this; see Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlan on the same subject, both from Poynter.

Oy. It’s been a week, hasn’t it? I feel as though all I’ve done is rattle keys and approve comments. Thanks to all who stopped by, but if I’m going to make a living I can’t sustain this pace. Deadlines are callin’ and today I sign a contract for my summer project — text for a coffee-table book. Why Nance, you’re asking. Doesn’t that boil down to “cutlines?” No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t add up to a 90,000-word manuscript, either. More like 20K, for a book with a nice history theme, which means lots of library research, old photos, microfilm and, because this is a Detroit project, deep sighing. It’s impossible to look at What Was in this city without mourning What It All Came To. I can be fairly dispassionate about the way societies change — the wheels turn, etc. — but “no regrets” isn’t really in my DNA, either. I’m not a Detroit defeatist; the city remains, even in its ruin, endlessly interesting and worth sticking around to see what comes next. But it was once something so grand, and you have to give that a moment of silence, too.

More on this project as it gels.

Do we have bloggage today? We do.

Just another day in the D:

One night last week, someone firebombed an abandoned house on Caldwell Street in northeast Detroit that was 4 feet from a home occupied by 22-year-old Adrian Griffin, a small, taut woman who awoke in a bedroom radiating heat like an oven.

When she opened her eyes, she saw flames from next door licking through a cracked window. She jumped out of bed and rousted her younger brother and sister. They escaped and stood on the sidewalk, watching the flames consume their home.

As she stood there, Griffin said, she thought to herself: “Is that fire engine smoking?” Yes, that was smoke. It was pouring out of the motor of the principal pumper engine on the scene, and it eventually forced the firefighters to shut down the pumper and rely on other equipment.

You live next door to an abandoned house, which is then firebombed by an arsonist, which sets your own house on fire, and the fire fighters arrive, and the pumper breaks down. Someone once told me that “living on the south side of Fort Wayne is a political act,” probably with an index finger raised in the air. But let it be said: Living on the south side of Fort Wayne is to living in Detroit what watching “Black Hawk Down” is to actually fighting on the streets of Mogadishu.

Meanwhile, Golden Wheel honoree Ron hits another one out of the park with his explication of how Michigan teachers will end up bankrupting us all. OK, a bit of overstatement, but not much. Probably not for non-Mitten residents, but for all interested in how these things get out of hand.

That’s it for me. On to the gym; my knee’s finally up for more abuse.

Humor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. (How’s that for a banal lede? I’m going for something more or less guaranteed to put every reader to sleep, because I want you all asleep by the time I realize I haven’t figured this out at all.)

Anyway, in all the Lileksian blather of the past few days, there was one comment that drew me up short every time: He’s hilarious! He’s the only reason I even get that paper; how foolish they’d be to drop him. I consider myself a person with a rich sense of humor, and I simply can’t wrap my mind around that one. It took me back to the Lileks Daily Quirk archive; surely I was missing something. Here’s Tuesday’s offering, paragraph one:

I like Pepto-Bismol. There. I said it. When I have a gut full of battery acid and barbed-wire shards, I reach for the big pink bottle, and I glug it straight. You feel it descending on your stomach lining, like a curtain falling on a bad play. It never seems to cure anything, but it’s a comfort; I always have a bottle in reserve, and it’s Maximum Strength, too, baby. Sure, it’s overkill, but once they admitted the existence of Maximum Strength, Regular was off the table. I think Maximum was like their private reserve, something they bottled for popes and astronauts. Now we all have access, and I’m not going back.

I see what he’s going for here, but it’s not working for me. If the newspaper offered this as a morning day-brightener, something to put a spring in my step as I head out the door, well, sorry. It has the flop-sweaty smell of bad standup. That the paper supposedly compensated the man who wrote this to the tune of $92,000 a year — now that’s funny, but probably not in the way they intended.

But it’s unfair to judge a man by one column. Let’s try another, from the day before:

Today’s Helpful Hint: how to customize your tissue boxes. Why? you ask. For heaven’s sake, does everything have to be customized? Must we have wi-fi enabled toilet-paper spindles that download tunes so you can customize the sound when someone rolls off a dozen squares? Maybe next year. For now, consider this: There hasn’t been much innovation in the tissue world since Kleenex invented the interfolded pop-up tissue in 1928. Imagine the reaction the first time someone pulled up a tissue and another took its place. My stars! First radio, then Lindbergh, now this! An age of marvels! At some point they added lotion, for those who want their specs to look like they’ve been rubbed with Crisco. (Kleenex does not recommend using their tissues for eyeglasses cleaning, incidentally. File that under “Don’t put Q-tips in your ear canals.”)

