If anyone’s interested, here is a remembrance of David Halberstam worth reading. By Henry Allen, WashPost genius writer nonpareil.

Nobody edits Mitch Albom. That’s the only explanation I can think of. He just opens his laptop, types any old crap, and they put it in the paper:

I was sitting at the Pistons game, fans screaming, giant men racing up the court, when Matt Dobek, the Pistons’ PR vice president, pointed at a TV and said, “My god, did you see this?”

There in the corner of the screen, was a “breaking news” alert: David Halberstam killed in a car crash.

Yes, I think we’ll all remember where we were when we heard the news of David Halberstam’s death. Mitch was schmoozing with NBA executives. I was sitting on my Ikea chaise lounge, trying to write some fiction for my workshop tonight. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn I was procrastinating by reading the wires.

Halberstam, who was 73, would have understood the “breaking news” part.

That’s good to know.

A Pulitzer Prize winner from his Vietnam days, he was as good a journalist as we’ve produced in this country. And since he wrote famous books about the news business, the sports business and even basketball, I guess the setting was not altogether inappropriate.

Mitch, one writer to another: Beware the obvious adjective, i.e. “famous” books. If the books were obscure, no one would give a fig.

But the news itself? Halberstam? Dead? This made no sense. Not a car crash. Not on a Monday. Not being driven by a graduate student in northern California. You couldn’t imagine Halberstam going out that way. Maybe covering some war in some hot zone. Maybe dying at his desk in New York, copious notes piled in giant stacks around him. But not like this.

For a man who made his bones writing about it, Mitch is surprisingly flummoxed by death. Mitch can never believe how people can just…die. And in such unexpected ways! Even on Mondays! As I recall, he was similarly amazed to hear of Bo Schembechler’s passing. The old coach was 77 years old and had had two — two — heart bypasses. And…yet…he just…died? Halberstam was 73, still in good health, but hey, everyone who rides in a car can die in a car crash. Hell, he could have choked on a piece of popcorn; hasn’t Mitch ever watched “Six Feet Under”? Mitch would be more comfortable with death in a war, a “hot zone,” never mind that Halberstam hadn’t covered a war since Vietnam. Or maybe dying at his desk, surrounded by “copious” notes. (Oops, the obvious adjective again. A lawn appears in a subsequent passage. In what condition? Why, “manicured,” of course.)

I tried to turn back to the game. I failed. In his later years, David had become a friend of mine.

Ah, so now we get to it. This is one of those Mitch’s-friend obits. The first one of these I read was Mitch’s tribute to Warren Zevon. Now there was a death with some irony attached. A decades-long smoker dead at 56 from mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer not related to smoking. A writer could do something with that. But, and color me astonished, Mitch’s tribute to Warren quoted the dead man praising Mitch. Mitch is never uncomfortable quoting someone with the opinion that Mitch is a wonderful writer. Bo Schembechler was another F.O.M.: When we finished our book together, the publisher asked if there were any dedications or thank-yous we wanted to insert. I listed dozens of Bo’s relatives, friends and former players. Bo only wanted to put in one sentence. He wrote “I want to personally thank Mitch Albom. The poor son of a bitch had no idea what he was getting into.”

Ha ha! As I was saying to my close friend Tony Bennett the other day…

Oh, why go on? What is the point of this? I still have fiction to write, and picking on Mitch is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. You can’t stop him; he’ll be writing his treacly novels and Broadway play tie-ins and Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movies until that day when we all look up at a nearby TV screen and gasp as one to read: Best-selling author Mitch Albom dies of exploded head; “stress of ego too great,” docs say…

I just hope he goes before Tony Bennett.

One last note: One of Halberstam’s most “famous” books was “The Reckoning.” It was about the decline of the American auto industry, based guess-where. It’s not mentioned in Albom’s column.

Bloggage:

If anyone cares, yes, I think Sheryl Crow is kidding.

