If you read news­pa­pers, you might notice the ombudsman/reader rep­re­sen­ta­tive is occa­sion­ally called upon to respond to the hand-wringers among the sub­scriber base who com­plain there is never any “good news” in the paper. This isn’t dif­fi­cult, because it’s sim­ply untrue. Every sin­gle edi­tion of vir­tu­ally every metro daily printed con­tains a heapin’ helpin’ of so-called good news, and except in extreme cases — 9/11, say — there is usu­ally at least one such story on the front page.

They never answer the obvi­ous follow-up ques­tion: Why would any­one want to read nice sto­ries about brave Boy Scouts when you can watch the video of the bridal shop brawl — a story that comes with a great, made-for-tabloid name — on YouTube? I don’t know much, but I do know this: Right now, a pro­ducer from “Bridezil­las” is speed-dialing that fam­ily and pray­ing some­one else didn’t get to her first.

Why would you want to read about upright pub­lic ser­vants, when you can read about dis­graced for­mer Detroit city coun­cil pres­i­dent Mon­ica Cony­ers, who went to court to be sen­tenced yes­ter­day and unleashed the furies. To be sure, you could won­der if this even counts as news, as Monica’s furies are rarely leashed at all; she can’t even check into a hotel with­out the police being called. After try­ing to with­draw the guilty plea she nego­ti­ated and signed eight months ago, she threw this into the mix: “My hus­band is an older man,” and pre­sum­ably inca­pable of car­ing for two teenagers (although he retains chair­man­ship of the House Judi­ciary Com­mit­tee). John Cony­ers didn’t show, by the way, although he was said to be in his office in the same build­ing when the hear­ing was tak­ing place. Yet another strange mar­riage in a world full of them.

Speak­ing of which, I won­der what Mrs. Massa is think­ing these days. I met a gay vet­eran in a bar in Key West once. Which branch? I asked. “The Navy, of course,” he replied. “Of course?” Weeks at sea on a float­ing tub full of men. Draw your own conclusions.

Well, pals o’ mine, I wish I could tell you the Buckley’s did the trick, but it didn’t. I feel as awful today as I did yes­ter­day, but now I have twice as much work to do, so I must away. A lit­tle bloggage:

I’m won­der­ing if Kate is going to want to see “The Run­aways.” My guess is, not if it means sit­ting next to her mother while Dakota Fan­ning sings “Cherry Bomb.” The whole movie looks a lit­tle, uh, mature.

This is very obscure, but I had no idea: Lynda Barry went out with him? Really? Really.

God, I feel like crap. Please to for­give. We’ll try again tomorrow.

The state of state bud­gets all over the coun­try is the same — sea of red ink, soon to be joined by more oceans of carmine blood, as pro­grams and jobs and salaries and the like are slashed in a des­per­ate effort to keep up.

(This makes our con­ser­v­a­tive friends very happy, of course. But let’s leave that argu­ment for another day. Actu­ally, let’s not have that argu­ment at all. BO-ring.)

Here in Michi­gan, where blood and red ink and dys­func­tion and all sorts of malev­o­lent forces col­lide on a daily basis, they’re talk­ing about cut­ting the Pure Michi­gan cam­paign. Which is? Glad you asked:

I know some of you have video blocked, so just so you know, Pure Michi­gan is the state’s tourism cam­paign. Nar­rated by native Tim Allen, these are 30-second spots tout­ing the state’s beauty to poten­tial vaca­tion­ers around the coun­try. But it’s more than that — the ads air on local TV as well. Full of swoop­ing heli­copter shots of blue lakes and white sand and green forests, it’s not just a lure to spend your dol­lars in-state, but a form of ther­apy for a state that’s beaten down, but still has an Upper Penin­sula. I always watch them when they come on, and not because one fea­tured the chan­nel in front of my friends’ sum­mer cot­tage. (The one whose depths con­tain the crude rub­ber toy exclu­sively employed for humil­i­at­ing pho­tographs of those who fell asleep before the oth­ers at the nightly par­ties? you’re won­der­ing. Why yes. And who hurled it there, after star­ring in a par­tic­u­larly ran­cid series? You’ll have to see if he ‘fesses up in the comments.)

The total bud­get for the cam­paign is $30 mil­lion. The Senate-approved bud­get bill whacks that by half, led by a sen­a­tor from Novi who is also behind the move to slash or elim­i­nate the film­mak­ing tax credit that’s led to so much lights-camera-action around here of late. She’s what Cool Hand Luke would call a hard case. The dis­cus­sion, as you can imag­ine, is about whether the ads are cost-effective, and var­i­ous resort-country busi­ness­peo­ple are step­ping up to tell the media yes, it boosted busi­ness. My ques­tion is, but are they effec­tive as ther­apy? Is there ever a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for feel-good spend­ing by a gov­ern­men­tal body? Espe­cially in a time when we could use a lit­tle good feeling?

The “I Love New York” cam­paign, you might recall, was launched in some dark hours for that state, dur­ing its largest city’s Travis Bickle period. Times Square was all porn palaces, the sub­ways smeared with graf­fiti. I’m sure some pub­lic ser­vant there said pro­claim­ing love for this place in ads run­ning in Cleve­land and Atlanta was a waste of tax­payer dol­lars. Who remem­bers them now? And yet the logo — designed by Mil­ton Glaser, pro bono — endures today and is among the most suc­cess­ful brands in adver­tis­ing his­tory. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. and Mrs. Bean Counter.

Michigan’s a pretty beaten-down place at the moment, but we still have our looks. And our Upper Penin­sula. It would be nice if our leg­is­la­tors would remem­ber that once in a while.

