Are you guys still wait­ing around for a post today? Sorry. I got dis­tracted. The base­ment floor drain is glug­ging, but for­tu­nately, I speak flu­ent Floor Drain. It is say­ing: Don’t you dare do any laun­dry today. Also, I’m inves­ti­gat­ing the Ama­zon Asso­ciates pro­gram site again, try­ing to fig­ure out a non-obnoxious, non-intrusive way to mildly mon­e­tize NN.C. I’m send­ing out seven mil­lion e-mails relat­ing to my other site, which is no longer entirely mine and is going to need some major atten­tion if our plans for its relaunch are to come to any­thing other than a spin­ning but­tfall. There’s a film fes­ti­val we’d like to enter “The Ceme­tery Precincts” in, which requires atten­tion and more e-mails. And there’s the fact it’s Fri­day, Jan. 2, which feels like some­thing other than a week­day but not quite a week­end, so I’m discombobulated.

Also, I over­slept, if over­sleep­ing means clear ’til 8:20 a.m. after retir­ing at 1:20 a.m.

How about a lit­tle hors d’oeuvre tray of blog­gage, then:

Repub­li­cans flee D.C. on the eve of the Obama inau­gu­ra­tions. Stay gone an extra week, folks.

I agree with TBogg, who said that when­ever he’s asked what three his­tor­i­cal fig­ures he’d like to have din­ner with, he replies, “I’d rather have three din­ners with Kathy Griffin.”

Finally, I took Kate to see “Gran Torino” on New Year’s Eve, on the grounds it was shot in and around our new home­town, includ­ing the Grosse Pointe Shores home of one of her friend’s cousins. I sub­jected my ten­der baby’s ears to a vir­tual bar­rage of pro­fan­ity and racial slurs in the hope she might get a valu­able take­away mes­sage from it, and this is what she took away: “Where are the black peo­ple? I thought this movie was about Detroit.” Any­way, a big dis­ap­point­ment. If you’re torn between, say, Manohla Dar­gis’ review in the NYT or David Edelstein’s in New York mag­a­zine, take it from me: Edel­stein speaks the truth. Alas.

Have a good weekend.

Since Kirk men­tioned it in the com­ments on the body-building post ear­lier today, the thread seems to have heated up again. So let’s take it out here, then, and ask the ques­tion that has bedev­iled human­ity for ages:

What’s the dif­fer­ence between a sport and a game?

Ask Google, and you’ll get a num­ber of answers, all of which indi­cate there’s no clear answer. I agree with Kirk that body­build­ing isn’t a sport, but I’m not sure what it is, either. Some say it’s not a sport if judg­ing is involved, which would toss out much of the Olympic com­pe­ti­tions. (My friend Ted, watch­ing ice danc­ing with me one year, said, “It’s not a sport if you do it in a bow tie.”) I recall many news­pa­per pho­tos of this or that pro­fes­sional golfer lin­ing up a putt with a cig­a­rette in his mouth, so I’d add that if you can smoke when you’re doing it, it’s not a sport, either.

What’s the cri­te­ria? Where do you sort them out?

The Com­mit­tee had an early meet­ing today. That would be the Com­mit­tee to Deprive Nance of Her Hard-Earned Rest. Over the years it’s had var­i­ous sub­com­mit­tees and chairs, but at the moment, the Worker Men are in their ascen­dancy, and have wres­tled con­trol away from the Blue Jays, the pre­vi­ous cadre at the top of the pyra­mid, squab­bling REALLY LOUDLY for the chance to wake me up at an unrea­son­able hour.

The Worker Men are the guys in charge of tear­ing up our street, then leav­ing for a cou­ple weeks, then com­ing back to push some stuff around, then leave for a cou­ple more weeks, etc. Osten­si­bly they’re replac­ing a water main, but the new main has been buried for weeks now, and once again, work seems to have stalled. That doesn’t keep them from mak­ing an early appear­ance. For sev­eral days, some­one was in charge of mov­ing a back­hoe from one end of the street to the other — CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK — at 7:45 a.m., then leav­ing it there, unused, for the rest of the day. I go to bed some­where around 1 a.m.; all I want to do is sleep until 8; IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Appar­ently so.

