“Patchy dense fog,” the guy on the radio said this morning. I guess they can’t say “lovely wisps of water vapor will cling to low-lying areas, including creek bottoms and golf courses, catching the early morning light in opaque streaks of loveliness that remind us of the dying of the season,” but that’s what it looked like as I drove Kate to school this morning. I’m not supposed to drive the morning shift, but as I said yesterday, it’s good to get out of your rut from time to time. Sometimes you see the morning light in new ways.

Then I came home and read this story, from AnnArbor.com, which replaced the daily newspaper there a few years back, and discovered I’m the same old grump. On just one readthrough, I spotted facts repeated in adjacent paragraphs, the governor’s name misspelled and windy quotes that needed a trim. Argh:

Dennis says, if passed, the bill would be an insurmountable blow to U-M.

“Surmount” and its variants apply to obstacles and other things you have to get over or around, not blows, even figurative ones. I’m sure two or three more reads would turn up more fat and gas, but editing brave new experiments in journalism isn’t my job. (Well, yes it is, but not this one.) Point these things out to people who aren’t in the journo-biz, and they look at you funny, but dammit, EDITING MATTERS. Proper use of quotes matters a lot. This is how you don’t do it:

“I am concerned for the university as a whole,” Dennis said. “It would be a really damaging blow to the university’s reputation as a fair and humane employer. I think it would cause us to lose faculty and never get them back.”

“It would just be tragic for the university,” he added.

I tell my students: Avoid using quotes to carry information. Use them to comment on the information. They are the pinpoint spotlights of storytelling, drawing your eye to important or interesting facts. The first and last lines of that four-sentence quote are unnecessary. In a squeeze, so is the second one.

Everybody loves the last scene of “A River Runs Through It,” but my favorite is the Zen writing lesson:

NARRATOR: Each weekday, while my father worked on his Sunday sermon, I attended the school of the Reverend Maclean. He taught nothing but reading and writing. And being a Scot, believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.

REV. MACLEAN: Good. Now throw it away.

Throw it away! Now that’s a man who knows the value of words on paper. Every so often a group of Buddhist monks show up at the Allen County Public Library and spend several days making a sand mandala in one of the public spaces, after which it is poured into the river. That’s all we do, although newspaper people have the added thrill of knowing their words are now lining my rabbit cage.

Let’s hop quick to the bloggage, so I can get a workout in today:

The Onion proves, once again, that it is America’s truly indispensable news source:

A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Northeast and Midwest.

The latest from Chest magazine (yes, it exists): Your blue jeans may have killed Turkish garment workers. Have a nice day!

One for Connie, Beth and the rest of you librarians and archivists, via MMJeff, a library mystery that reminds me, a little bit, of the guy who leaves cognac and roses on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave every year.

Jon Corzine, financial genius, nearly bails out of the company he ruined with a measly $12 million severance package. I can’t stand it.

Happy Tuesday to all.

Every time I take a mini-break, like I did this weekend, I think I should do it more often. Sometimes you get to feeling like a mule on a towpath, dragging the same load down the same road day after day, and that’s no way to live. You have to shake up your head from time to time. And so when, talking to my old friend Adrianne, wondering if we were ever going to actually see one another in the flesh again, I threw out the idea of a girls’ weekend in a third city — Washington D.C., where we’d wander the Mall and see people we both knew there, and maybe some others.

And that’s what we did. Just in time for an October nor’easter.

We escaped the snow, but Saturday was all about a chill, driving rain that relocated everything indoors. It turned out that was OK, as the activities mainly consisted of going from one loud, yakking restaurant or bar table to the next one, catching up and/or getting acquainted with friends old and new. Hank Stuever picked me up at the airport Friday, and we went from there to lunch to a driving tour of the city, which was really more of a sitting-in-traffic tour, but who cares? We talked and talked and talked, moving from there to a bar near Union Station, where we met Adrianne (aka Mrs. Lance Mannion) and an old colleague of hers, and an old colleague of ours, and that was another 90 minutes of talking, before Hank peeled off and the rest of us headed into Chinatown for dinner, and two more hours of blah-blah and when I tell you I woke up with a sore throat on Saturday, believe it.