Brooke Shields demonstrates what makes a first-birthday party tolerable for the adult guests: beer. (Actually, the more I see of Brooke, the more I like her. Talk about a girl who could have turned out differently. And a beer-drinker to boot.)

If I still lived in Indiana, the bureau of motor vehicles would have made me a believer by now, or at least encouraged it through license fees. Doghouse Riley explains.

The genius of Oliver Stone, screenwriter, via YouTube. Absolutely NSFW, unless you have headphones.

Back to the fiction. Someone, help me feel poetic ‘n’ stuff.

I was listening to Alec Baldwin tune up on his daughter, trying to think of the worst thing I ever said to my own kid. The list is so long. I try not to lose my temper, but sometimes I do. I’ve never called her a rude, thoughtless little pig, but once when she was a baby, when she was pounding on her high chair tray and shrieking BANANA! BANANA! BANANA! I may have turned to her at hissed, Jack Nicholson-style, “WE DON’T HAVE ANY GODDAMN BANANAS.”

My defense: It was 7 o’clock on a winter morning and I was feeling really, really raw. I tried not to yell; I delivered the line the way Jack did in “Terms of Endearment,” when he’s having his first, disastrous lunch with Shirley Maclaine, and he encourages her to order a drink. “I think you need a lot of drinks,” he says. “To kill that bug up your ass.” (That’s the sequence that ends with the two of them driving his Corvette down the beach, Jack sitting on top of the driver’s seat, steering with his feet, bellowing “Wind in the hair! Lead in the pencil!” Great scene.) But it was pretty menacing; her eyes got big and round, and she stopped yelling for bananas.

I’m glad no one recorded that moment, although I guess I just did. Maybe that’s how Baldwin can get through this; he can call in every marker he has and ask them all to stand up and say, essentially, “I am Spartacus.” I doubt it would work; we promote the myth of the perfect parent relentlessly in this country.

There’s a guy, Tim Goeglein, who writes occasional guest columns for my old newspaper (he’s from Fort Wayne). He has a very big job in the White House, “special assistant to the president,” serving as liaison between the Worst President Ever and conservative special-interest groups. You’d think he’d write an occasional piece about policy or D.C. culture or whatever, but no, for years now he’s been contributing these awful, drippy essays about his sainted parents and how good the good old days were, and blah blah blah. The last one he wrote about mom ‘n’ dad was typical, and I’d like to quote from it for you, but I’m finding that none of his columns appear to be in the paper’s archive. Oh, but here’s Memory Lane for you, a story from the archive in which his name is mentioned. Who do you think wrote this snappy prose?

What did I tell you? What did I tell you? Did I not tell you that Madonna’s insult of Evansville would not pass without some high-ranking weenie embarrassing himself with a totally humorless effort to “change her mind?” I did. Only even I underestimated the weenieosity that would be unleashed. I thought the inevitable blustery response would come from a chamber of commerce official, or maybe the mayor, but nooooo. We have a real U.S. senator getting in on

It cuts off because you only get the first few lines of a story in the paid archive. That’s from 1991. Yours truly, getting the word “weenieosity” in the newspaper.

Back to Timmy. I’d like to quote from one of his columns but I can’t, so I’ll paraphrase the last one from memory: Mom and Dad have been married for many years. Never for one day have they been less than 100 percent devoted to one another. They owe their love to their intense devotion to Jesus Christ, who has rewarded them with a marriage so strong and perfect that it enriches all who behold it. Mother never let a cross word pass her lips, and we could all rely on Father’s quiet wisdom in times of trouble, which we hardly ever had because Jesus was blessing us all the time. And so on.

Listening to Laura Lippman speak last night, she said, “I hate perfect people,” by way of explaining how she approaches the characters in her fiction. Of course, no one is perfect, but many work very hard to convince you they are. I was in my 30s before I was able to get my brain around the idea that a person could be a titan of accomplishment in one area of their life, and a miserable failure in another, and that the latter did not take away from the former. And I’m not talking about being a great father and occasionally putting the water bottle back in the refrigerator with only an ounce left in it. I’m talking about Miles Davis, for example, simultaneously a musical genius and a wife-beater. If you were God, and you had the option of saving Cicely Tyson some black eyes by pushing the “miscarry” button on an embryonic Miles Davis, would the world be a better place without him? I don’t think so.

