I guess the topic du jour is the death of Steve Jobs, and I don’t have much to add to the thousands of words already committed to paper and pixels today. My first steps onto the digital path were with the first IBM PC, which I bought secondhand from a guy who was headed on an open-ended, Jobsian journey to Europe. It worked OK for what it was — a very expensive typewriter — but once the loud, noisy printer died, I went back to using my Smith-Corona and left the thing on my desk to collect dust. A decade later, I bought my first Mac, and haven’t looked back.

Here’s why: In the early ’80s, I took a trip to Paris. The flight originated in New York; I found it in the back pages of the Village Voice. People’s Express was running its rock-bottom fares to New York at the time, and I cobbled together a package that got me from Columbus to Paris for about $500, a $200 savings over a traditional ticket. I had to arrange my own transportation from LaGuardia to Kennedy airports, but I fancied myself a brave, resourceful traveler, and this was only proof of my awesomeness.

It all worked fine getting there, but getting home was something else. The trip was a charter, which meant we weren’t committed to a particular airline, and on the way home, it was Alitalia. Every stereotype you ever heard about how Italians run things? It was like that. The flight was hours late leaving. We’d been in the air only a little while when the ice ran out, then the drinking water, then the water in the tanks that flushed the toilets. Before long, the passengers broke out their duty-free liquor purchases and started sharing bottles. The flight attendants did their best to put a stop to this, but as one belligerent man bellowed, in a voice loud enough to reach the entire coach cabin, “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll pay three bucks a pop to drink your hot booze when I can have my own.”

The drunken conviviality was a welcome break, and if nothing else, it helped everyone get to sleep, but as we approached New York and people started waking up, they were headachey and the toilets still weren’t flushing. We landed, and one of the loudest and drunkest of the complaining passengers immediately stood up to stretch his legs. The little Italian steward told him to take his seat. Nothing. The steward got up and approached him. The passenger continued to stand. The steward extended his hand, and…IF YOU PUT YOUR GREASY FUCKING HANDS ON ME, YOU WILL REGRET IT.

It was a genuinely scary moment. The steward wisely retreated.

We all deplaned. I’d missed my connection, and was now in Kennedy Airport, it was nighttime and I was probably broke. Fortunately, Jeff Borden was in New York for a TV critics’ convention, and had a double room at a Hilton in midtown Manhattan. I took the train to the plane in the opposite direction — thanking God it was an express, as we passed through those infamous, pre-Giuliani subway stations, filled with lurking wraiths — before shlepping my bags into Jeff’s room and collapsing on the bed.

I rebooked my People’s Express flight the next morning, and as we winged our way to Ohio, I asked myself if I’d have paid $200 to avoid the previous 24 hours, to get on a nice Air France or Pan Am jet at Orly and get off at Port Columbus, skipping Alitalia and the nonfunctioning toilets and the angry passenger and the train to the plane and all the rest of it, and thought: Oh, hell yes.

Years later, as I was contemplating the purchase of another computer, I learned that formatting a floppy in MS-DOS required me to type…

FORMAT drive: /C

…plus some other stuff, and if I got so much as a comma or space in the wrong place, it wouldn’t work. And if I bought the PowerPC Mac laptop I was considering, I would face a simple question: This disk is not formatted. Would you like to format it?, followed by a yes/no click option.

The Mac was a few hundred dollars more than the PC. I remembered the lesson of Alitalia. I clicked Yes, and haven’t looked back.

Thanks, Steve.

Jobsian bloggage today: Walter Mossberg remembers.

EDIT: Hank Stuever sums it up, and on deadline. We love us some Hank.

Bumper sticker I saw last night in Detroit: JESUS DIDN’T TAP OUT. I laffed all the way downtown.

And that’s it for me. I have to go format a day of work.

Big news out of Georgia yesterday: R.E.M. (or is it REM? Periods or no periods?) is breaking up. To touch on yesterday’s discussion, this seems like the sort of iconic news event for whatever the phenomenon is where you hear something like that and think, “Huh. I thought they were dead.”

I didn’t think R.E.M. was dead, but one of them had some health issues a while back — brain tumor, maybe? A quick glance at the indisputably authoritative Wikipedia says no, it was a brain aneurysm, it was Bill Berry, and he left in 1997, at which point it’s safe to say I was no longer paying attention. “Green” (1988) was the last album I bought, although I think “Automatic for the People” (1992) is lying around here somewhere. A guy I knew in the Fort had a one-night fling with Michael Stipe when they passed through Bloomington on tour.

And when I reread those two paragraphs, I am reminded why one should never tattoo one’s enthusiasms on one’s body. There was a time when I wore the grooves down on “Murmur” and “Reckoning” and the rest of the early catalog, and if the tattooing thing had had any traction then, I might have opted for a discreet “Radio Free Europe” inside an ankle. They were my favorite band in the last time in my life when I thought I needed to make such a designation. Such things are only evident in hindsight, and thank heavens for that, eh?