I also wished I’d written everything down, especially that one story about Somebody Really Famous, but as I recall, that was on a doesn’t-leave-the-table-basis anyway, so it’s just as well.

Saturday we slept late and headed off to the National Archives, there to gaze upon the charters of freedom, as they were called. Fun fact to know and tell: All of the guards in the chamber whose voices I heard had the lilting accents of the Caribbean. “Note the typo in ‘Pennsylvania,'” he said, and it kind of made my heart soar a little. We are a nation of immigrants, after all.

From there it was on to the National Gallery, because it was close, and a surprisingly nice lunch in the cafe there with Barbara, whom you all know as 4dbirds. Then some Warhol, then home to treat the barking dogs and prepare for dinner with Roy and Kia, at some tapas joint near the Verizon Center, for another two hours of talk and alcohol, and then on to one of those yuppie brewpubs for more of the latter, and even though my throat is really sore now, it was a wonderful time. Roy fell on the considerable dinner tab with the energy of a future posthumous Medal of Honor winner covering a hand grenade, and I really wish we had fought him harder for it. But special occasions and all that, right? The only thing that could have made the weekend more memorable was if I’d perhaps stolen a horse from the outdoor stabling at the National Horse Show, which we passed on our walk back from the restaurant.

As Alan drove me to the airport Friday, I reflected that so much of what I found jaw-dropping about Detroit when I first moved here is now simply part of the scenery, and while I still see things that blow my mind fairly regularly, when you stop seeing your own town, that’s when it’s wise to travel. D.C. is thriving, and has apparently not been informed we’re in a recession. There are so many high-rise cranes at work, you’d think you were in Dubai. Hank says he and his partner couldn’t buy the equivalent of their two-plus-den apartment in their neighborhood for less than $700,000, even though it appears whole buildings full of new condos are going up everywhere. You heard it here first: THE TEA PARTY IS RIGHT. UNCLE SAM IS A VORACIOUS BEAST.

My only regret is that I forgot my goddamn camera, so the only picture I took was of the Exorcist steps, with the iPad. Oh, well. We have our memories.

And now it’s Monday, Day of Suck, but fortunately, being away from the ‘nets for most of the weekend, I got a little bloggage:

Gene Weingarten considers the Online News Association conference, where the keynote speaker was the founder of I Can Has Cheezburger. A taste:

I love journalism, and frankly, even in this bewildering new form, I’m just glad that it’s still alive. My newspaper, for one, is actually hiring. I am looking at a new office-wide job posting for “an experienced, hands-on designer to help create Web-based and mobile applications … for various non-news verticals.”

Huh.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now, but Joe Nocera got his mitts on some Halloween pictures from a law firm that specializes in foreclosures, and you should not be surprised by what they show. In Gawker’s comment thread on the subject, however, I found this jaw-dropping entry from something called the Irvine Housing Blog, about HELOC abuse aided and abetted by Countrywide, and at least partially corrected by you and me. Talk about a scare for Halloween.

On a lighter note, Jim at Sweet Juniper has made another fantastic Halloween costume for his son – Rocketeer.

This and that: Seeing Roy this weekend, I was reminded of one of my favorite pieces of his, The Ballad of the Reverb Motherfuckers. That link is to Part 1. You want the rest, Google ’em yourself.

Time to get the day underway. I feel refreshed and rejuvenated, or maybe I’m still just a tad drunk.

Some of the great steps of modern cinematic history, and I visited them today.

I’m a big believer in food therapy, although the older I get the less often it takes the form of eating a bowl of raw cookie dough. One of the new activities I spoke of yesterday requires me to drop Kate off downtown at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, which is a strange time. If I head back out to the ‘burbs I run into after-work traffic, and so I look for stupid little errands to burn time until it thins out. Check out a possible bike route, buy a dozen tamales in Mexicantown, whatever. Yesterday I popped into a venerable downtown bar/restaurant called Cliff Bell’s.

