Perhaps in keeping with yesterday’s theme of bad neighbors, I found this story about a 10-year-old boy who shot his neo-Nazi dad to death strangely moving:

At a meeting the day before he was shot, Mr. Hall hoisted a swastika banner, not far from his newborn’s bassinet. His 10-year-old son listened as Mr. Hall spoke of finding rotting bodies on the border and discussed fears of being attacked with “AIDS-infected blood” if the group was to rally in San Francisco.

After the meeting, members drifted outside to smoke and drink.

The boy sat nearby on the steps. Was he having a good time? a reporter asked. Yes, he said, though he was annoyed by his four younger sisters. But he was the eldest, he added, and a boy. “And boys are more important,” he said.

That night, Jeff Hall apparently went out with some of his members. He arrived home about midnight and, four hours later, the police received a call about shots fired.

The boy shot his father in the wee small hours. Read the story, though, and you see that the family was already the subject of a reporting project on the neo-Nazi movement, which explains the many observed details of its particular family life, which ran from hate rallies to baby showers.

That is, of course, the story of many families, the way the daily details of our life are each member’s version of “normal,” whether it’s the way we eat dinner or what we hang on our walls. Try to imagine many of the details of those wonderful stories we told yesterday from the perspective of the people on the other side. Everything’s relative.

If I sound like I’m not making sense this morning, there’s a good reason. Kate is off on another of her last-year-of-middle-school weekend trips, and I was up at some ghastly hour to drop her at yet another idling bus. Destination: Chicago, for some choir thing, plus the usual — Navy Pier, cruise on the river, Magnificent Mile, etc. This isn’t even the last one, either. In another month, there’s a day trip to Cedar Point to celebrate the end of it all. I should travel this much.

Anyway, I came home, fell back into bed and woke up at 9:30 from a dream that immediately slipped out the window, and the sense that I’d wasted half the day. In some ways, I have. So time to publish and get outta here.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Thanks to my former colleague Bob Caylor for this story, with a sentence that’s surely the best one in a month of News ‘n’ Sentinels:

For a politician, he was exceptionally unconcerned about appearances, from the unmade bed to the explicit images of male-female couples performing sex acts that flickered on the screen of the room’s muted television throughout the interview.

Long made short: One of those crazy people who file for local office actually won his primary, and now the party is trying to get him disqualified. He’s claiming a right-wing conspiracy, “like Hillary Clinton said about Bill,” only the party trying to get him booted from the ballot is actually the Democratic one. I thought Bob handled it deftly, but then, he’s had lots of practice.

The Onion imitates life:

“Since last week, the number of people who have incorrectly stated that all SEAL members must do 300 pull-ups in a minute, earn advanced calculus degrees from MIT, and be able to hold their breath underwater for an hour, has been extraordinarily high,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, adding that the comment, “I heard you need to be able shoot a quarter from a mile away after running for four hours straight,” has been idiotically uttered in more than 65 percent of discussions related to the military operation.

Finally, Mississippi flooding photos, from the Atlantic’s In Focus picture blog. As a former resident of a city that floods, I thought you couldn’t surprise me with a flood picture. Turns out you can.

Off to the boatyard! Mast goes up today. Maybe something on the fun tomorrow.

Maybe you read John Wallace’s comment yesterday about his awful neighbors finally moving out. He and his wife sat on the porch for the load-out, listening to a custom mix of farewell music. He didn’t tell you he also took pictures:

Ha ha. The girl is 17 and pregnant. Pray for her baby.

We’ve all lived in places like this, haven’t we? Or rather, we’ve all had neighbors like this. It’s part of the motivating force that gets you to finally stop screwing around, pull up your socks, dress for success and move the hell out of these places. Alternate strategy: Start a campaign of merciless pressure to get them to move out. Whatever works.

I had a guy who lived behind me in Fort Wayne, on the Dayton Avenue side. David Hall. His sole claim to fame was that he ran for city council one year, put up to the job by some prankster pissed off at the incumbent, whose name was Dede Hall. He — the prankster, I have to think — paid for a few signs in the same colors as Dede’s, and posted them here and there. Dede had nothing to worry about, but as usual, he got a few votes from those who left their reading glasses in the car. Those people, I can assure you, didn’t live nearby.