As (a very small) part of this enthusiasm, J.C. and Sam and I day-tripped to Athens when I visited them in Atlanta one year. We made the drive noticing all the parallels between Georgia’s Athens and Ohio’s, which is where J.C. and I became friends: It’s a college town about 90 miles east of a large city. The road there starts out a traditional interstate, then becomes a plain old four-lane. And once you get there, well, you’ve got your traditional college town, which immediately sets off the ache of nostalgia and familiarity in anyone who ever spent time in one. You want to stop the students on the street and tell them savor every moment and stop snoozing through your comp lit class and you’ll never live like this again (nor want to).

And then we visited the Uga graves — that’s pronounced “ugga” — and the Tree that Owns Itself and ate in one of those places every college town has, probably a vegetarian/locavore/Moosewood hippie trough, and visited a bookstore. Then, while near a courthouse-lawn cannon, Sam said she thought the guns still had some mobility to them, so I put my hands on the barrel of one and pushed down, and whaddaya know, it moved, and poured about a gallon of accumulated rainwater, no doubt mixed with discarded beer and frat-boy pee, onto my shoes.

Then we went home. Now that I think of it, I was probably already pretty much over R.E.M. by then.

The other big news out of Georgia yesterday was the execution of Troy Davis, of which you have probably heard enough to at least make up your mind about the morality of the act. I have rather studiously avoided death-penalty arguments over the years, although I have my opinions about it. In general, I think: Some form of it will always be with us, because Americans are bloodthirsty people. We have almost certainly executed innocent men and women, and we will almost certainly do it again, and maybe the people of Georgia did it last night. And I’m against it, not enough for the Full Prejean but enough that I admire those who make its opposition their life’s work.

My ambitions are more modest — to get people to stop using “electrocute” as a synonym for “shock.” No one recovers from an electrocution.

OK, so: Speaking of Helen Prejean, which makes me think of movies, it’s now September, which means the list of movies I must see is already growing. So far: “Contagion” and “Drive.” Anyone with fewer weekend commitments seen them yet? What am I missing? I was going to avoid “Contagion” on general Paltrow-ish principle, but it’s my understanding she dies early and the rest of the film is “Traffic”-esque, which I loved.

We haven’t discussed the post office here, have we? You’ve probably heard about the organization’s financial problems, which set off the usual clamor in the well-paid flying monkeys of the conservative chattering classes (Roy’s got you covered there). It so happens I needed to get something in hard copy to the other side of the country in a two-day time frame not long ago, and alas, it was a Sunday. (This was a parcel consisting of about 100 pages of paper, letter-size.) My first stop was FedEx, thinking that was my only alternative. No, they couldn’t absolutely, positively get it there overnight, but they could get it there by Tuesday, for … the lady put it on the scale … $54.

“Are you kidding me?” I gasped. Of course not. I rechecked my requirements, found I only needed it to be postmarked by Monday, so I went to the post office the next day, and Express Mailed it for $18. It got there Tuesday, same as the FedEx package would have, for $36 less. Just so you get a sense of what we’re in for, in a USPS-free world.

Everybody saw this yesterday, but just in case you didn’t: Elizabeth Warren, bringing the Awesome.

Alas, work beckons. And the lawn-service trucks just pulled up outside, which means soon I won’t be able to hear myself think, let alone think of jangle guitars. Happy Thursday.

Fifty chilly degrees outside, but I’m not in any hurry to get the furnace going. Never mind the A/C was blasting not two weeks ago; as Dexter said in yesterday’s comments, sometimes it’s good just to be a little chilled. I had a roommate once who’d gone through a bout of anorexia, and was still quite thin, and she was cold in all but the hottest weather. Which, for some reason, made my mind go skip-skip-skip and land on Michaele Salahi.

You remember the Salahis — the vulgar social climbers of Washington D.C., who somehow managed to slip the security ring at the White House, enter a state dinner and get to handshake distance with the president. She was a Real Housewife, he was a “vineyard owner” or some such, and both were grifters, basically. The WashPost gossip columnists beat them like a drum for a while, pointing out their trail of unpaid bills and lawsuits, her sketchy resume and his likewise, but it never seemed to faze either of them, and they kept showing up at parties and getting in. Someone kept letting them check into ritzy hotels, ride in limousines and otherwise live the life. I should be so shameless.

This week — and I hope you’re sitting down for this shocking turn of events — they split up, and the way Michaele fitted her husband Tareq in cuckold’s horns was about as bad as it gets. She left him for Neal Schon. Who’s Neal Schon, you ask? Why, he’s the guitarist for Journey. Tareq was further humiliated by his actions when he noticed his wife missing. He called the cops and claimed she’d been abducted, because she left her things behind.

Tareq, hasn’t life with Michaele taught you anything? You leave it all behind when you have to, because there’s always someone with a fresh credit card waiting around the corner. In this case, a “rock icon” (TMZ’s description, not mine), whom Michaele joined on the road in Memphis, where Journey was playing a show with Foreigner.

Just let that soak in for a minute. A pair of high-profile publicity hounds, riven by the fleshly sword of a power-pop arena-band guitarist, now touring with another power-pop arena band. Imagine the crowd at those shows, rising from their $200 front-row seats to shake their Docker’d behinds to “Hot Blooded” and, of course, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” We are in hell, aren’t we?

You had to know things were rough for the Salahis. Why, just this year Michaele was accepted by, and then booted from, VH-1′s “Celebrity Rehab” show, on the grounds she’s not addicted to anything. But they knew that going in! Tareq protested. Michaele wanted to be treated — in a reality-show setting, of course — for her multiple sclerosis, which has been aggravated by the couple’s “ordeal” with the White House.

