Part of my duties at GrossePointeToday.com is compiling the public-safety reports. After three weeks of this, I’m ready to wrap myself in cotton batting, sell the bikes at a garage sale and never go outdoors again.

It’s the drunk drivers, of course. Most of these arrests are well after dark, when I’m safe in my wee bed, but the other day I came across a report for a broad-daylight arrest, on a residential street where I ride my bike. The driver blew a .23, driving with a dog in his lap. For some people, cocktail hour boils down to “any hour that I’m awake.”

This got me thinking about Alcoholics I Have Known, and the humiliations they went through en route to either sobriety or a parting of ways with your truly. Bed-wetting, seizures, property destruction, emotional devastation, and the usual run-ins with the authorities. I thought of the times I spent watching drunks make that another-round gesture at the waitress, the circling finger.

“But I don’t want another,” I might say.

“That’s OK, I’ll drink yours.” Never let a cocktail go to waste.

A year or so ago, I linked to a Washington Post profile of Elmore Leonard, the first I’ve ever read that discussed his drinking problem, conquered years ago:

One day in the early 1970s, Dutch came back from one trip to Los Angeles — where he might go through 20 drinks in a day — and started throwing up blood. It was acute gastritis. His doctor told him this was usually seen in “skid row bums.” He found himself arguing with his wife “every single night,” with him saying “vicious things, which I couldn’t believe the next day. I’d be filled with remorse.”

He moved alone into the Merrillwood Apartments, where he lived and wrote and went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and tried to stop drinking for another three years. “I was flat broke.” The book he was working on, “Unknown Man #89,” was rejected by 105 publishers before finding a home.

“It was a very difficult time,” remembers Bill Leonard.

The couple divorced in 1977, the year he had his last drink — Scotch and Vernors ginger ale one morning while shaving.

It was funny to read this, because alcoholism was a theme in his 1970s-era work, and even a casual reader would know the details came from having walked the walk — staggered the walk, maybe — to the point that I had to put “Unknown Man #89” down from time to time and let it soak in for a while. Two characters are alkies in various stages of recovery, and the picture he paints of one of them sitting in a Cass Avenue bar, ordering glass after glass of cheap white wine, is like something by Edward Hopper. He even gets the stance of the bartender down, the way he leans back against the ice machine and props one foot up behind him, hand resting on his thigh. I think I’ve been to that bar. It’s called the Good Times. Ha ha ha.

The other detail that kills me: The drunk drinks wine. Because everyone knows that if you only drink wine, you’re not an alcoholic. I know a guy whose dad killed a fifth — yes, an entire bottle — of bourbon every night between 5-something, when he walked in the door, and 8-something, when he went to bed. His mom nearly matched him. She had to have a hysterectomy, and the doctors told her she needed to at least taper off before the surgery, so she switched to wine, usually two bottles a night. The father was a high-ranking executive at a major corporation, had a Harvard MBA. He wasn’t an alcoholic because he had an important job that he was good at.

(They had four boys. One had a drinking problem and died young in a one-car fatal, another lost his medical license for self-prescribing heavy-duty narcotics, a third was diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome while still in his 30s and the fourth seems OK. The old man was told he was threatening his health with his drinking and quit in his old age, justlikethat. Well, he always did have an iron will.)

There’s another Leonard book, “Freaky Deaky,” with a character who probably does have Korsakoff’s, although it’s not stated out loud. He’s just addled from a life of drinking. I love that Scotch-and-ginger-ale detail from the writer’s life, because there’s a long passage in that book about an end-stage alky’s morning routine — his servant brings him two vodka-and-ginger-ales on a tray for his eye-opener:

Donnell would have to wait for the swollen face to show life mixed with pain, then for the man to get up on his elbow and take the drink. Donnell would then step out of the way. Soon as the man finished the drink he’d be sick starting right there if he didn’t get to the bathroom in time. Starting this wake-up service, Donnell had brought the man Bloody Marys, till he found out being sick was part of waking up. Did it one week and said, Enough of this Bloody Mary shit, cleaning up a bathroom looked like somebody’s been killing chickens in it.

Part of living with an alcoholic means cleaning up their messes — of all sorts. I never had much of a taste for it.

A note: Every so often I write about drinking in this petulant tone, and it usually kicks up a private e-mail from a reader, suggesting I’m “struggling” with drinking myself. For the record: I find myself drinking less these days than ever — hardly ever during the week, mostly only on Friday and Saturday night. Since I’m chronically sleep-deprived, one too many glasses just makes me soporific. Also, the older I get, the less I need to drink to feel it the next day. Hangovers suck. I’m lucky to down three glasses on a Saturday night, these days. So I’m cool. If I’m struggling with anything, it’s how to pass these lessons down to the next generation. Is it possible to learn about drinking without major trial and error? I wonder.

OK, then. Off to work. A bit of bloggage before I go:

Chris Matthews: Capable of learning?

I wonder if it drives Alice Waters crazy that successful cookbooks are written by people like Hungry Girl. “Cap’n Crunch Chicken” — it is to laugh. (If you click through, examine the picture and weigh in: Cheekbone implants, or are those the real thing?)