Mmm, happy hour. (But I can’t drink on weeknights.) Not too crowded. Lovely venue, restored in 2006 to its full Art Deco glory. Framed newspaper articles in the foyer outside the ladies’ describe it as a former speakeasy, or “blind pig” in the local jargon. It also says it opened in 1935, two years after Repeal. Well, I guess it could have been a blind pig before that — there were certainly enough of them. More fascinating fact: Blind pigs were the source of 50,000 jobs at their peak during Prohibition. Fifty thousand! That earns them a place at any economic-development table in my world.

But today is 2011, and the drinks are considerably more expensive. I saw complaining on Yelp about $12 martinis but as I said, I wasn’t drinking. I looked over the menu and saw just what the doctor ordered: Steak and eggs. It came in the form of a petite filet on a small potato cake, topped with a runny one sunny side up, napped with bernaise. It was raining and chilly outside, and all that warm protein just hit the spot.

On the way home, I took a few side streets to the freeway and watched a lone cyclist cross my path — no lights, dark clothing, with what appeared to be half a dozen hula hoops carried crosswise across his body, but a closer look revealed them to be insulated cable of some sort. A scrapper taking his treasure to the yard. I bet he won’t be enjoying the steak and eggs at Cliff Bell’s anytime soon.

How did the morning slip away again? I’ll tell you how: Editing copy. My reporters are young, they’re inexperienced, and they don’t always deploy their adjectives with care. May I also add that their only role models in pop culture are TV types, and every time one of these show ponies asks, “And how did that make you feel?” before tipping the mic in the subject’s direction, God kills a kitten. At the very least He gives me another story to fix, written by someone who thinks that’s how you do journalism.

I shouldn’t talk. My students teach me something every day, and seeing them grow over time is genuinely rewarding. One I would have written off a year ago called me a couple weeks back, shaking with excitement over being sent to New York to cover Occupy Wall Street. The story he filed was better than anything he ever wrote for me. I hope I had something to do with it.

But now I must away, and I will not be in my regular place tomorrow. I’m off for a weekend of R&R in an undisclosed location, although I’m sure there’ll be photos. But tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., I hope to be looking at Detroit from a rapidly ascending airplane.

Meanwhile, here was the most eye-opening story from last night’s health beat:

Expectant mothers are more likely to die from murder or suicide than from several of the most common pregnancy-related medical problems, a U.S. study said.

You don’t say.

One of my Facebook friends posted this video two days ago, on the birthday of Father Charles Coughlin. Remarkable in many ways, but perhaps mostly for the casual use of “voluble” in a newsreel script. But how did he feel? Also note the use of dramatic reenactment.

I have to go. I hope it’s not raining where you are, because it sure is here.

This fall has been maddening, mainly because of changes in everyone’s lives that are screwing up all my attempts to get a handle on things, order being the only thing that gives me a modicum of peace of mind in this crazy world full of uncertainty, crazy Republicans and a freelance income stream. Kate started high school, where the bell rings 20 minutes earlier than it did in middle school, meaning earlier mornings. Alan started a new job, shifting from a night shift to days. There are new after-school activities, new friends, new everything, and just when I think it’s settled in, something else comes up.

Plus, I’m still working until 1 a.m. every weeknight, which means I don’t get to sleep until 1:30, which means even more sleep deprivation, the Grump-o-Meter rising through the week until today it actually shorted out. I awoke to a clamorous house before 7 a.m. — Alan shepherding an earnings story onto the web from our kitchen table, Kate with her usual teenage grooming rituals — and actually felt calm. I think it was the collapse of will, a certain caving-in of the belief that I will ever again have a rewarding job that pays a decent salary, with a 401K, a paid vacation and a more or less normal schedule. I will never again get more than five hours of rest in a night, except on weekends. And year will pile upon year, and then I’ll be dead. Om.

Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I’m done cooking for the week. Roast chicken Saturday, meat loaf Sunday, baked ziti Monday and pot roast last night. (Really good pot roast. I’m the only one who likes it, which suggests a certain hostility in adding it to the weekly menu, but if you don’t like this pot roast, there is something wrong with you.) There are plenty of leftovers, and if anyone dares to look me in the face and ask what’s for dinner, I’ll jerk my thumb in the direction of the refrigerator and bark, “Microwave.”

Oh, I’m just grousing. I’m gearing up for an R&R weekend day after tomorrow, after which everything will smooth out for a while.

But now I have to head down to campus, for an internship fair. We have a table and a banner for our little hyperlocal website, although if I were being honest, I’d substitute one reading CHANGE YOUR MAJOR.

I have a little bloggage today:

Tony Fadell is a graduate of Grosse Pointe South High School, and is generally called the inventor of the iPod, although obviously that other guy had a lot to do with it, too. He left Apple a couple years ago and formed a new startup, about to unveil its first product — a programmable thermostat that’s as beautiful, and as easy to use, as an iPod. (Only a native of the frozen Midwest would see the utility of such a thing. My allegedly programmable thermostat is a steaming piece of crap, and should have been smashed in the driveway with a sledgehammer long ago.) The bad news: It costs as much as a month of gas heat. Still: WANT.

Jon Stewart, Pat Robertson, the GOP field: Comedy gold.

Must run.

I don’t have much time to write this morning; I used up 23 minutes of my allottment on email, venting about a particularly annoying Free Press columnist (not you-know-who) and asking Hank Stuever how I might get to see the rest of “Homeland” without subscribing to Showtime. The first episode is on iTunes, and it’s much better than I expected. I was able to get past the oh-sure-Claire-Danes-is-a-CIA-analyst thing fairly easily; it helped that the producers styled her against her beauty, at least a little. I’ve been watching “My So-Called Life” lately, and it’s interesting to see how losing the last few pounds of adolescent fleshiness seemingly made her eyes grow three sizes.

Oh, hell, why not say, “the usual actress diet starved her into a Keane kid,” but she’s good at what she does.

So let’s go for bloggage today, because I don’t have the steam for much else.

Only one day later, and I’m already tiring of the Steve Jobs tributes, even as they move on to second-day stretches like this: Jobs understood our individualistic culture, and that is applicable to politics somehow, which I’m going to show with a lot of sweeping generalizations. Watch how I do it:

At the same time, while Mr. Jobs saw a society moving inexorably toward individual choice, he also seemed to understand that such individuality breeds detachment and confusion. And so Apple sought to fill that vacuum by making itself into more than a manufacturer; it became a kind of community, too, with storefronts and stickers and a membership that enabled you to get your e-mail, or video-conference with your friends, or post a Web page of your vacation photos.

But that’s nothing compared to the Corndog, at National Review Online, where the ideologues do what ideologues do: Seek to see the whole world through their special glasses:

That old Motorola cinderblock (cell phone) would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn’t play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy. Not all of them, but a great many.

OK, I’m going to try to “figure this out”: A cell phone is not like public education because? One’s a cell phone, and one’s public education! What do I win?

I don’t always visit Sweet Juniper’s occasional posts on children’s literature, but I should, because of this explication de texte of “Goodbye Rune.” Killer line: I do feel like I understand Lars von Trier a little bit better now. Me, too!

OK, gotta run. We’re pulling the boat today, a bit early, in preparation for Alan starting a demanding new job at the paper later in the month, one that may well dictate that he never see his beloved sailboat again. Kidding. But at least we have good weather for it — Indian summer with a vengeance. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you after it’s over.