I have to pause for a minute and just say: I really enjoy wallowing in a good gossip sheet from time to time. Not necessarily the snark blogs — too meta — but the ones like TMZ and the Daily Mail. So retro! There are sources, and there are “close to” sources, but the ones they’re relying on to dish the Salahi dirt are described as “extremely close” to Michaele, which I’m taking to mean it’s Michaele herself. Any woman who wants MS treatment on cable TV would have no problem informing on herself to Harvey Levin. Who else could share the exact wording of this text message, from the icon to the blonde herself: “xxxoooxxxoo Kiss, lick, and a nice stiff one 4 ya lol Neal.”

(May I just say one thing? Any man who sent me anything that lame had better watch his ass. And people? I don’t do LOL. Nor “ya.”)

Anyway, the Kidnapping of Michaele Salahi, a Q-and-A.

And I’m sorry I’m so lame this morning. This is the first five-day week of school, and my new name is Erasmus B. Draggin. One-third of the household is sick, and I fear it might come for me next. So, regular hand-washing, no kisses for anyone and maybe a pot of soup this weekend. I’m thinking Minestrone, but if you have any ideas, you know where to leave ‘em.

I work a lot for others during the week, much of it for little or no compensation, and in return I ask for only one thing: Saturday. Saturday is mine, for Eastern Market visits and maybe a little urban exploration (in the bland, non-lawbreaking sense), and that’s how I ended up at the Rust Belt Market last weekend, in search of pie. This guy’s pies, specifically. But it would be silly to just pop in and out for pie, so I took a stroll through the market, which is kind of an offline Etsy — vintage clothes, handmade this, hipster that. Very Detroit-as-new-Brooklyn. Not quite the epicenter, but there is no epicenter. Still, a good place to put your cultural feelers out and get a sense of the millennial/late-X generation in their salad-days prime. What are you into, young folks? What moves you?

Just this: Food and bikes.

I’m not a fan of the writer Caitlin Flanagan, but she made an observation a while back that’s stuck with me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but indulge me: Imagine two young women — a housewife of the ’50s and her closest equivalent today. Quiz both on their attitudes about food and sex. You’ll find the ’50s housewife has many opinions about how you should live your sex life, but honestly doesn’t care what you eat — that’s your business. Whereas a 21st century woman is likely to be precisely the opposite. Are those eggs organic? Is your beef grass-fed? Those tomatoes — locally grown? But who you sleep with, and what you do in your bedroom? Who cares?

The good news about the foodie revolution is, the world is a much tastier place. You can get a better meal, or make yourself one, today than you could a generation ago, and certainly more so than in the ’50s. For all the concerns about pesticides and hormones and feedlots and the like, the fact remains that a stroll through even an unhip, pedestrian suburban grocery chain is a revelation of food unknown to even 25-year-old me, and I like to think I got in on this stuff early. My mother-in-law thought mangoes were green peppers. Today: Actual mangoes. A good thing.

The bad news is that it can get awfully tiresome, and I think we’ve gone down this road here before. When Anthony Bourdain says Alice Waters has a touch of the Khmer Rouge about her, it’s funny because it’s true. She’s the one who suggested $4-per-pound organic grapes should not be considered out of reach in any nation where poor people buy $100 sneakers, after all.

But getting back to the good news, it’s also given rise to a generation of young foodie entrepreneurs, many flying below the radar of the health inspectors, in food trucks and market stalls, trying to change the world with empanadas or bagels or whatever. The pie guy I visited was very much of this tradition, with his artistic tattoos — a chef’s knife on his forearm, among many — and his unexpected flavor combinations. Oh, and his T-shirt: “Fuck cupcakes. Eat pie.” I bought three slices at $2.50 per — salted caramel apple, peach mango (hold the green peppers) and blueberry lemon. Elsewhere in this market you could buy artisanal coffee and other snacky things; at the Eastern Market you could buy everything, including a nosh from my favorite new stop, the People’s Pierogi Collective (their slogan includes the word “revolutionary,” but I can’t remember it now).

Elsewhere in the market, I looked through a booth that sold make-your-own necklace systems, with various charms and suchlike. It seemed half the charms had bicycle themes — chains and chainrings, spokes, wheels. I see bike-themed tattoos everywhere, too, “fixie forever” on a muscular calf, or “fuck cars,” one word to a leg, something for motorists to see as you flash past them on your fixie. Bike culture is strong in Detroit, a flat city with many miles of eye-popping sights. But it’s crazy strong among younger people, who commute on sticker-covered, beat-looking-but-fast-moving bikes and lock them to any old thing with chains heavy enough to swing at crackheads, should the need arise.

Meanwhile, there is $70,000 in county parks money lying on the table in my community, waiting for the cities to pick it up and use it to buy mainly paint and signs to designate bike routes (not paths, mind you, just routes) through the five Pointes. I predict it will sit there until it grows mold and expires, because the police chiefs are fretting about the need for a traffic study first, and why can’t we all just ride on sidewalks, anyway? The suburbs always move behind the city. Although I hear everybody enjoys pie.