It’s not all bad news in the economy: Abercrombie & Fitch is struggling. Huzzah.

If I want to get done in time to take a sprained-knee bike ride (with wraparound ice pack), I gotta get going. Have a good weekend, all.

I generally update this blog in the morning, when I’m useless anyway. I read the papers, start the coffee, drink the coffee, open the laptop and take my morning batting practice while I wait for the French Roast to work its magic. I generally try to be done by 10 a.m., and that’s when my day really begins, work-wise.

It turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong:

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. His brother had received a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., and in his freshman year Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. During his college years, Alex took fifteen milligrams of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing “any ability to sleep for approximately eight to ten hours.” In his sophomore year, he persuaded the doctor to add a thirty-milligram “extended release” capsule to his daily regimen.

This is the lede of a fascinating story making the rounds this week, from the New Yorker. Margaret Talbot’s piece on the off-label use of prescription stimulants and other ADHD drugs is both thrilling and terrifying, the idea that there could be real help for those of us who stumble through our lives unable to concentrate, even if we have to wheedle our doctors for it. Here’s the terrifying part:

Recently, an advice column in Wired featured a question from a reader worried about “a rising star at the firm” who was “using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive.”

Welcome to the new world. Please take your Adderall and get to work.

A few years ago I read a first-person essay by someone who’d taken Ritalin without a prescription, and described the effects as nothing short of revolutionary — the “better than well” sense of energy and focus that allowed the writer to not only work, but work better than he ever had in his life, to concentrate for long periods, to ignore distractions, to finish his novel. How easy it would be to become dependent on such a drug. How simple it would be to fit it into your life.

I can’t believe my generation spent all those years sitting around in smoky living rooms smoking pot, when we could have been swallowing Ritalin and accomplishing something.

(As you can tell, the French Roast is kicking in.)

It’s trendy to refer to our nation’s efforts against self-administered chemicals as “The War on Some Drugs,” or “The War on Some Classes of People Who Use Some Drugs.” You read stuff like this, and you see why it’s funny — because it’s true.

OK. It seems some of you are still back in yesterday’s thread, arguing about torture. Here’s a new starting place for that throwdown, a pretty fair-minded look at how, exactly, we determine what “high-value information” is and how it’s obtained.

If you’d rather take an easier road, torture drives Shep Smith to forget the cardinal rule of live broadcasting.

Meanwhile, why do people bring infants into homes with aggressive dogs? Why, why, why?

And now it’s 10 a.m., time to get to work. Fully engaged, but I could use some Ritalin.

It rained all day yesterday — hard, cold and sideways — and now something hard and needle-like is falling on the skylight. Could it be? Yes it could: Freezing rain/hail! And spring is delayed another day or two.

Don’t mind me. I always liked the feel of a nice snug straitjacket.

A few notes/clarifications/follows:

My comments about Susan Boyle got linked here and there, and reading the comments on other blogs, it seems there are some who believe my contempt was aimed at her, not at those surrounding her. Nothing could be further, etc., although I do wonder why anyone, let alone a nice Scottish virgin (say that phrase in a Scottish accent — it’s fun), would willingly climb between the sheets with Simon Cowell — talk about your deals with the devil. But obviously there aren’t many producers willing to take a chance on a woman like Boyle, and if she wanted to be heard outside her Scottish village, this was probably the only way it was going to happen.

No, my problem is with the people who treat her like some sort of sideshow, and in so doing reveal their not-particularly-hidden contempt for anyone who dares break the mold of what’s considered acceptable in our culture.

One more note: Not long ago I heard something on public radio about John Philip Sousa’s reaction to Mr. Edison’s infernal invention, the phonograph. He saw in an instant what it would lead to — the loss of music as an amateur pursuit, that’s what:

…when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely…

In Sousa’s time, music belonged to anyone who had the minimal discipline to learn it. Everyone — or, at least, far more people — could pick out a tune on the piano, favor the group with a song, play the fiddle at a Saturday-night dance. When entertainment was scarce, everyone entertained. You lent your talent, whatever it might amount to, to your church choir, your community band, your local musical society. When the music business amounted to the sale of sheet music, it was a far more democratic institution. Music was like the local plant life — unique in a particular place, shaped by circumstances and geography.

Boyle is, I think, far more rooted in this older world than ours. While she’s obviously influenced by the musical theater and other modern institutions, she seems to have one foot firmly planted in a time when being able to carry a tune meant you were somewhere on the scale from normal-to-gifted, not a superstar waiting to be discovered.

Of course her new Svengali will help her make a record. Here’s hoping it enables her to spend her remaining years wherever she wants, in Scotland or on a beach somewhere, singing like a canary just for the joy of it.

Also, I saw most, but not all, of HBO’s “Grey Gardens” the other night, and I have to say, I was impressed. I thought combining the Edies’ backstories with their degradation brought a note of empathy to the whole sad and squalid affair, and the acting, particularly Jessica Lange’s, was outstanding. Just the right combination of needy and calculating, mama spider sitting in her web waiting for the right moment to wrap her daughter up in it for good.

Needless to say, the wardrobe was fabulous. Why don’t we wear cloche hats anymore? They looked good on everyone.