We’re having some strange-bedfellows moments where I live, as the governor and a supportive legislature enact various planks of his education-reform package. In large part, they’re cut and pasted from the white-paper library of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which probably exists, in some form and under a different name, in your state, too — (Name of state) + (policy) + (institute/review/consortium). The Mackinac Center is “non-partisan,” the Indiana Policy Review (for which I once did some work) seeks to “marshall the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues,” but down the line they’re pretty much doctrinaire Republican, and take their cues from the big boys higher up the food chain, the Hudsons and Hoovers and the like.

(I shouldn’t say they’re doctrinaire Republican, as the relationship is the other way around — the Republicans are doctrinaire free-minds-free-markets think-tank policy photocopiers. Beats workin’.)

Anyway, the governor is pushing his education agenda through a compliant legislature, and it’s ruffling feathers big-time here in this very Republican area. At its heart is the strongly held belief that public education is a shambles, that a big part of the problem is fat, overpaid teachers, and “market solutions” like charter schools are the answer to all our problems.

An early proposal was to make all Michigan schools open to all Michigan students, which sounds very egalitarian and progressive and a whole lot of no-big-deal, as 80 percent of Michigan schools have already voted to make themselves so-called schools of choice. As funding is determined on a per-pupil basis, kids simply arrive with a backpack full of cash and take their seat. This was a lead-balloon idea in Grosse Pointe, however, for a number of reasons. We’re not a schools-of-choice district, and never have been. We already pay higher taxes here, in order to keep our per-pupil spending at a higher level than the state allows, and no one accounted for that in the bill — how would these new arrivals make up the difference? Perhaps by magic. There’s also a strong sense of community and parental involvement in the schools, a shared belief that money alone doesn’t make a school excellent, but rather buy-in by all. And finally, unlike lots of high-quality suburban districts, we are not in exurbia, but hard by, literally across the street from, the worst-performing district in the state. The fear was that open enrollment would mean an influx of badly prepared Detroit students who would need disproportionate teacher attention, etc. And because race is the bass note to every single issue here, some of this fear was based in racism, and I’d never deny that for even a second. But that’s not the whole part of it. I don’t favor schools of choice, either, at least not without a lot of carefully considered conditions that would ameliorate the obvious problems. (Those who think we’re walled in by stacks of money are invited to peruse real-estate listings here, which are extremely affordable — ahem — of late. We also offer a range of rental housing. You can get into our district for well under $1,000 a month in housing costs.)

But I don’t want to get into a detailed discussion of Michigan education policy for you folks, most of whom don’t live here. Rather, I want to think a little about public education, including the foundation of this reform movement — that it’s a bloody mess.

Obviously, it’s not a mess in Grosse Pointe, and it’s not a mess in Carmel, Ind., and it’s not a mess in any number of well-to-do suburban districts. It’s also not a mess in urban schools where an engaged parent base demands excellence, and gets it. (Shoutout to LAMary here.) It’s not even a mess in a place like Fort Wayne, which has a student body across the economic spectrum, and generally does a good job with them. It can be admittedly difficult to navigate in many cities — you have to know which schools are the ones you want, and know the teachers down to a dossier level — but when we talk about failing public education, we’re mainly talking about a handful of dysfunctional, chaotic big-city districts like Detroit, Chicago and the like. And I’m not even sure it’s failing there. Rather, I think the schools are simply where we’re seeing the manifestations of a decimated middle and working class.

I think a lot about what I’m paying for here in Grosse Pointe. What does my education dollar buy? A huge chunk, at least half, buys an engaged public, period — parents who value education and support it with their behavior and lifestyles. They read books, feed nutritious meals, use correct grammar and tell their children from an early age that college isn’t an option. Another big chunk is for excellent teachers. We just had back-to-school night, and I was impressed by nearly all of Kate’s teachers this term, from geometry to gym. Since enrolling her in second grade, I can count the clinkers on one hand, no, three fingers. And even they were only clinkers in the sense that they were merely competent, falling short of talented. I don’t begrudge any of them a dime of their salaries; teaching is an exhausting job. I think the next-largest chunk is for the physical plant — pleasant schools, current textbooks, contemporary technology, bathrooms with toilet paper. (And may I just say? Anyone who says throwing money at the problem doesn’t improve education hasn’t been in an affluent public school lately, where so much money is thrown around great wads of cash blow down the halls like tumbleweeds. SMART boards, new computers — and you haven’t even stuck your head in the auditorium yet.)