Better than the Pepto-Bismol effort, but still — not laughing, nor even smiling. Kleenex boxes — what’s up with that?

This isn’t a pile-on for poor, soon-to-be-bought-out Lileks. The problem isn’t him; it’s newspapers. Newspapers can be very entertaining to read — I have laughed myself to tears reading them more often than I can count — but they’re very seldom funny on purpose.

An example: One day the morning paper in Fort Wayne ran a story about a dog that went on an incredible journey. He belonged to some extended family of mutants who lost him at a rest stop somewhere around Chicago. They were en route to Wisconsin, the whole clan traveling in an overloaded car with no brakes. They knew there were no brakes, but they all really wanted to go to Wisconsin, and didn’t think such details should hold them back. So they got on the road — U.S. 30, for God’s sake, with no brakes — and somehow coasted to a stop at this rest area, and everyone got out to pee, and the dog got loose. They looked all over for him, but couldn’t find him, so they headed off to Wisconsin in the brakeless car, had their visit, and came back. They stopped somewhere, and whaddaya know, there’s the dog, still hanging around after several days. So they took him home and called the newspaper. The story had great quotes from Linda Mae and Pop-pop and so on, and then there was the photo — the whole family of Cletuses gathered around the dog. One of my colleagues drew a little balloon coming out of its mouth: I thought I’d gotten away from these goobers. I thought this story was hysterical, although my retelling isn’t, but if you had been there, you’d have laughed, too. (The picture had a lot to do with it.)

That’s the kind of humor the newspaper does best. They shouldn’t monkey with success.

For a long time, they didn’t. The designated humor columns were utterly lame, some geezer spinning one-liners or puns. Many editors hate writers who try to be funny, especially if they’re sarcastic about it, because there’s always a contingent of readers who simply won’t get it, and can get really pissy, complaining about it. One of the Milwaukee papers was so freaked by its humor columnist that it ran a tagline at the bottom: A satirical column of personal opinion. This was funny, but again, not in the way the editors intended. In most newspapers, the only place to be legitimately funny was on the comics page, and you know how often we all crack up over “Beetle Bailey.”

One guy changed all this. Dave Barry, of course. I still remember the utter thrill of reading his early columns in the Miami Herald’s great, now-defunct Sunday magazine, Tropic. They were so daffy and original. It was such a treat to read something in the paper that made you laugh out loud from joy. He was syndicated almost immediately. Here’s an early story about how his column went over: He was writing about physical fitness, and had two paragraphs that ran something like this:

“Once upon a time, American presidents were giant waddling tubs of lard like BLANK and BLANK. (RESEARCH: PLEASE INSERT THE NAMES OF TWO FAT PRESIDENTS.)” Later on, he wrote, “An exercise routine without a plan is like a tractor without a BLANK. (RESEARCH: PLEASE INSERT AN IMPORTANT TRACTOR PART HERE.)” The blanks didn’t have anything to do with the column, unless he was making some joke about laziness, but were the sort of wild meta-tangent he liked to take. This was funny enough, but even more amusing was the Columbus Dispatch copy editor who inserted “William Howard Taft” and “Grover Cleveland” in the first two blanks and “motor” in the third, taking out the RESEARCH notes. The editor of the section met Barry at a conference shortly after this, told him about it, and said Barry nearly peed his pants laughing over it.

For many, many years, Barry set the bar for newspaper humor. The first profiles of him that ran, in the early ’80s, pointed out that while he was funny in person, he was also kind of an angry guy, too. This was no surprise; the roots of humor are in pain, as any Jewish comic could tell you. My favorite pieces by Barry remain a few that didn’t run in the usual places — one about his mother’s suicide, another about taking his little boy to the first day of kindergarten, and a rip-roarer long-form essay about South Florida weirdness. The first two were terribly sad but beautifully written, and the Florida essay had few jokes in it, but was hilarious simply for its statements of fact, like how strange it is when your kid comes home from school and reports a classmate brought a machine gun to Show and Tell. Barry understands that nothing is as funny as reality, that car full of goobers and their luckless dog; it’s no accident one of his catch phrases is “I am not making this up.”

(What’s your favorite Barry niche? Mine is Mr. Language Person. I love his rule of apostrophe usage — “to let the reader know an S is coming, e.g. ‘Try our hot dog’s.'”)

