Quite an evocative photo from the archives of J.C. Burns, longtime friend of NN.C, as well as NN and everyone else in the co-prosperity sphere. You know, it occurs to me that some of you may doubt the stories I tell here: Oh yeah, she says she was a columnist. But was she really? Well, suckahs, here’s the proof. My own rack card. Note the awkward language: “Tuesdays, Thursdays, Friday and Saturdays.” (Only one Friday, evidently.) And that was an improvement; on my first rack card, they actually misspelled my name. But I wrote four days a week. Take that, Maureen Dowd.

It was so, so long ago: August 6, 1990, from J.C.’s Quicken records and the metadata, aka the headlines you can see in the window (“Bush disputes Iraqi pullout in Kuwait” and “Marines rescue Americans from Liberian capital”). And check out the rack card on the Journal’s box: “The fastest-growing daily newspaper in Indiana!” (Nowadays it would say, “Dying at a somewhat slower rate than the others.”)

Who was this person? I barely know her anymore. No wedding ring, liked neutral colors. Lived in a rented house on Buell Drive. Beyond that, hard to say.

A most excellent surprise in the New Yorker this week — an essay by Nora Ephron. I used to love Nora Ephron– no, I still do. Hand me a copy of “Scribble Scribble” or “Wallflower at the Orgy” and I can almost quote large chunks of it from memory. She’s one of the writers I read when I was — I hate this phrase, please understand I use it under advisement — finding my voice, and she’s one of the reasons I do what I do. If you want to be a writer, you need to find a few who make it look easy; otherwise you might never try. And she always made it look easy, even when it was obviously hard. You want to know what a great magazine essay/story looks like? Read “Dealing with the, uh, problem” from “Crazy Salad,” about the development of the feminine hygiene spray. It’s simultaneously a total stitch and a stinging indictment of an industry that did its best to convince women that their ya-yas had such strong odors that needed to be corrected and sweetened.

(I was reading it once, and giggling, and Alan asked why. I told him. He said, “Never in my life have I been able to smell a woman’s p*ssy in a social setting.” There you have it. I guess nobody told the suits at Alberto-Culver, makers of FDS.)

Anyway, the essay this week was called “Serial Monogamy,” and was about Ephron’s relationships with cookbooks. Only, of course, it’s not about just that. I should quote a section, but it’s not online, and I’d have to go upstairs and find the magazine, and I have to go to work in a few minutes and excuse excuse excuse and whine whine whine. Just buy the magazine — it’s the Eustace Tilley anniversary issue.

No excuse, sir — it was just one of those days. Got to bed late, slept badly, woke early, went back to bed, still slept fitfully. I always take a pulp novel to bed to help me sleep. Since I reread almost everything, reading one of my well-thumbed Travis McGee paperbacks is like hugging a well-loved teddy bear, and just as calming. Someone comes to Travis for help. Travis comes to the corrupt town to hunt down his quarry. A babe falls into his lap. And so on. I can drift off knowing the universe is still in proper order.

But today’s — “A Purple Place for Dying” — just kept me turning the pages. I couldn’t remember reading this one, although I obviously had. It kept me awake. That’s usually a good thing, except today it was bad.

Finally rose and shone close to 11, although I still felt cloudy. Showered, drank a gallon of coffee, took myself out to lunch (Thai). Problem…solved! There’s little that can’t be fixed with those three, is there? It’s like a good cry.

But since the day was effectively truncated, I have little more to add. Onward to bloggage!

He feels so princessy, so it’s not surprising the gay community has adopted Johnny Weir as one of their own. Regrettably, he’s a sore loser, but at least one who gives good quote: “I missed the bus. They changed the schedule,” Weir said. “It was every 10 minutes. Today it was every half-hour. I was late getting here and never caught up. I never felt comfortable in this building. I didn’t feel my inner peace. I didn’t feel my aura. Inside I was black.”

Girlfriend, I know just how you feel.

Hang on to your wallets, suckahs: Detroit is asked to bid on 2008 GOP convention. Wanna rent my house? Lots of fellow travelers here in the Woods.

Loved the book, looks like I’ll hate the movie. “Freedomland,” that is. Casting Julianne Moore as the white-trash mama? I know she’s a brilliant actress, but come on.

Finally, this Muslim cartoons thing is proving revelatory in so many ways. Not publishing them is becoming the newspaper equivalent of a 40-year-old virgin — the irrational protection of something now so overvalued it can hardly be brought into proper perspective. I’m glad to see college journalists trying their best to do the right thing, equally disheartened to see many getting nipped in the bud. Eric Zorn looks at the case at the University of Illinois, and is, in the bargain, exactly right.

