It’s traditional that a newspaper’s editor-in-chief write a weekly column, usually on Sunday. Some do it more gracefully than others. Like the 900-pound gorilla, they write about anything they want, although many use the space to explain Why We Ran This Seemingly Stupid Thing in the Newspaper Last Week. In recent years, the job of explaining these things has fallen to the ombudsman/reader representative/public editor, and it seems I see fewer editor’s columns. Too bad. Even the atrocious ones are usually worth reading. I suspect many editors these days are such enthusiastic carpetbaggers, ticking off cities and newspapers on their career plan with cold-blooded efficiency, that they shy away from this job; they know anything they write about their current city will sound as sincere as the lead guitarist in the touring rock band down at the local arena, roaring, “Hello (checks note taped to back of guitar) Scranton! Are you ready to RAWK?!”*

All this by way of noting that Neal Shine, former publisher of the Free Press, died yesterday. I didn’t work for him. I met him once, at a Knight-Wallace Fellows event, and he was charming and gracious. But I felt I knew him, because I used to read his column, back when the Freep was passed around the newsroom in Fort Wayne. Unlike most editors/publishers, he could write.

The obit is here. He had a long and distinguished career. But if I were you, I’d skip right to the column archive (scroll down), where you’ll find gems like this:

After almost 34 years, I have made my peace with Jack Shook. It was a decision not lightly arrived at since I have a genetic tendency for simmering resentment.

But it seemed, somehow, the right time to set things straight and drop Mr. Shook from my selective roster of active grudges.

Grudges that are dated can distract you from the very serious business of dealing with contemporary resentments, so it is probably a good idea to purge the list from time to time.

It is not easy to sit here and admit to what might appear to some as a major character flaw. But I feel an obligation to expose a few minor truths about myself every now and then and keep the major character flaws a secret. I wish I felt worse about being an accomplished grudge-holder. The truth is, I have always felt that a good grudge can be a wonderful thing if you maintain a reasonable perspective.

A grudge that is bitter, corrosive or all-consuming is a grudge that has gotten out of hand.

A workable grudge is one you can call up on quiet winter evenings to fan the embers that have been cooled by the intervening years and bask in its warmth as you recall all the delicious details of the transgression. Control is vital.

In the 1920s a man sold my father shares of a worthless stock for $200. Whenever the memory of that unhappy transaction would begin to fade, my father would take out the worthless stock certificate and study it until the fraud was once again fresh in his mind.

When the man who sold him the stock died in the 1950s, my father studied the newspaper death notice for a while and then said: “I hope that when he gets to heaven, God asks him about the stock.” He never mentioned the incident again.

Which brings us back to Jack Shook.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to write like that? Look it over. There’s a chuckle, or a smile, in every paragraph, which naturally leads you to the next one, a little trail of bread crumbs that pulls you through to the end. You don’t get the pungent, flop-sweaty smell of someone trying to tell jokes, or impress you with their exquisite vocabulary. And yet, I bet it wasn’t particularly difficult for Shine. This is what storytelling is when storytelling is deep in your bone marrow. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that Shine was Irish. Jon Carroll, another Irish storytellin’ fool, writes like this. He can write about his grandchildren, his cats, the infinitesimal details of his life, and I’m reading every word. (Little Jimmy Lileks could take a few lessons. Not that he would.)

For a long time, the Free Press had a well-deserved reputation as a writer’s paper. I’m not surprised, with Shine making so many hiring decisions. He heard the music. May he rest in peace.

* Image stolen from an old “Simpsons” episode. Mea culpa.

Lance Mannion is another Irish storyteller who hears the music. He tells, or rather, remembers how I told, a particularly good one from back in the day, here. Hats off to storytellers, today.

Certain jobs are more than jobs. Every editor who’s written a headline knows this. Say you are violently murdered tomorrow. If you’re a systems analyst, the headline on your murder story won’t read SYSTEMS ANALYST DEAD IN GRISLY SLAYING. (In some smaller markets, the slaying will be “GRIZZLY” for the first few hundred papers. Until an editor we’ll call “Kirk” stops the presses and swallows five Valium in lieu of beating the offender with a pica pole.) No, you’ll be “local man” or “woman, 42,” but never “systems analyst,” and not because it’s too long for the headline. Accountants have the same problem.

Now, say you’re a nurse. Or a teacher. Or a dancer. But especially a nurse. Nothing like nursing to spice up a headline. NURSE FOUND STABBED TO DEATH IN APARTMENT — now there’s one to goose street sales. It doesn’t matter that the victim’s job had nothing to do with the crime. Some jobs simply transcend such trivialities. The death is not just a loss to the victim’s family and friends, a blow to the peace of the community; it’s one less nurse in the world. No one gives a crap about systems analysts.