Even Barry has his bad days, though. There was a long time when I stopped laughing, and then he got a lot better, and then he took a year off, and then he more or less retired from journalism, and no, I don’t blame him. Comedy, as they say, is hard. And he only wrote once a week. Which brings us back to Lileks, who writes five or six times a week. No wonder he’s not funny. Groucho Marx couldn’t be funny on a schedule like that. He’s a fine writer, but the gruel doesn’t get much thinner than I Go Shopping for Sunglasses:

I found a store that sold clip-ons, and yea, there was much rejoicing. They were cheap and poorly polarized, which gave certain objects a peculiar pattern; when I looked in the rearview mirror, the polarized surface of the back window looked as though it was covered with a giant ultraviolet waffle. I didn’t care. Twenty bucks. But I lost them. Keep in mind that I do not lose things, aside from important financial documents needed around the middle of April. It’s possible I mailed the clip-ons to the IRS. They’ll probably send them back in 2009. Without interest.

So who’s funny now? For my money, Gene Weingarten in the WashPost, known to insiders as The Man Who Discovered Dave Barry, is the only competition. In fact, I think he’s far funnier, and here’s why: He can be mean, and he doesn’t mind showing it. One of my favorites was when he called up PR people and said he’d promote their clients in the Washington Post, in return for the revelation of an embarrassing personal secret. And they did it! “My husband left me for a younger woman,” said one, which was followed by a boilerplate recitation of the merits of some sofa pillow she was repping. Wondering how much more abuse the president can take, he suggested an upcoming weather report:

It’ll be warm tomorrow in Washington, high in the 60s, with clear skies except maybe over the White House, where, anytime now, with any sort of luck, we’re going to see the wrathful, purifying fire of a justly outraged God. Over to you, Christina, for a look at the traffic.

If you’re going to be funny, you have to be fearless. Newspapers have their backs against the wall, and live in fear of offending even a single subscriber. And so too much newspaper humor ventures a weak joke, and then adds an immediate apology: Of course I’m not seriously suggesting we draft the Bush twins, only that… Jon Carroll, for my money the best five-day-a-week columnist in this or any country, explains the roots of humor as well as anyone, and underlines the need to be fearless. He’s also fearless about making fun of himself, which is why he’s as good at being funny as he is at being serious, and he is devastating at both.

Here’s a funny experiment to try at home — Google “humor columnist.” Hit No. 1: Sheila Moss, freelancer, “a columnist for Smyrna AM, a supplement to the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal and Nashville Tennessean.” At the top of her menu, “A Night at the Opry,” which begins:

The other night I went to the Grand Ole Opry and took my grandson. I feel that children need to be exposed to performing arts in real life, not just on television. Of course, the first thing he did when found out the Opry was live on television was to call his dad and tell him to look for him in the audience. So much for the importance of reality to an eight-year-old.

Hit No. 2, Tom Purcell. Read him in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Washington Times, the Jewish World Review and hear him on the Rush Limbaugh show. Uh-oh. Most of his stuff online is pretty old; let’s enjoy an excerpt from a piece called “The Silver-Tongued Devil”:

As the president extricates himself from his latest tangle, I’m convinced of something I’ve suspected for a long time: Clinton is the devil.

My suspicions were bolstered a year ago when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd arrived at the same conclusion. But when I watched Clinton dance through his State of the Union Address, I became sure of it. Clinton is Satan, the prince of darkness, Beelzebub himself.

David Leonhardt bills himself as “the Happy Guy.” From “A Bad Hairdresser Day,” let’s read together:

“Hey everybody!” Hairdresser Lady called out. “It’s The Happy Guy.”

“Don’t try buttering me up, Hairdresser Lady,” I warned. “It’s not going to work.”

“What’s not going to work?” she demanded.

“You can’t cover up your gross incompetence with a ‘Hey everybody’ cheer.”

“Gross incompetence?”

“That’s right. Just look at my head. Go ahead, take a real close look.”

“Why, it’s a family of sparrows. What a lovely nest,” she grinned.

“No, over here.”

“My, my. If it isn’t a bald spot,” she giggled. “Should I give it a shine?”

Maybe you can see the problem. There’s just something about newspaper humor columnists that isn’t funny.

(I should pause at this late point and address the three of you who are still reading: I was not a humor columnist, but I tried to be funny lots of times, and failed pretty spectacularly, too. Once I wrote 650 words about Demi Moore’s boob job. It won an award for humor writing. I recently ran across it in some housecleaning, reread it and thought, Nope, not funny.)

