I cannot tell a lie: Last night I kept one eye on the ice dancing while I was working, and day-um, it was great. Those Italians, who stared each other down? Priceless. I wanted subtitles: You clumsy piece of left-footed crap!

NBC, for once committing journalism, offers a good gallery of the sequined carnage. And Slate has it all in a nutshell: Given that ice dancing seems to require little more than basic coordination, mediocre rhythm, a terrible outfit, and a cheerleader grin, these falls border on the surreal. You would expect such a performance from Will Ferrell. You expect more from your Olympians. Thank goodness these wobbly ballerinas defied my expectations. Tonight, for the first time, I’ll turn on the Olympics with the express purpose of watching the ice dancing finals. I don’t care who wins, but I’ll be hoping that someone falls.

When I was a j-fellow at the University of Michigan two years ago, a seminar by Bill Miller was one of the many unexpected and delightful treats. I forget what the title of his chat was, but I went in with low expectations, thinking it would be 90 minutes of law-school yammering. It wasn’t. He took us on something of a romp through such topics as the nomenclature of justice, the nanny culture of managing risk and Icelandic blood feuds, keeping us chuckling throughout.

One thing he said that night that stuck with me: The phrase “life is cheap” is used as a phrase of condemnation, but actually, it’s a sign of great progress. If you run into someone in your car and cause them to lose the use of their leg, which would you rather do? Pay them some money, or give up the use of your own leg? Valuing life cheaply is actually what allows civilization to advance.

I never thought of it that way.

Anyway, he’s written a book about the concept. Laura Miller reviews it in Salon. You’ll have to watch an ad, but pfft, it’s worth it:

Of course there was no insurance in those societies. We like to think that life was cheap in those cultures, but the problem was that it was so expensive they couldn’t get anything done. Life is cheap with us, despite all our talk about how we can’t have capital punishment because human life is too valuable. Do you know there are these signs up on the Michigan highways that say, “Kill a worker, pay $7,500”?

Yes, because not only are you going to go to prison, but you’ll pay a little fine. But everyone who drives by and reads it sees it as an insult. Seventy-five hundred for a highway worker! “Hey, I’ve got $7,500, let’s knock one off!”

When something appears in the New York Times, you can’t really say it isn’t getting attention, but I was struck by a passage in this Selena Roberts column, about Johnny Weir, the flaming figure skater, and wanted to point it out:

He isn’t required to satisfy anyone’s curiosity (about his sexuality). He doesn’t need the validation. He is guided by his confidence and by working-class parents who nurtured his individuality from the start.

“He is a role model in how he has achieved a goal,” Battiste said. “But he hasn’t really said, ‘This was my childhood and here’s how I dealt with it.’ Maybe he will. I have to keep reminding myself that Johnny is still young.”

I was talking to someone a few weeks ago, who has a friend with a son like this. Five years old, plays with Barbies, loves to play dress-up and clamors to help mommy arrange flowers.

“Let’s put these in the living room,” he said when they were finished. “It needs some detail.”

I asked another friend about this, one of those gay-from-birth men, wondering what he’d tell this mother. And he said he’d do what Weir’s parents seem to have done: Nurtured his individuality from the start. It’s a fine line for a parent to walk, between “You’re perfect just the way you are” and “If you wear nail polish to school, sooner or later you’re going to get your ass kicked.”

He wrote me, “I have a feeling that the Isaac Mizrahis of the world had mothers who gladly let them play with the sewing machine and gave unconditional encouragement. Today Mizrahi’s probably the number-one reason any of his classmates attend a reunion.”

I think he’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

Girlfriend, I know just how you feel.

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

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

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

You leave a place, you lose touch. But hey, that’s what the people left behind are for. And besides, being late doesn’t make “Lazy Muncie” any less amusing.

Not recommended for dial-up. Brief profanity, more than leavened by humor.

(My favorite was the khakis-and-blazer. Yours?)

Hat tip: Indiana Parley.

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

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

So let’s get to it, then.

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

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

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

Once again, terriers rule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tomorrow or later. Back to the grindstone.

I’m astonished:

The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had “a minor heart attack” Tuesday morning, hospital officials said.

The victim, Harry Whittington, was immediately moved back to the intensive care unit for further treatment, said Peter Banko, the administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial in Texas.

Yep, that’s Professor Ashley, on the Krewe de Vieux float, the first of 2006 Mardi Gras. Guess he always wanted to be a mime.

(Note: He’s a real professor. Dunno about Professor Longhair.)

Viva NOLA!

Even wasting as much time online as I do, it’s still possible to miss things, and I apologize if someone else sent you here first, but not really. (People apologize for all the wrong things and none of the right ones.) I’m speaking of Picky, Picky, Libby Copeland’s amusing essay on what happens when people who have too many choices bring their attitudes to the battlefields of love:

There is something peculiarly modern about this phenomenon, something aligned with our dark privilege of too much , this consumeriffic culture in which jeans and houses and breasts and ring tones are customizable. Consider it all: geographical dislocation, cities filled with singles, extended childhoods and postponed childbearing, speed-dating, the growing sense that the dating pool is as vast as the 454 men-seeking-women between the ages of 29 and 31 within five miles of your Zip code on Yahoo Personals.

