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.

If I could turn back the hands of time, as Tyrone Davis sang, there isn’t a whole lot I’d change. A few boyfriends would remain strangers, I would have paid closer attention in high school Russian class, I would have taken more chances. But for someone whose big mouth has gotten her into so much trouble, I don’t regret all that much. The remarks that were hurtful, yes. The ones that gave voice to a truth everyone in the room was thinking but which were impolitic to give voice to, not really. Every step on that road took me to this spot on the road, or not exactly on the road, more like off in the ditch, spinning my wheels, shrieking to passing traffic, “Sure! That road seems like the one you should take! But beware! Beware!” — I don’t mind this spot too too much. All part of the journey, etc. Soon the tow truck will arrive, or maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll start walking, and…

OK. Abandon metaphor.

My point: If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have chosen journalism. Time Inc. laid off nearly 300 people yesterday, eliminated three bureaus. Yes, yes, the next Britney Spears story in People may not have five reporters, what a tragedy, etc. I don’t want to sound any big themes about journalism here; in a lot of ways we made our bed and now we’re lying in it, only it turns out it’s no longer a bed but just this sort of narrow cot, and people keep falling out, and…

Abandon metaphor.

What particularly cheeses me is the timing. Speaking out of pure selfishness, this could not come at a worse time. For me, anyway. Too young for retirement, too old to make a graceful sidestep into another field, it seems that those of us who were drawn to journalism by its two great movements of recent memory — New Journalism and Woodstein-style investigation — are now in the worst possible position. Tough times may make tough people, but they also shred a few in the bargain. Again, speaking selfishly, those 289 jobs eliminated yesterday represent 289 lives turned upside down, and not all will be righted. Yes, it happens in every industry. No, I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just taking note.

Pout, pout, pout.

I remember, many years ago, my newspaper sent a couple of reporters to some training sponsored by our parent company, Knight Ridder. They came back with their heads spinning; some Free Press people were at the same session, bitching about their latest degradation — the paper would not employ stenographers to transcribe taped interviews. How were they supposed to do their jobs, etc. I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, starved to a ravenous husk, remembering the antebellum tables groaning with food as she’s puking up that radish in the Twelve Oaks garden.

As God as my witness, I’ll never…well, I’d better get to work.

But first! Bloggage! Because that’s why you come here, right? A few snarky remarks, a report on how we’re doing in the D, maybe a dinner menu, and then some tasty linkage, after which we turn the floor show over to the commenters. See? We evolved a new form of journalism, justlikethat. Let’s make it pay for the proprietress, and we’ll all be happy. I will, anyway.

Salon reports on the latest alt-foods craze — raw milk. One of my college boyfriends rented a place in the country for a while, next door to a dairy farm, where he bought gallons of raw milk for something like a buck or two. I mentioned this in passing to my mother, who nearly leapt from her chair in alarm, then commenced telling a hair-raising tale about a girl she knew who got undulant fever (medical name: brucellosis, for you Zevon fans) from drinking unpasteurized milk. She made me promise never to touch the stuff, and I did. It was an easy promise to make, as what little I’d had so far was sort of like drinking liquified butter. In the Salon story, people say raw milk keeps them away from sweets. I’ll say — liquified butter will do that.

It made good coffee cream, I’ll allow. Still: Thank God for Louis Pasteur.

With a 10-year-old in the house, “American Idol” is simply an element that we must live with, and the lack thereof would make life impossible, kind of like oxygen. Eric Zorn tried to put up his dukes against the juggernaut of humiliation that is the early episodes, but on this, I’m more with Jody Rosen at the Slate AI blog, who points out “you couldn’t help but suspect that most of the ‘bad’ singers were actually savvy performance artists, angling for a few minutes of airtime.” Yup. And there were teachable moments, just the same; Alan told Kate the moral of this story is, “Always wear a bra.” How true that is.

Do you hate Pachelbel’s Canon in D? Rob Paravonian does.

UPDATE: And while I was feeling sorry for myself a little while ago, I forgot to thank my lucky stars that while I may not work for the New York Times, that also means I’ll never have to write a story like this:

For some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,�? Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

I mean: Whew.