I wish it were different, but this is another case of the internet ruining just everything. How can any humor columnist compete with The Onion? How can an editorial cartoonist, with one measly hand-drawn panel, compete with The Poor Man’s Keyboard Kommando Komix? An editorial writer may think he’s wielding a rapier of wit, but I guarantee you he can’t compete with Alicublog. (Note: You can substitute bloggers who line up with your own political views, if you like.)

And now, 8 million words later, what have we learned by plowing through this sludge of a blog entry? How about this: I am reminded of an old, old New Yorker cartoon, back when they were multi-panel. A guy sits writing at a typewriter, chuckling to himself. His wife enters the room with a flyswatter, and he asks her to read over what he’s written; he doesn’t want to be guilty of “too much levity.” She reads while he sits smirking, hands it back, stone-faced, and says, “No, I don’t think it’s too funny at all.”

Only one bit of bloggage today: The plight of the residents of tiny Lakeville, Mich., victims of a rule-obsessed postmaster. The DetNews story is very funny, but yes, understated. Funniest single fact: Lakeville has a lake called Lakeville Lake.

Regular readers may notice something new on the nightstand — the Warren Zevon biography, the existence of which I only learned about a few days before it appeared in stores last week. In years past, I’d have known for months ahead of time, had the date circled on the calendar and been among the first to buy a copy when Border’s unlocked its doors. Ah, well. Groupiedom really doesn’t become a woman as long in the tooth as I am.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” weighs in at 450 pages or so, a lot for a rock musician who remained stubbornly unpopular until the end of his life. No matter — if his popularity wasn’t wide (and personally enriching), it was deep. The right people loved Zevon, writers and filmmakers and politicians and other musicians. David Letterman, Martin Scorsese, Carl Hiaasen. Every journalist I know loves him; it seems half the Zevon concerts I attended were with carloads of colleagues, driving to Chicago or Indianapolis in raucous caravans and pounding the table along with “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Ah, memories. Zevon died in 2003 of mesothelioma, a rare lung cancer linked to asbestos, not smoking, a bad habit Zevon had for most of his life. As has been chronicled a million times by a million sympathetic journalists, smoking was the least of it.

Well, there’s always room for one more. Crystal Zevon, the man’s long-suffering ex-wife, says Warren himself asked her to write his story, more or less on his deathbed. He promised her his diaries, and told her to tell the whole truth, “even the awful, ugly parts.” That she has done, delivering a manuscript that still has the power to shock and dismay, even longtime fans/students like me, who thought they knew it all. Note to all my caravan buddies: We didn’t.

It’s not the big stuff that’s appalling, although some of it really and truly is. It’s the little things that pile up. The compulsive shopping, the vanity, the child-support dodging, the casual cruelty to the people who cared most about him (his children, notably, especially his daughter), the lying, the cheating. He withheld LeRoy Marinell’s share of the “Werewolves of London” royalties for a number of years, a five-figure sum. After he quit drinking, he seemed to transfer his addictive behavior to women — housewives by the score, you might say — and plowed through auditoriums full of them. (Combining two vices in one, he even details getting laid at a tanning salon, on the damn tanning bed, which made me think of my friend Emma, who once worked at such a place. People were always peeing in the wastebaskets and doing other vile bodily functions behind closed doors. Maybe medical science can investigate the effect of UV light on human inhibitions.) He battered his wife in a blackout and later cursed her for trying to pin her black eye on him.

You start to wonder, what exactly did anyone find to like about him?

Well, that’s there, too. He was hugely smart and very funny, great with the quip — no wonder journalists liked him. Musicians admired him, too. You look at the list of guest artists who played with him, everyone from Neil Young to Bob Dylan to George Clinton, for cryin’ out loud. He wrote great songs, right until the end — “The Wind” was the record that won the Grammys, but for my money, “My Ride’s Here” was the creative peak, the title track being one of the all-time great death songs. It begins:

I was staying at the Marriott
With Jesus and John Wayne
I was waiting for a chariot
They were waiting for a train
The sky was full of carrion
“I’ll take the mazuma”
Said Jesus to Marion
“That’s the 3:10 to Yuma
My ride’s here…”

Rhyming “mazuma” with “3:10 to Yuma” — that’s Zevon all over. Played in the key of laughter-through-tears, they way so many of them were.