OK, blog­gage:

While we’re talk­ing video, the Butt Drugs com­mer­cial. Which shows the best of Indi­ana. Snicker.

Lind­say Lohan makes a des­per­ate plea for atten­tion. It’ll prob­a­bly work. It’s work­ing now.

And now, off to work.

Nathan Gotsch, one of those young squeaky-clean Fort Wayne guys for whom the phrase “you went to Con­cor­dia, didn’t you?” was coined, is try­ing to pro­duce a TV pilot far away from the Man, man. It’s an expan­sion of his Josh Jen­nings for Con­gress spoof of 2006 — he pro­duced a cam­paign com­mer­cial for a fic­tional char­ac­ter who decided a job in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives would be way bet­ter than one at Sub­way. He got a lit­tle atten­tion, if “being men­tioned on Tucker Carlson’s show” counts as “a lit­tle atten­tion,” and I think it does.

Any­way, Nathan got some atten­tion from the Man, and after con­sid­er­ing what going the tra­di­tional route would entail, decided to blaze an indie trail. He’s put together a bud­get for a $25,000 pilot pro­duc­tion, and is try­ing to raise the dough via Kick­starter. Here’s his fundrais­ing page.

I read the script and it’s pretty funny. (Fun­nier than “Reno 911,” any­way.) If you’d like to help Nathan, go to his Kick­starter page, watch the video, mar­vel at how much he resem­bles the absolute essence of a Con­cor­dia grad­u­ate, and, if you’re so inclined, kick him a few bucks. He has a week to raise about $15K. Goad to my fel­low Hoosiers, past and present — although the pilot script never explic­itly says so, the story’s set in Fort Wayne, and I can assume this would come up in sub­se­quent episodes. How­ever, if it gets picked up, I think we can expect to see Nathan’s crew in Michi­gan for exte­ri­ors shoot­ing, because we have the fat tax incen­tives. (For now.) So win-win all around for my Mid­west playas.

No pres­sure, just a chance to use a Web 2.0 idea for good, for a change. (You know how Kick­starter works, right? Nathan only gets the money if he reaches his goal. If not, you’re not billed. That way you aren’t giv­ing him cash to drink away his sor­rows because he didn’t get enough to make his pilot.)

Given the bum­mer tone of recent days, let’s make this Twin­kle Thurs­day, and strive for opti­mism in all things. It’s what Josh would do.

While this isn’t exactly a happy-news sort of thing, I’m call­ing it out because it makes me feel opti­mistic about the future — of jour­nal­ism, any­way. One of our read­ers, Kim, left it low in the com­ments of yesterday’s post, but let’s drag it out into the light of day:

Bob (not Greene) and all the other journos out there who have been accused of mak­ing it up: Here’s the story we used from a stu­dent jour­nal­ist who was at the bor­ing press con­fer­ence but pay­ing close atten­tion (and record­ing it) because she didn’t want to get it wrong. Note the link to actu­ally lis­ten to the state del­e­gate say­ing the words he now says were “poorly cho­sen” and mis­in­ter­preted. As you might expect, there’s been a fecal avalanche as a result. Rachel M., Huff­Post, Sally Quinn — everybody’s weigh­ing in. There’s a move­ment to skewer the stu­dent reporter because she is a stu­dent and because much larger, “actual” papers were present and totally missed it. Why’d they miss it? My guess is they were just mak­ing the dough­nuts, going to a con­ser­v­a­tive legislator’s press con­fer­ence about de-funding Planned Par­ent­hood and fil­ing that Sat­ur­day feed-the-beast story. Sim­i­lar to the rea­son a local del­e­gate who was present as a sup­porter of de-funding PP did not hear it — she admit­ted to not pay­ing atten­tion because she was talk­ing to another del­e­gate. Quite a les­son for the stu­dent. I’d say for pub­lic offi­cials every­where, too, but that would make me seem much younger than I am.

The story, if you’re not inclined to click through, quotes a state delegate’s inter­est­ing opin­ion about why there are so many dis­abled chil­dren in the world:

“The num­ber of chil­dren who are born sub­se­quent to a first abor­tion with hand­i­caps has increased dra­mat­i­cally. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the sub­se­quent chil­dren,” said Mar­shall, a Republican.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Mar­shall, well, he now says he didn’t exactly say that:

“No one who knows me or my record would imag­ine that I believe or intended to com­mu­ni­cate such an offen­sive notion. I have devoted a gen­er­a­tion of work to defend­ing dis­abled and unwanted chil­dren, and have always main­tained that they are spe­cial bless­ings to their parents.”

In other words: Shit. And you were record­ing? Dou­ble shit.

I love it when Roger damns with faint praise. In this case, review­ing “The Crazies.”

“The Cra­zies” is a per­fectly com­pe­tent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its inter­est for me, the Zom­bie Film. It pro­vides such a con­ve­nient sto­ry­telling device: Large num­bers of mind­less zom­bies lurch toward the cam­era as the hero wreaks sav­age destruc­tion; they can be quickly blown away, although not with­out risk and occa­sional loss of life. When suf­fi­cient zom­bies have been run through, it’s time for a new dawn.

“The Cra­zies” stars NN.C crush object Tim­o­thy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, two actors who class up the joint, although I watched the trailer and it uses the old “no sig­nal” cell-phone trope. As they say in that other zom­bie movie: One more for the bon­fire. (That link doesn’t go to an imdB page, by the way, but to a great “no sig­nal” mon­tage, via John August, which he cred­its to Four­Four. Has all due credit been passed around? I hope so.)