Here’s the difference between those people and you: They fight outdoors. When Kate was a toddler, I was putting her into her car seat when David’s baby mama stormed out the front door, child in her arms, pursued by David, and they proceeded to have a shoving match on the lawn. One night a few people got in an argument in the same spot. I know we drop occasional F-bombs here, but I also know some of you read this on filtered computers that can be tripped by too many of them. So for the fine Anglo-Saxon no-no word, we’ll substitute “fork.” This is how it went:

Fork you.

Fork you.

And so on. One morning I came out for a bike ride and found a young man parked in front of my garage, blocking it. He was sound asleep, a drink in his hand, his other nestled in his pants for warmth. I knocked a few times, trying to wake him up, but all he did was shift a bit in his seat and turn his face the other way. I gave up and called the police, and when I returned from my ride, the car was being hitched to a tow truck and he was on his way to the lockup. It wasn’t David, but it was probably one of his pals.

He moved out, leaving his long-suffering mother behind. She was a nice woman. Things improved immediately.

Which seems as good a time as any to link to this mugshot I keep forgetting about: Kelly Gene Gibson of Fort Wayne, after his 48th arrest for huffing paint. I don’t know where he lives, but if it’s on Dayton Avenue, my former neighbors have my sympathies. Alan dug up this story on the city’s frequent flyers at the jail, and he was in there, too.

So, some bloggage:

Hank Stuever watches “Becoming Chaz,” the documentary about Cher’s daughter’s sex-reassignment surgery, and gets right to the good parts:

Cher looms distantly and mostly unseen, providing still more fertile OWN fodder — when mother-daughter issues become mother-son issues. When she at last makes herself available for a single, awkward interview, we are treated to the galling spectacle of a 66-year-old woman with that much cosmetic surgery describing her bewilderment at her son’s fixation on image, body and identity.

It’s weird when you see an obviously professional photographer shooting pictures on Saturday, and then see the piece he was shooting for — and one of the pictures — a few days later. And then I read the story, and find the mother of one of Kate’s friends quoted therein. No great shakes on the story, just one of those things.

She-who and He-who — it’s complicated.

A soft-spoken member of our community with a single link to the Gingrich clan says he values that relationship and doesn’t want to endanger it by saying anything publicly, but this line from his email yesterday is too good not to share:

When I read about him, I want to kill people, break things, blow up large animals, eat small ones alive, build meth labs, drink rotgut whiskey and smoke crack while Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” plays at 11 in the background.

And the fact that U.S. news media do not respond in exactly the same way I do shows just how incredibly sick and fucked up this country is.

A quote like that is too good to go to waste. Happy Wednesday, all.

Sorry, late start today. I spent my blogging time writing a column for my other site. It was on a plan to designate bike routes in Grosse Pointe — not paths, mind you, only a few signs and stripes on existing roads — that seems to have stalled. Nothing happens quickly here, but this is approaching ridiculousness. When Fort Wayne outpaces you, you are one foot-draggin’ place, cuz.

Amount of impact I believe this column will have: Zero.

That’s always been my impact as a columnist. It doesn’t bother me, and never has. One of the hazards of being a paid commentator, on anything, is that it doesn’t take much feedback to swell a person’s head, and once that happens, everything you write sounds like it’s being delivered in the Roman senate by some guy in a toga. Remember when Charles Krauthammer laid out a strategy whereby the Bush administration could walk back the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination, and three days later, they followed it pretty much like a road map? Remember how his prose continued to be lively, and he didn’t take himself too seriously?

Look, here’s a picture of him with the closest thing to a smile that ever crosses his face. You want to know how old I am? I remember when Charles Krauthammer occasionally filed a lighter piece about raising his son.

On the other hand, you could argue that failing to take myself seriously is what doomed my career. I remember once, sitting in my little semi-private cubicle at work, overhearing a copy editor making a service appointment in the next one over. She was working very hard to impress the person on the other end about how valuable her time was. That’s a phrase that has never crossed my lips — “my time is valuable, too.” (I will say, “life’s too short for this bullshit” from time to time, however.)