The underlying theme to all this, if there is one, is just how much havoc one addict can wreak, in their own lives and in the lives of others, acts that reverberate through generations. I was halfway through “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” when I stopped and wrote a fan letter to Crystal Zevon (her e-mail is public). It’s hard to write about being an alcoholic’s wife without lapsing into one or two predictable slots — victim or fool. She doesn’t do that, perhaps because at some point she realized she had her own drinking problem, which she acknowledges, and what it took to quit. The tone is not one of pity-me but of clear-eyed, dispassionate truth-telling. I have a feeling some people are going to portray her as the embittered ex seeking revenge now that the man who hurt her is unable to protest. I hope that doesn’t happen, because she fulfilled every writer’s No. 1 obligation: She told the truth. People, especially creative people, are complicated, and very few have public and private faces that would recognize one another. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” doesn’t affect my opinions on the music, only what it took to make it. It ain’t that pretty at all, as the man himself once sang. If we didn’t hear it, then maybe we weren’t really listening.

Thanks to all who stopped by yesterday. This has happened a time or two before, and most people don’t come back afterward, but we sometimes pick up a few new readers. For them, a briefing: This blog isn’t about anything in particular. My politics are center-left, but I try not to harp on them. I live in the suburbs of Detroit, a city of spectacular weirdness and great stories and frequently awful weather. I’m a freelance writer, living with my husband Alan, daughter Kate (10 going on 30), dog Spriggy and a few bad habits. My interests are small-c catholic but I’m particularly fond of good writing, movies, strange current events and domestic life. “Daily life, with links” — that’s the log line for this blog. I came up with it six years ago, and it seems to fit as well today as it ever did.

I think I’m done talking about Lileks, but feel free if you’d like to continue the discussion. I was struck by a point some people made yesterday, in all the comments — that there are many who find Lileks’ writing “hilarious.” I’m not one of them, obviously, but it got me thinking about humor writing, in the newspapers and elsewhere, and sometime in the next few days I’ll try to wrestle them to the ground. I don’t expect it to be terribly funny, but if you feel like it, stick around.

I wasn’t going to write anything about James Lileks’, er, sudden change of assignment. I mean, talk about your inside baseball. But reading about the right-wing blog star / Minneapolis Star Tribune “humor” columnist’s predicament — abruptly told the paper had other plans for his FTE, and that he was to report to the metro desk a week from Monday for general-assignment reporting duties — rang a bell, you might say. It is, with a few details changed, pretty much exactly what happened to me five years ago at a fading p.m. daily in far-less-glamorous Fort Wayne, Indiana. Perhaps I can offer the pint-size pundit some perspective.

Sometimes I feel like journalism’s coal-mine canary. All the stuff that started happening in 2002 at our paper, the stuff that had my friends at bigger papers saying, “Wow, that’s terrible. So far, knock wood, we here at the Major Metro Times-Bugle are OK” — that’s happening everywhere now. Even Lileks, if he could stop the furious cycle of his narcissism for five minutes, would have to agree that having a job as a full-time humor columnist at a large-circulation daily is a little like being Henry Ford’s buggy-whip polisher in 1905. I’m sure his vision is somewhat clouded, though, by his status as a right-wing web star; his allies’ gift for understatement (“newspaper suicide”) is already muddying the waters. They forget the Lileks they know, with his daily Bleat and radio appearances and one-joke books, is not the Lileks the Star-Tribune readers know, the writer who offers 250-word dispatches on his sniffles, his dessert choices and …oh, I seem to have reached my limit of free Star-Tribune stories for today, but you can do your own explorations here. To them, the effect of killing the Daily Quirk is the destruction of their boy’s meal ticket. He gets paid for the Quirk; the rest of the stuff he does free. If they like him so much, they need to get acquainted with that 20th-century concept of paying for content.