Congratulations to the Detroit Free Press for their well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Unrelated: The other day I read about a prostitution ring in the metro area that relied on Craigslist, and the Free Press article said:

Sheriff Warren Evans charged Wednesday that Craigslist is major source of prostitution. He said the evidence will be sent to Chicago to bolster a federal civil case filed March 5 against the giant Internet firm by the Cook County sheriff.

“Giant internet firm.” I ask you. It is the truck that ran over our industry, and we don’t even know what color it is.

For what Wikipedia’s worth, the giant internet firm operates out of a nondescript house in San Francisco and has 28 employees.

And now I am off to mail the letter that will seal my summer in a nice package: I’m teaching a class this spring/summer term. At the university level, which I’m sure will give all you tuition-paying moms and dads pause. In internet journalism, at Wayne State. I’m as stunned as you are, but for now, I have to get my letter of offer back to them before the deadline. So I’m off, eh?

As I may have mentioned here a time or two hundred, I’m a retired equestrienne. One of these days, when I get a working scanner again, I’ll put some pix up of me in my riding togs, jumping fences on my very expensive steed, who was only expensive to me; among people who ride, he was little better than a plug. I rode with 14-year-old girls whose doctor daddies thought nothing of dropping a mid-five-figure sum on a well-trained thoroughbred for their darling daughters, and even that was on the cheap end, even then. At the elite levels, a five-figure sum is the monthly bill.

But never mind that. I did my time in the saddle, and while I never had the build or the talent or the budget to be a contender, I didn’t totally disgrace myself, and I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned was how to fall off.

Falling from a horse, in our culture, is made out to be far scarier than it is. In a movie, if a pregnant woman gets on a horse, she will be suffering a miscarriage within minutes. Bonnie Blue Butler only had to put the fence rails up too high to meet her tragic fate. And while there are a number of horrible accidents in riding competitions every year, they are exceptional. People with fancy horses tend to work them in riding rings with deep, soft footing, and what’s good for Dobbin’s legs is also good for your sorry ass when you land in it. Not that it doesn’t hurt, but unless you come off head-first or somehow land on the jump or the rail, chances are you’ll be just fine. The classic riding injuries are not Christopher Reeve’s broken neck but the big three — broken wrist and/or collarbone (from putting your hands out as the ground comes up to meet you), and cracked ribs.

Which brings us to Madonna, who either needs to toughen up or stay out of the saddle. I’ve dismounted more horses the hard way than she’s dismounted boyfriends, and never once did I have to go to the hospital — on a backboard, no less — for what turned out to be bruises. I thought she was Miss Super Fitness. Just get up, dust off your ass, lead your mount back to the block, get back on and finish the class. That’s how the tough girls do it.

My trainer didn’t coddle people who fell. She wasn’t a tyrant about it; a kid who was honestly terrified by the experience wasn’t forced back into the saddle at gunpoint or anything. But she never made a big fuss one way or another. It was like oopsy-daisy, everything OK? Fine, up you go and pick up a posting trot. As all parents know, the bigger the fuss you make over any injury, the more the injured party is frightened. However, I get the feeling that making a fuss over Madonna is pretty much the point of her existence, so I’m not surprised she was content to stay immobile on the ground while worried faces and EMTs peered down at her.

BTW, I was dumped because of “paparazzi,” too. I could never afford a good, well-trained horse, so I rode a couple of young, spooky ones. A barking dog, a loud muffler, a sudden hand gesture or windy day could turn them into the sorts of animals who disappear from underneath you and simultaneously reappear 10 feet to the left. You felt like Wily Coyote, running off the cliff. As I picked myself out of the dirt, I’d tell my trainer, “(X) spooked him.” She’d say, “Learn to stay on your horse.”

In Madge’s defense, however, one of my favorite lines from Thomas McGuane, as a character is riding the spooks out of a young stud colt: “By your mid-thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day it admits you.” True dat.

OK, some quick bloggage for, what else, a dreary Monday:

How fast food can kill you. It has nothing to do with cholesterol.

Dear Mr. President, this is how letters get to your desk.

It’s a good thing Berkeley has so many rich people. White roofs for all!

Why I keep fivethirtyeight.com bookmarked, even though the election’s over: For posts like this, about Minnesota’s Senate election.

Finally, since we seem to be heavy on the popculch today, to the next person who sends me the Susan Boyle video:

Stop it. I don’t care how much you were moved, wowed, whatevered. I don’t care. Don’t you realize how condescending this all is? Don’t you know how much you’re being played? Is there nothing Simon Cowell can’t make a buck from? You know why Susan Boyle is such a phenomenon? It’s not because she’s a great singer; how would anyone know? There are two recordings of her singing two songs extant in the world. No, Susan Boyle is a phenom because she’s ugly. Go ahead, say it: Ug-ly. Leave the nicer euphemisms — frumpy, dowdy — for the weak-willed. The bottom line is, when someone is ugly in our culture, we expect nothing good from them. The idea that a ugly woman could open her mouth and have something beautiful come out flummoxes us — how could she have been cultivating a love for music when she was neglecting her eyebrows and fitness routine so? Doesn’t she know our priorities? If a gorgeous woman had come out and given the exact same performance, you probably wouldn’t even know about it.