The rest is spent in dribs and drabs, but by and large, I feel like I’m getting full value for my education tax dollar. Detroit, on the other hand, is feeling the effects of all the social chaos that plagues the city — poverty, single parenthood, substance abuse. I volunteered for a year in an after-school program a while back, and saw with my own eyes the kids who struggled with simple arithmetic, with the difference between a noun and a pronoun, with finding a clean shirt and stick of deodorant in the morning. One night I was asked to drop off a trio of siblings at home, as yet another crisis in their crisis-ridden lives had derailed transportation that day. The eldest directed me down a typical Detroit street — streetlights out, half the houses gone and half of the remaining ones abandoned — until I got to a bungalow so dark I hesitated to let them out of the car. “It’s fine,” the kid said, and walked onto the porch, where he pulled open the door and let out the light inside. They were living behind plywood. Of course.

And the answer to this, the various public-policy think tanks tell us, is? Charter schools! Market solutions! Choice!

By the way, Detroit is already riddled with charter schools; the idea parents have no choice in alternatives to the building on the corner — or several corners away, depending on what’s closed lately — is a joke.

Here’s another: The governor, a wealthy man, sends his children to private schools. I am done listening to his ideas for public education. The charter-school movement is yet another flavor of the month designed to neuter teachers’ unions and transfer public resources into private hands. That the people pushing it think we’re too stupid to see this makes me wonder where they went to school.

OK, enough rant. I have to go meet with my own students, and I have work to do. Bloggage:

Like all Michiganders, I look forward to my new sense of safety and freedom, now that I will be allowed to carry a concealed Taser.

Detroitblogger John — I wish he’d just use his regular name, now that he’s been outed as John Carlisle — on the people who beg in Detroit. What works, what doesn’t.

For me, it’s breakfast time. Happy Wednesday, all.

For the first time in ages, Alan and I are going to a Halloween party. Actually, we’re going to a killer Halloween party, Theatre Bizarre’s “The Initiation” at the Masonic. Costumes are mandatory. The ticket says those that obscure identity entirely are preferred. So. Hmm.

Alan, ninja shopper, immediately hit Etsy and fell hard for the plague doctor getups. He likes the idea of placing aromatic herbs in the snout to cleanse the miasma from the air, probably a good idea among the throngs at the Masonic.

As for me, he suggested this rabbit mask, perhaps worn with my black wool tail coat and my riding boots, for a March hare vibe, although I think it would also be arresting with a black velvet cocktail dress I might be able to wedge myself into. The price is ridiculous, but we’ve had a little good fortune lately, and I could justify it as an art purchase, as I’d certainly hang it on the wall afterward. Who doesn’t want a demonic leather rabbit face looking down on them in the living room?

Looking through the rest of the offerings from this particular shop, I wonder what sexual proclivity I might be advertising with my rabbit mask, unbeknownst to me. The rabbit is a symbol of fertility, after all. I’d hate to be followed home by some sort of Furry variant.

The Theatre Bizarre documentary trailer is online, and is entertaining, although you are warned of an outburst of profanity toward the end, so — NSFW, unless you’re using headphones. But some great imagery.

Sweet, sweet Friday. I thought you’d never get here. Only about three hours of assorted this ‘n’ that, and then the rest of you is mine-all-mine. The school year schedule has settled in, with a couple of new activities that virtually guarantee I will never nap again. Although Kate is the one I feel for — her homework load is ridiculous. On back-to-school night the counselor said two hours is standard for a student with a basic course load, and add an hour for honors classes. Her extracurricular is music, but not at school; she was prohibited from auditioning for jazz band because she’s not enrolled in the music program. (During what hour of the day? I wondered.) So she’s doing the youth program at the DSO, which is going to be great, but is demanding at a whole new level.