I must point out the obvious — that many of these jobs-that-aren’t-just-jobs have distinct erotic overtones. Admit it: When your mind’s eye envisioned the stabbed nurse, didn’t you see her (never him; a male nurse would be “local man”) sprawled out in a short white dress with a spreading blood stain, starched cap askew? Of course you did, you pervert.

(Man, I can’t wait to see the Google ads on this one.)

Teachers are another. It’s more understandable with teachers; a dead teacher calls to mind a classroom full of sad children struggling to understand why Mrs. Whoever won’t be back the rest of the year, in fact forever. You think of hushed conferences at the classroom door between the flustered sub and the principal, of the grief counselors who will soon be descending in an unmarked van, each carrying a box of Kleenex.

(True story: Alan once sent a story about those satellite trivia competitions in bars to the copy desk. The opening anecdote was about a grade-school teacher who spent three nights a week sipping cranberry juice in her favorite tavern, playing electronic trivia contests. A copy editor replaced her actual name with her online handle, so horrified was she that we were TELLING THE WORLD that a TEACHER goes to A BAR. The next time someone mentions the olden days, when teachers used to have to resign when they got pregnant, remember we haven’t come so far.)

Doctor, lawyer — these are also more-than-jobs. But not all the professions qualify. ENGINEER KILLED IN STREET-DISPUTE CROSSFIRE…nah, just doesn’t work. Even dentists are borderline; no one ever wrote a successful one-hour TV drama about hot dentists in love. But a dancer? Oooh, yes. Doesn’t matter if the decedent hadn’t put on toe shoes, or tap shoes, or even a spangly thong, for years. Once a dancer, always a dancer.

Go ahead, try it at home. Insert your job title in any of the following headlines:

(BLANK) DIES IN SHOTGUN SLAYING
MAN HELD IN BLUDGEONING OF LOCAL (BLANK)
POLICE SAY (BLANK) ‘FOUGHT HARD’ WITH KNIFE-WIELDING KILLER

Some abbreviation is allowed. If you’re the second vice-president in charge of corporate donations for a well-established charity, you can call yourself NON-PROFIT EXEC. But not TYCOON.

OK, then. You can tell it’s exercise season again, because these are the things I think about on long bike rides. Nothing like sharing the road with cars to get one thinking of death and headlines.

Bloggage:

Ken Levine’s going to build a franchise on his “American Idol” post-mortems alone. This one isn’t his best performance overall, dawg, but he starts out so strong — Getting it out of the way first, Sanjaya, with the new mohawk hairstyle is now just the Gimp from “Pulp Fiction” — that I’ll keep him around another week. (I missed much of Idol last night; kept switching back to “Elevator to the Gallows” on Flix. I came in 30 minutes late, but found it mesmerizing. How can you not love a movie that features both a gull-wing Mercedes SL and a Miles Davis score? Of course it’s not scheduled again for DVRing. Drat. Good luck finding that one at my local Blockbuster.)

Laura Lippman’s having quite a week: NYT bestseller list, full-page ad in NYT, and shooting a cameo on “The Wire.”

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was doing a radio essay, on a topic that failed to grab the attention of all the print editors I usually deal with. Working title: “Elmore Leonard’s Master Class on Detroit.” It came out…just OK. (My criticisms are all of myself and my stupid voice, not the production, which was excellent.) It aired last week, so I’m embedding the MP3 file here. (Requires QuickTime.) Thereafter it will live in The Clip File. And I recorded another this week, which I like better. It’s nice to learn new things at my age.

In honor of the impending release of “Grindhouse,” Kim Morgan assembles a list of her favorite car movies. As a Detroit partisan, let me point out that no one makes movies like this about Toyota Camrys. (And the Mini Cooper chase scene in “The Italian Job” doesn’t count. That was just a big fat product placement.) Got any favorite car movies? You know where to discuss.

Big news in the D over the weekend — the suburbs, actually. A woman’s been missing for three weeks. Her husband said they had an argument, and the last time he saw her she was walking down their driveway to climb into a dark-colored sedan. This was February 9. He waited five days to report her missing, and then it started — an ex-girlfriend came forward with e-mails from the husband, saying he suspected his wife was having an affair, then the creepy interviews with media outlets where he referred to her in the past tense, before going all teary and begging her to come home.

Well, you don’t have to be an ace criminologist to suspect how it would turn out, although even ace criminologists probably didn’t expect a weekend like this one. The police searched the house Friday night, and in pretty short order found a woman’s torso in the garage. They turned around to say, “Hey, care to explain this?” but hubby had vanished into the gloaming. The following day was spent following the twin threads of the Search for More Body Parts and the Search for the Husband. They found the former (strewn around the proverbial nearby wooded area) before the latter, but by daybreak Sunday he’d been collared; they tracked him like an animal to a state park up near the Mackinac Bridge. He was found, hypothermic and frostbitten, huddled under a fallen tree with no coat or shoes. He confessed from his hospital bed, and will likely be cleared for travel in a day or two.