This was a huge relief to finally accept. I could enjoy art again without fretting that the artist was a schmuck. Which most of them are.

Which most of us are, actually. At least sometimes. I’ve never yelled at my daughter’s voice mail. But I have it in me.

OK, then:

Last night was great, if only to be in my old neighborhood again. The reading was at Nicola’s Books, an independent book store in the Westgate shopping center, which all you Tree Towners should patronize, because it is an exceptionally good one. Nicola herself took us all out to dinner afterward, which was more generous than we deserved; I knew I should have bought some more books while I was there. We had some publishing-industry gossip, and some journalism gossip, and Laura told us the line she delivers in her cameo in Season 5, Episode 1 of “The Wire.” Ahem: “I’m not the police reporter.” (Or maybe it was, “Do I look like the police reporter?” Can’t recall.) I laughed, because everyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom has heard that line approximately a million times, sometimes in its alternative forms: “Do I resemble an obit clerk?” “Are you mistaking me for the education writer?” or the ever-popular, “Can we give this one to Features?” When I was first given the newsroom mail to open, there was but one firm order: Give as much of this as possible to other departments. Buck-passing — it’s our art form.

OK, I have to get to work now.

I don’t know how many layers of ads you’ll have to sit through to read this, but please do — Joan Walsh on the conservative commentariat’s reaction to V-Tech. And no, it’s not to call for more guns in the classroom; it’s the tarring of the victims — yes, the dead people, and the ones in the hospital — for not stopping the shooter. Because that’s what they would have done. Because they are, and you can take this to the bank, very brave manly men who know exactly what they’d do in a similar situation. (They probably have regular drills at home.)

Look. I’m not one of those people who turns to a self-identified liberal or conservative, after one of their like-minded has said something stupid, and demands, “Denounce that!” But I’m wondering why I haven’t heard any — denunciation, that is. The dead haven’t even been buried yet. And here are these prominent, well-compensated jerkoffs essentially saying, “Well, you should have done something.” To a bunch of corpses.

Sometimes I hate this country.

While we’re on the bummer theme, let’s get this out of the way: Saw United 93 the other night, and watched the credits roll with mixed feelings. The simple truth is: This is a beautifully written and shot movie about an almost unbearably painful event absolutely no one wants to see. I was enormously impressed, and I never want to see it again.

But I’m glad this movie is out there, and that it sets a few bars, including the most important one: We really don’t know what happened up there. We know some things, but they’re just flash frames; the whole movie went down with the plane, along with anyone who saw it. It was easy to fear, in the anguished, crazy time after 9/11, that the first films made about the tragedy would have highly partisan narratives that would push one version of events over another. “United 93” doesn’t do that. No one stands up and says, “Let’s roll!” and leads the group to a gallant death. It looks, in its no-recognizable-actors way, very much like news footage.

And, if you’ve ever been through a remarkable event, it has the feel of truth. The passengers never act like Bruce Willis in the “Die Hard” movies; they look about to piss themselves from fright, even when they’re being as brave as people can be. And in the last minutes, when the cockpit door has been battered down and the final struggle is taking place, no one man or woman steps forward to be the hero — all we see are a dozen different hands, all straining to get to the controls, before the camera turns to see the view from the windshield. The world turns upside down, and the ground rushes up to meet everyone. The end.

“I bet you’d have been one of those guys,” I told Alan afterward.

“One never knows,” he said.

No, one doesn’t. Really, one doesn’t. We all like to think we’d be brave, but we don’t know until we know, and by then it’s a little late to argue. Of course, it’s never too late for right-wing morons to star in their own little imaginary movie:

Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren’t bad.