…they turn to YouTube. TwoTube, today. First is a little inside-newspaper baseball, some “I’m the Tribune/I’m the Sun-Times” spoofery:

And because I kinda feel bad about their pain, and because someone mentioned it in the comments yesterday, a good, high-quality Script Ohio, including a great i-dot:

Last year’s Detroit auto show wasn’t the first I’d attended, but my first as a working journalist. I freely admit to being a total country mouse about these things, but the most satisfying word in the event, for me, was “show.” You don’t have to suspend your journalist’s skepticism about the b.s. you’re being fed in the press conferences to appreciate the entertainment factor. The car companies go to great lengths and even greater expense to make their product roll-outs special, and I’m happy to appreciate them. Only 6,000 people — journalists, most of them — get to attend the press preview. By the time the public is admitted at the end of the week, the buffet lines will be gone, the liquor will be packed up and the celebrities will be back in Los Angeles. I think it’s important to let your readers know what the rollouts were like.

Nevertheless, there’s always someone who’s too cool for the room. Say, “I loved how they drove that Jeep through the front window at Cobo,” and he’ll say, “Oh, they did that 10 years ago.” Say, “Those cappuccino-flavored yogurt thingies at Maserati were delicious” and he’ll say “They totally ripped off that idea from some place in Milan.” And so on.

This year, Mercedes installed an ice-skating rink in Cobo. Really. Ice. With skaters twirling around the cars. Many reporters act as though this is simply the most boring thing they have ever seen. Oh, an ice rink. They did that in Berlin five years ago, didn’t they?

So when I saw this picture, taken on that very same ice rink…

…I thought, “At least the photographers aren’t afraid to smile at the amusing sight of Emmitt Smith and Cheryl What’s-Her-Name, reprising their ‘Dancing With the Stars’ gig.” And then I looked closer. All the “photographers” seem to be carrying the same camera. They’re also holding them wrong; you’d think someone could instruct someone pretending to be a photographer in how real photographers hold cameras. And they’re wearing ice skates! They’re shills, dammit.

No wonder reporters get cynical. I guess the real pros were on the other side.

(The guy in the upper right-hand corner, dressed in a suit? He’s a real photographer — correct grip, no skates. But I bet he’s not news media; looks like corporate PR to me.)

By the way, for the best mise en scéne reporting, I recommend the NYT auto-show blog. For car pix, Jalopnik. The Freep auto-show page is getting most of the breaking news, but seems to be having intermittent technical problems. Best all-around goes to the News’ blog, but they have no pictures; apparently those are all on the main auto-show page.

Meanwhile, as I seem to be working on a minor in alternative-energy vehicles, I paid close attention to the roll-out of the Chevrolet Volt concept, positioned as GM’s bid to reassert itself in the alt-energy field and something of a mea culpa for killing the EV-1. Wow. What a woulda-coulda-shoulda this thing is, even for a concept:

…a hybrid that could get as much as 150 miles per gallon of gasoline. From the hints GM has dropped, the Volt could be on the road in three or four years.

…The automaker faces a major hurdle in finding a supplier that can build a battery system GM wants.

You know? I’ll be a billionaire once I accumulate as much as a billion dollars. However, I face a major hurdle in finding a supplier. Stay tuned.

Sorry for taking the day off. I was tired. Although I probably should come up with a better excuse; who isn’t tired in January? How about: I was in mourning for Gerald Ford, and it just seemed wrong to fritter time away blogging.

But really, I was tired. Our friends John and Sam came by on their way back home to Atlanta — they’ve been in Michigan most of the last three months (sick parents), but we haven’t seen each other. It seemed time to take the night off, go spend some money on beef tenderloin and open a few bottles of wine. (Although I will say: You can spend all you want on beef tenderloin, but you know what’s a bigger hit? Picking up a couple dozen tamales in Mexicantown for microwavable breakfasts. My kitchen still smells like salsa.)

So, anyway: Tired, but now rested. Back in the proverbial saddle. But I need to hustle. A freelancer’s income depends on multiple income streams, and all the streams are trickles at the moment. There are a few checks expected in the next few weeks, but it’s time for QueryFest 07. Oh, well — what else is January for?

Of course, thanks to the newspaper business, the ranks of potential freelancers swells seemingly hourly. It’s a jungle out there. In the sturm und drang of my last days in Fort Wayne, I talked regularly with a friend who works as a newspaper journalist in another city. His advice: “Don’t get bitter.” Exchanged e-mail with him yesterday, and learned his wife didn’t escape the reaper’s blade in Philadelphia this week. Guess what? He’s bitter.