It’s 9:47, which means my Flex Appeal class starts in 13 min­utes and I must away. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beau­ti­ful, and so are you, dear read­ers. So I’m going out to play.

For a place where ideas are sup­posed to be exchanged in a lively man­ner, most news­pa­per edi­to­r­ial pages are, well, not.

The one in Colum­bus, when I was there, was the last stop before retire­ment, the place for loyal but lame geld­ings to put their whiten­ing muz­zles to the lush grass for the last cou­ple of years, and be asked to do no work more dif­fi­cult than car­ry­ing the chil­dren around the pas­ture, and have I mixed enough metaphors? (I’m told it has since improved. Con­sid­er­ably.) One of the young news­room guns used to pub­lish an equal parts scathing-and-fun inter­nal cri­tique of the paper, and did a hilar­i­ous take­down of Dis­patch edi­to­ri­als. At least twice a month the page could be reli­ably counted on to take note of an approach­ing hol­i­day, wel­come it, and hope it her­alded good things. I remem­ber one such head­line: Bean Can Day Awaited. Read­ers, do you know that “bean can day,” in quotes, does not turn up a sin­gle result in all of Google­dom? Could that aging scribe have been hav­ing his own joke, turn­ing in an edi­to­r­ial for a hol­i­day entirely born of his imag­i­na­tion, wait­ing to see if it would run? I think so. He was like the National Lampoon’s Pent­house par­ody, where the copy around the cen­ter­fold, month after month, was the text of the writer’s res­ig­na­tion let­ter, never accepted because it was never read.

My friend Leo does his best with what he has to work with in Fort Wayne, and that’s not bloody much, but even in the high-cotton days, I won­dered about the paper’s pecu­liar attach­ment to cer­tain writ­ers, both local and syn­di­cated. I think we had to have been among the last papers still run­ning the vile Joseph Sobran, years after William F. Buck­ley him­self had cashiered the anti-semitic bas­tard from the National Review. (Here’s a recent effort, “Sodomy, Abor­tion and the Forces of Hate,” in which he refers to our “mulatto president” — still swingin’!) And then there was the uniquely awful Thomas Sowell.

I don’t think this take­down of his lat­est book can be improved upon, so I’ll just link, quote a pas­sage or two, and encour­age the rest of you wal­low in it the way I did:

Even jere­mi­ads should have their joys; there is some­thing so won­der­ful about being a writer and a critic that deliv­er­ing even bad news can be a source of unbear­able plea­sure. But Sow­ell takes no joy in any­thing he has to say: his tone is as dour and depress­ing as his con­clu­sions. I under­stand that the man is a con­ser­v­a­tive, but can’t he crack a smile? Sow­ell is such a plod­der that even sar­casm, conservatism’s reli­able and some­times amus­ing old ally, is beyond his reach.

This busi­ness of dreary writ­ing escapes me. True, writ­ing can be a tor­ment. But then there is the pay­off: the unex­pected insight, the sly pun, the impli­ca­tion left dan­gling for the reader to run with. Did Sowell’s research assis­tants, one of whom has worked for him for two decades, ever hear him shout with joy? Did he ever run into a colleague’s office burst­ing with enthu­si­asm about a bril­liant sen­tence that made a whole chap­ter hang together? I can­not believe it. There is no grandeur in Sowell’s words, no sign of human cre­ativ­ity, no dream or fan­tasy of immor­tal­ity. Sow­ell writes as if called to grim duty.

It’s that good all the way through. I love a piece like this that sin­gles out some­thing you hadn’t thought of but, once it’s pointed out to you, hits you like a sledge­ham­mer. In focus­ing on Sowell’s unique joy­less­ness, he puts his fin­ger on what’s wrong with so many news­pa­per edi­to­r­ial pages. Leo fre­quently pointed out that the death of oxy­genated edi­to­r­ial pages tracked with the rise of the one-newspaper town, that the monop­oly on print adver­tis­ing led to the cur­rent model of point-counterpoint, on one hand/on the other hand, and what does the future hold? Only time will tell. What­ever. That doesn’t explain how Sow­ell found such a com­fort­able home on his page, but Sow­ell cer­tainly towed toed the ide­o­log­i­cal line, if also being as bor­ing as dry toast.

Joy­less — that’s exactly the word for it. Else­where in that story I learned with amaze­ment that Sow­ell has pub­lished 46 books. Forty-six! As Wolfe notes:

I con­fess to not hav­ing read them all. But I have read enough of them to know that Sow­ell is not one for chang­ing his mind. Although he claims to have been a Marx­ist in his youth, his pub­lished writ­ings never vary: the same themes — the mar­ket works, affir­ma­tive action does not work, Marx­ism is wrong, and, yes, intel­lec­tu­als are never to be trusted — dom­i­nate from start to finish.

I’ll say. Ironic that Sow­ell writes like a mir­ror image of a good Marx­ist appa­ratchik in Stalin’s Soviet Union, ain’a?

While we’re on the sub­ject of writ­ers, two rec­om­men­da­tions before I leave:

This NYT piece on the dis­cov­ery of a major influ­ence on William Faulker — a diary kept by a plan­ta­tion owner who was an ances­tor of a child­hood friend — is full of great details, not the least of which is its descrip­tion of the diary itself:

The cli­mac­tic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yel­lowed pages scrawled in fad­ing ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the doc­u­ment on which Faulkner mod­eled that ledger as well as the source for myr­iad names, inci­dents and details that pop­u­late his fic­tion­al­ized Yok­na­p­ataw­pha County has been discovered.