Yes, at the very least, “count the shots,” such a natural response when the door to your classroom swings open and a madman walks in, guns blazing. And check out the ballistics report from a guy who hasn’t been any closer to a real firefight than a TV screen. I know I said I wasn’t going to read any of this stuff, but sometimes it just jumps in front of you.

So, to the bloggage:

Jack Shafer’s defense of pushy reporters is good enough, but he had me at this passage:

The gold standard for journalistic insensitivity was established in the 1960s by an unnamed British TV reporter who was trawling for news at a Congo airport. According to foreign correspondent Edward Behr’s 1978 memoir, the Brit walked through the crowd of terrified Belgian colonials who were evacuating, and shouted, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

I doubt I’ll ever cover breaking news again, but if I do, I’m going to use that line. You know, just for laughs.

Yours truly had another radio essay on the air yesterday, on “Detroit Today,” on WDET, our (what else?) public station. Find it here. Requires QuickTime, etc. The edit isn’t precise, so when it goes to music at about two-thirds through, it’s over. The producer didn’t trim the music; probably too busy. One of these days I’ll get out QT Pro and do a nice fade-out, but for now, bandwidth hog it shall remain.

We had a family discussion/argument about split peas the other day, over, what else, a dinner of split-pea soup — I made the last pot of the season, using up the remnants of the Easter ham and banishing these maddeningly slow-to-exit chilly days. Never mind the specifics of the argument; I will end up looking particularly stupid, and besides, I contend that I never suggested split peas were separated by hard-working immigrants using tiny vises, chisels and hammers, only that the so-called split pea is not a separate species from the green pea found in Green Giant cans and pods in the grocery store.

News flash: It is indeed a different animal. Ahem:

field pea
A variety of yellow or green pea grown specifically for drying. These peas are dried and usually split along a natural seam, in which case they’re called split peas.
Source: epicurious

But as frequently happens to the curious, epi- and otherwise, the research led me down half a dozen paths of delight, including that of Pea Soup Andersen’s, a legendary bit of California kitsch that appears to be the Frankenmuth of the west coast. Anyway, one of these days I’m going to make it out there for a visit, as I love pea soup in all its incarnations. I’m sure LA Mary knows the owner, and can arrange a kitchen tour.

And now, I remind you that split peas are a high-fiber food, and combined with two cups of coffee — whoa, gotta go. Later!

I read somewhere that domestic violence is abnormally high in Livingston, Montana. (And I fully realize this may be pure b.s., and something my brain thinks it read, but really just made up.) The reason? The wind. The wind comes pouring off the Yellowstone plateau pretty much all year, and grates on your nerves. Makes people hair-trigger, and they take it out on the people they share quarters with.

Monday was a windy day. I guess it was the remnants of the nor’easter that poleaxed the, um, nor’east. But it just blew and blew and blew. I had a meeting with an editor, and it sounded like the wind wanted to kill us — it was shaking the windows in fury.

I was driving home when I heard first word of events in Virginia. At that point the death toll was 22. But because no day can be so bad that there isn’t room for it to get a little worse, sometime this afternoon came the grim punctuation: A five-year-old girl in the suburbs here was killed on the playground of her elementary school, after being hit by a falling flagpole.

I don’t know what’s happening to me, but it seems like the bad news of any given day can always be made worse by the coverage of the bad news. I turned on CNN in search of a succinct here’s-what-we-know summation, and found Paula Zahn wondering “what sort of counseling students will need” to process their feelings. On the blogs, the usual yapping about guns — hey, let’s arm everyone! Then this will never happen again! (Advice: Move to Detroit, where that’s pretty much the case, and see how well it works. A woman shot at the tires of a truck she thought was tailgating her, and recently said she thought it was entirely justified.)

I’m confining my reading on this story to one or two excellent newspapers. I solemnly promise to avert my eyes from any chin-scratching columnists seeking to explain it all to me, to keep the TV turned off, to change to the hip-hop station if I hear Daniel Schorr rumbling to life on the subject on NPR. On this story as on no other, all I want are facts. I’ll handle my own analysis.