This morn­ing they put in a stronger, and louder, show of force, push­ing sev­eral pieces of heavy equip­ment around, com­plete with those hor­ri­ble beep-beep-beep backup noises. I look out­side, and for the life of me I can’t fig­ure out what they’re doing, other than mak­ing noise. I sus­pect the whole crew is com­prised of tod­dler boys, who have dis­cov­ered this cache of really big Tonka trucks, and are just hav­ing fun dri­ving them around.

OK, rant over. Sec­ond cup of cof­fee in progress. I guess if I wanted I could close the win­dows and turn on the A/C, but it’s a cool, pleas­ant morn­ing and I want to feel the breeze on my face as I sit next to the win­dow. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Never mind. Count­ing bless­ings now.

Actu­ally, if it were per­mit­ted, I’d love to hang out with these guys for a day or two, just to watch them work. No one really knows how things are done any­more, do they? What’s involved in build­ing a bridge, replac­ing a water main, rais­ing a sky­scraper? I’m 95 per­cent clue­less. That’s where I envy Alan his time spent work­ing in fac­to­ries while he decided whether to fin­ish col­lege; he under­stands the grit-and-grime part of the world far bet­ter than I do. (Too well, actu­ally; hav­ing worked in a canned-soup fac­tory, he won’t eat canned soup. His sto­ries about mov­ing dough around in the frozen-pizza plant will put you off frozen pizza for­ever. The less said about Etch-a-Sketch pro­duc­tion, the bet­ter, and if I can leave you with one les­son, it’s this: Don’t ever buy man­u­fac­tured hous­ing, unless you want to learn how “DAP it” became a catch phrase in our household.)

Well, obvi­ously I got nut­tin to say. Do I have blog­gage? Not much of that, either. (The world is on vaca­tion.) But a little:

Why char­ity is com­pli­cated these days: CARE turns down 45 mil­lion Amer­i­can dol­lars, because a need­lessly com­plex sys­tem of ship­ping sub­si­dized Amer­i­can crops over­seas to sell in the Third World wastes money and under­mines local farm­ers. Color me shocked.

Hack­ing Star­bucks, tes­ti­mony that non­fat jour­nal­ism doesn’t have to be boring.

In my per­am­bu­la­tions around Flickr the other day, I found this gem, shot by Bobby Alcott, a local Detroit pro. It reminded me of my ex-neighbor Den­nis in Indi­ana, who left our lit­tle street in the city to move to the coun­try and breed cham­pi­onship Angus cat­tle. He mostly dealt in embryos and frozen semen but kept a few head around the place, and I loved to scratch their sweet-smelling fore­heads. “You really like live­stock, don’t you?” he asked once, amazed. Well, how can you not? They’re irresistible.

This story has so many coulds, mights and isn’t-even-on-the-drawing-board-yets you won­der why it even exists, but the idea is intrigu­ing: a muscle-car hybrid. A Camaro hybrid. I’d buy that just to piss peo­ple off, even though I know it’ll fall apart in six months and cost me thou­sands of dol­lars and thou­sands of tears. It’s just funny.

What’s that I hear out­side? It’s the beep­beep­beep­ing of a back­hoe! Time to get to work.

A very smart per­son who liked to por­tray him­self as oth­er­wise — yes, I’m talk­ing about you, Rob Daumeyer — once told me the secret to busi­ness report­ing: All sto­ries are busi­ness sto­ries. Find the money angle and empha­size it enough to sat­isfy your boss, then tell the rest of the story. A good story is a good story; don’t get in its way and all will be revealed.

That’s a wise out­look, and it’s one rea­son I enjoy my night-shift edit­ing job, surf­ing the great dig­i­tal media land­scape in search of sto­ries of inter­est to our cor­po­rate clients, who are in the health-care trade. Many of these are four-graf snooz­ers on ABC Biotech being bought by XYZ Pharma, but sev­eral times a night I find real gems, great sto­ries that just hap­pen to be health-related. As Rob pointed out, almost every story has a money angle. That’s also true for health-care sto­ries. If a doc­tor appears some­where in the story, you’re good to go. Every hos­pi­tal in your town is more crammed with pathos, humor, greed and plot twists than any news­pa­per can carry.