So, not much bloggage today, but may I say one thing? I’m extremely uncomfortable about much of the commentary I’m hearing about whether She-Who did or did not bang a University of Michigan basketball player when she was young and single and the calendar read 1987. I’m getting the strong feeling this Joe McGinniss book is a steaming pile of crap, and I don’t care how respectable he is. If the big talker you come up with is that she slept with a black guy when she was 23, you are only Kitty Kelley with a better publicist. The discussion I heard yesterday bugged me on several levels, including but not limited to noting it happened “just nine months before her marriage to Todd,” misuse of the word “fetish” and whoa, MANDINGO!!!!!

I’m disappointed in Garry Trudeau for making this a week’s worth of “Doonesbury” and I really, really resent the way it makes me feel like defending her. That said, some of the comments on this thread are sort of funny.

The first serious review of the book I’ve seen. Doesn’t sound like a must-read.

After 10, gotta go. Happy Thursday, all. The weekend is drawing nigh.

This is my goal over the next four years, and foolhardy it may be: To get my daughter admitted to the University of Michigan. She doesn’t have to go there. But as I have told her since we moved here:

1) It’s the best education for the money that we are likely to have available to us; however,
2) If you can get into Michigan, you can get into a lot of other schools. We have money saved, and you’ll be able to get more elsewhere. All bridges will be crossed when we get to them. But for now, aim high. Aim for Ann Arbor.

So. Last year she took two courses that offered high-school credit. She got an A-plus in Spanish I, and a B-plus in Honors Algebra, missing the A by a whisker. Still, a very good start, I thought. Earlier this summer, a letter arrived, informing us that we could have those grades entered on her high school transcript as credit only, or grade and credit. I did what I always do with perplexing or disturbing mail — set it aside for the remainder of the summer.

But now the deadline for deciding is approaching, so I called her high school, figuring the counselors were back on the job by now, and sure enough, the phone was picked up by the person I needed to talk to. Explained what I just told you, and asked her opinion.

“Hmm, well, the thing you don’t want to do is take credit for one and grade and credit for the other,” she said. “That’s a red flag.” Noted. Grade and credit for both, then?

“Well, there’s that B-plus,” she said, as though I’d presented her with a dead mouse or something.

“It’s an honors algebra course,” I pointed out. “Accelerated math.”

“There will be many other factors determining whether she’ll get into Michigan,” she said. “But for now, you want to play it safe. We’ve had students with 4.0 averages not get in.” She advised credit-only. I put down the phone with a variety of emotions, but one swam to the surface first — eye-crossing anger. It just occurred to me what my poor, sweet, smart daughter will be up against to join the student body at my state’s premiere university four years hence. She’ll be angling for one of the spots available for kids who aren’t rich, who aren’t Olympic athletes, who contribute nothing special to the diversity profile, and who aren’t — a burr under my particular saddle, because they’re so thick on the ground hereabouts — a Topsiders-and-madras-shorts-wearing, entitled brat whose lawyer daddy is a legacy.

Four years stretch before me, years of applying the whip on the grades front, and winter months scouting the sorts of fascinating summer camps and volunteer opportunities that will make her stand out in this crowded field. All so my sole offspring can get a toehold into the middle class, a stratum her own parents are rapidly sliding to the edge of. All so she can maybe attend a university I had my own experience with a few years back, filled with undergraduates who didn’t have the sense to change out of flip-flops on a February day, among many other dullards. (This really happened. A girl stopped in front of me to adjust her backpack in the vestibule of a building. I looked down, and beheld her toenail polish. The temperature outside was in the low 30s. I asked her why she was wearing rubber sandals. Her answer: “Because my dorm is, like, really hot.”)

I’ve told this story before, about the UM women’s sport-redacted coach, who complained in one of our Wallace House seminars about her players, who stand like children before her, awaiting orders. “They have to be told when to warm up, when to cool down, what uniforms to wear, when to wash them. It’s like they’ve spent their entire life getting into the back seat and being driven to their appointments.” And they have. Their mothers and fathers have functioned as their personal assistants. They’re like the powerful men I know, whose jobs are so all-consuming they’ve come to rely on their wives to run every other aspect of their lives. One gets a weekly allowance. Srsly.

I don’t want to raise that kind of kid.

I told the counselor, “I’d rather she swing for the fences and miss a few than play it safe for the sake of a grade-point average.” She said playing it safe isn’t enough. You must swing for the fences and clear them, every time, to get into a top college.

Personally, I think she’s full of shit. But for now, credit only.

Perhaps you’re wondering where Kate wants to go to school. (Ha! Like that matters.) The only one she’s mentioned so far is UC/Berkeley, because she remembers Telegraph Avenue from our trip a few years back, and “it seems like a cool place.” Maybe if mom writes three best-sellers in the next four years, we can swing it.

OK, time to hop to the shower and embrace the day. A little bloggage:

Via Nancy Friedman, Hollywood clichés in infographic form. Funny.

That Mark Bittman can even figure out a way to improve spaghetti and meatballs. I think I’m going to try this one.