As a long-time reader of Lileks in print and online, I’ve found him a fascinating study. I used to like his Newhouse column, until his hardening right-wing sensibilities ruined it for me. Close your eyes, and you’d swear his words were issuing from the mouth of a 33-year-old Grosse Pointe soccer mom in a blonde pageboy, about to climb into her Hummer H2 without guilt, thank you very much, because it makes her feel safe. He never irked me as much as Albom or Greene, probably because he never made it as big as they did, but many times I set aside his work with my eyes crossed in either boredom, rage or frustration, wishing I had the last three minutes of my life back. But what really bugged me about him was his Janus-faced b.s. about the news media and the internet, the way he threw meat to his MSM-hatin’ buddies by hatin’ right along with them, and then quietly cashing his check on payday. His complaints about news coverage, whether in Iraq or St. Paul, ring hollow from a man who stands up today and frankly admits “writing straight news is a skill I lack, and I take off my hat to those who’ve mastered that discipline.” Really? You do? I must have missed those Bleats. They must have been hidden between the ones hailing the Web as the end of the lecture-based form of journalism, and explaining the secret liberalism that stalks American newsrooms, this from a man who works from the kitchen table in his $600,000 house. And it will be amusing, in the days to come, to see the defense of Lileks coming from people who, days ago, would have agreed that newspapers are overstaffed and need to get some more shoe-leather reporters out on the street. To see them begging to have their humor columnist spared will be quite the entertainment.

But I’m losing the plot. All this has nothing to do with anything, and the sooner Lileks faces a few facts, the sooner we can cut this whining short.

Fact. No. 1: It’s not personal, Jim. Try to remember that. It will be difficult for quite some time. I can still tick off at least half a dozen newspaper managers who, if I saw them in flames on a sidewalk today, would prompt no thought more vexing than “Damn, where’re my marshmallows?” But really, it’s not about you. It’s about your salary. You’re fat, and the paper is on a crash diet. They don’t really want you to be a reporter; they want you to quit. They’re just making sure you’ll be in a mood to do so when, in a number of weeks or maybe months, they offer you a buyout to leave. Take it. There’s no guarantee the next staff reduction will be voluntary. Keep in mind, many of us didn’t get buyout offers; we just got the humiliating reassignment. You’re better-positioned than 90 percent of journalists to make a soft landing; you have a reputation, a sideline (the books), fans and, far more important, a fully employed spouse with a professional degree. Presumably you have a health-insurance alternative. (I’d say at this point that you should thank the Newspaper Guild before you leave, not only for your living wage but for the buyout offer, but I don’t expect a nice conservative union member to do anything that drastic.)

Fact. No. 2: Change is good. Yeah, yeah, it’s a cliché, but it’s a good one. When my job was crumbling beneath me, when I moved first to columnist/reporting/editing and later, post-fellowship, to the copy desk, I was beside myself with rage and frustration and self-pity. But here’s the thing: I kinda liked the copy desk. The move was designed to make me insane, but for the six months it took us to find new employment and shake the Hoosier dust off our shoes and move to Detroit — I should say here you’ll probably not be required to move to Detroit — I actually liked sitting behind a giant bank of monitors, enforcing AP style. The hours were insulting, 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., but that meant I was free to enjoy summer from lunchtime on. I enjoyed driving to work at 4:45 a.m., listening to “Coast to Coast” or Eminem and trying to break my land-speed record in the deserted streets. Who knows, you might like covering breaking news as a g.a. reporter — trust me, you can “master the discipline” of the five-W inverted pyramid in about 12 minutes — and, if you open your mind a bit, you might see things that could end up, oh, changing your outlook. You might see how hard it is to be poor, how racism is the metastatic cancer of American life, how…oh, but that’s crazy talk. Still, though, a change of perspective is always good. Seriously.

Fact No. 3: You have alternatives. Freelancing should be a breeze for you, and it will enable you to dote on your kid and bake bread and whatever else you do all day at home. It may require some early belt-tightening, until the cash flow equalizes; you may not be able to buy every new Apple gizmo the first day it ships from the factory. (I know this will be hard, having endured the Bleat after your wife was unexpectedly canned, and you actually lamented having to let go “the woman who does the woodwork,” as though this was a chain reaction of economic catastrophe unlike any the Twin Cities had seen. Most people married to an unemployed lawyer might be able to hold their tongues for a few weeks before turning their pockets inside-out, but not you. You have standards! And woodwork!) Your kid may not be able to go to private school immediately. But eventually your life will assume a new form, and you’ll be fine. You’ll be different, but fine.

Well, looky here — give me an inch, and before long I’ve gone on as long as Lileks can about the new soap choices at Target. And I know no one asked me, either. But as I said before, I’ve been down this path, and I’m looking out for the people who are following. It’s rocky, the thorny bushes need to be trimmed and there’s no lighting but the moon. But it leads somewhere, and so far I’m still advancing under my own power. So will you, Jim. So will you.