All this by way of point­ing out one I found last night, from The Hindu, an English-language paper in India. It’s about the ele­phant in the Chi­nese liv­ing room, which coughs and smells like an ashtray:

Eyes shin­ing and lips aquiver, the bride stands along with her fam­ily at the entrance to a five star hotel in down­town Kun­ming, the cap­i­tal of China’s Yun­nan province. Out­fit­ted in lay­ers of meringue-like white lace, she hands out wel­come gifts to the wed­ding guests who pull up in a steady stream of flashy cars.

The gifts con­sist chiefly of cig­a­rettes. Later on in the fes­tiv­i­ties the bride lights the cig­a­rettes of all the male guests, a com­mon rit­ual at Chi­nese wed­dings that is sup­posed to auger well for the newlywed’s abil­ity to have children.

Would you not kill to see this? I mean, can you even imag­ine the sight of a bride mak­ing the rounds of her own wed­ding with a Zippo? I won­der if this is done casu­ally — if she min­gles through the guests, light­ing every­one up — or if it’s more of a rit­ual, with all the men lin­ing up with a Marl­boro dan­gling from their lips, and she flits, bride-like, down the line. We could spend all day dis­cussing how this became a rit­ual in the first place, how putting flame to a tube of a known car­cino­gen some­how became a fer­til­ity rit­ual. (I sus­pect Hol­ly­wood, and all those post-coital cig­a­rettes.) Or we could just enjoy the essen­tial weird­ness of our big world, and feel grate­ful that we live in it, at a time when you can read The Hindu online.

The rest of the story, by the way, is about what hap­pens when all those guests have been smok­ing for a few decades:

Chi­nese soci­ety today is in a cri­sis. The cri­sis is to do with the health of the world’s most pop­u­lous soci­ety and the cul­prit is tobacco. With an esti­mated 350 mil­lion smok­ers, China is both the largest pro­ducer and con­sumer of tobacco, account­ing for a third of the world’s smok­ers. Accord­ing to offi­cial sta­tis­tics, the coun­try sells around 1.6 tril­lion cig­a­rettes a year.

The WHO says smok­ing related dis­eases kill one mil­lion Chi­nese annu­ally and if unchecked this num­ber could dou­ble by 2020. With incomes in China ris­ing steadily over the last few decades, so has the aver­age daily con­sump­tion of cig­a­rettes per smoker from around four in 1972 to 10 in 1992 to nearly 15 today. Smok­ers are also begin­ning to develop the habit at ever younger ages with a stag­ger­ing 100 mil­lion smok­ers esti­mated to be under the age of 18.

But despite the alarm­ing evi­dence, many in the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment claim the coun­try can­not afford to quit smok­ing, given the value of the tobacco indus­try to the Chi­nese econ­omy. Cig­a­rette com­pa­nies not only gen­er­ate tens of thou­sands of jobs (up to 100 mil­lion Chi­nese are directly or indi­rectly depen­dent for their liveli­hood on the tobacco indus­try) but are also among the top tax pay­ers, con­tribut­ing $30 bil­lion or eight per cent of total cen­tral gov­ern­ment rev­enue in 2005.

It’s the old­est story in the world: Oops, we did it again.

So, some bloggage:

Yes­ter­day I said I love the inter­net. Some­times I hate it. The story of Alli­son Stokke is one good rea­son to. It’s about a teenage ath­lete of some accom­plish­ment who has become the new Cindy Mar­go­lis on the strength of one photo of her look­ing very pretty (or hawt, as you kids like to say) at a track meet. And then, well…

Three weeks later, Stokke has decided that con­trol is essen­tially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a dis­tress­ing les­son in the unruly momen­tum of the Inter­net. A fan on a Cal foot­ball mes­sage board posted a pic­ture of the attrac­tive, ath­letic pole vaulter. A pop­u­lar sports blog­ger in New York found the pic­ture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other blog­gers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hun­dreds of thou­sands of Inter­net users had searched for Stokke’s pic­ture and leered.