I guess it’s pointless to object, because this is The Way Things Are These Days, but it still bugs me. Every so often I read something worrying about the things teenagers can see on TV these days. TV? If your kid has time to watch TV for longer than a few minutes at a time, he’s not doing his homework.

So. Before I leave, a few words about fat.

When Mark Bittman wrote, the other day, that the campaign against fast food will have to be conducted at the cultural level and patterned after the one against smoking, I shifted in my seat a little. That’s partly because I enjoy an Egg McMuffin from time to time, and also because if you’re waging war against corporations in the name of public health, the collateral damage is going to be human.

Many fat people will tell you their condition is the last acceptable prejudice, and I don’t doubt it. People who would drive nails through their tongues before allowing it to speak the word “nigger” have no problem casting casual slurs at fat people, seeing it not as a thing one cannot change but as a character flaw. They have a point. We all know how to lose weight, and to the extent we don’t, well, it’s our choice. I’d argue that we all have character flaws, and if we’re lucky, they’re not visible to the world. We watch baroque pornography online, or harbor vile thoughts about others. We’re wearing our special underwear right now. We cheat on our taxes. We stole our best friend’s girlfriend, or maybe we just had a quickie that one time. We dream, late at night, about getting in the car, draining the bank accounts, and heading west without a word to those left behind.

This is all prompted by a discussion I find not just ridiculous but offensive, i.e., is Chris Christie too fat to be president? Michael Kinsley:

He is just too fat. Maybe, if he runs for president and we get to know him, we will overlook this awkward issue because we are so impressed with the way he stands up to teachers’ unions. But we shouldn’t overlook it — unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it. … Controlling what you eat and how much is not easy, and it’s harder for some people than for others. But it’s not as difficult as curing a chemical addiction. With a determined, disciplined effort, Christie could thin down, and he should — because the obesity epidemic is real and dangerous. And the president inevitably sets an example.

There are many reasons to think Christie shouldn’t be president, but this isn’t one of them. And oh, I know — I’ve chuckled at fat-Rush Limbaugh jokes with the rest of you. And I laffed out loud at Cooz’s most recent expression of lyrical genius, filed just moments ago. But I’m going to decline to participate in the fat-bashing this time.

(Oh, and Michael Kinsley? How casually you state that fixing disordered eating patterns is less difficult than “curing” a chemical dependency. You quit heroin by not taking heroin ever again. A fat person trying to lose weight still has to eat. A while back my health-care searching kicked up a story out of Australia, in which a number of fashionistas told the truth and nothing but the truth about what they eat. One drinks hot water all day long before sitting down to a 1,200-calorie dinner. Another confesses to taking a daily over-the-counter cold medicine, because her doctor told her it would boost her metabolism by a tiny amount. That’s as fucked-up as any McDonald’s habit.)

Let’s end the fat hate. Just for a while, to see how we like it. And because I’m not totally dour on the subject, I’d like to unearth one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time, Bill Clinton at McDonald’s:

I love it because it gets to the truth about both Clinton and so many fat people — they are that way because their appetites, for everything, are large. I always thought Clinton’s fondness for chunk-making food was an expression of his essential generosity and love of people. Not to mention salt and grease.

So, some quick bloggage:

Lance Mannion considers Archbishop Timothy Dolan, darlin’ of the right.

You all were right about Officer Pepper Spray yesterday; I just wasn’t keeping up with the story. Jon Stewart takes it one step further.

And now, I’m off to (almost) start the weekend. Enjoy yours.

Someone has probably sent you videos of the Occupy Wall Street protests this week in New York. This clip is popular, 40 seconds that ostensibly shows two women being pepper-sprayed for no apparent reason, although I’ve run it a few times and can’t find the moment of truth. Besides, I’m sure someone has it from another angle. Every other person there was carrying a camera.