Anyway, reading all this exciting news in the paper Sunday kept me from Mitch Albom’s column longer than usual. But there it was, and so I read:

There is a dog show in Detroit this weekend, and 60,000 people are expected to attend, and 3,000 dogs, and 163 breeds, and we won’t even count the plastic bags and scoopers.

Hey, I went to that dog show. I read on:

And at some point during the show, as thousands of spectators cheer, the prized pooches will walk alongside their owners, in lockstep, in gentle canter, paws bouncing as if on marshmallows, coats groomed, heads erect, spines straight.

One sentence, and I can pick a nit in nearly every phrase. First nit: Most dog shows are not Westminster, in Madison Square Garden, but in vast convention-center spaces like Cobo, in Detroit. There are many rings scattered throughout this space. There have to be, as at last count the AKC recognizes something like 80 million distinct breeds. Anyway, the breed judgings tend to be attended by one of two groups — fierce partisans for the Bouvier des Flandres and exhausted spectators looking to take a load off their feet before checking out the Dog House Bakery, purveyor of gourmet treats for your best friend. A couple dozen, not thousands, and the standard expression of enthusiasm is applause, not cheering.

I attended one group class — the toys. Maybe 100, 150 people were strung along the outside of the ring paying attention to the events within. Most didn’t cheer. I guess, if you add up all the classes in all the rings, at least a couple thousand people actually cheered, but most watched with an expression suited to one of the two groups mentioned above. P.S. The Pomeranian won.

Next nit: Check the dictionary definition of “lockstep.” It means to march as close as possible to the person in front. Open up the definition a little, and I’d accept using it to mean walking in stride with someone next to you. In any event, it doesn’t describe how dogs walk next to handlers, because one party has two feet and the other has four.

“In gentle canter”? Even a nodding familiarity with four-legged locomotion would indicate dogs show at a trot. And what’s a “gentle” canter, anyway?

“Paws bouncing as if on marshmallows.” This, my friends, is the kind of wordsmithery that lands you at the top of the bestseller list for months at a time.

“Coats groomed” — yes, as opposed to those come-as-you-are dog shows.

“Heads erect, spines straight” — Note, please: A dog has four legs. This means its spine is on a plane perpendicular to ours, and so straightness has no relevance here. Dogs can’t exactly slump the way we do, although sometimes, when they’re tired, they’ll lower their heads, so he gets points for noting that a dog in the show ring keeps its head erect.

Because I am a masochist, I skimmed the rest of the column. It was about Mitch training his dog. Piercing insight: It turns out that when you hire a trainer, he doesn’t actually train the dog, he trains you to train the dog. What’s up with that!

OK, enough. I — we — enjoyed the dog show. Kate brought a friend, and the two oohed and ahhed over the teensy-weensy ones; apparently the toy dog you carry in a purse is all the rage with little girls. When I was her age, I read all the Albert Payson Terhune books and dreamed of owning a collie like Lad or Lady, so I don’t count this as progress.

I paid close attention the the Parson Russell Terriers, of course. Contrary to what you might have heard, a Parson Russell is not a Jack Russell, but the compromise in a bitter dispute over whether the JRT is the result of careful husbandry or just a naughty little mutt. When my own naughty little mutt was a pup, I quickly developed an eye for the breed, and it’s funny: They all looked different, and yet, they were unmistakably Jack Russells. Long coat, short coat, long legs, short legs — they all just had the look. (I think it was in the straightness of the spine.) This was before they were recognized by the AKC, and nowadays the Parson Russell has a standard and is much easier for civilians to pick out in a crowd.

I petted two. Both were adorable. One was terribly shy, not a good thing in a terrier. Not surprisingly, she was a washout in the show ring. Still, adorable.

I left thinking our next dog will not be something you carry in a purse, but not a collie, either. (Ack, the grooming. How did these dogs get bred in a country with so many burrs?) Probably another terrierist. Alan’s thinking a border terrier — he likes that little otter face. I’d be happy with a shelter critter. But not for a while. The one we have still has some life in him, the naughty little mutt.

Bloggage:

In Fort Wayne my New Yorker used to arrive on Thursday (it’s published Monday), but here it comes on Saturday, so I was late reading Seymour Hersh’s “The Redirection.” Not recommended for the easily upset. Hersh says we’re preparing for the war to spread into Cambodia Iran, among many other things:

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. …After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Oh, joy.

Note: The headline for today’s post is not a Honeymooners reference. Have a nice day.

I marvel at Keith Olbermann. I don’t doubt for a minute he’s a real jerk, but boy, no one can top him in Bush hatin’. Although that’s not why I listen to his rants, or commentaries, or whatever he calls them. It’s more of an academic exercise. Having recently written for radio, I had to relearn the rules of broadcast writing, which boil down to:

1) Write something.
2) Go through and replace all “ands” and “buts” with periods.
3) Go back through and replace a few ands and buts, but with extreme judiciousness.