UPDATE: I must be getting some outside linkage, because I’m getting a lot of first-time commenters today. That’s great, but for you newbies, our policy: First-timers go to moderation first, as an anti-spam measure. I’ve been approving everyone promptly so far today, but I have to step out to do some errands, so more will have to wait a bit. If your comment doesn’t turn up immediately, rest assured it will eventually, and don’t re-submit.

Some years ago, I offered the theory that the back-pages, business card-size ads and classifieds in any print publication constituted the id of its readers. It was always so amusing, back when the newspaper I worked for actually had the budget to subscribe to political journals, to turn to the back and see all those increase-your-word-power pitches in right-wing publications. (The lefties leaned heavily on meet-women-who-will-appreciate-your-genius dating services. Woody Allen got a laugh out of this in “Annie Hall”: Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. “Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who’s interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy.”

I’m still deciding what porn spam indicates. I get so much of it in my comments, 99 percent of it caught by filters, but occasionally I like to poke around (sorry) there and see what’s what. I can report two trends: 1) absurd sub- sub- sub-niche specialization (mature hairy black Texas Hold’em nudes); and 2) comical trickery. As to the latter, I just deleted a comment that said “fried chicken recipes here” and linked to you-know-what. Ah well. As Willie Dixon said, “I eat more chicken than any man ever seen.” He wasn’t talking about the wings.

Today is, we’ll be reminded approximately a million times, the four-year anniversary of President Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. Alan just recalled the fond memory of sitting in the morning news meeting that day, gazing at the Page One proofs, which featured that memorable phrase in tombstone-size type. “We were discussing how to note the casualties,” he said. “There had been something like 66, and someone said, ‘We’ll run that on Memorial Day.’ I said, ‘I guarantee you there will be more dead by Memorial Day, and in two or three or four or seven years, we’ll still be fighting in Iraq.’ They looked at me like I was a communist sympathizer. Especially Name Redacted.” Ah, well. That was another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

What I recall of that time — invasion to Mission Accomplished, which petered out into counting the days to my Ann Arbor fellowship — was how strange that time was. Obviously our little newspaper didn’t have correspondents in Baghdad, or even Washington, or even Indianapolis by that point, but we were doing our part to cover the home front. There was a list of story ideas that boiled down to “How is (name of public institution) preparing for the war?” The schools, the police department, etc. I was baffled; what were we looking for, duck-and-cover drills for second-graders? Blackout exercises, lest we be bombed by the Iraqi Air Force? “Pray For Our Troops” signs covered lawns — freebies from the local G.O.P. — and every so often a tiny knot of anti-war protesters would show up at the Courthouse Green for a demonstration, and people would honk at them. I felt like I was speaking to my fellow Americans through a thick sheet of plexiglas.

In the midst of this, someone handed me a slip of paper with a name and a phone number, a local Iraqi of fairly recent immigration who might be willing to give an interview. I went to the guy’s house and we sat for a while watching the war on Arab satellite TV. (He was out of work, and watched it non-stop.) He switched between Al Jazeera and stations in Abu Dhabi and Lebanon. Obviously I couldn’t follow the audio, but I noticed the video emphasized not heroic images of soldiers in Hummers, but civilian refugees walking down the road with their belongings on their back. My subject, a Shiite, told of the ill-fated rebellion after the first Gulf War, how the U.S. had led the Shia to believe we had their back and then oops, we didn’t. He spent a couple years in a Saudi refugee camp before making his way to Indiana, which must have been a strange transition, to say the least.

He was of the opinion — this was April or May 2003, around that time — that now that Saddam had been booted, it was time for the U.S. to leave. He did not express gratitude; it was more like, “OK, we’ll take it from here.” He also said the longer we stayed the more we’d be resented, and that the prime reason we wanted Saddam out after all this time was to get our hands on the oil fields. He also shared his belief that the Mossad had used remote control devices to fly the planes into the World Trade Center. The copy desk cut that part, but they left most of the rest. At least one reader wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that my Iraqi should be more grateful.

A crystalization of the war, right there. Mission accomplished.

So, bloggage:

Readers frequently call the work of columnists “musings,” as in, “I was reading your musings the other day, and…” Jon Carroll is one of the very few who can muse, in print, and lead you along from the first word to the end. Today: Musings on miracles.

I was away with the Girl Scouts when this story broke, so I missed it until yesterday. If it weren’t so jaw-droppingly shocking — another GOP hypocrite caught with his pants down, literally — I’d have reported it then. As it was, I had to call for smelling salts to get off the floor.

Off to Flex Appeal. Back soon.