The wave of atten­tion has steam­rolled Stokke and her fam­ily in New­port Beach, Calif. She is rec­og­nized — and stared at — in cof­fee shops. She locks her doors and tries not to leave the house alone. Her father, Allan Stokke, comes home from his job as a lawyer and searches the Inter­net. He reads mes­sage boards and tries to pick out poten­tial stalkers.

Argh. (And in case you’re won­der­ing, yes, I con­sid­ered not link­ing to the photo. But what was the first thing I did after read­ing that story? Look for the photo. And what is the one thing my edi­tors used to do that drove me insane when I worked in news­pa­pers? Decline to pub­lish some­thing widely known/available else­where, on the grounds of moral or eth­i­cal purity. I try to live in the reality-based world. Any­way, I looked at the photo and said, “That is a girl who takes great care of her­self.” Your reac­tion may be different.)

For­tu­nately, though, we can con­sole our­selves by turn­ing our atten­tion spans, now whit­tled down to a sub-toddler level, to more amus­ing pic­tures like this. Look, some­thing shiny and funny!

That’s it for now. Tune in tomor­row for our semi-whatever salute to “Ode to Bil­lie Joe”!

Kate and Allie (yes, really) find­ing Nemo.

I give the place a lot of grief, but never let it be said I don’t give Fort Wayne its due, either. The ren­o­va­tion of the main library, a gut-to-the-studs bump-out, was a major project, the cen­ter­piece of an $80 mil­lion bond issue for improve­ments system-wide. A remon­strance, in which the argu­ments ran from “that’s too much money” to “splut­ter taxes splut­ter eggheads splut­ter a café?!?” failed, and so con­struc­tion com­menced more than three years ago. The entire main branch was relo­cated a few blocks down the street for the dura­tion. When it became clear we were leav­ing Fort Wayne for good some­time in 2004, one of my first thoughts was: I’m not going to see the library com­pleted. Damn.

Eighty mil­lion smack­ers is a lot of money. Noted. How­ever, it won’t even buy a mid­dling sta­dium any­more, a facil­ity that pol­i­cy­mak­ers every­where are con­vinced is a ver­i­ta­ble golden goose for any city. But I don’t fol­low most sports, and step into their are­nas only rarely, whereas I’m in a library at least once a week. When my child was younger, it was more often. It helped that the Allen County Pub­lic Library was such a rich well of resources, a facil­ity that seemed to belong in a city three times the size of Fort Wayne. And it wasn’t the crown jew­els — a top-three-in-the-country genealog­i­cal col­lec­tion, a rare-book room with every­thing from an unopened copy of Madonna’s “Sex” to a com­plete set of Edward Sher­iff Cur­tis’ “The North Amer­i­can Indian” folios — that I used. They just kept up with every­thing, from new fic­tion to kid-lit to inter­net resources to music and DVDs. The staff was friendly and sharp. I was grate­ful for it every time I stepped through the doors.

So. Came the week­end, and one of Kate’s play­dates fell through, and we had time on our hands. Where to go? No question.

I only took a few pic­tures. If you want to see pic­tures, go to the ACPL’s Flickr page, which doc­u­ments every nook and cranny. My imme­di­ate first impres­sion: They were right to aim high. To call Fort Wayne “fis­cally con­ser­v­a­tive” is laugh­ingly inad­e­quate; Mid­west­ern fru­gal­ity is the bass note of every dis­cus­sion of spend­ing tax dol­lars. There’s a main traf­fic artery on which you drive with your heart in your mouth, so nar­row are the lanes. They are the absolute bare min­i­mum allowed by law, con­structed to save a few shekels on con­crete and land under the admin­is­tra­tion of a pre­vi­ous, tight-fisted mayor. To drive on Lake Avenue is to expe­ri­ence a lit­eral man­i­fes­ta­tion of penny wise and pound fool­ish — it’ll have to be widened at some point, at a cost that dwarfs what it would have been to just make them wider in the first place — but nobody cares. The edi­to­r­ial pages call the old miser not a bull­headed obstruc­tion­ist but a nec­es­sary voice of fis­cal restraint. Whatever.