The next step, after celebrating Susan Boyle for being a fine singer, is a YouTube video of some street-looking black kid who steps to a microphone in a speech competition and delivers a perfect reading of a Shakespearean sonnet. Look, he’s so articulate! Just be aware.

Also, pleeze: Does anyone honestly believe the judges didn’t know what was coming? Do you think people make it onstage at shows like that without a single pre-performance screening? You think Simon didn’t know the camera was on him, red light lit, when he smiled? How dumb are we?

Pretty dumb, I’d say.

The other day we were watching a promo for the newest iteration of “Grey Gardens” on HBO when Alan asked, “Am I the only person in the world who doesn’t think that movie was a masterpiece?” I assured him he was sitting next to another one. In fact, I thought, we’d watched it together, just a year or two previous, on DVD from the library, and we’d turned it off midway through. It was during the feed-the-raccoons scene, as I recall.

If you haven’t been backgrounded: “Grey Gardens” started life as a National Enquirer story and became a documentary film, and that’s where it stayed for the longest time — a cult classic, as the phrase goes. It’s about a mother-daughter team of lunatics, both named Edie Beale, who lived in an enormous, ramshackle house in an exclusive nook of the Hamptons. If you’ve known a crazy cat lady in your life, you’ve known the Beales, except the Beales were crazy with a twist — they were aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (the elder Edie was Edie Bouvier Beale, sister of Jackie’s no-good father). They lived in this huge, crumbling pile together, filth and decay forcing them into one or two rooms, where they spent their days talking crazy to one another in these upper-class accents. I guess that made them irresistible to the Maysles brothers, who made the original documentary.

Eventually, in the days of home video, “Grey Gardens” emerged from midnight-screening-at-the-art-house obscurity and into pop culture, and then there was a Broadway musical and now a dramatic remake of the doc, with the story of their early, pre-crazy lives folded in. I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I watch with a cold eye. “Eccentric” may be the polite word for insanity, but ultimately finding entertainment in a portrait of two mentally ill women just doesn’t feel right to me. Whatever floats your boat — I don’t judge. But it creeps me out.

All over this country are people like the Beales, living in less picturesque but very similar surroundings. Once I had this idea for a reporting project — to do a profile of every single person who filed to run in the city election in Fort Wayne in 1995, for council and mayor. The idea was not to look at their positions on the issues, but at them as people, on the grounds these are the politicians you’re most likely to meet in the supermarket, and you might want to know about them. My editors like the idea, and when the filing deadline passed, we made up a list and I divided it with another reporter.

I thought the project was, on balance, a success, but I hadn’t accounted for the Crazy factor, and so we found ourselves obligated to profile at least two people who were not only hopeless candidates, but, frankly, a little nuts. One was borderline and ran for mayor; the other was all the way there and was up for a council seat. Both were on my half of the list.

I walked into the latter’s apartment, a much less picturesque version of Grey Gardens, to find the furniture had been turned upside down. “Spring cleaning,” the candidate said by way of explanation. Two chairs were righted, I was served tea in a filthy cup, and the interview commenced. An hour later I made my escape, having been led on a magical mystery tour of his personal crazytown. I was advised that I should never leave appliances not in use plugged in. I was told that my subject had been caught in a crossfire with the Purple Gang and another band of gangsters, and that’s why he was physically disabled. I was told he had several advanced degrees, but didn’t possess the diplomas because of administrative persecution. And so on.

The next day, just for the hell of it, I went spelunking in our ancient, non-digitized clip files and in nothing short of a miracle, turned up a brief story that mentioned the would-be council candidate. Decades earlier, he had opened an unsecured fire door of a hospital under renovation and stepped into thin air, falling two floors and seriously injuring his back and legs. I was not particularly surprised to learn it had been a plain old accident (likely an attempted suicide) and not Purple-Gang thugs who left him a physical wreck, nor was I shocked to hear the door he’d used was on the mental ward.

I might still have the story in my files, but I like to think I walked a careful line in my reporting, enough to let the readers know who was living in the apartment with the upside-down furniture without holding him up for unnecessary ridicule. Ditto with the other candidate, who lived in a house with a front door about 15 feet from a major thoroughfare, one of those places you wonder why anyone would stay in. He served me coffee from an elaborate china service, added a big dollop of Cool Whip, and we struggled through an interview while every passing truck rattled all the cups and filled the room with its roar. (This, I’m convinced, is what drove him around the bend. I was only there an hour, and it nearly did it to me.)

When one of your names isn’t Bouvier, this is what being nuts is like. No arty documentarians, just a third-rate columnist wondering how she’s going to tell your story without bringing the authorities into your life.

I wrote a lot about mental illness when I was a columnist. The mother of a schizophrenic said something to me I’ll never forget, describing her son: “He’s sick. He’s in pain. Why can’t anybody see that?”