I needed to get some movies from the library, for a story I’m writing. (Can’t tell you much, but hint: It involves movies.) They had one I needed but not another one, and then I looked up, and what did I see at eye level: “Ben-Hur.” Well. This seemed positively karmic. (What did we say before we all knew about karma? Oh, right — “coincidental.”)

I took it home, and tried to think of the last time I watched it all the way through. Decades at least. The running time is 212 minutes, so it’s not the sort of thing you watch while waiting for a chicken to roast. It’s on cable every so often, and certain scenes are classics, the kind you stop and watch when they flip past — the chariot race, of course, and the galley-slave parts, when the evil Roman general wastes lord-how-many lives just to see if Charlton Heston can maintain a punishing pace at the oars, pushing the overseer to bang his drum faster and faster. (As if. Charlton Heston could withstand anything. He was the Chuck Norris of his day, without the roundhouse kicks.)

I put in the DVD after Kate went to bed, and soon was in the first-act scenes of Judah Ben-Hur meeting his childhood friend Messala, newly returned to Judea as the Roman tribune. And it’s, like, the gayest scene ever. Long, smoldering glances. Silences charged with eroticism. They did that Roman hand-to-forearm clasp, and held it. I’m thinking, “Go on, Charlie. Kiss him. You know you want to.” Dennis Quaid didn’t give off pheromones like this when he was cruising the bars in “Far From Heaven.” Someone asked how that sister of yours was doing, historical-movie code for the Girl Who Will Divide Them, and it’s like they’re exchanging small talk about the weather.

Why didn’t I notice this before? Maybe because the last time I saw this movie I was 19 years old. Long before Google was invented. Laptop open, “homoeroticism in Ben-Hur,” and in about two seconds was reading this in Wikipedia:

In interviews for the 1986 book Celluloid Closet, and later the 1995 documentary of the same name, screenwriter Gore Vidal asserts that he persuaded director Wyler to allow a carefully veiled homoerotic subtext between Messala and Ben-Hur. Vidal says his aim was to explain Messala’s extreme reaction to Judah Ben-Hur’s refusal to name fellow Jews. Surely, Vidal argued, Messala should have been able to understand that Judah, his close friend since childhood, would not be willing to name the names of his fellow Jews to a Roman officer. Vidal suggested a motivation to Wyler: Messala and Judah had been homosexual lovers while growing up, and then separated for a few years while Messala was in Rome. When Messala returns to Judea, he wants to renew the relationship with Judah, but Judah is no longer interested. It is the anger of a scorned lover which motivates Messala’s vindictiveness toward Judah. Since the Hollywood production code would not permit this to appear on screen explicitly, it would have to be implied by the actors. Knowing Heston’s aversion to homosexuality, Vidal suggested to Wyler that he direct Stephen Boyd to play the role that way, but not tell Heston. Vidal claims that Wyler took his advice, and that the results can be seen in the film.

(Charlton Heston denies this, btw. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

I realize, for serious film buffs, this qualifies as the ultimate Duh observation. But I guess there are holes in everyone’s knowledge base, and I’m glad this one was filled. Next week: Why keeping the shark out of sight until the last 20 minutes was the right thing to do for “Jaws.”

And I only just realized that by watching “Ben-Hur,” I missed Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War.” Damn.

If bloggage is light around here lately, it’s because I brutally trimmed my bookmarks earlier this week, in a no-doubt futile effort to cut down my goofing-off temptations. If you see something you think I should link to, send it along. In the meantime, here’s a story about a topic near to my head if not heart these days: How newspapers should handle online reader comments, on individual stories; it’s the trend that’s sweepin’ the nation. This was the subject of the letter to the editor I wrote a few weeks ago, which I might as well have set fire to in an ashtray; it was to the Free Press, and I was prompted to do so after reading the comments on the story about the guy who was first thought to have died from a homophobia-inspired beating, but turned out to have spinal stenosis, instead. (It’s complicated, but it’s not really important for what we’re talking about.) Free Press readers chimed in to say, “I bet he was used to taking a pipe from behind” and other witticisms. You should have seen the chatter after a black kid with an unusual first name was named Mr. Basketball. The Klan probably made printouts for next year’s banquet.

Anyway, I pointed out that it’s useless to fret over your attention to diversity in the newspaper if you’re going to let people attach comments like this to stories, and leave them up, unchallenged. That’s what the above-linked story’s about. Discuss, if you like. I’m off to the gym.