The orig­i­nal man­u­script, a diary from the mid-1800s, was writ­ten by Fran­cis Terry Leak, a wealthy plan­ta­tion owner in Mis­sis­sippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wig­gin Fran­cisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since child­hood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wig­gin Fran­cisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s fre­quent vis­its to the fam­ily home­stead in Holly Springs, Miss., through­out the 1930s, say­ing Faulkner was fas­ci­nated with the diary’s sev­eral vol­umes. Mr. Fran­cisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remem­bers that he “was always tak­ing copi­ous notes.”

And, finally, another NYT story on another cel­e­brated author, this one 17 years old and Ger­man, who is bat­tling pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions after her hot book of the moment was found to have lots of cut­ting and past­ing from other sources. This strikes me as a rather ballsy defense, however:

Although Ms. Hege­mann has apol­o­gized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended her­self as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of infor­ma­tion across new and old media, to cre­ate some­thing new. “There’s no such thing as orig­i­nal­ity any­way, just authen­tic­ity,” said Ms. Hege­mann in a state­ment released by her pub­lisher after the scan­dal broke.

In other words, the sampler’s excuse, i.e., I took that pre­vi­ous thing, yes, but I made it my own. Feh. Peo­ple who say there’s no such thing as orig­i­nal­ity are, what’s the word? Uno­rig­i­nal.

Finally, a good ChiTrib piece on the death of a les­bian bar. A lit­tle melan­choly, but not — the story points out that as the gay com­mu­nity is wel­comed into the main­stream, it has less use for bars as com­mu­nity cen­ters. Any­thing that gets peo­ple out of the smoky air and into the light can’t be all bad.

OK, I’ve prat­tled on too long and I have much work to do. Enjoy the weekend.

Kate got a snow day today. I’m flab­ber­gasted. The super­in­ten­dent here is noto­ri­ous for never clos­ing school; you look at those “you know you’re from Grosse Pointe if” things on Face­book and they all say, “…you hate Suzanne Klein because you never got a snow day.” From where I sit, it looks as though we got five or six inches, remark­able only because it’s taken this long to arrive. And they can­celled school. This is surely a sign of the apocalypse.

Frankly I don’t blame her for being a hard case. All schools are local here. There are no buses. And half the stu­dent body has at least one par­ent who dri­ves a hulk­ing SUV that could scale Mt. McKin­ley (at least, that’s what the com­mer­cials imply). Plus, duh, it’s Michi­gan. I tell her she doesn’t want the Fort Wayne model, which was to can­cel or delay schools at the first sign of a cloud cross­ing the sky, which makes all the kid­dies happy until the end of the year rolls around, and the days have to be made up. Know­ing what hap­pens around here at year’s end — in which learn­ing basi­cally ceases after Memo­r­ial Day, replaced with a round of pic­nics, par­ties and in-class movies — I won­der why state leg­is­la­tors even bother fuss­ing about this stuff.

So, any­way, snow day. I made chili last night. Used my own chuck (ground by moi), added a bas­ket of corn muffins. There are lots of left­overs. Stop by.

Which reminds me of a story some­one once told me: A cou­ple of his acquain­tance gone to see Bran­ford Marsalis per­form in (I think) Bloom­ing­ton, Ind., and as they were leav­ing, walked past the stage entrance, where Marsalis was hang­ing around, talk­ing to the fans. Lit­tle by lit­tle the crowd dwin­dled until it was Marsalis and this cou­ple, and he said, “So, what’s a good place to eat around here?” They sug­gested a few places, and then the man added, “My wife made a pot of chili before we left. It should be pretty good by now. You’re wel­come to join us.” Marsalis said OK, that sounded good, and they drove him home with them, and then back to the tour bus. I’m not sure what to make of this story, other than a) the Marsalises are jes’ plain folks; and b) one should never under­es­ti­mate a tour­ing musician’s long­ing for home cook­ing. I think it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle of both.

Does Branford’s more famous brother still do his great radio show? I for­get the name of it, but it should have been called “Mas­ter Class with Wyn­ton Marsalis.” I would catch it on Colum­bus’ public-radio sta­tion when I was trav­el­ing there often on Fri­day evenings. It was a really engag­ing lec­ture with lots of records, aimed at that pre­cise point where a trained musi­cian would learn some­thing new from it, but an untrained lis­tener could eas­ily fol­low it, too. He’d tell you why Thelo­nious Monk was impor­tant, play a record, explain why he was a great com­poser, play a record, drill down into par­tic­u­larly engag­ing key changes, play a record, etc. By the end of the hour you felt a) enter­tained; and b) smarter. That’s a hard line to walk.

Add me to the I Hate Face­book club. If it weren’t for the fact many peo­ple con­sider FB my de facto e-mail account, I’d drop it entirely. They’ve retooled it yet again, and it’s the usual train wreck — reload your home page three times, and you’ll get three dif­fer­ent news feeds, and one of them will be from two days ago. I think what they’re strug­gling with is suc­cess. I now have nearly 300 “friends,” many of whom I couldn’t iden­tify in a police lineup, but are still pretty good FB play­ers, in that they post good links and can be funny in a status-update line. Other peo­ple are far bet­ter friends in real life — my best friends, in fact — but lousy on FB, and some­where there’s an algo­rithm that will let you sort them out, but Face­book hasn’t fig­ured it out yet. What I need to do is sit down with all my 300 and do a great big cull. I did a tar­geted one over the week­end and friends? It felt good.