Ah, but enough of that. This new year more than any in recent memory, I’m sensing a vibe of Big Change in the air. I know now that big change is as likely to be cancer or terrorist attacks as a new pony under the Christmas tree, but I’m choosing to be optimistic. You really do never know, and that’s why we get up every morning: To know.

Actually, yesterday I got up for another reason — I had to be Cocoa Mom at Kate’s school, to make warm chocolate sustenance for the incoming crossing guards, who are inordinately exposed to the elements as part of their duties. This being the Winter That Wasn’t, it was a borderline day; you’re excused from duty if the temperature is above 45 degrees. It was a couple below that, so I came in and stirred up a couple pots of Swiss Miss. Most of the takers were boys, who then sat down around a table in the small kitchen area to drink. I turned around, and caught them in a brief moment when their poses were not that of little boys, but of old men talking over coffee in all the places that old men do that — a casual slump, one hand wrapped around the cup, staring into the middle distance, dreaming of whatever. One boy wore, with no apparent sense of irony, a Sinatra-style fedora, which is probably why my mind made the connection. I just stood there for a minute, looking at the old men they will become (if they’re lucky enough to live that long), enjoying this moment of time travel before the bell rang. A little gift from the cosmos.

And now a little gift of bloggage:

When conservatives get high, they get high with a doctor’s prescription: William Rehnquist, addict. A fascinating story, really, which would have been an interesting cautionary tale, had its central figure chosen to tell it before he died. It seems the man in the striped judicial robes fell victim to a classic trope of the age: If it comes from a doctor, it’s not a drug, it’s medicine. Only the medicine was Placidyl, a “sleep aid” that could knock out an elephant, and the judge was taking three times the prescribed dose. Withdrawal made him a raving loon, and he tried to escape the hospital in his jammies.

Why laid-off newspaper journalists get bitter: “There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was really affordable. But I’m not prepared to reenact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility.” An inside look at the looting of the Chicago Sun-Times. Don’t read if you’re on blood-pressure medication.

One dark cloud on our visit with our friends came when they were preparing to leave early yesterday morning, and John checked his e-mail one last time, only to learn of the death of a college friend, Steve Korte. John writes a nice remembrance, but I’m linking separately to a little treat within for you Columbus natives: Steve’s recreation of “Wake Up, Mr. Tree,” beloved by all Columbus kids who watched “Luci’s Toyshop,” which is to say, all Columbus kids.

I’ve loved Djimon Hounsou since I saw his staggeringly fine ass in “Gladiator,” and resented the preachy movies of Edward Zwick since I saw “Glory” for the second time. Joe Queenan has his own problems with the Zwickian genre, perhaps best described as Whitey Saves the Black Folk. The usual Queenanesque evisceration.

Now I gotta go make dog biscuits. Why? Because I care, that’s why.

I first encountered the work of Michael Browning in the pages of Tropic, the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine. It was a piece about what a handful his 2-year-old was, normally a subject a young, unmarried, fearful-of-parenthood female reader would avoid like gum surgery. Intrigued by the headline — “The Life and Crimes of Matthew No” — I started reading. Within a minute, I was giggling. In a few more, guffawing. It was an early lesson that in the hands of a gifted writer, any topic can be entertaining. Even toddlers. Even gum surgery.

I don’t know if Browning ever wrote about that, but I learned to look for his byline on the KRT wire. For years, he reported from Beijing, then came back to Florida and found good stories everywhere. In 1999, seeing the inevitable in Miami, he moved to the Palm Beach Post, where my friend Carolyn works. She forwarded my fan letter to him, and he let me know that Matthew No turned out just fine:

Good old Matthew. We all give hostages to Fortune and Fate when we have children. They could end up drunkards, drug addicts, smushed by oncoming trucks, Knockers-Uppers of 14-year-olds. But to my amazement, he grew up to be a very decent sweet young fellow with a good work ethic and a gift for drawing and a love of art. I’m proud and relieved.

So am I. The picture he painted of the kid at 2 was truly terrifying. In a funny-terrifying way.

You know where this is going, however, don’t you? Michael Browning died this week, too young. The obit has links to several of his best pieces. A former colleague at the WashPost has rounded up a few more. I recommend every one.