This is a day late, but I’ve been hella busy — a Smart Money deadline at week’s end, an Hour Detroit one after that, my Great Big Essay on Newspapers for another client and in between, I have to wrangle a newsletter into shape, while many of its opinion-laden contributors and principals are in Turkey, Spain and other distant lands.

I don’t normally talk about my clients here, mainly because most of them are magazines and don’t post their content online, so what’s the point if you can’t link to it? But it occurs to me that many people, reading this blog, would assume I have one of those “careers” that sort of asks for ironic quotes around the word, and that isn’t the case. I really do write and edit for a living. My workload waxes and wanes, but at the moment it’s all wax, baby.

So let’s get to it, then.

Roy Edroso at Alicublog has become one of my favorite lefty bloggers, mainly because he has the patience to do what I don’t — read and respond to a great deal of the krep being churned by the so-called blogosphere. (He’s particularly devastating on Lileks.) Anyway, he took the time to write this, and for “Have a Right-Wing Valentine’s Day,” I’m grateful.

Nathan Gotsch has been working the Fort Wayne blogworld for the better part of a year, and not badly at all: All those stories he’d been doing about Fort Wayne topics, sometimes showing up or outright shaming actual paid local reporters in the process? He was living in L.A. most of the time. (“Has any editor in Fort Wayne approached you about maybe taking a job there?” I asked him once. After all, he can already write and work sources and demonstrates an eye for a good story. The answer: “No.” But of course. Not that he wanted a job there, but you know, you’d think someone might have made the gesture.) This week, though, he’s hanging up his cleats and turning the name, archives and all the rest of it over to ex-state legislator Mitch Harper, who’s now running Fort Wayne Observed.

Among Nathan’s many accomplishments in a short time is the humiliation and otherwise stick-a-fork-in-him-he’s-done barbecuing of the maroons at Mediawatch. (I’d link to the amusing podcast he did about their great trademark dispute, but it’s gone with the switchover. NO IT’S NOT: It’s here.)

Once again, terriers rule.

I keep reading about Cheney’s hunting screwup, and I notice that the quail, on this hunt, were farm-raised. Most people know something about “canned hunts,” where exotic, aged or fenced-in animals go toe-to-toe with armed Bwana Diks — Carl Hiaasen made them the focus of one of his comic novels, and they’ve gotten a lot of publicity. I’ve read defenses of them here and there. My feelings run across a range from open contempt to shrugging dismissal. I have no problem with most hunting, but if you want to shoot an animal in an unfair fight, that’s its own punishment, in my opinion.

Farm-raised birds are another variety of manipulated hunting. It goes without saying that this is a wussy-boy pursuit; one reason I generally respect hunters is, they get out of town and actually go into the country looking for their quarry. Most ethical hunters are also environmentalists (Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited), so we have that in common. But getting into the country requires some exertion — walking, hiking, even trudging. Evidently the vice president cannot be bothered to trudge.

Ultimately, I’m with Jon Stewart. As the WSJ reported a snippet of his “Daily Show” monologue:

The other player in the drama? Ranch owner and eyewitness Katharine Armstrong.

Jon Stewart: “What kind of hunting story begins with getting out of your car? As I sighted the great beast before us, my shaking hands could barely engage the parking brake. Slowly, I turned off the A/C and silenced my sub-woofers…”

Many years ago I read a story about these sorts of bird hunts. They were called, not ironically, “shootenannies.” Snicker.

More tomorrow or later. Back to the grindstone.

What is lost when a newspaper leaves town — in this case, Hazard, Kentucky.

This isn’t a question I spend a lot of time contemplating, but if you were to ask me to name a radio host who makes Sean Hannity look like Walter Cronkite, I’d immediately answer, “That’s easy — Glenn Beck.”

WOWO picked him up in Fort Wayne when I was still there, and it took about seven seconds before I pegged him as yet another contender for the Formerly Fat Man’s throne, should he ever feel like retiring or dying of a drug overdose. He came to town to lead one of these “Rallies for America” before Fort Wayne started sending its young men off to Iraq — flag-waving whoop-de-dos with lots of purple mountain majesties and Republicans.