On the career front, since many of you expressed concern yesterday: Thanks for it. I batted out a quick 600 words on the Critical Mass ride yesterday and sold it to a local magazine. I also contacted a person who has used me in the past, having heard that she recently lost an assistant just as she’s embarking on a project that will require many fresh new words, and that’s looking good. And I heard from a few more folks privately. I’ll get through this, although I doubt my time will be all that much more valuable.

So let’s make a quick pass through the bloggage. We have some good stuff:

The Situation Room photo, analyzed like the May Day photograph. Thanks, Jolene.

Amazing: Buried in all that Wikileak information, this.

The silver horse’s ass is running for governor of Indiana. I’m sure he will bring his best radio voice to the job. Meanwhile, Gail Collins considers the current occupant of that office:

But about Mitch Daniels. The political world has been abuzz with speculation that he will run for president. Centrist Republicans loved it when he began urging the party to keep its eye on the deficit-reduction prize and stop obsessing about social issues. “Try to concentrate on making ends meet, which Washington obviously has failed to do for a long time, and have other policy debates in other places if you can,” he advised.

He then went home and announced that he would sign a bill to strip Planned Parenthood of Medicaid financing.

Good doggie!

OK, time to get out of here. Have a good half-day, all.

Forty-six degrees and fog as I write this, but it’s supposed to climb to 70 today. Woot, 70 whole degrees the last week of April at 42 degrees north latitude. But with thunderstorms. Always a downside.

Sorry, feeling a little grumpy today. My iPhone is failing. It’s three years old and it’s probably time for replacement, but the idea of getting a new one fills me with resentment. My model is the 3G clearance special that AT&T is now giving away for $50, and I’d be happy to do that, but I’m sure I’d need to sign a two-year contract. I hate two-year contracts. I hate all contracts, frankly. In two years, I could be dead. In two years, the 3G clearance special will be as antique as a four-pound all-metal Ma Bell desk model with the corkscrew cord.

Speaking of which, I loved those phones. I love scenes in movies where someone uses a phone to beat someone else, like Joe Pesci does with the pay phone in “Goodfellas.” He put a serious hurt on that guy, and he only used the receiver. Nowadays, I drop my phone and we all gasp — Is it dead? Is the screen cracked? You couldn’t beat a hamster to death with an iPhone.

On the other hand, I have dropped this sucker plenty, and the worst thing that’s happened is, the SIM card has popped out. It’s been a pretty good phone. But I still resent it, the way I would resent crack cocaine, if that were my addiction, instead of constant phone-checking. There’s been some talk of late of smartphone etiquette — talk about an oxymoron — and I’m sympathetic, really I am, but the goddamn thing is just so convenient, it’s insinuated itself into my life so thoroughly, that I feel I might as well be wearing a tether. We always hate the ones we love.

Since today is already a train wreck, and I have hours of work ahead, let’s go right to the bloggage:

At least it’s spring on the Coozledad farm. Is that Llewd, or Purley? No matter, because today, it’s Ferdinand.

The story is OK, but the headline is one for the ages: Patient emits potentially harmful gas; hazmat called to Ann Arbor hospital.

The problem with The Onion: Real life is always crazier than fiction.

A companion piece to that long-ago news story about the newspaper of the future — remember that one? — is this more recent, though still ancient, report on the newest wrinkle, c. 1994. The tablet newspaper:

It’s useful to watch these, as I’ve been among those who said the newspaper industry was blindsided by the internet. That’s not true. From almost the beginning, we saw the future. We just didn’t see the future business model, i.e., free. Free free free free free. Plus ad blockers.

OK, it’s time to pull the plug on this disaster and set nose to grindstone. A bloody mess, dead ahead.

Eh, ’twas a rough night. For the second time in a month, I was awakened in the wee hours by overwhelming nausea. Considered barfing, didn’t, and eventually it faded enough that I could sleep again. I don’t know what it might be, and don’t plan to worry about it until it happens again. Chances are, I’m fine. You’re always fine, until you aren’t.

Speaking of which: Courage, Moe.

It’s Good Friday, which means nothing much is going on, here or anywhere else. Further, not much will be going on Monday, either — the cities are closed, the schools are closed, etc. I’m all for adequate leisure time, but criminy, some of these folks need to work in newspapers for a while. We got New Year’s, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas off. Excuse me while I chomp my cigar and whine about kids these days.