Not much time today — the biggest part of the Big Edit still stretches before me, and I got five hours of sleep last night, which means an afternoon nap is a necessity. I sent the first part of the job to the client last night, and discovered we differ on whether the phrase “unpaid volunteer” is redundant.

I said yes, but then considered the volunteer military, which is paid, so OK, he wins on that one. And so it will go for about 50 more pages. Which I volunteered for.

Whenever I do a project like this, I can feel myself slipping into editor mode, ready to go 15 rounds over unnecessary adverbs and “unpaid volunteer.” Every so often I have to smack my cheeks, screech “big picture!” to the empty room and reset the ol’ brain. Good writing, and good editing, is all about details, but obsessing over details is the original slippery slope leading to madness. I didn’t know my journalism fellowship was really over until I was back at work on the copy desk, beefing with a colleague over…(harp glissando, swimmy-screen effects)

When I was away on my leave, the newspaper was redesigned yet again, with the usual results: More big type, less little type. Stories now carried a main headline, a sub headline, something called a “lead-in” and my personal favorite, the overline. The relationship between all of these elements was complex and changed from section to section, but it went basically like this: The main head could be Tarzan-speak: Fire kills 3. The subhed was longer, still Tarzan: Space heater blamed for early-morning blaze. The lead-in, if there was one, had to be more of a complete sentence: The home had smoke alarms, but they lacked batteries. (By this point the poor reporter could file a story saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah” and not worry about being found out. By readers, anyway.)

And then there was the overline, which hovered over everything else like a vengeful god. It was a short little all-caps thing that was at the very top of this explosion of verbiage, and no one really knew what to do with it. In sports stories, it was always whatever sport or league the story below concerned: NFL, COLLEGE BASKETBALL. Elsewhere, it was sort of a Greek chorus commenting on the story below. Think of an old-fashioned painting where a cherub flies above the action, trailing a banner like a little airplane, helpfully spelling out the scene’s moral lesson. For our fire story, it might be HOLIDAY TRAGEDY.

So on this one day in the summer of 2004, I was handling the Page One story about an insurgent attack in Iraq. The main hed was something like 4 Marines die in bombing and the subhed Truck explodes in crowded marketplace; 12 civilians killed, many more wounded. And there was probably a lead-in, too, but today’s story involves the overline. The one I wrote read BAD DAY IN BAGHDAD.

Can you guess what was wrong with this, and why it had to be corrected between editions? Was “bad” considered undue editorializing? No. Did it happen at the cusp of sunrise or sunset, making “day” not precisely accurate? No. Grizzled copy editors with the AP stylebook tattooed on their frontal lobes know the real problem:

Baghdad is not a stand-alone city in AP datelines; hence it must always have the country appended to it on first reference. And since this was part of the headline array, it might be the very first word a reader’s eye falls on. On the one-in-a-billion chance that this might be the first story read by a recently awakened coma victim who didn’t know the United States was fighting a war in Baghdad, Iraq and not Baghdad, Iowa, and might spend a nanosecond or two in terrible confusion, the overline was changed to read BAD DAY IN BAGHDAD, IRAQ.

No, I’m not kidding.

This is why I’m really not cut out to be a copy editor. However, I do it because I care.

Today’s holiday foto feature is submitted by Alex Jokay, who notes it’s from Aboite Township (the Fort’s hoit-to-the-toity suburb), “but not the tonier side of the tracks.” Ah, suburbia:

Now go out there and pick some nits of your own.

It’s amazing what “research” indicates these days: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals. Kinda says it all, eh?

Call me crazy — Hey! You crazy! — but in all the discussion of getting news online, my imagination is increasingly taken with the, shall we say, meta. Let lesser drones worry about delivery systems; I’m all about the voice. The syntax. The evolving grammar of a new language of news. (And if you can’t tell I’m being kind of snarky here, move along, you lesser drones.)

I can, and have, gone on for many zillions of words about this, but here it is in a nutshell: I once heard Nora Ephron speak, and she quoted Milton Glaser on car design. (I have looked high and low for the original citation of this, to no avail. So let’s trust Nora for a bit, shall we?) He said the look of cars mimics the prevaling mode of transportation of any era. When cars were first invented, they looked like buggies. As horses gave way to trains, cars started to look like locomotives (witness the Cords of the 1930s). As the interstate highway system began to spread, and cars came into their own, so commenced the glory days of car design, in the 50s, when they looked their most carlike. And then we were in the Jet Age, the come-fly-with-me years, and cars began to resemble airplanes.