The problem, if you’re a clause-y writer like me, is you write sentences that are too long, forget to breathe at the commas and end up gasping. Plus, you don’t want to sound too writerly; conversational is always better. But here’s the thing: Olbermann is even clause-ier than me. How does he get away with it? Here’s a sentence from the Special Comment below:

From springs spent trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, to summers of cynically manipulated intelligence, through autumns of false patriotism to winters of war, we have had more than four years of every cheap trick and every degree of calculated cynicism, from an administration filled with Three-Card Monte players.

It takes him 17 seconds to read that single sentence. He takes a few breaths in there, but no deep ones. The guy must run marathons or something. Anyway, here’s the whole thing. Not recommended for the easily excited, but it has a great last line.

This is why, when the northeast is hit by some wussy little snowstorm, inconveniencing Wall Street Masters of the Universe and, more important, scores of network-TV reporters, so that the storm leads all the newscasts — Big Apple paralyzed! Capital socked in! — the rest of the country just rolls its eyes. That weather system is moving up from the southwest; we’re told that by day’s end we could experience snow, sleet and possibly a thunderstorm. It’s snowing now, hard. I’m reminded of a line from “Polar Star,” Martin Cruz Smith’s great murder mystery set, no kidding, on a factory ship off the coast of Alaska: “Come. Enjoy the refreshing Bering weather.”

OK, then. I need to call Hicksville today. It sounds like it should be a state of mind (“Dude. Go back to Hicksville.”) but it’s not, just an unfortunately named town in Ohio, on the Indiana border. For some reason our co-prosperity sphere has some money in a bank there, and I need to find out what it’s up to.

There used to be a rock club in Hicksville — the name escapes me — and for a while they booked some semi-significant bands. The owner was quoted once saying she thought most of them came just for the club’s embroidered jackets, with “Hicksville, Ohio” on the back. The club was popular with Fort Wayne kids during the Era of 3.2 Beer, a curiosity of local law. Until the Mothers Against Drunk Driving pushed through the 21 drinking age nationwide, Ohio had a two-tier system. Eighteen-to-21-year-olds could drink so-called “low” beer, which had an alcohol content around half the standard product. When you showed your ID at the door, you got either a “low stamp” or a “high stamp” on your hand, which you showed the bartender when you ordered. Not surprisingly, this law had a mixed record, enforcement-wise; you could always figure out a way to sneak the high stuff somehow. Anyway, in Indiana people younger than 21 couldn’t set foot in any bar, so they drive the 20 miles or so up Rt. 37 to Hicksville to hear Huey Lewis and the News and get a watery buzz on.

It should not surprise you to know that Rt. 37 had a lot of fatal accidents. Alcohol: Cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

Anyway, Hicksville. When Alan was a young reporter at our newspaper, he was driving through Hicksville one day and spotted a large sign in a yard: God’s Tiny Kennel. Chihuahua Stud Service. Of course he knocked on the door.

The resulting story was a gem. The proprietress of God’s Tiny Kennel (I just like to write those words) was a dedicated Christian who believed she’d been called by God to this work. The dogs all had names like Scrappy and Sparky and Little Man, and she prayed over every litter, that her chihuahuas would go forth in the world and spread Christian love. (Please, no jokes about fear and trembling.)

I tipped a friend of mine in Columbus, a writer who loved to travel around the state and find stories like this, and he wrote a great one, too. His lede was a long string of “begats” — “And God looked down on Scrappy and saw it was good, and Scrappy begat Tiny Tim, who begat Little Man, who begat…”

Anyway, stories like this are the reason some of us went into feature writing, rather than, say, chasing down corrupt politicians or other crooks. Some of us think, heretics that we are, that if papers ran more stories like this, we’d have more readers.

Ah, well. It was only a few years later that well-dressed newspaper executives, with their flat abdomens and snappy ties, would start sneering at this genre, sometimes known in the business as “the 100-year-old cobbler story.” The new focus in features was on news you can use, stories with “utility,” stories that “help readers manage their lives.” By the turn of the next decade, our paper would have passed on God’s Tiny Kennel because a) it was out of our circulation area; and b) it lacked useful information. Once Alan shepherded a lovely little tale into the paper, written by one of his staffers. It was about a group of Philippine war brides who came to this country and were terribly lonely until one by one they found one another, and now, years later, they still meet once a week for a Philippine-food potluck and a little mah jongg. The editorial reaction in the morning news meeting? It needed a sidebar on how to play mah jongg.

Grr.

Anyway, it’s all behind me now. After watching that Frontline special the other night, it’s clear a lot of other things about newspapers will be in the rear-view mirror soon, too.

Postscript: I just Googled “god’s tiny kennel” to see if anyone else ever wrote about it. One citation: Mine.