Neil Steinberg considers the new Michael Jordan Steak House in Chicago:

When you can get a fantastic steak three blocks from your office, why go elsewhere? This is not to ignore Chicago’s other fine steakhouses, in no particular order: Gibson’s, Chicago Cut, The Capital Grille, Smith & Wollensky, Ditka’s, Ruth’s Chris, Sullivan’s, Harry Caray’s, Chicago Chop House, Lawry’s — there are many more, but those are the ones off the top of my head, places that I have patronized.

I haven’t been to the new Michael Jordan Steak House that opened this week in the InterContinental, and frankly, as much as I love the hotel it’s in — my wife and I were married there — I don’t plan to go. You have to wonder at the savvy of somebody who could survey the Chicago restaurant scene and conclude: “What this city needs is another steakhouse!”

And I’m off.

I’ve had the iPad long enough to have made my way through three e-books, so I feel qualified to assess the experience, at least at a first-impression level. (The fact two of them were “A Game of Thrones” and “A Clash of Kings” is the reason the total isn’t much bigger. More on that in a minute.)

A friend of mine who’s a little further down this road said, when I expressed reservations at ever joining the Kindle generation, “You will,” which to my ears sounded like me talking to vinyl holdouts in the late ’80s, complaining about CDs. The wave of the future sweeps all before it, and while there will always be a place in the world for ink on paper, and I’m sure there will be some Brooklyn-hipster retro book movement down the road (they’ll call themselves “codexers”), e-books are here to stay. Which is fine, but to a far greater extent than CDs, they’ll change the experience of reading.

Unless you’re the sort of audiophile who really notices the difference between analog and digital recording — and I wasn’t, at least not at first — the prime selling point for CDs was convenience. They were smaller. They didn’t wear out, at least not quickly. They didn’t need to be flipped halfway through. You could have a party, and if someone pogoed too hard, they didn’t skip all over the place. Multi-disk changers meant you could load up an evening’s worth of music, press play and forget about it.

I don’t quite see the same argument for e-books. A Kindler I know who travels often says it’s a nice way to carry an armload of magazines onto a plane, and mentions the added value of being useful for the sort of books you want to leaf through or even read, but not necessarily buy in hardcover. The trendy non-fiction read of the month, say, or something dirty. An author here in Detroit says her erotica-penning colleagues are enjoying a renaissance via Kindle, as you no longer have to hold something with a whip on the cover while reading your lunch hour away on a park bench.

But as to the claim that ebooks will declutter your house? No, thanks. I love all my books, and only fail to love them at moving time. As I’m not likely to be moving again until I’m carried out feet-first, it won’t be my problem.

There are some advantages, though. Last month, I set up an interview with an author whose book was being published that day. Available electronically? Yes. Money in the Amazon account? Yes. (And thanks for that, all of you Kickback Lounge shoppers!) Click, click, and there it is. About as fast as it took you to read that last sentence. It takes just a few seconds. So great, more instant gratification for a nation swimming in it. There’s that.

Your comfort with the reading experience will depend on how you read, and that’s where my problems come in. Take George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, for instance, the first two volumes I mentioned above. Every one is the size of a cinder block, and features nine million characters. Each volume features endpaper maps, and appendices that lay out all the families, clans and alliances between them all. I’m only at the end of the second book, and I can already see the series developing Harry Potter’s Disease — the sort of overwriting authors do, and editors permit, when a franchise has become so popular that fans clamor for more, more, more. (I haven’t read Harry Potter, but people whose opinion I respect say that each subsequent volume was more bloated than the last, and knowing some HP fans, I can see how it happened. They are black holes of need.)

But I’m at the point in “A Clash of Kings” where, if I were a reader of ink on paper, I’d be flipping ahead, skimming battle scenes, blowing off interior monologues and, of course, checking all those family trees, but I don’t, because I’m afraid of losing my place. (Yes, there’s a bookmarking system. I don’t like it.) At this point, in the final chapters, I feel like I’m driving a snowplow through 10 inches of slush.

On the other hand, I search for a living, and I’ve developed my eye for keywords. I like having a search function so, if I can remember a character’s name and its odd spelling — and I do remember, and they’re all odd — I can easily find his or her first appearance if I want to recheck something. I like that. And I like the fact I can read a 1,000-page novel in a slim little case the size of a file folder.

When I go on vacation next week, I’m taking “Just Kids” and “Djibouti” in analog form, and “A Storm of Swords” on the iPad. I’ll tell you how it works out.

So, bloggage:

Rick Perry says he wants to be president? Gee, I wonder what he’ll decide. Stop teasing and get it over with, a’ready.

Meanwhile, you’re not paying enough attention to Sarah! She will not be ignored!

And with that, I must run. Be good, all.

UPDATE: Oops, almost forgot! The heartbreak of cleavage wrinkles. The New York Times is ON IT.

OK, now I’ve seen everything (or, rather, Hank Stuever has): There’s now a competitive league for beard-growing:

“Whisker Wars” starts tonight on IFC, and even though I get that channel on cable, I’m not convinced this is exactly appointment TV yet. But who can resist, really? A whole subculture of men whose activities are not only of no or little interest to women, it actively repels them? You could almost compare them to homosexuals, but every smart girl has a gay boyfriend, and some are even sexually attracted to them. Whereas if a competitive bearder even came near me with one of those waist-length things, I’d run away as fast as possible. And I bet you would, too.