Fortunately, we have some pretty good bloggage today, starting with our own Coozledad. His gander is up to something with his sheep. Drake, I mean: Akbar Brynwaladrllwnin. Wouldn’t you love to be an animal on Coozledad’s farm? It must be all that late-night singing around the campfire.

I know we’ve talked about Kiryas Joel before here, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish village north of New York City. The NYT did a piece on them this week; on paper, they’re the poorest place in America, although in KJ, things are more complicated than they look on paper:

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

My local pet store is my favorite pet store ever. Clean, sweet-smelling, it’s the sort of place where even the creatures doomed to end up as another’s dinner, like the white mice, look happy and healthy. Lately they’ve added a ringtail lemur, just for the amusement of customers. There’s a house tortoise, Franky, who lumbers around the store as an official greeter. And there’s a large pond in the front, where lives two lunker red-tail catfish, an aropawa and some sort of freshwater ray. One of the catfish got sick a few weeks ago. The video on how they figured out what was wrong with it is worth watching. You can see Franky watching in one of the later scenes.

OK, an appropriately somber Good Friday to all. Remember, tomorrow night is “The Ten Commandments” — Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!

And a good Easter, as well. Think I’ll go read for an hour, until I feel fully human.

We’re finally getting some competition for Comcast in these parts. As Comcast has recently rewarded my years of customer loyalty with a $20 monthly rate hike, to give me services I don’t use, I listened when the WOW cable guy stopped by yesterday. Most intriguing offer: Real savings on the land line, thanks to the choice of three tiers of service. We use it so little I know that if it rings, it’s likely someone I don’t want to talk to. I’d drop it if it weren’t for my husband’s objections, and the fact the phone mount in my kitchen is huge and will require a large framed portrait of Alexander Graham Bell to hide. So this would work for us, and I’m pissed Comcast hasn’t stepped in with an alternative.

They also offer three tiers of internet service, but in this area I require Maserati-like speed, so no savings there.

But the real elephant in the business-model room would be true choice in cable TV. The doomsday scenario for that industry is when customers can craft their own package from the channels they actually watch. Farewell, Golf Channel, hello AMC, etc. We’re there, more or less, at least with anyone willing to watch TV on their computer. I’m not. I still practice the exhaustion model of TV consumption — slump in chair, pick up remote, surf — enough that it would bug me to not have the option.

Anyone with WOW experience, I’m all ears.

Someone sent me this article, more food apocalypse-porn from Gary Taubes. Headline: Is Sugar Toxic? Let’s see if I can guess what the answer might be, coming from a writer who’s been beating the drum for the low-carb, paleo diet for years. Do I even need to read it? Probably not.

New rule: I no longer listen to anyone who tells me a food that I, and millions of other human beings, have enjoyed for centuries, is “toxic.” If nothing else, I’d like to enforce a certain strict constructionism in language. A toxin is a poison. If I eat this cookie, will I fall to the floor in a writhing heap? No? Then I’m going to eat it. Taubes acknowledges as much in his opening paragraphs:

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

OK, then!

The longer I live, the more I throw in with those nutritionists. I come from a long line of moderate people who lived into their ninth decade by practicing moderation, and eating a piece of birthday cake ever year.

However. Speaking of food, someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, and while its headline is immoderate — The 20 Worst Foods in America — it’s worth a click-through on your next coffee break. It’s not foods, exactly, but restaurant dishes, compiled by the folks at Eat This, Not That ™, yet another insta-book that became a franchise overnight. I don’t eat at places like the Cheesecake Factory and Blimpie’s often, but every so often circumstances will force us off the freeway and into an Olive Garden or some such. Just last week, Kate and I ate at a Chili’s nearby; I fired up the Fast Food Calorie Counter app on my phone, to get a sense of what we were in for.

And nearly fell on the floor. I’ve never seen so many 1,800-calorie appetizers in my life. Everything seemed to boil down to a fat stuffed into a carb, then deep-fried and glazed with more fat — crispy-cheesey tortilla bombs. I ordered the chicken tacos and ate half. Kate got the sliders and ate half. As these are not foods that reheat well, we passed on the go-boxes, but it reminded me of the other thing that is making us fat — portion size. Do you remember when restaurant plates became platters, when the goal was not to feed you so much as stuff you like a foie gras goose? I do. It was approximately the mid-70s. It started with Chi-Chis. I knew a woman who waitressed there; she was living in a hippie farm commune and asked the dishwashers to scrape the plates into a special garbage bag, which she took home at the end of every shift to feed to their pig. Fitting.