So, bloggage: Jon Carroll discovers Pump It Up. Kate went to a PIU party last fall. I knew it was a zillion-dollar business idea because it left my frontal lobes baffled and my medulla oblongata in raptures (those two parts never get along). Simultaneous genius and appalling excess: It’s the American way.

And that’s it for me today. I had a great one yesterday — after months of feeling I’d been buried alive, two-count-em-two editors reached out yesterday, both with interesting assignments. It gives me the strength to carry on.

I don’t have a personal Molly Ivins story, but I remember one from a magazine profile of her, long ago: She was a national correspondent for the New York Times, charged with roaming the western United States and filing those quirky sorts of stories they find so amusing in New York. One was about a chicken-slaughter in some dusty burg, and it was a turning point in her career. Oh, look — it made her NYT obituary:

Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.

The phrase was “gang pluck.” As I recall the anecdote, this sent Rosenthal into a towering rage, and the ensuing scolding was something to see. Rosenthal, trembling with anger, leaned across the table and thundered, “You were trying to make the readers of the NEW YORK TIMES think of the phrase gang fuck, weren’t you, Molly? Weren’t you? The readers of the NEW YORK TIMES?!?”

I don’t recall what Ivins said in reply, if she said anything; that’s the sort of thing you just have to endure. But in retrospect,it says something about both of them: Molly Ivins knew something that A.M. Rosenthal did not, i.e. how to turn a phrase. (Also, how to have a sense of humor.)

While the NYT has employed some fine writers, Ivins was never cut out to be one of them, so of course she didn’t really come into her own until she was back in Texas. Everyone talks about her regular skewering of the Shrub, i.e. the 43rd president, but I always thought her best work were her deadpan accounts of doin’s in the Texas legislature, a repository of crooks, weirdos, stuffed shirts, shitheads and others so strange it makes, say, the Indiana General Assembly look like the House of Lords. Reading her columns was like sitting with a great, funny friend in the observation gallery, while she pointed out people on the floor below and told you great stories about them.

I recall one vividly: The Texas legislator who had to attend a function in San Francisco in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. So terrified was he of catching something that he called the front desk of the hotel and asked for extra shower caps, which he wore on his feet. While showering.

I look at Ivins’ work then and I think: So ahead of her time. Note this paragraph from the Times obit:

But the (Dallas Times Herald), she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.

You wonder, looking at that phrase, what was so awful about it, other than it was rude and funny. This was in the mid-’80s, before right-wing talk radio and blowhard cable slugfests, when newspaper humor was Art Buchwald and Erma Bombeck and Andy Rooney, and political humor was Mark Russell and the dopey Capitol Steps, and the only people allowed to be rude and funny were the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” and that was mainly about doing impersonations and coining catch phrases.

You wonder why newspapers lost their audience? Because Molly Ivins was considered the outer limits. (Although, to be sure, the Dallas Times Herald went ahead and folded in 1991, with Ivins on staff. Ultimately, it comes down to this: I don’t know anything.)

If you haven’t read the comments from the previous thread, do so. Low down, LA Mary tells some stories about her time working for Ivins as an assistant. Lucky girl. Or read the WashPost obit, here. Better yet, read both.

Bloggage:

I once knew a man who claimed to have been 13 pounds and change at birth, and judging from the size of him in adulthood, I believe him. But it gets better: His parents were so poor he was born at home, in a Chicago tenement. (I’ll bet that labor and delivery kept the neighbors up.) But he has nothing on Super Tonio, born in Cancun, weighing 14.5 pounds at birth. A moment of silence for his mother’s birth canal, please.

Kate went back to school today. Fingers crossed for no bounceback.

Boy, I am out of it. I never realized the Vietnam vet spitting story had been pretty much debunked. Although it doesn’t surprise me, as the whole narrative was a little too tidy for real life: Recently discharged Vietnam vet, in uniform, comes home not to a festive parade, but to a cold, sterile airport. While walking through the airport, not a hero, but just another shlub between planes, a contemptuous fellow traveler, usually a woman, spits on him. Baby-killer! Etc.

I don’t just say this because I’m not a spitter, myself. I know spitting on another person is a time-honored insult, but it never occurred to me to do it, ever. (I like the gypsy custom of spitting on a person’s shadow, though; that’s kind of chilling.) To spit well takes practice; otherwise you’re left with drool all over your chin. Women don’t do that spit-a-hocker thing men do. I’d think even Hanoi Jane Fonda would rather fling a verbal insult than saliva, and face it: Most people just wouldn’t do that.

As for male spitters, there isn’t a riper opportunity for a butt-whippin’ than a filthy civilian hippie expectorating on a uniformed soldier. Most people are smarter than to invite a butt-whippin’.

If you’re an urban-myth spotter, though, you look for the consistencies, or inconsistencies, that make a story too good to be true. Jack Shafer in Slate explains:

While Lembcke doesn’t prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman–you can’t prove a negative, after all–he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport–not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street.