Oh, but what am I saying? There’s a match for every sock in the world; you just have to look at bit harder, is all. My youth was a big era for facial hair. My male confederates had beards and moustaches of all shapes and sizes. One of my favorite boyfriends had a splendid moustache, in fact, although I doubt he still does, as one day we all woke up and they were called “pornstaches,” a cruel jape, because as every man with a weak chin eventually discovers, facial hair can cover a multitude of sins, and sometimes that sin is an upper lip that is too thin, too stiff, too something, and a moustache can salvage it.

(There was a TV personality of my youth, fella named Bob Braun. A friend of mine, a hilarious and dead-on mimic, could conjure him out of the air just by pulling down and fortifying his upper lip. Bob Braun could have used a moustache.)

The facial hair of my yout’, however, was generally not something to be fussed with. Trimmed, yes. Groomed, certainly. But it was either there or it wasn’t. (With a few exceptions, like the aforementioned Joe Namath and his famous Fu Manchu.) These latter-day beards, with their fanciful trimming? No. Show me a man who grooms it like this, and I’ll show you a real asshole.

Alan had a beard, long before I met him. He looked like a young Bob Seger. My dad grew one in his young manhood, and it came in all gray and white. The other guys called him Frostypuss, so he shaved and never ventured forth again. But it strikes me the real problem with beards is, they invite stroking by their owners. It’s very hard to stroke one’s own chin without looking like a total douche. In fact, the very gesture of chin-stroking, the phrase itself, is shorthand for someone who talks too much and rarely proposes action of any value, but rather, thinks the whole room needs to do some supplemental reading before we revisit the topic at a later date.

At which point the room rolls its eyes and makes the jackoff gesture.

Boy, am I in need of a vacation, or what? Which, by the way, I will soon be taking. We’re heading north in a week, and I will be away from the internet for most of that time. I might have asked J.C. to maybe fill in here while I’m gone, but as it turns out, that’s who we’ll be visiting. There may be supplemental material, however, and comments will be open all week. You all are so good at playing amongst yourselves. We’ll see.

Bloggage! Let’s get to it!

Minister of Culture Michael Heaton on why August is the month of bad decisions:

The bad decisions of August also include the impulse road trip. You and a college friend are sitting around talking about Crazy Bob from your fraternity. Next thing you know you are on the road to Kalamazoo, where Bob lives, for a surprise visit. At his house you find only his mother, an old and broken woman who informs you that Bob killed his wife with a ball-peen hammer and then set himself on fire. Always call first.

We’ve already got one embedded video already today, so you’ll have to follow the link to YouTube for this one: That stock-trading talking baby confronts his losses.

Wow. The Cat Scan Tumblr. Wow.

Hurry, vacation. But first, lots of work to do. Have a great weekend.

Again! I swear I published this at 10:30 a.m. Apologies. Maybe it’s a bug, or maybe the bug is me.

The city of Pontiac closed its police department forever this week — no money. Policing the unfortunate city was turned over to the county sheriff’s department, and I hope they go with God on this one, because Pontiac is a pretty rough town, and they may need divine intervention to make it work.

Meanwhile, I visited the home page of my former employer this morning, and saw the cops were driving the hostage rescue vehicle around for National Night Out festivities last night. The website being a p.o.s. I can’t link, but it just so happens I have a photo of that vehicle which I took way back in 2003, during a flood:

As you can see, its high clearance makes an excellent flood-navigation vehicle, although most often, you see it in this situation:

Hey, kids! Ever want to see the inside of a real tank?

The city of Defiance, Ohio, has one of these, too — we saw it in the Halloween parade. I think it was the year they were talking about closing the city’s swimming pools for lack of funds, but I’m not sure.

Do any of you Hoosiers know if this thing has ever been used to rescue a hostage, or is it just trundled around as a gas-guzzling vehicle of diplomacy, like an armored limousine?

I’ve been covering city governments long enough to know that the money for these items rarely comes from the general fund. Homeland Security likes to sprinkle dollars around the hinterlands from time to time, in the event al-Qaeda ever targets northwest Ohio. And never count out a hungry police chief when it comes to finding grant money or weak spots in the armaments of the county treasury. Remember, Fort Wayners, when the Ku Klux Klan rallied at the courthouse in the ’90s? It was a greenmail dream come true for every badge in both city and county. The courthouse, as courthouses tend to do, sits smack in the middle of town, but it’s a county building, so you had two forces elbowing for the right to be on the front lines. The sheriff’s department got to be the primary perimeter around their building, and they turned out in riot helmets and shields so new you could almost see the ghosts of the price tags on them. The city protected the area around the courthouse, and I think the entire force was there, likely on overtime. So few people actually showed up, the police-to-rallier ratio was about 3-to-1. But nothing bad happened, so every penny was defensible. Right?

Ah, it was the ’90s. We had so much, then. Riot shields, functional police departments, rising property values. The good ol’ days.

I still count the column I wrote about that rally among my favorites. Couldn’t find it today at gunpoint. Newspaper columns, like the good times, aren’t made to last.

Folks, the coffee ain’t working today. Let’s pop down to the bloggage, shall we?