You want to know who finally said something last night that made me feel human again? Jon Stewart, genius. He launched his show by saying something about the day’s awful events, not frowning, just speaking honestly. And then he said something like, “But I’m not going to dwell on this tonight. I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to repress it, try to forget about it, not think of it at all. And then, in 40 years, someone’s going to spill some juice, and I will explode.” How deft. Acknowledgment, rueful joke, sidestep, and not a patronizing note in the whole thing.

Maybe it’s just the wind getting on my nerves. If you need to vent, go ahead. But if Paula Zahn shows up, she is so banned.

Interesting how much TV reporters chap my ass at times like this. They come on for their live shots with their sad, furrowed brows and I want to throw a brick through the screen. Do they take an extra course in j-school on oleaginousness that we print types didn’t get? Even Brian Williams, a pleasant enough fellow, made me fume, throwing in all those random “tragics” and “shockings.” Like I can’t figure that stuff out.

And yet, study after study shows people feel a bond with their local TV newsies, that they believe them when they say “only on channel 5,” and “as we told you exclusively at 6.” When I was in newspapers, one year the editor rolled out a collection of graphic bugs that had to go in stories where they applied — “only in,” “follow-up,” “breaking,” etc. Nothing else changed, but research had shown readers — our readers, the ingrates — consistently believed TV gave them more exclusives, follow-ups and breaking news. As this was demonstrably false, the editor concluded it must be simply because they were always saying so. And so we had to say so, too.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m in a terrible mood. It’s the wind.

Also, it’s the taxes. Do I owe? Why, yes. Do I owe a lot? Why, yes, if you consider a sum that would buy a halfway decent European vacation “a lot.” I’ll write a check today, and send it off by mail. Screw e-filing; let some clerk open the envelope and scan it in. Let them deposit my paper check and watch it plod through the banking system before it bears its fruit for continued warmaking on terror. And no, this isn’t making me consider becoming a Republican. The price we pay for a civilized society, etc. I console myself with the fact I made more money than I expected last year. Cold comfort, but.

So, bloggage:

Debuting on my blogroll with a bullet, I give you…Doghouse Riley on Tim Russert, etc. Yes, it’s Imus-related, but it’s also a more bracing dose of public comment than any honored by the Pulitzer board yesterday.

I was working the other night when the news of the New Jersey governor’s car crash first appeared on the NYT website. The story said he was injured, was being treated at a hospital, “expected to survive,” etc. Then it laid out the laundry list: broken femur, six broken ribs on both sides of his chest, broken sternum (!!!), etc. Well, this was obviously no run-of-the-mill accident. Or maybe it was, sans seat belts:

Do you know how we can tell the difference between people who were wearing their seatbelts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an automobile accident? The ones who were wearing their seatbelts are standing around saying “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there.

Jim Macdonald lays out the grim facts too many people still don’t want to face, preferring to be “thrown clear” instead.

Off to the post office. You know what I’ll be mailing.

What a night Friday was for people-watching on Woodward Avenue. At the State Theater, the Tragically Hip. Across the street at Ford Field, “Battle Cry,” some sort of Christian teen thing in which people like me (that is, members of the so-called secular media) were equated with jihadists.

And at the Fox, Iggy and the Stooges. Alan and I sat at a window table in a bar called Proof, trying to peg which venue the passersby were heading to. The Battle Criers were easy: Pudgy teenagers in high-school sweatshirts, traveling in groups, high on life. The Tragically Hip fans were, fittingly, tragically hip. But the aging bikers towing soccer-mom wives, the young punks too cool for the room, the prosperous autoworker types and what seemed like half the journalists in town — those were Iggy’s people.