Good question. I guess part of it was that fashionable attitude that flowered in the ’60s, the in-a-crazy-world-who’s-to-say-what’s-sane wave of the hand. Part of it were the revelations of what institutionalization was really like for people who couldn’t afford the best care. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” played a part. And mental illness, like most illness, is a continuum, and one doctor’s judgment of who needs help imposed upon them and who doesn’t isn’t the same as the next doctor’s. Of my two candidates, the guy in the loud house was firmly in the “eccentric” range, the other edging into intervention territory, but neither was a danger to himself or others, as the legal standard goes. But I also don’t think either was happy, nor healthy.

I see the publicity surrounding the new “Grey Gardens,” and that’s what bugs me about it — this idea that the Beales should be celebrated, because Little Edie liked to wrap sweaters around her head. That their tumbledown house should somehow still encompass their legacy of illness, maybe in the famous gardens. Sally Quinn, the journalist who bought the house from Little Edie and restored it, gets it, although she’s too polite by half:

What do you recall of Little Edie that day?
Well, I thought she was nuts. I thought she had serious psychological and emotional problems. There was no question about it. She had just escaped into her own fantasy world. I didn’t know the story that much and so honestly, I feel bad about Edie. Your reaction was just to laugh at her because she was such a character and so crazy, dancing in the hall, saying isn’t it beautiful and this incredible outfit she had with safety pins and a turban and all that—and later when I saw the Maysles documentary and then the Broadway play and now the HBO movie, it’s so heartbreaking. I wanted to rewind and go back to that moment and just put my arms around her. I wanted to help her, do something for her.

Putting your arms around Edie wouldn’t have helped. She needed something a lot stronger.

So.

The weekend looms! Any bloggage?

What is it about the gays and “Grey Gardens.” With YouTube.

And that’s it. Add your own if you like. And have a good weekend.

One of the local bloggers refers to the Free Press’ reader comments as the Klavern, and one look at it after a story touching on race — as approximately 75 percent of all stories in Detroit do, and a little imagination can bring the other 25 percent under the umbrella — shows why that’s true:

I see it all now. A new amusement park right on the riverfront.
“GHETTOVILLE” !!!
A real life amusement park. You’ll take part in muggings, and car jackings. See what it’s like to live in a crackhouse neighborhood. Try your skills as either a streetwalker or a crack dealer. Dress up like a clown and serve on the city council.
for the kids there is the “Who’s your daddy” ride

Ha ha. This was attached to a story on the Cobo expansion, which is, of course, about race.

This is one of the things we’ve discussed about GrossePointeToday.com, whether we’re going to allow anonymous comments, and we’ve decided we’d rather have fewer with real names attached than the sort of sewage allowing anonymity would encourage.

Earlier this week, a former editor at the Washington Post’s website defended the anonymous variety, arguing they served as an unpleasant but necessary reminder of a particular segment of the audience. This was picked up by Romenesko, where all important issues of journalism are debated, and it was there that a Gannett reporter replied with his own experience. Hello, future of journalism:

Like other Gannett papers, the Register has turned its newsroom into an “Information Center,” in part by publishing rumors, half-truths and outright lies submitted by anonymous folks with screen names like “Hugh G. Rekshon.” Not long ago, we had a reader who decided to publish on our site the juvenile court record of a young woman, complete with references to drug testing, psychological exams and the girl’s one-time status as a juvenile ward of the state. We routinely publish comments questioning the virtue of female criminal defendants and the citizenship of anyone who seems to have a Hispanic surname. We call that “community conversation.” Others see it as a public stoning, hosted by a newspaper that grants all of the attackers complete anonymity.

And like other Gannett papers, the Register is cutting back on content produced by trained, professional journalists while encouraging community members to submit photos, columns and blogs. A few of our community bloggers have used this forum to write about the details of their drug use and their sexual activities. Most of our contributors choose their topics more carefully, but again, they’re not professionals. Not everyone who can type is a reporter. Not everyone with a cell-phone camera is a photographer. But in the Information Center, we’re all part of a homogenized team of “content providers” — some of whom, not coincidentally, work for free. A well-researched Register news article is published on the same Web page as a reader’s step-by-step instructions as to how a local woman under a psychiatrist’s care should commit suicide using carbon monoxide.

That’s the Des Moines Register, by the way, one of those papers that existed for years as proof that Iowa was a state that valued education, that far from being a collection of farmers and cornfields, could produce a paper that was the equal of any in the country. Won several Pulitzers. I read it when I was in Iowa covering the floods of 1993. They ran exhaustive coverage, much of it presented in Spanish as well. And now it’s the home of Hugh G. Rekshon.

I don’t know why I’m talking about this today. It is Good Friday. Death and execution is topic one today. Maybe that’s why.

So, friends, how are you today? I’m fabulous. I spent most of yesterday away from my computer, and recommend it highly. It turns out there are people out there with whom you can have these things called “conversations,” which don’t involve a keyboard. You can accompany them to restaurants and eat actual food, actual being the opposite of everyone’s favorite adjective these days, “virtual.” We went to B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque, a place I’d not visited before this year. How had I missed it, this place that McDonald’s-izes the hibachi table? The last I checked, the Mongolians were a nation of proud horsemen who once conquered the world and today eat a lot of yogurt. The fast-casual joint that bears its name invites you to gather a large bowl of raw meat and vegetables, complemented by sauces that range from Fajita Pepper to Thai peanut. You present this mess to a cook who makes snappy banter while he shoves it around on the grill for a few minutes, then take it back to your table, where you’ve been given a bowl of rice. Also, a small tortilla warmer.