We live in a world more photographed every day, and still, we miss stuff all the time. All the cameras in New York City, and only one captured the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. Probably hundreds were trained on the buildings when the second plane hit, and yet, conspiracy theorists continue to insist we don’t really know what happened. Did anyone ever see the plane that hit the Pentagon? The command center of the vast American military, and all I recall was a grainy security-camera image of a blur and a fireball. No wonder the truthers were able to beat that dead horse for a decade.

I knew a photographer in college who was summoned to testify about some photos of alleged police brutality he’d taken at a demonstration. As he remembered the experience, the cross-examination was short. How many frames can your camera shoot? Five per second with a motor drive. How many frames on a roll of film? Thirty-six. How many frames does a film camera capture? Twenty-four per second. Thank you, that is all.

A plane crash-lands in the Hudson River, in a city packed with tourists and cameras, and one building’s security cam gets a clear shot, and only a glimpse between buildings. Today’s cell phones can capture video in high-definition. I can have mine out and ready to roll in a matter of seconds, and I don’t think I’ve ever shot anything worth shooting.

And yet, does a day go by when someone isn’t embarrassed or done in by a single photo? Scarlett Johansson can’t resist snapping a private shot of her fine fanny, and soon it’s out there and nearly crashes the internet. Two Detroit cops are on the hot seat for photos taken outside a traveling strip club/party bus called the Booty Lounge. I don’t even see where they did anything wrong; the picture could have been a photobomb for all I can tell. But it was on the club’s Facebook page, and so it must be atoned for.

Last night NPR had a piece on the crackdown on anonymous internet commenters; more newspapers are making a connection with Facebook or some other real-name network, and now comments on stories must be made under one’s actual name. Part of me applauds this — a self-respecting sewer rat wouldn’t hang in most newspaper comment section — while the rest wonders what this will mean in a world where we’re supposedly accountable for every utterance, online or off, along with every embarrassing photo ever taken of us, ever.

My guess is, soon it won’t matter. Or maybe we’ll all simply change our names.

The final day of my hell week, and pals, I can’t wait for it to end. Happy Thursday.

Mariam Charara, one of my students from last year, got married in May, and as part of their engagement-photo package, she and her fiancé Hussein, both avid Red Wings fans, took some pictures at the Joe:

As you can see from the brand, it got them named the team’s official Facebook fans of the day yesterday. The last I checked, 850 people “liked” the photo, and 89 had left comments. Eighty-eight were cheery and supportive. One wasn’t:

I don’t like. I see this as a provocation. Arabs will never integrate themselves into the american culture, believe me. When they will be numerous, Arabs will try to impose their culture to America, and when you will become aware, it will be too late. So wake up. We had the same problem in France, and now… it’s too late.

Actually, this is probably good news. One jerkoff among 90 hockey fans? The Pope himself might call that a miracle. To me, it’s a reflection of the utterly unremarkable nature of the scene; you see young women like Mariam all over the area, and all over the sports venues. When I took Kate to a Tigers game a few years ago, we sat behind a father with three daughters, each wearing a team jersey and hijab in matching colors.

And it’s too funny to imagine someone could look at a picture of a Lebanese-American woman dressed in a Red Wings jersey and blue jeans, capering in front of their arena, and draw the conclusion that Arabs are trying to impose their culture on the U.S. Because of course this is a very common sight in Beirut.

Mariam’s career goal, by the way, is to be the first hijab-wearing hockey beat writer in the NHL, and my guess is, she’ll make it.

I have about six hours of work to fit into a four-hour bag, so I’m going to have to get out of here. A few quick blogends:

From one of Sweet Juniper’s side blogs: Urchin with puppies.

Something Gawker is indispensable for: Telling me about parts of the internet I would never visit, but still want to be briefed on.

One reason to give Barack Obama a second term. There is no way Mrs. Mitt Romney will turn herself out like this.

Ta ta.