Bradley Cooper speaks French, Mila Kunis speaks Russian. The translated title of her movie, “Friends With Benefits?” “Sex Friendship.” Some things just don’t translate. Did I ever tell you about my friend in Paris, who sent me the titles for the porn listings in the local weekly? American porn producers favor dirty versions of existing movie titles (“Pumping Irene”), whilethe French go for a more clinical approach. One, as I recall, used a verb that means “to break in” or “to enter with violence,” for a title that ran, “I’m breaking into you sans Vaseline.” Ick.

The big tree Morgan Freeman finds a letter under in “The Shawshank Redemption” was torn asunder by a storm this week, prompting a wire-service story. Best reader comment? Ooh, you gave the ending away!!! How long are spoiler alerts required for a movie made in 1994?

And that’s all I have today. Off to drink more coffee.

I think it was Dave Barry who, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was still on the drawing board, suggested its singular feature should be volume. People should always be calling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, telling it to turn itself down, he wrote, in an observation that goes to the heart of what was always my problem with it. Lots of other people have it, too, i.e., how does a cultural movement which still has youthful disaffection and rebellion at its creative heart warrant a hall of fame?

Pretty simple, that one, and you can tick them off if you like. It’s an artistic movement of decades’ standing, incorporating uniquely American strands woven into an original, and new form. It’s a cultural force to this day, and if you don’t believe me, ask Lady Gaga. And from a purely commercial perspective, like a Kiss concert, it’s going to sell a lot of tickets. Sometimes I think the defining emotion of my generation — not the first to rock ‘n’ roll, it goes without saying — is nostalgia, but that’s what happens when your adolescence gives critical mass to a unique cultural force. What do you do in your 20s? (Go punk.) In your 30s? (Start disapproving of hip-hop, which isn’t even music, with all that scratching and sampling, and you call that singing? You might give a nod to the Seattle sound, but honestly, that’s when you stopped keeping up, right?)

What do professional nostalgists love most? A hall of fame. A museum. Put them both in an avant-garde building by I.M. Pei on the shores of a Great Lake, and it’s no surprise that as a business proposition, the Rock Hall, as it’s known on second reference here, is such a draw.

But that’s being unfair, a little, because it’s not just nostalgia being sold here. My advisor for this trip, Michael Heaton of the Plain Dealer, told me not to miss the introductory film that starts the tour, “Mystery Train,” a 12-minute triptych film montage that shows the roots of rock in bluegrass, Texas swing, country, blues, and (my favorite) the field hollers of Southern stoop laborers. Sam Phillips is famous for what he said about finding a white man who sounded like a black man, but the quote of his that always stuck with me was about the time he stopped for a Co’Cola at some backroad southern watering hole, and saw a woman hanging laundry across the road. She was black, and sang as she worked, and Phillips reflected that these folks were the most naturally creative people in the world. Which is two-thirds paternalistic romanticism and one-third true, and when you see the brief shot of black railroad workers knocking rails into place, making the clack of their tools part of the rhythm of the song they’re singing, you can see it plainly. But the film is only 12 minutes, and pretty conceptual. I got it, but I was traveling with two 14-year-old girls who could have used a little more David McCullough-style narration. On to the permanent collection.

I’m not much of a relic person. One Fender Telecaster looks pretty much like every other one, and with the exception of the exceptions — Bo Diddley’s cigar boxes, most notably — the instruments quickly blurred together. It’s the technique, not the tool. But the rest of it charmed me. The clothes and costumes, the programs and posters, the set lists, the scribbled early drafts of classics — it draws you in, and it helps when it’s intelligently arranged and annotated. Video loops at significant stops along the path detail mini-movements like Motown, psychedelia, grunge, rockabilly. Kate liked Sly Stone’s fringed jacket and Jimi Hendrix’ shirts; I liked the spiral-notebook page with the first draft of “Rainy Day, Dream Away.” By the time we arrived at the best of the stage outfits, with David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust wardrobe, Bootsy Collins’ glasses and, yes, Michael Jackson’s glove, more than two hours had passed. And we’d only seen one floor.

Time was running short, so I made the executive decision to head up to the top floor and check out Women Who Rock, a temporary exhibit about guess-what. It was crowded, and I can’t believe we never saw Lady Gaga’s meat dress, now jerky-fied and preserved for the ages, but we got a taste of everyone from Mahalia Jackson to Aretha Franklin to Joan Jett to Debbie Harry to Madonna, and that was enough to fill out the afternoon and bring us almost to closing time.

Next time: Allow more time.

Worth a visit? Absolutely. Worth several. I’d feared the Rock Hall would show the music I love preserved in amber, instead of a living, breathing art form that continues to evolve (although, admittedly, not as quickly or as creatively as it once did). The professional nostalgist would find plenty to wallow in, but nearly as much that says move along now, there’s still more to see.

Oh, and Dave Barry got at least part of his wish: There are outdoor speakers, but they don’t really boom. The only neighbor who would ask it to turn itself down would be the football stadium next door, and you know how those guys like to party.

No bloggage today; I’m hoarding links for tomorrow. It’s Monday and, as usual, I have to run. Some thoughts on Oslo, maybe, and a few more things worth reading for a week that promises to be nearly as miserable as the last. Until then, stay cool.