“What’s in there?” I asked the waitress.

“Tortillas,” she said. Oh.

Anyway, against all expectations, this mess is still delicious. I cleaned my plate and wiped it with a tortilla. God bless the melting pot.

And God bless Wikipedia, which notes the first American restaurant chain to open in Ulan Bator was? B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque! The entry goes on to note: “…neither the ingredients nor the cooking method has anything in common with Mongolian cuisine.” Good to know.

Somewhere in the world is an American restaurant that serves live eels.

OK. So I’m off to buy white eggs, asparagus and maybe a beef tenderloin. We’re staying in for Easter, making it a feast for three. So no ham for us — we’re going with the good stuff.

Happy weekends to all.

I posted this picture on Facebook yesterday:

It’s from my Russian teacher’s fascinating library of Soviet-era children’s books. This is in a beautifully illustrated picture book about the alphabet, pitched at, I’d estimate, the kindergarten cohort. Because this was published in 1962 or so, and because this was the Soviet Union, the parade of alphabet pages are interrupted by propaganda. The sausage-fingered Ukrainian above is, of course, Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev. The copy tells us he is a soldier for peace, ha ha. Sometimes peace needs to be imposed at the point of a bayonet. I’m impressed at how the artist captured his essential peasant nature — check out the fit of that jacket around the shoulders. And the brow.

Later in the same volume is a page about Vladimir Lenin. I regret I didn’t take a picture, but I was too amused by the text under his portrait, which reads:

Lenin is dead.
Lenin is alive.
Lenin will rise again.

Just a little mystery of faith for you Catholics to contemplate during Holy Week. You gotta think that was deliberate, but Catholicism isn’t so big in Russia, and I’m not sure that passage (“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”) is part of the Orthodox liturgy. One thing about the internet is, you can throw any question out there and someone will answer it in an hour or two.

How is your week going? Mine is the usual train wreck, complicated by my glance at the calendar Monday to discover it is now the second week in April and I haven’t even started our taxes yet. So that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of today, and maybe the rest of the week. Unholy week, in my case.

So before I send you off with a half-baked effort, here’s a story from the NYT’s front page today, about good Samaritans using social networking and other digital technology to return found objects to their rightful owners:

Companies are also moving to exploit the fact that millions of people have published information about themselves on the Web. Traditional lost-and-founds are migrating online, and a batch of start-ups and hobby Web sites have sprouted with the aim of harnessing people’s altruistic impulses to return lost items.

“Generally when people are given the opportunity to do something good for someone else, they’ll take it,” said Matt Preprost, a college student in Canada who has created a blog, Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures, to reunite cameras and their owners.

The opening anecdote is about a lost camera and the Scottish woman who did not rest until she had returned it to its rightful owners, a couple who thought they had lost all their wedding and honeymoon pictures.

And how coincidental that Metafilter led me to Is This Your Lost Luggage, a site kept by a guy who buys abandoned bags at auction, then photographs their contents. You can claim your property if you don’t mind knowing a total stranger has taken a picture of your “Daddy’s Girl” t-shirt, Roxy bikini and green-and-pink hippopotamus PJs.

If you ever wondered why mystery novels are popular, here’s why. People love to solve a mystery.

The story touches on the findees, some of whom “feel weird” that others were able to find out so much about them, even if it was for a good cause. Good grief. We live in Overshare Nation and this surprises anyone? Be grateful you got your stuff back and shut up about it. As Coozledad pointed out so eloquently the other day, your damn mail carrier knows far more about you than you might think, let alone Facebook.

Finally, I’ve started taking special notice of a few talking heads/bloggers, who are ignoring the conventional wisdom about Michelle Obama — that she looks great — and instead picking nits over her wardrobe, that sleeveless is the same as topless, that cardigan sweaters are tacky, blah blah blah. Oscar de la Renta seems mainly peeved that she’s not wearing more Oscar de la Renta. I know those pink knit suits are popular with some people — hello, Mrs. John Roberts — but for the life of me I don’t understand why people are so up in arms, ha, about Mrs. O. It’s not like she wore a tank top and trucker hat to Buckingham Palace. The NYT celebrates the end of Wife Wear.

You can sense I’m putting off the inevitable. Time to install Turbo Tax and do the job I really should delegate to someone smarter than me.

It seems half the people I know are going gluten-free. Gluten is the new sugar, no, the new lactose — something you can claim a vague “sensitivity” to and give up, thereafter proclaiming you never felt better. While I know that celiac disease is real and that people actually suffer from it, I’m a little dubious about many of my newly gluten-free friends’ health claims. But I have a prejudice. When I was in fourth grade, the teacher asked us to speculate on what is meant when bread is called “the staff of life.”

I raised my hand. “That you’ll die without it?” The teacher chuckled and called on someone else, but I stand by my contention. Life without bread not only lacks a staff, but a point.