Blog­gage? Oh, not very much:

I thought this Henry Paul­son book excerpt from over the week­end was remark­able in the story it told about John McCain’s spec­tac­u­larly dumb move in fall 2008, but the intro was one of those “huh?” moments:

With the stock mar­ket in freefall and the coun­try headed for a crip­pling eco­nomic reces­sion, Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Henry Paul­son pro­posed the $700 bil­lion Wall Street res­cue plan to Con­gress on Fri­day, Sept. 19, 2008. By the fol­low­ing Mon­day, the Trou­bled Asset Relief Pro­gram was meet­ing resis­tance on all sides. Mr. Paulson’s next few days, marked by lit­tle sleep and no exer­cise, were fran­tic with meet­ings and pri­vate phone calls on behalf of the legislation.

I know many, many peo­ple who con­sider a daily work­out nec­es­sary to remain on top of their game, men­tally. I know I feel bet­ter when I exer­cise than when I don’t. It’s also the first thing to fall off the sched­ule when I get busy. I think it’s remark­able that the edi­tor of this piece, in sketch­ing out the con­di­tion of Henry Paul­son dur­ing a truly scary stretch in his work his­tory, would sin­gle out the fact it cost him his work­out. If I’d learned that he still made time for the tread­mill while the world’s finan­cial sys­tem was tee­ter­ing on the brink, I’d be pissed. Thoughts?

First Toy­ota, now a Honda recall? The Detroit auto exec­u­tives must feel like a boxer on the mat at 7 on a 10-count, look­ing up through the blood and sweat to see their oppo­nent sud­denly suf­fer chest pains.

Betty White’s Super Bowl ad is giv­ing her a lit­tle career lift. Ha ha. It’s funny to see the old-bag vet­er­ans of Mary Tyler Moore’s show get a sec­ond, third or maybe fif­teenth wind. Cloris Leach­man was all over Com­edy Cen­tral for a while, work­ing blue-blue-blue at some roast a while back. She called up some young hunk and planted a soul kiss on him, and don’t think that didn’t rock the house. There’s noth­ing fun­nier than a horny old lady, as Betty already knows from hav­ing chased Lou Grant back in the day.

And with that, I think I’m out of here. Happy snow day, all.

I think I just shot my writ­ing time fir­ing off a thousand-word memo to the stu­dents staffing Grosse​Pointe​To​day​.com. It started off as a gen­eral guide to cov­er­ing small city coun­cils, and, as usual, became some­thing else. When some­thing starts with “be on time” and ends with a lit­tle story about how I over­came my fear of the New York City sub­way sys­tem, I know I’ve lost the thread. Ah, well. Some­day, kids, I’ll be famous, and that memo will be worth some­thing. If I can stop writ­ing memos long enough to get any­thing else done, that is.

I’ve got about a mil­lion things on my mind at the moment, so let’s fall back on that time-tested trick of lazy colum­nists every­where — the three-dotter. I called it Items in Search of a Col­umn when I was doing that sort of thing, but I’m repu­di­at­ing all ties with my for­mer employer, hav­ing learned yes­ter­day that they laid off the last remain­ing full-time staff pho­tog­ra­pher, along with two other peo­ple, late last week. (What’s more, they called the guy in from his vaca­tion to fire him.) A news­pa­per with­out pho­tog­ra­phers, yes. Reporters now carry point-and-shoot cam­eras and take their own pic­tures, the stan­dard bush-league model. When I joined that out­fit, it was a year off of win­ning a Pulitzer Prize and, need­less to say, writ­ers wrote and pho­tog­ra­phers pho­tographed. But that was a long time ago.

I’m chang­ing my resume, any­way. New item: 1984 – 2004: In a coma. It would be less embarrassing.

…For the record, while I only heard it from an adja­cent room, it sounded like the Who sucked eggs at the Super Bowl. If noth­ing else, it inspired my daugh­ter to ask, “Why do only old peo­ple per­form at half­time?” Alan: “Because the last time they let young peo­ple do it, Janet Jack­son showed her boo­bie.” She did like the laser light show, but for the love of Mike, can we book some­one other than the Motown All-Stars or some other geezer out­fit for 2011? Just a thought.

…More bad news from my home­town: Casa d’Angelo on Fair­field is clos­ing its doors. “Declin­ing rev­enue,” etc. Today’s story says it’s a domino effect fol­low­ing the clos­ing of a nearby hos­pi­tal SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, and the empha­sis should tell you what I think of that one. Well, it’s their busi­ness, they can do what they want. But it’s a loss for the neigh­bor­hood that will no doubt be cheered on by the knuckle-draggers, who have been trash­ing Fort Wayne’s south side as long as I can remem­ber. They think it’s unsafe, which struck me as ridicu­lous then and even more so now that my bad-neighborhood meter has been recal­i­brated to Detroit stan­dards. I used to despair that Hoosiers would rather buy a new house in a sub­di­vi­sion exactly like every other one than a crafts­man bun­ga­low for half the price in my neigh­bor­hood. Looks like noth­ing has changed.

…Does any­thing ever change? Some­times I wonder.

…My cheer at the Saints vic­tory, which was pre­vi­ously pred­i­cated on the sim­ple thrill of see­ing a feisty under­dog defeat their smug bet­ters, esca­lated to joy upon watch­ing this video. The fact it irks knuckle-draggers who resent the con­flat­ing of a foot­ball team with the social upheaval of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina is just the whipped cream on my sundae.

…I hate the new Face­book, what­ever it is at the moment. Some­one asked the other day if I’d pay for Face­book. Most days, I’d pay to be forcibly dis­con­nected from it. Even as I con­tinue to use it, yes.