We were Iggy’s people, too. Not hard-core, mind you; we were at that very moment skipping the opening act. And if you think the Tragically Hip would get me to hire a babysitter, you’re nuts. But Iggy, doing a downtown hometown show? I’m so there. I tried to powder down my suburban unhipness for the occasion, but it was hopeless, and, to be sure, absolutely unnoticeable in a crowd that was diverse in pretty much every way but racial. Alan saw a 4-year-old kid in the men’s room, sporting a fully spiked mohawk, there with his dad. There were at least two people in wheelchairs. The couple sitting next to me were young enough they felt the need to French-kiss every 90 seconds or so. A woman in the lobby showed off cell-phone pictures of her kids to a friend. “Wow, they’re so big,” the friend said. “You don’t know how old we are,” the woman replied.

Well, actually we do. Iggy himself turns 60 this coming Saturday. I expect he’ll still be touring with the Stooges, doing “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “1969” and “Real Cool Time.” For the latter, he invites a few dozen members of the audience up on the stage to mill around, sing the chorus and generally have a real cool time.

At one point I yelled in Alan’s ear, “I remember when my dad was this age.” He was a well-preserved man throughout his late middle age, but he wasn’t up for performing shirtless for 90 minutes, in a raging shower of decibels, and complete with stage dives. Not the running-start sort of wild swan dives a younger punk might make, mind you — Iggy sort of stands on the edge of the stage and falls forward. It’s an AARP stage dive. (The roadie hovers nervously; you can tell he wishes he had a leash around his ankle.)

This isn’t a concert review; you can follow the links for that. But hey — Viva Iggy. He’s still making music that sounds better screamed out over a bunch of bobbing heads in a venue like the Fox than it does on a CD. Fifty-nine going on 60 and he still wants to be your dog.

So, bloggage:

Tom Watson on Imus. Maybe the best — and pray god, the last — word. And via Wolcott, I also liked David Kamp’s observation of the obvious:

But I’ve always winced at anyone who bills himself (or has his representatives bill him) as an “equal-opportunity offender”–which is the tack that the defenders of Don Imus have taken. Any true aficionado of comedy and comedians knows that “equal-opportunity offender” is apologist code for “hack entertainer trading in dated ethnographic material.” Jackie Mason comes to mind (he actually has a DVD out called Equal Opportunity Offender), as does Carlos Mencia. A corollary to this, which I learned from my old Spy boss Kurt Andersen, is that anyone who uses a construction along the lines of “I treat people all the same; I don’t care if they’re black, white, purple, or green”–who uses colors that no human being can actually be–is inherently a racist bastard.*

Is it dressage…or is it dancing?

Later, folks.

UPDATE: Sorry I’m late getting to this, but I wanted to boost a couple of things out of the comments. First, Tom Watson’s newcritics take on the last Iggy bio. Ashley points out his faboo concert rider, courtesy of The Smoking Gun, our national treasure. And finally, James Burns’ Grumbles on the subject. Note, Jim: He didn’t sing “Lust for Life” Friday night. I guess it’s now been thoroughly melded to images of yuppies swimming with the dolphins on cruise lines.

Alex raises a question in the comments of an old thread: If Don Imus had referred to the Rutgers baseball players as lesbians rather than prostitutes, would the outcome today be different? Hmm.

“Nappy-headed dykes,” say, or (more likely) “tattooed dykes.” I don’t wish to be a cynic. But if I think his insult had been seasoned differently, had been about sexual identity — which all good Americans know is entirely a choice, something you pick out in a store like a pair of Levi’s — rather than race, Imus would be interviewing Frank Rich as we speak and we wouldn’t be looking at his Andy Rooney eyebrows in the newspaper today.

Since this topic is now so played it’s like discussing the weather (STILL TOO COLD), maybe we could take it away in that direction. Or maybe you’re as sick of hearing about it as I am.

Me, I went shopping yesterday. Nickel-and-dimed my discretionary spending away on things like foot cream and a misting fountain for Kate’s room (long story boiled short: she loves it). But I counted myself victorious, because I went to the Container Store and only bought two 99-cent plastic squeeze bottles and a marked-down iPod case. As soon as I walked through the doors I knew I was at high risk to produce a credit card and start making sweeping arm motions at entire aisles. The place is like a porn store for women, dangling the fantasy that we all hold in our heads — that somehow, somewhere, with the right filing system and a lot of clear plastic boxes, you can find a place for everything and put everything in its place.