(Yes, this train of thought begins to go off the rails in recent years, but I heard the speech in 1980 or so. Nowadays you’d say car design is tapping a deeper vein in the human subconscious. As the gap between the classes grow, we increasingly armor ourselves in quasi-military vehicles, the Hummer being only the most obvious and unimaginative example.)

Anyway, the same can be said for news media. Each technological advance starts by mimicking the one before. When radio news came along, it was little more than newspaper stories being read on the air; same with television. The telephone allowed radio reporters to give live reports on the air, something newspapers could obviously never do. As satellite trucks, ever-shrinking equipment and easy-edit videotape came along, TV news came into its own, fully exploiting its visual potential, and giving us the one-alarm house fire or two-car fatal as the lead story. We could write a whole book about the curious rise of the car chase as national news, but we won’t — I think the New Yorker had a pretty good piece about it earlier this year.

You could cite 1980 as the year newspapers finally acknowledged the obvious, when USA Today debuted with short-short stories, flashy graphics, throbbing color and, just in case you were still too stupid to get it, vending boxes that looked like televisions.

(So ends the in-a-nutshell version of my theory. A very fat nutshell.)

And now here we are in the 21st century, and online news is coming into its own. Newspapers are starting to figure out that putting the same old crap online isn’t going to make it, that you have to use the medium’s unique capabilities to craft a new kind of storytelling, and anyone who sits in a meeting and says, “But if we put links in stories, people will go away from our site and never come back” needs to be told to go make some more coffee. And as this is still a transitional period, occasionally you get a glorious mash-up. I give you this item from the Freep’s main page today, flagged as a “news bulletin:”

A manhunt is under way this morning after a prisoner escaped at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Check back for more developments.

Now that’s immediacy, eh? The story’s main source is a TV report, which tells you the newsroom is still virtually empty but for a few website-updaters, who have the right idea but no staff yet, but screw it, cite the TV guys, information wants to be free. Yet note the language and imagery, which is right out of a Superman movie: manhunt, carjacking, police searching “on the ground and in the air” and then, that bang-up last line, cut off in mid-sentence — can’t talk now, deadline! You can almost hear Perry White: “Olson! You know about these newfangled machines. Get this story on DailyPlanet.com!” (Meanwhile, Clark Kent slips quietly from the room.) Check back for more developments! This story’s so hot we gotta get it out there now!

OK. Maybe I’ve had too much coffee.

I think I have. God, I love this French Roast stuff.

Bloggage:

Slate caps its gallant crusade to promote “The Wire” with a lengthy interview with David Simon, the show’s creator. If you’d like, Wireheads may use this thread to discuss the penultimate episode, although I just watched the finale and can barely speak of it yet. It should win every Emmy and six more Peabodys, just for good measure, but it won’t. Ah, well. No one should go into any business to win awards, but still, some truths need to be acknowledged, and this is one: Best season of television, ever.

Jimmy Lileks writes five, or maybe fifteen, columns a week about nothing. Jon Carroll writes five columns a week about all kinds of things, and once in a while he tackles a real manageable topic that fits well in a 650-word space, like, oh, work and illusion and our lizard-brain fears. Enjoy.

I have no strong opinions about the six imams ejected from the US Air flight in Minneapolis. People are jumpy; these things will happen. Considering the things that have gotten people ejected from flights in this country — everything from having a buzzing sex toy in your luggage to defecating on the beverage cart — my policy is this: Give the folks a seat on the next available and chalk it up to experience.

However. Reading Debra Burlingame’s revved-up account of what got them booted — chanting “allahu akbar” at the boarding gate, bitching loudly about the war in Iraq, asking for seat-belt extenders for no apparent reason, I have to wonder if anyone thinks these things through. Sure, they were acting suspicious, at least as we consider suspicious behavior in a post-9/11 world. But they were acting ridiculously suspicious, at which point it comes around the circle and becomes non-suspicious again. Because really, if you were going to hijack a plane, would you stand at the gate with five other traditionally clad Muslims, chanting “allahu akbar?” Hell, no. You’d shave your beard, wear Western clothes, carry a briefcase and adopt the bored/irritated expression of every other air traveler. That’s how I’d do it, anyway. Just a thought.