…Jezebel on unre­touched Madonna. Thanks, LAMary. I find these pho­tos as impos­si­ble to resist as choco­late cream pie in the refrig­er­a­tor, some­thing Madonna doubt­less hasn’t tasted in decades.

And with that, it’s into the shower with me. Sorry for the scram­bled eggs, but we have a snow­poca­lypse under way, and I need to run my errands early.

If luck smiles on my sched­ule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The man­agers of the project haven’t announced its loca­tion yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s dif­fi­cult to keep an aban­doned house that has been care­fully cov­ered with ice much of a secret. They’ve sur­rounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get dis­turbed before the offi­cial project pho­tographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the tem­per­a­ture should be high enough that things should be a lit­tle drippy. High pres­sure promises preser­v­a­tive tem­per­a­tures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guer­rilla art projects going on around here — a pre­vi­ous cadre of hip­sters painted aban­doned houses, from roof to foun­da­tion, includ­ing win­dows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I won­der if we’re on the tip­ping point of becom­ing a play­ground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bar­tender become a real-estate devel­oper, but now it’s even eas­ier. In “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Bar­low remarks that Detroit is a pretty big can­vas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated con­cern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attach­ing a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while cer­tainly wor­thy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judg­ment until I see it. One of the very few con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big expla­na­tion text, that when an artist has to post a sign­board telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint sig­ni­fies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “ref­er­ence the con­tem­po­rary urban con­di­tions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look for­ward to see­ing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of say­ing, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Sat­ur­day, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban con­di­tions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, any­way. I’ve reached the stage of win­ter where feel­ing bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get out­doors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hiber­nate the sea­son away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stew­art on? And Stew­art said Fox has “taken rea­son­able con­cerns about this pres­i­dent …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next com­ing of Chair­man Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If every­one is hip to this, why do these things keep get­ting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to sud­denly read a mil­lion words to get up to speed, and sev­eral hun­dred of the words involve morons whin­ing that they should have to pay for some­thing and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last week­end seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announce­ment. Ama­zon is using cheap e-books to sell Kin­dles, and MacMil­lan is try­ing to hold the line on sell­ing its inven­tory at a loss, for obvi­ous rea­sons. Here’s Vir­ginia Postrel at the Atlantic with some­thing of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stu­pid things peo­ple are say­ing in the wake of last week’s events, includ­ing (in so many words), “it’s not like writ­ing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for any­thing I can steal with impunity.” (I’m think­ing this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those peo­ple say­ing, “E-books are great, because then the last bar­rier stand­ing between the ded­i­cated ama­teur and his vast read­er­ship will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile read­ers any any pub­lisher within dri­ving dis­tance. And please, in keep­ing with your views about the real work of pub­lish­ing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental pro­posal to help little-seen inde­pen­dent films get a lit­tle more-seen, offer­ing feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the com­ments have already started:

“The begin­ning of the end,” wrote one user in com­ments; “i thought the pur­pose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seri­ously [sic] sell­ing out,” appar­ently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where peo­ple think noth­ing of pay­ing $4 for a cup of cof­fee could they balk at the idea of pay­ing a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy break­fast, step one to improv­ing one’s per­spec­tive on win­ter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

I had to go to the Apple store this week­end. Mail con­tin­ued to give me prob­lems, and it finally reached the point where I real­ized this might be the irregular-shaped mole of my OS, and it was time for a biopsy. The Genius fixed it with some diag­nos­tic this and that, then noticed a cracked top piece on the lap­top. It’s no big­gie, I’ve been liv­ing with it for months, it doesn’t affect any­thing but the appear­ance. But the Genius said he’d replace it under war­ranty. Like the diag­nos­tic and repair, free o’ charge.

This lap­top is now…four years old? Maybe three. At least three. I’ve never paid for any­thing that went wrong with it. Do their war­ranties ever expire? I asked Alan when I got home. He said I must be in the com­puter as a Mac slave/superplatinum cus­tomer, or just a blog­ger who always writes about how good their ser­vice is. What­ever. Lit­er­ally: Works for me.

This was the out­door “lifestyle cen­ter” mall, the one in Macomb County, the dog-friendly one. I fre­quently leave shak­ing my head over the tragedy surely wait­ing in the wings. Dogs are like chil­dren; it only takes a few mis­be­hav­ing ones to ruin the expe­ri­ence for every­body. I know the way you teach dogs to behave in pub­lic is to take them out in pub­lic, but if you weigh 98 pounds and your dog about the same? You bet­ter be car­ry­ing a cat­tle prod, lady.

It’s star­tling to turn the cor­ner in a store and see an afghan hound stand­ing there look­ing at you, too. But as long as he’s a good boy, no biggie.

While I was there, I stopped in Sur la Table in search of mar­tini glasses. I’m com­menc­ing my cock­tail edu­ca­tion with a new shaker I bought for us this Christ­mas, and my first project — pome­gran­ate mar­ti­nis — is com­ing along, but I lack the stemware for the right pre­sen­ta­tion. S-la-T has mar­tini glasses, oh goody, and they’re only…$10? A piece. No. They’re also way too big; I want a mar­tini to be relax­ing at the end of a long day, not a sledge­ham­mer. So I was inter­ested in this Atlantic piece on the trend toward giant cock­tails. Thank God I don’t make enough money to hang out in places like this; I’d be broke and on Skid Row by now.