Years ago, my sister bought a SimpleHuman trash can. It cost something like $130, which may strike you as insane (it did me, at the time), but everyone who experiences the marvel of this trash can is entirely sold on its clean design and smooth operation, then goes out and buys one. Yesterday I saw the logical upgrade — a $199 electronic model that raises its lid when you stick your foot in the sensor zone at its base.

No, I didn’t buy it. But I drooled. Afterward I came to my senses, the way a man who 20 minutes ago was thinking, “Hmm, yeah, Jenna Jameson might make a nice life partner for a guy like me” might wake up and say, “Um, maybe not.”

Visual joke: For sale at the checkout of the $199 trash can store? Copies of Real Simple magazine, pitched at the person vexed by owning too much stuff.

OK, we’re back on the road today. No. 1 on today’s to-do list: Find a babysitter. Because guess what snuck up on me? Tonight is Iggy at the Fox in Detroit. If necessary, Kate can sit in the car.

Happy birthday, John Christopher Burns, half a century old today. We’ve been friends since college. We met in 1977, at an organizational meeting for the following year’s student-newspaper staff. The editor passed around a sheet for everyone to write down their summer mailing address. Mine was 1832 Barrington Rd., Columbus, Ohio. His was 1860 Barrington Rd., Columbus, Ohio.

Wha-?

Turned out John didn’t really live there; it was one of the apartments his mother occupied in her post-divorce perambulations, and the closest thing to a permanent address he had. But it was an opening. We’ve been friends ever since.

Lots of years ending in 7 in this story, I just realized. I guess that means we met when we were both 20, and we’ve known each other 30 years. The older I get, the more I value long-term friendships, people who saw you through the disco years, three unfortunate perms, five bad boyfriends, one good husband, two horses, a dog and I-don’t-know-what-all, and still like you anyway. One is silver and the other’s gold, etc.

Here’s some of what John taught me: Computers, typefaces, design. I was never much of a design student, but I know more about typefaces than the average person because of him. I appreciate good design because of him. I use a Mac because of him. Here’s some of what he did for me: Designed three or four resumés, my wedding invitations, this website in all iterations (which he has hosted for 6 years now, at a cost to me of $0.00). He even designed the name on Alan’s boat.

But mostly, he’s been my great, good and true friend for 30 years now, and I hope for at least that many more. Happy birthday, John.

P.S. In one of those twists that I just love, he shares his birthday with Helvetica. Typically, he has an opinion about Helvetica: “ubiquitous, beautiful, and intolerable in its ubiquity.”

P.P.S. Don’t ask him about Optima.

Kate and I are headed out of town for a couple of days. (I wish for: Florida. I settle for: Columbus.) But we have some bloggage for y’all to chew on in our absence:

I don’t know what to say about Don Imus that won’t add to the general cacophony surrounding a story that isn’t really that important in the grand scheme. (Number of Imus-related stories in yesterday’s Free Press? Four. Number of stations that carry Imus’ show in Detroit? Zero.) I used to listen to the show and I liked it, but I also winced a lot. I always thought of Imus as a palate-cleanser after an hour or so of NPR, the guy you listened to on the way to work who prepped you for a day of office politics. So I don’t really have anything to say, but that’s OK, because two of the best things I’ve read are Doghouse Riley’s and Lance Mannion’s.

This is for newspaper people only, so be forewarned: When Neal Shine died last week, at first I couldn’t understand why I felt so sad — considering I didn’t know him or work for him. And then it dawned on me, as it did on Jack Lessenberry. It’s about the death of newspapers, not one man. And this passage, about the role Shine played in the tragic strike of 1995, made me wince:

He had worked for (Knight Ridder) his entire life, and they had promoted him from copy boy to publisher. Threatening to fire people he had known for decades must have given him enormous pain, but it was something he felt bound to do.