(And yes, boys and girls, I’m aware Bob Greene swallowed this gob whole and got another tiresome book out of it.)

Anyway, it hardly matters now. The spitting story is now part of the landscape, contrary to the best efforts of Jack Shafer and Jerry Lembcke. And now we have a whole new generation of wounded vets coming home (or not coming home), and the spitting story is always the subtext of the new welcome-home movement: Never again! Support the troops! No problem. I support the troops. But when you press people on what that means, actually, you rarely get a straight answer other than: Don’t spit on them. Agreed. No spitting.

I know I have some military readers, so let me ask this question, something I’ve always wondered about: Those care packages that various groups are always fund-raising for, or collecting for, or sending out — are they worth it? I ask because they so often seem compiled for a troop of hardscrabble mercenaries, not soldiers in the most technologically advanced, well-trained and generously funded fighting force in world history. If I were putting together a soldier care package, I’d try to put myself in a soldier’s shoes and imagine what I’d miss most about home. I’d include… something like… DVDs and video games; meaty letters including photos of lovers/spouses/children; digital cameras; a pint of excellent bourbon in unlabeled, non-breakable flasks; Tabasco sauce for MREs; maybe some discreetly packaged porno. But the ones that I see people sending include things like baby wipes, toothpaste and Kool-Aid. I always think, can’t they get adequately supplied with toothpaste and baby wipes any other way? What kind of Army can’t get its troops adequate wiping supplies?

Probably the same one that can’t get decent body armor. Never mind.

One of my old neighbors, a Marine and Vietnam vet, said a bottle of Tabasco was as highly prized as a bottle of scotch whiskey. He carried his at all times, like his rifle: This is my hot sauce. There are many like it but this one is mine, and better stay mine, if my comrades know what’s good for them.

Day three at home with my poor sick bunny. I’m racing to get a story done so that if I’m felled next, my calendar will be clear. Downside of freelancing: No paid sick days.

One bit of bloggage: Have you driven a Ford lately? No? Well, you can still buy Bill Ford’s house. One error Autoblog makes: You can’t have a “view of Lake Huron” from Ann Arbor. You can have a view of the Huron River, however.

Remember the Michigan county treasurer who lost $200,000 in the Nigerian e-mail fraud? The story gets worse.

Nursing sick children is part of the job description for parenthood, and mercifully, Kate is pretty healthy. Most of the time. Not now. She was down yesterday with a 100-degree fever, chesty cough, sore throat and general ickiness; I knew she was really sick because she didn’t move off the couch all day, mainlining “Suite Life of Zach and Cody” episodes for hours. My rule is: Don’t call the doctor until a change. This morning her fever was up to 103, a personal best for this kid. Called the doc. We’ll be going in later this morning.

I’m taking action on the diagnosis. Her voice sounds like it hurts to even whisper, so I was thinking strep throat, but the cough is wrong for that. Bronchitis, 5-2. Strep, 7-1.

Of course, thinking of odds brings us to yesterday’s sad news, about Barbaro. Even with all that’s been written about the colt, there’s still a certain bafflement in some people — how can a horse die of a broken leg? Jane Smiley explains it elegantly in today’s WashPost:

A horse’s hoof is wondrous structure — the outside horn is lined with delicate membranes and blood vessels that feed and support the bones of the foot. The bones of the foot are analogous to a person’s fingertips, since a horse’s knee is analogous to a person’s wrist. The racehorse carries a thousand pounds at 35 to 40 miles per hour using a few slender bones supported by an apparatus of ligaments and tendons that have no analogues in human anatomy. Every part of the system depends on every other part. What happened to Barbaro was that the engineering couldn’t take it. When it was right, as in the Kentucky Derby, it was perfectly right, and when it became wrong, it became irredeemably wrong.

I knew Barbaro was doomed last weekend when I heard that 80 percent of one of his hooves had to be removed due to laminitis. That’s practically an amputation. The part that was removed is the part that grows back, but to do so would take more than a year, and this after 8 months in slings and casts and padded stalls. Even banking on the return a horse like this can bring at stud — and thoroughbreds breed live, no artificial insemination for them, so he’d have to be sound enough to cover the mare — it would be cruel to put him through that. He’s happier in horse heaven, where only people wear leather.

They had the Miss America pageant last night? In JANUARY? In VEGAS? For the SECOND year? (Man, I’m out of it.) Still, though, you have to laugh — what feminism couldn’t kill, reality TV slaughtered without a peep. The new action is in Miss USA, with its rehab-attending top Miss and MySpace-disgraced wannabe Miss. Now there’s a pageant for today’s world, ain’a? And to think, this used to be considered the contest for girls who were too dumb to say they advocated world peace. Huh.