Alan was a health reporter for a time, and brought his deep skepticism to the job. It’s his contention that 99 percent of all self-diagnosed food allergies and sensitivities are b.s., that for every person who goes into anaphylactic shock after eating peanuts or shellfish, there are 99 who claim “allergies” that basically boil down to being a picky eater. If ice cream makes you fart, that does not mean you’re lactose intolerant. (Bloody diarrhea is another matter, and yes, you’re welcome for that observation. I suppose there’s a middle ground where you’re confined to your room until you stop smelling like a dairy that’s been abandoned during a heat wave, but everything’s a spectrum.)

But this gluten thing is sweepin’ the nation. Just a brief scan of the celiac disease entry on Wikipedia makes it sound nearly crippling, and no one in my circle who’s given up gluten can really claim to have had it, but may I digress and gross you out some more? From the wiki:

The diarrhoea characteristic of coeliac disease is pale, voluminous and malodorous.

That’s as opposed to the scant, sweet-smelling diarrhea, I guess. Ha ha.

Crunchy Rod, between posts on economic catastrophe, the Benedict Option and the usual mania, posted a while back that his house has given up gluten and casein (milk protein) and they’re all feeling better. (I only wish this was reflected in his writing.) The post attracted the usual comments, wherein some people claimed that making one change in their diet led to clearer thinking, retraction of an autism diagnosis, etc.

Speaking as one who has always had a cast-iron stomach, who can eat virtually anything with no ill effects whatsoever, who has never even experienced heartburn, whose sum total of bad dietary outcomes boils down to “no matter how good it sounds at 2 a.m., White Castles at closing time are almost never worth the morning-after misery,” it is perhaps hard for me to empathize. If one doesn’t have celiac disease, how can cutting one food from one’s diet make that big a change? Maybe if you replace it with something healthier, more complex carbs or whole grains, I can see it. Otherwise, I’m still skeptical. I note how many people are diagnosed with these conditions by “alternative” doctors, and trash the AMA all you want, but I used to sit next to an alt-medicine crackpot at work, and I formed my own opinions, particularly about iridology.

The U.S. is a far more diverse place than it was when I was a kid. Different ethnicities bring different genes into the mix. I’ve heard it said that Asians can actually smell white people, that we reek like aged Cheddar to noses that don’t mess with milk past the breast-feeding stage. So I won’t rule it out. But can anyone tell me what a mixed-bag-of-European-genes person like me has to gain from giving up her twice-weekly loaf of rustic Italian bread?

The question to the crowd today: Gluten — threat or menace?

So, bloggage:

One of the trainers at my gym is trying to sell two Final Four tickets. Great seats (he says), all three games, $2,000. Yesterday it was $2,500. I don’t know what this means — the price reduction, that is — but I hear through the grapevine that there are still seats available. Everyone blames The Economy, but if you’re in the market, yo, I can hook you up.

Jeff TMMO posted this to Facebook, and as of five minutes ago, so had two others, so heads up for the hey-martha story of the week and probably the month. The headline alone is a classic: Police charge man with OVI after he crashed motorized bar stool. And there’s a picture!

Brian mentioned Google’s invasion of privacy a few days ago. A too-perfect story along those lines, that we won’t bother to check out further.

Hey, John Rich: Screw you, too. Love, Detroit.

Off to the gym. Times like these require all my strength.

So, the White House will have a victory garden, a bit of news appropriately released on the first day of spring. Glad to hear it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out — I’ll go out on a limb here and predict “spectacularly,” mainly because I’m not in charge — but I’m particularly interested in seeing the shapes it makes the president’s enemies contort themselves into, given their calm, considered reaction to the Special Olympics joke and the Wednesday night cocktail parties.

The main story has a map graphic, and I’m puzzled by all that lettuce. Even a thin family like the Obamas can’t eat that many salads, and lettuce will be a non-starter in a D.C. climate once the summer really settles in. My guess is, this is the initial planting map, and there’ll be quite a bit of modification down the road.

It so happens I’m thinking similar thoughts here at Casa de NN.C. We are infamous for our concrete back yard, but we do have a little tillable patch at the back of the lot that could be put into use as a garden. It would involve taking out a tree, not a big one, but it’s the stuff that would come after that discourages me. I’ve written before about the incredibly aggressive animal population here, probably a direct result of Detroit toughness in general. Squirrels here can be reliably counted on to strip tomato plants clean. The rabbits carry switchblades. My victory garden would have to be fenced and possibly roofed with chicken wire to discourage looting by the animal kingdom.

And any garden produce we grew ourselves would take away from my weekly trip to the Eastern Market, the most pleasant errands of the warm season. So maybe not. The tree lives another year.

The Obamas’ garden will feature hyssop, notable for being the designated paintbrush used to mark the Israelites’ homes with blood during the first Passover, in Egypt. This is clearly a coded message to Obama’s followers to prepare for the Great Purge of Conservatives; I’ll be starting some in a container as soon as the threat of frost abates.

They’re also growing collards. Rush Limbaugh can get some laughs out of that one.