Where his tragic mistake lay was in thinking that the modern corporate newspaper company appreciated and valued loyalty. Indeed, Knight Ridder mostly undervalued Shine. They never gave him the top newsroom position (executive editor), probably because he was from Detroit and never had worked elsewhere. Indeed, he had to help a succession of out-of-town bosses find Woodward and try not to unduly embarrass themselves.

And now, I must hop to and drive south. Escaping — strangled sob — a winter storm warning en route.

Page One story in the NYT today, so you know it’s important: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. The story is pegged to some recent high-profile (in blogland, anyway) incidents of over-the-top bad behavior and all manner of associated shittiness, between bloggers and the people who read them. (This was a theme of the letter to the editor I wrote a few days back. Ten days to be exact, and it’s still unacknowledged. It’s like it dropped into a well. They get three weeks; they’re busy people.)

It’s hard not to read about some of these incidents — death threats; grotesque, sexually suggestive abuse; vile Photoshopping — without wincing. That, and counting blessings. I developed a thick skin in my time as a newspaper columnist; I heard it all, and I mean all, so I know that the guy who prints your home address and suggests the world’s felons come to your place and rape you is most likely a pathetic, Cheeto-stained soul who hasn’t left his own house in 15 years or so. (Also, that rapists surf another part of the web when they’re looking for victims.) On the other hand, one of the problems a thick skin brings is the sense that everyone needs to have one, and where would we be in a world full of the thick-skinned? Someone needs to stand up for decent behavior.

To reiterate: I am extremely grateful for all the people who comment here, for the high level of discussion that goes on, and for the singular fact that when we occasionally descend into the gutter, we keep things good-natured and amusing. I haven’t had to ban anyone. My policy, if I have one, is pretty simple: Don’t piss off the proprietress, keeping in mind the proprietress has seen it all and is hard to piss off that much (most days). First-time commenters need to be approved, but I approve 99.9 percent of them, and after you’ve been approved once you’re in for good. The only people who keep knocking on the door after being turned away, other than spammers and damn their robotic little souls, is one guy who occasionally submits vile, racist screeds from an IP address of a well-respected member of the Fort Wayne corporate community, but his secret is safe with me.

I installed Google Analytics only recently (as in, last night), and for years I’ve tried very hard to ignore my site statistics. A journalist asked me recently what sort of traffic I get, and I honestly don’t know. I get over 1,000 page impressions most days (thanks, AdSense), and I suspect fewer than half are unique visitors. (It’s this sort of attention to the bottom line that for years endeared me to my newspaper overlords.) All I care about is that I’m still having fun, and you all are a large part of what makes it fun.

So, thanks.

How was your Easter? Mine was fine, if a bit chilly, and I take solace that it was a bit chilly in huge chunks of this great land of ours. We traveled to Defiance (Alan’s family homestead). I drove. I was looking forward to catching up on my reading en route, but Alan had a headache knocking on the door, so I took the wheel. It made me think of all the couples I’ve known, and their who-drives policies. For some, it’s a question of whose car it is, but for others — a lot of others, and I’m stunned by how many — it’s not even a question. The man drives. The man always drives. Either the man is a control freak or the woman is one of those who feels unladylike with a man in the passenger seat. I once heard Dr. Laura Schlessinger say that not only does her husband always drive, she insists he open the door for her, and she’ll stand there until he does. (This is why Mr. Dr. Laura will likely welcome death with open arms.)

OK. A brief bit of bloggage and then on to watch Google Analytics run my numbers, so to speak:

When Gene Weingarten writes the cover story in the WashPost Sunday magazine, it’s always worth your time. This week he sets up violinist Joshua Bell — playing a Stradivarius — as a D.C. Metro busker, and asks:

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The story is a stitch. Only in the WashPost.

Also, TBogg on Johnny Hart, pointing out that once upon a time, “B.C.” had a reason to exist other than Hart’s religious obsessions. (I loved it as a kid.) Please, please, please, can the strip die now? Please?