In a world of infinite possibilities, the notion of falling in love, of finding The One, seems itself like the taquito girl, small-town and old-fashioned. Once upon a time, The One would’ve lived in your village or another one like it. Now, she could be this sweet girl across from you at the dinner table, but she could also be someone you haven’t yet met. What if there’s another woman somewhere in the world, like this girl, but better? Someone who will snowboard with you, and doesn’t do that strange throat-clearing thing?

There are people like this, I know, people like Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom character, capable of pushing the trapdoor button on women with man hands or the wrong laugh or whatever, but I’ve never had the luxury. Copeland quotes a personal ad:

Online, people attempt to custom-order mates with the awesome specificity of children at a Build-a-Bear Workshop. In the personal section of Craigslist, a man describes his dream woman: “you are very feminine but also a tad clumsy. you are short, but you love high heels . . . you have long dark hair and big eyes. you like to wear mascara and other eye make-up, and/or you have long lashes.”

I’ll bet my next freelance check — which will be a big one! — that this man is still alone.

But I think about this sort of thing in idle moments. I keep trying to finish this essay on newspapers, and I think a lot about whether they’re doomed because they’re badly run by the insecure hirelings of greedy corporations, or just because the very idea of a “general-interest” anything is simply antique. No one wants what everyone else has anymore. At the auto show last month, I wandered into the Rolls-Royce press conference, for no particular reason other than I had the time and I wanted to hear cultured British gentlemen say “motorcar.” The honcho giving the presentation said the biggest growth area in their company was the “bespoke sector,” i.e., the customizers. When you spend half a mil for a car, you don’t want to drive the same one the next guy with half a mil gets; you want one with chinchilla upholstery or paint the precise color of your wife’s hair or with a built-in cooler here or bulletproof glass there.

Maybe it stands to reason some think it can be applied to other people, too. Sooner or later they’ll learn.

By the way, I think newspapers wouldn’t be in quite so much trouble if they’d run more stuff like Copeland’s essay. I dunno about you, but by the time I read the features section, I’m not looking for tuna recipes or smart parenting stories. Maybe that’s just me.

A few days ago, some of were discussing school-play disputes in the comments, which only goes to show that NN.C commenters are ahead of the New York Times, which weighed in on Saturday with this depressing dispatch from the Culture Wars, about the cancellation of another play, this one in Missouri, after “some residents” (note: three of them) objected to its moral foundation.

The play: “Grease.”

To many, the term “culture war” evokes national battles over new frontiers in taste and decency, over violence in video games, or profanity in music or on television. But such battles are also fought in small corners of the country like Fulton, a conservative town of about 10,000, where it can take only a few objections about library books or high school plays to shift quietly the cultural borderlines of an entire community.

The complaints here, which were never debated in a public forum, have spread a sense of uncertainty about the shifting terrain as parents, teachers and students have struggled to understand what happened. Among teenagers who were once thrilled to have worked on the production, “Grease” became “the play they’d rather not talk about,” said Teri Arms, their principal, who had also approved the play before it was presented.

By the way, the principal also cancelled the next play — “The Crucible.” Wouldn’t want to produce anything that makes Christians not look like the loving, tolerant people we know they are, right?

Random bloggage:

Someone made Mitch Albom wait. No one makes Mitch Albom wait! That’ll teach him, Mr. Bigshot Doctor.

Hey, I like the Olympic beret. Others…don’t.

I have a new job. It pays well, allows me to work from home, uses my brain and skills and leaves lots of time free for writing. The only downside is the hours, which take up my evenings and deprive me of sleep and, well, blogging time. So a speed entry today, one of those blogger-meme things, blatantly cribbed from Lance Mannion. Ahem:

Ten views I hold without any evidence.

1) I was right to move to Fort Wayne and stay for about 17 years longer than I planned to.

2) Warren Zevon was a better songwriter than he was a performer.

3) Dogs are better than cats.

4) Lincoln was the best president. (OK, lots of evidence for that.) He couldn’t even survive the New Hampshire primary today.

5) If Islam really is a religion of peace, the peaceful Muslims are saying so to the wrong people.

6) Certain Lutherans are worse than many evangelicals, in terms of annoying the crap out of me.

7) Martin Scorsese keeps getting robbed because everyone in the Academy is jealous of him. But: Woody Allen is the world’s most overrated director. No, Spike Lee.

8) Small luxuries are better than big ones. Cashmere may be the best luxury of all.

9) Evil exists in every single human being above the age of 7. Some people just keep it buttoned up a little better.

10) The best art, the best food, the most interesting culture, comes from the bottom up. Also, from the oppressed up. (What if Michelangelo had been out’n’proud? We might never have gotten the Pieta. He’d have been dancing in a Florentine disco.)

Add your own in the comments.