So, the San Francisco Chronicle started this new podcast — “Correct Me if I’m Wrong,” reader voice mails shared with the world. The first one was genius. Not only do we have a reader who uses terms like “prolix” and “tautology,” he goes off on a rant that’s one for the ages (“Aren’t you there to ensure that the English language is not pissed on by your sub-editors?”), and the readers responded with remixes, mash-ups and ringtones made from it. I wish I’d saved some of my better reader VMs, but none of them are nearly as good as this one; I got grouchy bitching, mostly, including one from a man who lectured me for five minutes about why I wasn’t using my husband’s name. (Time stamp: 3:30 a.m., a nice way to ensure the writer won’t croon “chuck you, Farley” back atcha.) There was a guy who used to call the Columbus Dispatch city desk at night, utterly stone crazy, and rant about the Irish Republican Army (he was a fan) and dropping bombs down the Queen’s chimney (which he advocated). One night he called as we were leaving for dinner, so as an experiment, we laid the receiver down on the desk and went ahead and took our break. When we came back an hour later, he was still talking.

Pilotless aircraft! Pilotless aircraft! Don’t you check these things?!

Gary Kamiya weighs in on those pesky readers and all their opinions, here.

Off to the doc. Temp’s down to 99 and she’s feeling better, but we’re going anyway.

The New York Times has a story today that says female politicians are more likely, these days, to emphasize their maternity in selling themselves to the voting public, i.e., vote for me, I’m a mom. Hmm. The story goes into some detail about what a radical departure this is, as previously being a mommy was seen as a sign of weakness: For a long time women seeking high office, particularly executive office, were advised to play down their softer, domestic side, and play up their strength and qualifications. Focus groups often found voters questioning whether women were strong enough, tough enough, to lead. Huh. This just goes to show why I’m ill-suited for a career in politics, as it would be difficult to have one for very long before one developed an all-consuming contempt for voters.

Case in point: I once interviewed a woman at a rally for Dan Quayle. This was when he was briefly running for president, in 2000. “What do you like about him as a candidate?” I asked. “His marriage,” she said. “Go on,” I said. “Just…his marriage,” she said. Unspoken was her obvious contempt of the current occupant of the White House, who was also married, but who cheated on his wife. Quayle didn’t stay in the race long, and I assume this woman ended up voting for George Bush, who was also married. I wonder if she ever remembers this moment and feels like an idiot. My guess: No. One of the subsequent holders of Quayle’s foot-in-the-D.C.-door congressional seat is my old congressman, Mark Souder. He chickenhawked his way out of Vietnam as a conscientious objector and later was a strong booster of the Iraq war.

The archives of American newspapers are full of blustery quotes by male politicians who vowed to “protect” America, as though they were out there patrolling Fallujah in a Humvee, not sitting in Congress risking no injury more severe than accidental stabbing with a ballpoint pen. Remember when that crazy man came into the Capitol building with a gun and started shooting? It was a few years ago; he killed two Capitol police officers. Who was the testosterone-drenched congressman whose response was to lock the office door and crouch behind the desk? Tom DeLay? I think so. I remember thinking at the time, maybe this will be the incident that finally makes us confront the disgraceful state of care for the mentally ill in this country; perhaps it will be led by Congress, whose home was shot up by a man whose most recent treatment was “Greyhound therapy” — the inside-baseball jargon for buying a troublesome nutcase a ticket to another town, where he can be some other locality’s problem. No. Instead the talk was immediately about the far more useful tactic of arming everyone, so that the next attack could be answered by a hail of bullets by brave armed citizens.

If this is what passes for strength in Washington, bring on the mommies. At least I know they’ve been thrown up on and changed about two million diapers. That’s harder than flapping one’s gums.

The bloggage:

Glory hallelujah, I never thought it would happen, and it has happened, and so it must be shouted to the heavens: I finally found a post-“Close Encounters” movie directed by Steven Spielberg that I actually like. “Munich.” Those who know me know this is a true milestone; I’m probably the most reliable Spielberg-hater in five counties. I’m still so stunned that I think I’m going to have to digest it for a few days before I can write about it. I just thought the date should be noted somewhere.

I don’t know why this is amusing, but The Sun has found topless photos/screen captures of all the nominees for Best Actress. (Probably NSFW, depending on where you W.) No, I know why it’s amusing: Because they asked, in the lead-in, who has the best “jubblies” on this year’s red carpet. Surprise of the bunch: Judi Dench. Yes, I said Judi Dench.

There are very few reporters who could write a first-person account of this personal problem — trying to get one’s passport renewed in a matter of days, after one has noticed its expiration and one has a non-refundable flight to Paris coming up — without sounding like an overprivileged twit. The phrase boo-freakin’-hoo comes to mind. And yet, most reporters are not Jon Carroll:

It was still dark outside. I sat on the narrow steps of the passport building. I guess I must have been looming in the gloaming, because I alarmed passers-by who suddenly rounded the corner and encountered my slumping form. I dialed the number on the window. I was placed on hold. I was on hold for quite a while. I began to realize that I looked a lot like an indigent person, huddled in a darkened doorway with an old cell phone pressed to my ear. Were a police officer to come along, what would I say? “I’m on hold with the State Department?” Yeah, I bet that works.