It would have been easy to do the same thing with the library, to address park­ing and space issues a lit­tle bit at a time, set­tling for good-enough rather than great. But library admin­is­tra­tors didn’t, and the pub­lic backed the play, and good for them. They bought them­selves not just a won­der­ful facil­ity but a new focal point for down­town. Exam­ple: The plan called for the aban­don­ment of one block of Web­ster Street, even though the build­ing wasn’t going to grow sig­nif­i­cantly in that direc­tion. Instead they built a wide plaza at the main entry, an out­door gath­er­ing place suit­able for every­thing from polit­i­cal speech­mak­ing to lolling with a good book. (I’m assum­ing there’ll be some benches there once the weather turns.)

And that’s apart from the other pub­lic spaces within — a the­ater, meet­ing rooms, acres of study tables and com­puter work sta­tions. There’ve been some crit­i­cisms that the 21st-century design slights the books, but I think it’s more a ques­tion of scale; the spaces are so vast now that the books take up less space than they used to. In any event, the new library elim­i­nated one of the odder traits of the old one — stor­age. There were two base­ment lev­els, and if the cat­a­log said the book you wanted was in stor­age, you filled out a slip and sent it down on a dumb­waiter. An unseen library troll fetched it for you and sent it back up in a few min­utes, which was always amus­ing. (I always wanted to send down a cup­cake or love note or something.)

Now all the books are in the pub­lic stacks, and the base­ment lev­els are under­ground park­ing. You swipe your library card to raise the gate.

When the old library closed, Kate mourned the loss of the children’s depart­ment, which was cramped but cozy, a place we both loved. The star attrac­tion was an aquar­ium fea­tur­ing a sin­gle occu­pant, which we called Mr. Fish. The new children’s sec­tion is vast, with sev­eral play areas and, well, a big upgrade in the aquar­ium depart­ment — two semi­cir­cles of beau­ti­ful salt­wa­ter tanks, along with a tubu­lar bub­ble dis­play that dri­ves the tod­dlers wild with delight. One of the librar­i­ans rec­og­nized us, and after mar­veling over the tall girl at my side who has replaced the lit­tle sto­ry­time reg­u­lar, we asked what­ever hap­pened to Mr. Fish.

She made a face. “Poi­soned,” she said, when a kid poured soap into the old tank. “The new ones are a lot taller,” she said. “I don’t think any­one will be able to reach that high.” Or will want to, I expect. It’s all too beautiful.

Finally, the café, a detail that drove the remon­stra­tors crosseyed. The library is a draw for lots of out-of-towners, mostly ama­teur geneal­o­gists. Down­town Fort Wayne can be a dreary place after dark and in cer­tain sea­sons, and a place to get a sand­wich and cof­fee with­out going too far was always these vis­i­tors’ No. 1 request; the cir­cu­la­tion desk used to give out a pho­to­copied list of all rea­son­ably priced restau­rants within walk­ing dis­tance. But a restau­rant struck many as the ulti­mate unnec­es­sary detail, a lux­ury for the sort of Starbucks-haunting layabouts the new place would be sure to attract. Why, there’s a Taco Bell right across the street; couldn’t they be happy with that?

The café shares a space with Twice Sold Tales, the used book­store run by the Friends of the Library. I ducked in to see if I could score some cheap hard­cov­ers, and found a few, only to see that the Friends’ cash reg­is­ter was unat­tended. A sign instructed me to take my pur­chase to the café reg­is­ter and pay there. I looked over. A line had formed that was nearly to the door, at least a dozen peo­ple. The lunch crowd, in other words. I put the books back and left empty-handed but heart-full. I’m so proud of the old place. They aimed high and hit a bullseye.