Although…there was a place in Athens, Ohio that adver­tised “Texas cock­tails” in the mid-‘70s. Mr. Magoo’s. It also had a dance floor and played disco music, which was the craze else­where but totally uncool in hip­pieish Athens. The Arab and Iran­ian guys went there, hop­ing to pick up one of those famously easy Amer­i­can girls. They never looked com­fort­able with a fishbowl-size drink in their hands. I won­der if those cheap, rotgut G&Ts ever led to Islamic regret the next day. Is the Pope Catholic? Etc.

Any­way, after sketch­ing out some truly ghastly sound­ing drink-and-drown tankards, Wayne Cur­tis notes:

Small cock­tails were favored for a sim­ple rea­son: they stay chilled from begin­ning to end.

Well, yeah. I mean, you can always have two.

These mar­tini glasses could hold most of a can of Diet Coke. I’ll keep looking.

Some good blog­gage today. Jim at Sweet Juniper has been silent of late, entirely under­stand­able:

I think liv­ing in Detroit and watch­ing “The Road” in the mid­dle of Jan­u­ary is not a good idea.

Yeah, me nei­ther. Funny essay, though.

Also, a Michi­gan­ian with a master’s degree and a fancy resume finds work in Florida — at Pub­lix.

Finally, I think I’m going to have to back the Saints in the Super Bowl. Sorry, Indi­ana, although not really, because with my sup­port, they are des­tined to lose. You’re welcome.

And so Mon­day hits the ground run­ning. Enjoy yours.

The horse-eating project I’m work­ing on involves some his­tor­i­cal research, which involves dusty old records, which involves going down to the his­tor­i­cal branch of the Detroit Pub­lic Library and sum­mon­ing boxes out of stor­age. The librar­i­ans turn them over with a pair of white cot­ton gloves, which you are expected to wear when you han­dle any­thing within. It’s hard to type in them, how­ever, so there’s a lot of on-and-off when you’re tak­ing notes.

I’m gen­er­ally not sen­ti­men­tal about ephemera. I can think of noth­ing less worth hav­ing than an auto­graph. And yet there’s some­thing about hold­ing a piece of let­ter­head embossed Sul­li­van & Cromwell, 45 Wall Street, New York, New York. Just a piece of paper, and more than 50 years later, and it still screams white shoe. As does the sig­na­ture: J.F. Dulles.

A cou­ple years ago, I inter­viewed a gray­beard from our legal com­mu­nity. What’s changed since you started prac­tice in 1969? I asked. The work, not so much, he said; it’s still about money and how it’s divided, and it always will be. But the pace, the old days of chin-scratching and delib­er­a­tion — that’s gone for­ever. A client would call with a ques­tion, and you’d tell him he’d be hear­ing from you. Then there was time for thought, and research in libraries, notes on a legal pad. Then you sum­mon the sec­re­tary, dic­tate a let­ter, maybe revise the let­ter, type it in dupli­cate or trip­li­cate, put it in the out­go­ing mail, onion-skin copies for the file. At every step in the process there was time to change your mind, con­sider fur­ther, refine. No one expected a reply sooner than the next day’s mail, and that was con­sid­ered a blis­ter­ing pace. Thought per­co­lates, reduces, strength­ens its flavors.

No more. Funny that we have a slow food move­ment, a slow travel move­ment, but slow thought is con­sid­ered lazy. Dude, I saw that on Twit­ter like, two hours ago.

Speak­ing of move­ments, the NYT Thurs­day Styles sec­tion, home of bull­shit trend sto­ries of all sorts, has a story today on what you might call the slow blood move­ment, i.e., freez­ing your ass off. Today, a clot of the impov­er­ished, the self-righteous and the just plain whack who endure, nay embrace, a life with­out furnaces.

I’ve read so many of these I can recite them in my sleep, but here’s a theme I see more often these days:

Atti­tude, not cloth­ing, is what thaws Daniel McCloskey and his room­mates in Pitts­burgh. Last year, Mr. McCloskey, 22, bought two poorly insu­lated turn-of-the cen­tury clap­board houses for $41,000 in the Lawrenceville neigh­bor­hood there, and turned them into a writer’s retreat he named the Cyber­punk Apoc­a­lypse Writer’s Co-op. …Mr. McCloskey offers month­long res­i­den­cies to emerg­ing writ­ers, which is to say a free room in the house at the back. There is a fur­nace, but his finances are low and mostly it stays off. …Mr. McCloskey warms him­self up by spend­ing time in cof­fee shops, he said — “an hour will do it” — and by main­tain­ing an upbeat demeanor. Doesn’t his girl­friend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy?

“What makes her grumpy is using resources,” he said. “We’re all about stay­ing positive.”

Ah, yes: “Using resources.” Way to sell a greener Amer­ica, Daniel’s girl­friend — cham­pion a lifestyle of miserly one-downmanship (“I keep my ther­mo­stat at 55″ “Well, I don’t have a ther­mo­stat”) that turns on the embrace of a mis­er­able lifestyle and fin­ger­less gloves. Also, rationalization:

If it’s 20 degrees out­side, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gal­lagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bed­time, though it slides pre­cip­i­tously toward freez­ing as she sleeps. “The main rea­son why I do these win­ter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only prob­lem you have is get­ting warm. Focus­ing on sur­vival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clear­ing the mind.”

It’s not the cold that’s the prob­lem. It’s you that’s the problem.

For the record, I think most Amer­i­can houses are over­heated, and that a chilly night­time tem­per­a­ture is actu­ally con­ducive to bet­ter sleep. But I like toi­lets that flush and pre­fer to focus my mind on work, not survival.

Eh. It’s their house, after all.

OK, now to com­mence eat­ing the horse. First, a work­out to strengthen the body. And one bit of blog­gage: Man buried in Haiti rub­ble sur­vives with help of his iPhone. He was res­cued 65 hours later. I imag­ine he amused him­self in the interim play­ing Wurdle.