Forty-five minutes are up. Go have yourself a Monday.

I’m disappointed by the stupid soundtrack, but there’s still something about this that cracks me up:

Man wonders why AT&T truck has been parked in the alley for three days. Man looks closer. Man realizes AT&T worker — in orange vest and hardhat — is actually using the bucket truck to pick oranges off a neighbor’s tree.

Now see, if he were doing this in Iraq, we’d celebrate his entrepreneurial spirit.

Having never lived with a fruit tree, I’m of two minds. My friends in Florida say that once you get over the thrill of having a mango tree in your yard, after you make the first mango ice cream and mango chutney and mango smoothie and mango grilled with fish and so forth, you look up at the tree and realize: I’ve got about a million more mangoes to go, don’t I? And then you start praying an AT&T truck rolls down the street and steals a few, before they start to fall on the lawn and rot. The next thing you learn about fruit trees is, they really require a great deal of care to give fruit worth picking — thoughtful pruning and spraying and so forth, and if you don’t, pretty soon the apples get wormy, the peaches shrink to the size of golf balls and you start perusing garden catalogs online, using the search term “maintenance-free.”

On the one hand, I could see that AT&T guy as a blessing. On the other, it’s always courteous to ask before you pick. On the third hand, maybe he did ask; what does the guy with the video camera know, really? On the fourth hand, this is what journalism will look like in the future; this is “citizen journalism,” comrades. Enjoy the future!

Speaking of future journalism, here’s something else you’ll have to get used to — major metropolitan newspaper columns about anal sex, including a bulleted list of tips for how to make it work for you. I can only chuckle wryly, recalling the approximately 70 million times I had something excised from a story on the grounds that it was too spicy for our readers. I once wrote a fashion story about the strategic removal of pubic hair that, by editorial fiat, never once used the term “pubic hair.” I was scolded for trying to pull a fast one on a less dirty-minded editor by including the name of the rock band the person I was writing about played in (Catherine’s Horse). I recall the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when hours were spent in meetings, trying to draw a shaky line between the sexual practices that were most often involved in the disease’s transmission and the sensibilities of our readers, whom the editors all assumed were 70-year-old nuns, apparently. And now here’s a column about how to do one of these very same dirty deeds! I never thought I’d live so long.

As recently as Jan. 3, 2005, I worked for a newspaper where, on orders from the corner office, the word “butt” was verboten. Not two years later, butt-f*cking. It is to laugh.

(A friend of mine tells me a story about how her syndicated column, which on this day discussed the merits of sucking fat about of one area of the body and injecting it in another, caused a stir with editors. Why? Because she wrote that fat was sucked from one’s “butt,” and oh my we can’t say that, can we? She was encouraged to substitute the word “hips” instead. I tell you this so the next time you see a story about “hips-f*cking,” you’ll know what it’s about.)

OK, bloggage: Here in southeast Michigan, I wake up every day and open my newspaper with a certain wreck-on-the-freeway fascination, because it appears that our free-fall to the bottom of the economic barrel is not over. Our unemployment rate is over 7 percent and the state is bleeding population in an arterial spray. The day before yesterday came the news that we lead the nation in home foreclosures. (Guess what our rate of increase between 2005 and 2006 was? Here’s a hint: Nationally, it was 42 percent. Give up? OK. In Michigan, it was…drumroll please…127 percent. Yes! Michigan is in the house! Or out of the house! Whatever.) Yesterday came the news that Ford Motor Co. could not have lost more money last year if they’d set fire to the building and used a dump truck to drop $100 bills into the flames for 12 months straight. And today comes the story I’ve learned to look for in the days immediately following these gloomy announcements. I reproduce the headline here because it didn’t disappoint:

Ford CEO says bonuses needed to retain talent

This happened after the Delphi bankruptcy filing last year, too. The company announced it was cutting the rank-and-file’s pay by 50 percent, but paying seven-figure bonuses to certain members of the management team so they wouldn’t leave. A reasonable person might say, “So? Let them leave. Don’t they share responsibility for this debacle?” Well. To read these stories, not only is this a stupid question, the sort of thing only a blue-collar numbskull would ask, it shows your utter lack of understanding of how business works. Said the CEO:

“Now we are in a tough situation right now, and we are in a turnaround situation, and we need the absolute best, skilled and motivated team in all of the positions. That is the way we are looking at it, is to make sure that we are paying for performance, even though it is really a turnaround situation. We need that performance … more than ever.”

It’s times like this I regret not going to business school.