But it was in Ohio where Beck made a big splash, grilling the mayor over a case of violence in Columbus Public Schools. I was discussing this case with a friend, and got as far as that previous sentence — “he grilled the mayor over a case of violence in Columbus Public Schools” — when he interrupted me with the obvious question: “What does the mayor of Columbus have to do with how the schools handle their affairs? That’s the school board’s job.” What an excellent point. Unfortunately, the mayor lost his temper when he should have just hung up, and oh my, but many points were scored.

Anyway.

So who, then, does CNN hire for a new show? But of course. I’m a couple days late with this, but I think San Francisco’s Tim Goodman sums up CNN’s problems pretty well:

Meanwhile, CNN’s Headline News has hired talk-radio host Glenn Beck, who is just to the right of Attila the Hun. The network tried to pass him off as some kind of affable conversationalist. That lasted about four, maybe five seconds, until all kinds of media watchdog groups pointed out Beck’s hate speech — calling Hurricane Katrina victims “scumbags” and saying he hated some of the family members who lost relatives on Sept. 11 because, well, they complained too much.

Sorry to start with the bloggage and not have any same ol’ same ol’ today, but yesterday was a socks-on-the-lampshade sort of day and today is going to be of the nose-to-the-grindstone variety. I took an assignment thinking it was something I could accomplish with one hand and a few enjoyable phone calls, and I’m now realizing it’s going to take actual, you know, hard work.

I hate when that happens. And it happens every day. But you know what? I still wouldn’t give it up. It occurred to me the other day that while I’m not yet making a living, I am making a life, and that counts for a lot.

More later, maybe. It’s time you learned the truth: I do all this while waiting for phone calls to be returned.

My earliest lessons in how tetchy newspaper ad managers could be were learned at, well, my earliest newspaper job, at the Columbus Dispatch. They were always monkeying with ads that tried to push the boundaries a little. And it was a tough job, considering the paper ran ads for strip clubs, adult movie theaters, escort services and the like.

Things crept in, anyway, and it was always funny to compare before-and-after changes. The adult-movie ads, for instance, had to be business-card size, no pictures, and titles and screening times only. But after a time they started allowing limited review quotes. And so, between editions, “Full er*ction — Hustler’s highest rating!” would become “Hustler’s highest rating!”

My all-time fave was for a stunt performer at Columbus Motor Speedway, the city’s stock-car track: “Bennie Koske, ‘the human bomb,’ will blow himself and a car up Sunday night!” Oops. In the second edition, he would “blow up a car and himself.” Which, really, is much better grammar.

But one ad in particular was a problem, and it was for one of the James Bond movies. This one. The art was of Roger Moore, framed between the legs of a babe with a bodacious can. Braver papers ran the picture whole; the Dispatch (and many others) cropped her at mid-thigh.

I thought of this when I started noticing internet ads on newspaper sites for “Imagine Me and You,” which looks like we should call it “Lipstick Mountain.” From the trailer, it seems to be about a woman whose lesbian affair interferes with her upcoming wedding. But I noticed two versions of the ad. This one:

And this one:

Only problem is, I noticed both ads on the same newspaper websites. Damn. Seems to be a vertical-horizontal question.

And a pretty crummy movie, if its January release is any indication. That’s Piper Perabo in the lead — went to Ohio University, starred in “Coyote Ugly” with assorted supermodels and, well, isn’t an Oscar contender.

Finally, maybe my all-time favorite ad at the Dispatch came after I left, a line of 6-point type buried deep in the classifieds. It was for a piece of buildable land, close to a middle school. “Buz Lukens special!” it crowed. Evidently the classified-ad takers don’t read the rest of the paper.

So I get a new blog playground, and almost immediately have to take a break. Another housekeeping note: I’ll be blogging Sunday, Monday and Tuesday from the North American International Auto Show, for the Free Press. This won’t be NN.C-type blogging, just straight reporting on the series of press conferences that stretch over the three-day press preview. You can see by the schedule it’ll be a bit hectic, so I don’t know how much gas I’ll have left in the tank by the time I get home. From the pacing, I expect I’ll be huffing Simoniz by Tuesday noon, but you never know.

If you’re interested in following the action, go to Freep.com and look around. I’m sure there’ll be a link from the main page.

This is a very cool show. I was last there two years ago, when I was a journalism fellow. The thing about press days is, every booth has a bar and a noshing opportunity, and what a time we had, wandering from Jaguar to Jeep to Porsche, swilling wine as we went. I especially remember the party atmosphere — and frozen daiquiris — at the Mini Cooper booth.

This year, alas, no alcohol for me. Maybe Gatorade.