I was googling “Broth­ers & Sis­ters,” the TV show, try­ing to find some­thing I once read about it. I tried to watch that show and gave up after about half a sea­son, when it became clear the writ­ers were never going to give up this mad­den­ing music-cue thing they do.

The show is your basic prime-time soap, with comic ele­ments. When­ever a comic scene com­mences, how­ever, the sound edi­tors insert this gig­gly lit­tle piano/string thing, the uni­ver­sal music code for “French farce scene about to com­mence! Get ready to laff!” I remem­ber a cou­ple years ago, read­ing an inter­view with some net­work exec­u­tive who said it was nec­es­sary to tele­graph every punch that way, because they’d given up the idea of any viewer giv­ing any TV show their com­plete atten­tion, and they didn’t want some­one to look down at their lap­top dur­ing a seri­ous confession-of-infidelity scene and look up to find a zany oops-we’ve-been-caught-having-sex-in-the-cloakroom scene. Too jar­ring. And so tonal shifts are under­lined, per­haps so view­ers know they’re watch­ing broad­cast TV, not HBO.

So I was look­ing for that inter­view, and got dis­tracted by rever­ies of the All­man Broth­ers, who — you younger folks might not know this — had a mon­ster album in the ‘70s called “Broth­ers and Sis­ters,” which com­bined with “music” would of course turn up in any Google search. And by then I had for­got­ten that one of the things I wanted to say was, nobody has any atten­tion span any­more, because they’re always multitasking.

There was a trainer at my gym who liked to com­bine the ab work in his classes with “Whip­pin’ Post,” which I always thought was appropriate.

Which sort of brings me to this story from the New York Times’ Depart­ment of News You Already Knew, about how kids today are addicted to the inter­net. As an abu­sive par­ent in this regard, defined as “one who declined to buy the data plan for her child’s cell phone, and who also acti­vated the parental con­trols fea­ture of the computer’s OS,” I read with keen interest:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, com­pared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last con­ducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend tex­ting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

“I feel like my days would be bor­ing with­out it,” said Fran­cisco Sepul­veda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, lis­ten to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

It’s the tex­ting that makes me insane. A true mod­er­ate, I equipped Kate with the mod­er­ate plan — 1,500 per month, which feels like all the god­damn texts any nor­mal per­son would need, don’t you agree, my fel­low geezers? Well, you should pay closer atten­tion to your kid, who thinks noth­ing of tex­ting “yo” or “‘sup?” or “hey” nine mil­lion times a day, and I am not kid­ding. Object­ing to this is like say­ing with all this long hair, you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

I told her if she went over 1,500, I was tak­ing it out of her hide. And no data plan until she gets a job.

After all, I don’t want to hap­pen to her atten­tion span what’s hap­pened to mi– Shiny object! New tab in Safari! Tan­gent! So let’s go straight to the blog­gage, eh? (I pro­nounce that blo-GAHGE, by the way, from the orig­i­nal French.)

Detroit­blog finds a ster­ling exam­ple of that unique Amer­i­can char­ac­ter — the grapho­ma­niac. (Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Why do you think we have tabbed brows­ing and the inter­net at our fin­ger­tips, fool? If this were a TV show, I’d be play­ing stern music right now.) Don’t miss the guy’s web­site.

It so hap­pened I was at John King Books, Detroit’s spec­tac­u­lar used-books trea­sure house, look­ing for a cou­ple of vol­umes that will aid in my horse-eating project men­tioned last week. You want to know where grapho­ma­ni­acs’ work goes to die? Check the local-history shelves at your own town’s ver­sion. They are dis­tin­guished by their lengthy sub­ti­tles (“Offi­cer Down: One Man’s Heroic Cru­sade Against a Cor­rupt Police Force and Its Enablers Among the Legal Com­mu­nity, Par­tic­u­larly the Prosecutor’s Office — You Wouldn’t Believe”) and their equally lengthy ded­i­ca­tions to the many kind helpers they had along the way to pub­lish­ing their opus, which no pub­lisher would touch, because it’s sim­ply too hot.

There’s one at my local car wash, or was the last time I vis­ited. I love this car wash, which takes advan­tage of the few moments you will spend there to push every imag­in­able sort of impulse pur­chase at your face. Greet­ing cards, scented card­board air fresh­en­ers, bulk lots of util­ity tow­els, one-size-fits-most floor mats, lam­i­nated study guides for every­thing from the SAT to the peri­odic table — I have barely scratched the sur­face. But there, on a table next to the win­dow where you watch them fin­ish your inside win­dows, is a lit­tle pile of books. Self-published, natch. Title: “My Wife Has Can­cer.” I can’t bear to pick it up. I hope it was ther­a­peu­tic for someone.

An odd and an end from yes­ter­day: You Cincin­na­tians, does Zino’s still have the great­est pizza in the world? We used to drive down from Colum­bus for that stuff. It’s the big red onions that does it. And Bob (not Greene) won­dered if the Kim who com­mented yes­ter­day had a last name begin­ning in L, because if so, he thought they knew each other? She does; you do. Con­tact me pri­vately if you want to catch up.

It’s a new medium, so the growth curve is spec­tac­u­lar: The Chi­nese folks who brought you the ani­mated Tiger Woods story tackle the Leno-O’Brien-NBC story. And it is awe­some. If I were a young jour­nal­ism stu­dent, this is what I’d be studying.

And now, to com­mence what is, the­o­ret­i­cally, my work. If I don’t get distracted.