OK, the morning is fleeing, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Longish, but worth a read, as Hugh Grant — yes, the actor — sits down with a former tabloid hack and gets the download on how prevalent surveillance techniques like phone-hacking and other digital eavesdropping is. Via hidden recording. Brilliant. P.S. And this is a developing story.

Speaking of food, Roy Edroso linked to this, and so am I: A few notes on modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy, at both the restaurant and McDonald’s-lab level, from the Chicago magazine 312 blog. (Broken link fixed. Sorry.)

It’s not “Sophomore dies in kiln explosion,” but it’s close: Yale student dies when her hair gets caught in a lathe. Something to remember when you’re considering what factory work should pay.

OK, off to the bike, and outta here. The week, it’s nearly over!

There’s nothing sadder than a bookstore on the eve of closing:

Our poor Border’s, currently being stripped to the walls, and beyond — the shelves themselves are all marked with “make offer.” Did you know you can buy a good used set of security towers — the things that sound the alarm when someone tries to sneak merchandise past them — for $500. Every book was $1.99. That was the good news. The bad news: There was nothing to read. I picked up Tom Perrotta’s “The Abstinence Teacher,” but couldn’t remember if I’d read it before. Oh, well — never could resist a bargain.

This is the last day. Any dummies out there looking to adopt a racing greyhound? Or a Jack Russell? I actually looked through that one a bit, then put it back. I could have written that book, and made it a lot shorter: Your dog is smarter than you are. Enjoy! The end.

It’s pledge week on public radio, and our local has been running spots proclaiming their dedication to unbiased news coverage. This is choir-preaching time for me, so I’ve been letting my ears glaze over, but about the third time around, I listened more closely, and heard the news director say that other news outlets claim Dearborn is governed by Sharia law. O rly? Turns out he’s right. It seems to be a truism of some right-wing media, in fact. It stems from an incident last year in which some members of a Christian group got themselves arrested at an Arab-American festival there. All they were did was set up shop at a cultural event and tell people their religion was inherently violent and evil. The police arrested them for disorderly conduct, they fought it, and were acquitted. This is proof enough to some people that if you’re caught stealing in Dearborn, you lose a hand. If only. Dearborn has plenty of strip clubs, a strange institution for a city allegedly run under Sharia law. And its mayor is named Jack O’Reilly. I wonder if his friends call him Osama O’Reilly when he stops by the bar for his 5 o’clock medicine. I would.

Anyway, I hope the police learned their lesson. Next time, stand back and let them get their asses kicked. Although that creates its own set of problems.

Not surprisingly, this case was accompanied by a weenie with a video camera. When did we become such a nation of jerkoffs? Watch the video, and you see a typical summer festival like any one of dozens of others. Then the Bible action team shows up and starts stirring the shit. But the video gives the impression of “truth,” because hey — it’s video. And can we have a rule? A sort of Godwin’s Law, part 2? The minute someone feels the need to say, “Hey! This is America!” we all get one free eye-roll, no penalty.

Oh, the coffee is slow to do its work this morning. Think I best head to the gym. But first, another video treat for the season, as Eric Zorn one-ups the Passover-themed YouTubin’ all up in this joint:

Disapproving rabbits. Because they will have no more of your nonsense.

One-hundred fifty years ago, it’s finally on. Disunion is daily reading for me. Should be for you, too.

Time to cut this short and hope for delayed caffeination. Good Wednesday, all.

I guess you guys are all waiting for a new entry, so we can start the day’s comment-thread conversation. I don’t have a lot to say at the moment, having spent the last 10 minutes watch the cardinals eat safflower seeds at the feeder. Last winter, they were timid, and would let the sparrows’ superior numbers push them away. Now, they fight back; a particular female has been eating casually for a few minutes now, making threat displays to any finch or sparrow who dares to land on the platform with her. Alan thinks they’ve learned; I think it has more to do with mating season, and the need to hoard scarce food resources.