The map doesn’t show, but the story states, that there will be two beehives “for honey,” which strikes me as a bit showy. For pollination, sure, but as we’ve discussed here before, growing your own food and being a locavore tiptoes dangerously close to being a boring jerk sometimes, and I hope the Obamas don’t use their private beehives to lecture their guests about the top notes of the local honey. (That said, I bought a small jar of local honey last summer at the market, in part because the label amused me — “Detroit honey” sounds more like a variety of heroin to my ear — and because I wondered if it would glow in the dark. The whole metro area has seen so much old-school manufacturing over the last century that it’s safe to assume every square inch of soil contains more heavy metal than Ozzfest. And yet, I still eat it, because I assume it coats the innards against more exotic invaders.)

On my season-opening bike rides last weekend, I checked out my friend Steve’s place. Steve used to write a gardening column for the paper in Fort Wayne, and has tilled every inch of his own yard, right down to the park strip. He’s generous with the bounty; a local dog-walker has his permission to take one leaf of Swiss chard every week to feed her iguana. Most of his stuff is behind fences, but the park-strip plot is still there, heaped with compost and waiting to be tilled. He rotates, like a good organic farmer, so I don’t know what’s going in that spot this year. I’m hoping for heirloom tomatoes. Or maybe some hyssop.

What’s in your garden?

There’s so much strange crime in Detroit. Just last week the local constables broke up a champagne-theft ring, or at least its best customer. The police tracked a particularly selective shoplifting ring from the Kroger in Grosse Pointe to a party store in Detroit, which was buying stolen meat but mostly champagne from the thieves. The Kroger manager said he’d make a pass through the wine aisle, and come back five minutes later to find the shelf carrying the $50-a-bottle stuff stripped bare. Even in the Pointes, that’s not normal demand.

These stories interest me because they reveal a set of coping skills I lack. If you presented me with a scenario where I was a) broke; and b) addicted to drugs; then told me I had to get enough money for my fix before, say, noon, it would never occur to me to steal champagne. (I’d nick wallets from purses in the grocery store instead. I’m amazed at how many women leave their purses unattended in shopping carts while they squeeze the Charmin.) Every so often I see one of those oft-e-mailed pieces about the skills required for poverty, how to get free meals and cheap clothing and a month of free rent, that sort of thing. I inevitably fail. I just don’t know enough about the ghetto economy.

One of my Facebook friends posted this story, about the vindication of tightwads in today’s economy. The lead anecdote was about one Amy VanDeventer, who describes herself as “neurotic” about saving money, to the point where she now banks half of each paycheck, up from 25 percent a year ago. She does this by, among other things, repurposing her children’s bagel scraps for pizza toppings and slicing up lotion bottles to get that last little bit. My Spidey sense started to tingle, because I’ve known women like VanDeventer, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I found the telling detail, and whaddaya know, here it is:

VanDeventer was drying her hair in front of a fan after her portable hair dryer broke — until her friends bought her a new one.

I’ve got news for Amy: She’s not frugal, or even a tightwad. She’s a miser. Big, big difference.

People who practice frugality find happiness in simplicity. Misers bring the nastiness. They think an ugly sweater from the 80 percent off rack is better than a pretty one that was only 50 percent off. They’d not only rather eat hamburger than steak, they can’t even enjoy steak, even when you’re picking up the check, because you’re spending money they would have saved. It makes them miserable, all that waste. And waste is everywhere.

I once asked a miser how her vacation went. She said Great! and told me about the clerk at the McDonald’s on the turnpike who got confused and gave her change from a $20, instead of the $10 bill she’d been handed. “So it’s like I made money on it!” she said. Frugal people eat at McDonald’s; misers exult over an error that probably got the clerk fired at the end of the day.

A woman banking 50 percent of her take-home pay who won’t spend $19 at Target on a new hair dryer is not a person to be admired. Of course you may disagree, but that’s how I come down on it.

I’ve worked for newspapers, so I know a thing or two about making do with less. One year I turned off my furnace on March 1, because I couldn’t afford heat. (A valuable early-life lesson: It’s worth the $50 annual American Express fee for a couple of years, if it teaches you to never charge more than you can pay off in any given month.) I wasn’t starving, and I wasn’t poor, but there were times when things ran out or broke and didn’t get replenished or repaired because there just wasn’t any money for it. No biggie. And yes, I too rinse out my shampoo bottles to get the last couple of hair-washes out of it. I can get every drop out of the ketchup bottle. That’s just called Being Midwestern.

Little about the past 20 years has been so disgusting to me as the conspicuous consumption we’ve gawked over. From Donald Trump and his gold everything to “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” from designer jeans to designer sunglasses to designer baby clothes to designer kitchen utensils, from eight-year car loans to thousand-dollar senior proms — it’s all vile, and the sooner we flush it from the culture, the better. Let’s bring back “vulgar,” and paste it on those who deserve it. But hoarding money can be a sickness, the same way hoarding animals or household goods is. It’s one thing to buy the dark-meat chicken on sale, but it’s quite another to reuse your coffee grounds four times.

One is inventiveness and thrift. The other is a lack of generosity. Remember the woman with the ointment and the alabaster jar.

Howzabout some bloggage, then?

Of course, I will probably be rethinking miserliness in the very near future.

Roy watches PJTV so we don’t have to. Given the show in question was all about Going Galt, he should get a medal.

Roger Ebert on eroticism in the movies. Not sex, eroticism.

Off to work, so I can afford my coffee.