Here’s something I see more often these days — a lament for dangerous playgrounds. Frequently the argument has an undercurrent of hostility; I recall one by a father of two that basically boiled down to, these kids today could all use a few more broken arms, but I’m sorry, I can’t find it now. Most of the people advocating it seem well-intentioned enough, although I note they tend to live in the land of the anonymous “some” who are ruining childhood, but not for attribution.

That many of the Some may be made of straw and live in the Land of Oddly Articulate Taxi Drivers occurs to me, yes.

Here’s how the argument goes: Children’s playgrounds are being, or have already been, ruined. By lawyers, by — finger quotes — experts, but mostly by Some, who want to take all the risk out of childhood, and hence, all the fun.

There’s some truth to this, at least to the bare fact of ruination, although I wonder how much it has to do with risk and how much with money. But I’ve seen some pretty wan playgrounds in my time. The one at a nearby elementary school in Fort Wayne had a single piece of equipment on it — something that looked like a folded slice of Swiss cheese, with a total height of maybe five feet. I gather you climbed on it. Not that I ever saw a child do so.

But something else happened along the way, and playgrounds started getting fun again. When I was a kid, I played at the elementary at the end of my block. There were four or five different playgrounds, sized for the range of grades, and if I remember correctly, they were basic — swings and monkey bars and slides and see-saws, anchored to asphalt. If you fell, you fell hard, although that was rare. But it happened. My major dread of the playground was being dumped from the high position on the see-saw; I had a friend who specialized in it, with a truly perverse timing that suggests she had a bright future in torture of all sorts.

By the time Kate was born, the playground had changed. The “playscape” had come on the scene — sprawling constructions that mimicked kid-size castles, with spiral slides, swinging footbridges, climbing walls and all manner of things you could swing on, jump from and otherwise exhaust your energy and imagination.

A few of our favorites: Planet Westerville, near my sister’s house in suburban Columbus; Kids Crossing and Foster Park’s playground in Fort Wayne; and a Kids Crossing clone here in Grosse Pointe Woods’ Lake Front Park.

One thing all these playscapes had in common was some sort of soft footing underneath, usually wood chips, although I’ve also seen sand and shredded rubber. I honestly never gave these a thought, other than to be grateful for them. It seemed like, oh, progress, the way a padded dashboard is progress, and seat belts, and bike helmets.

I’m now informed I was all wrong. Modern playgrounds destroy children’s natural risk-taking impulses:

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

Excuse me, but New York Times? What a crock of shit. I can go a long way with this movement — yes, kids must take risks to grow; no, playgrounds shouldn’t be made entirely risk-free — but when you need to tuck “stunted emotional development” in there, hiding behind that big “may,” I’m going somewhere else to play.

The story goes on with the usual reporting; a Norwegian psychologist consults her clipboard and identifies “six categories of risky play” and then we get to the inevitable sources for these types of it-seems-one-way-but-it’s-really-not stories — an evolutionary psychologist. The more bullshit I find in the world, the more I can trace back to evolutionary psychology, the talk radio of soft-science scholarship.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

I always wanted to use “posit” as a verb. So here goes: I posit that all this hand-wringing over too-safe playgrounds is perpetrated by a handful of people who really don’t like children all that much. As I said before, it’s important that kids take risks and try new things, but this barely disguised yearning for them to fall from the top of the monkey bars and break bones is deeply hostile. To them I say: OK, your kid goes first. And if you don’t have any, shut up.

Somewhat related, an old treat found while Googling: Sweet Juniper’s Jim on the unique nature of Detroit playground culture.

Let’s hop to the bloggage, so I can get dressed for weights class:

I do not use special soap on my crotch. There, I said it! Nevertheless, Vagisil would like to sell me some, using some lamely “provocative” viral videos they want everyone to post on their Facebooks and be outraged by. I look at these and think, More good voice work for actors. Huzzah.

I used to be lonely, in my discussions with fellow Elmore Leonard fans, when the topic of film adaptations would come up. “Of course, ‘Get Shorty’ was the best adaptation of a Leonard novel,” someone would say, to nods all around. No! No! I screamed inwardly. “Get Shorty” was a huge improvement over all that came before, and a breakthrough, but no way it’s the best, because that title belongs to “Out of Sight,” and this guy agrees with me, so er’body just shut up.

So, two videos:

You wanted to tussle; we tussled. My favorite scene from “Out of Sight”:

And a video I worked on with my summer interns. I’m not much of a video producer, and it’s hard for me to teach this stuff, because I barely have a handle on the technology, and what I see in my head is so different from what appears on the monitor. Still: The assignment was to do a slice-of-life video aboard a Mackinac racer. We were invited out for a Thursday night of fun-type racing. Took two small cameras, the Flip and the GoPro, mostly handled by the interns. And virtually all the audio turned out like that in the first 10 seconds — spoiled by a persistent roar of wind. (Cheap mics are the bane of cheap cameras.) I fixed it by going back a few nights later with my good USB mic, going belowdecks, and reconducting the interview in acoustically cleaner conditions. My critique of the video is: Too many cut-off heads, too few detail closeups to cut away to, not enough of a narrative arc — it plays like a sketchbook. On the other hand, given the raw materials, I don’t think it turned out too-too badly. Tell me what you think, and have a great weekend. Stay cool.