And you might think: This is so boring I may die. Sorry. An erratic sleep cycle was further disrupted by the need to rise at oh-dark-forty and pack Kate off on a two-day class trip to Our Nation’s Capital ™. The bus pulled out at 5 a.m., bound for Detroit Metro and a 7 a.m. flight to Baltimore. This is an eighth-grade tradition at her middle school, although only about 50 kids are going. I have to assume cost is the reason; even in an affluent district, $700 for a whirlwind speed-tour of monuments might be a pinch to many pockets. We committed and made payments over several months; we don’t travel enough as a family, and like Sinclair Lewis, I believe travel is so broadening. For a kid, travel made apart from parents is even more so. I am reminded of Anthony Soprano Jr., returning from a similar trip, and reporting his most overwhelming impression: “They had PlayStation 2 right in the hotel room.”

Early on, I hoped to go as a chaperone, but it is a parent-free trip — only teachers. Anyway, I couldn’t keep up with the pace, and there doesn’t look to be a spare five minutes in the schedule to, say, meet with your many internet correspondents and have a drink. Although I would have happily scratched the Newseum visit for that.

So for now, I’m just happy they are going ahead of the shutdown.

Let’s jump to the bloggage. Disrupted sleep or no, I still have work to do.

I’ve mentioned here before that Michigan has a form of Vouchers Lite in its public schools. Not 100 percent school choice, but districts are able to vote themselves open to students who live outside their boundaries, and those kids bring their per-pupil state funding with them. (Our district isn’t one of them; if it were possible to put walls and moats around it, I’m sure the residents would happily build them.) One of the things this leads to is marketing by districts, who try to catch the favor of the invisible hand with radio and TV ads touting their advantages. And in one case, it’s looking as though it led to $400,000 disappearing down a rathole in an already desperately poor district that watched its enrollment fall by 50 percent over the time it was paying a company to attract students. Nice investigative work by the Freep there.

I was never a Glenn Beck viewer, so I always heard accounts of his lunacy thirdhand. Dana Milbank explains how utterly off the rails he’s gone in recent months, including two weeks ago…

…when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what his happening in our world today.”

These guys were prevalent when I was doing talk radio in the early ’90s in crazy, right-wing Fort Wayne. Until I sat behind a microphone, I had never heard of this stuff. At the time, they struck me as antiques, like those Japanese sailors who crouched in Pacific island caves for years and hadn’t heard the war was over. Guess not.

Lance Mannion finds a new metaphor for Paul Ryan’s budgetary technique.

Off to work.

Hey, look what my sister found in her cache of our old family stuff:

This was our mom’s old typewriter, barely used. (By us. As I said yesterday, I preferred the Smith-Corona Sterling.) Serial numbers peg its manufacture to 1938, and Pam reports they’re fetching good prices on eBay, so that’s where it’s going. I hope it goes to some hipster enthusiast and not to someone who will carve it up and make something silly, like this steampunk wristband (speaking of Brooklyn hipsters):

Although I have seen some cute Etsy stuff made of old typewriter keys — bracelets and cufflinks and the like. Stuff like this. I guess that decision — to leave intact or disassembled for parts — is up to the buyer.

My mother was 18 in 1938. The time, it do fly.

And now it is 9:05, and I have an appointment to give blood in 25 minutes. I’m as tired as a rented mule and hope it’s not due to anemia — I guess I’ll find out. So right to the bloggage:

One of the amusing things about all the movie action here is the props that get left behind. The Chinese North Korean police station from the “Red Dawn” remake stayed in place for a while after they left, and there have been other things. Jim from Sweet Juniper ran across one the other day. Funny.

Well, I’m glad somebody else noticed. Yay, John Stewart.

The rest of the day’s political news is simply too depressing for words. With that, I limp toward the weekend. Have a good one, all.

My goal this morning is to get the blog updated and a story written about the budget meeting at my local city council in the next 75 minutes. Hang on, folks — we’re going to see just how fast mommy can screw things up this morning.

Fortunately, I have supplemented last night’s 5.5 hours of sleep with three cups of coffee.

And I already edited and posted one story from my intern. Because that’s how hyperlocal online news runs these days — all the meetings happen early in the week. That makes for a miserable Monday and Tuesday, but by Thursday, the air smells like Weekend.

My intern’s story was on the first budget meeting of the year for the school board, which is facing the possibility of seeing $5.8 million in cuts if the governor’s budget goes through as proposed, a pretty hard swallow for a 8,500-pupil district. That means larger class sizes at a bare minimum and the usual no-more-this, can’t-have-that elsewhere in the district. I used to marvel sometimes that pretty much the last decade of my newspaper career — and, really, many years before that — were spent in a fiscal environment where all you knew for certain was that next year would suck more than this year. Now, the whole country lives like this. (Well, except for Goldman Sachs. And General Electric. Et cetera.) I always knew I’d find my true calling as a canary in a coal mine.

Speaking of sucking and newspapers, my alma mater — which I have taken to describing as the paper I might have worked at, had I not been in that tragic, 20-year coma from 1984-2004 — is in a minor ethical kerfuffle, thanks to its sports editor’s tweeting. I hope you all understand how hard it is for a person of a certain age to think of tweeting as serious communication worthy of sustained attention, but that’s what you get in a world where Sarah Palin is looked up to. Anyway, evidently the sports editor advised a recent Indiana University basketball recruit to play for Butler instead, his alma mater. In a tweet. Which ended with the phrase, “Go ‘Dawgs!”

I guess this is a problem. I guess some people consider this recruiting, and it’s a blow to the hard work of many who have tried to give sports departments more respect. I see their point, although every sports department I’ve ever worked near has fanboys galore. Still, journalism is journalism, and you’re supposed to keep this stuff to yourself.

But not if you work for Fox! Ahem:

Bill Sammon, who’s responsible for the network’s Washington coverage, linked Obama to socialism many times during the 2008 campaign, but didn’t believe the allegation, he acknowledged. In the final stretch of the 2008 campaign, a Fox News executive repeatedly questioned on the air whether Barack Obama believed in socialism.

Now it turns out he didn’t really believe what he was saying.

Bill Sammon, now the network’s vice president and Washington managing editor, acknowledged the following year that he was just engaging in “mischievous speculation” in raising the charge. In fact, Sammon said he “privately” believed that the socialism allegation was “rather far-fetched.”

OK. Now, to me, this is a scandal at the very, very least on a par with the recent NPR affair. This guy isn’t a fundraiser on contract, but a bureau chief in the nation’s capital, i.e., the very person in charge of directing and shaping the network’s coverage of Washington, D.C. And he was being “mischievous” with repeatedly making a charge that the Democratic candidate was a socialist, something a vast segment of his readership viewership takes as an article of faith.

I can’t fucking stand it. I just can’t.

The audio of that speech is nauseating — the amount of back-scratching, log-rolling and ass-kissing in the first two minutes alone is just vile. “My good friend James Carville,” “his lovely wife Mary Matalin,” “my old friends from Hillsdale.” Urgh.

But then, what is GOP politics at this point but a giant vaudeville act. Donald Trump, born-again birther, wants the governor of Hawaii “investigated,” he tells Fox ‘n’ Friends. What is this, a performance art piece? No other explanation makes any sense. Also:

“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump asked. “I wish he would, because I think it’s a terrible pale that’s hanging over him.”

What is “a terrible pale?” Can someone explain?

OK, well. I have a budget story to write in the next…42 minutes. So I best go. Let the above be your bloggage, although I close on yet another journalism-related nugget. Alan and I saw “Kill the Irishman” last weekend, a film about a Cleveland gangster named Danny Greene, whose compelling story and Belfastian death would make a pretty good movie someday. Alas, “Kill the Irishman” isn’t it. But a guy I know had a small part in it, and Ray Stevenson, aka Titus Pullo in “Rome” a few years back, played the lead, so it seemed worth the time.

There are two shots in the movie where we look over a character’s shoulder at the front page of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s muscular, dominant newspaper and at the time the film covers, the best daily in Ohio. I always look at the other stories on prop pages like this, because I know that’s where the art department’s inside jokes go. I was able to read two. One was:

High school
gets new
lockers

and the other was:

Attorney
opens
practice

Somewhere, an editor is weeping.

Gotta run!