The head­line I’ve been wait­ing to write: Cause of death is elec­tro­cu­tion, but not by urine.

Thanks! Noted.

Well, I’ll get an iPad. Even­tu­ally. Not this year, but maybe next, when the hard drive gets big­ger and the price drops and I start doing all my work in cof­fee shops. If noth­ing else, it seems to be the e-reader that might tip me into e-reader ter­ri­tory, not that I’ve been wait­ing for one. But, you know, I like to keep up. And if the iPad and other tablet devices throw a life­line to news­pa­pers, then I’ll feel obligated.

You have to be care­ful, though. I some­times call my iPod my musi­cal id, because when I started buy­ing music online, I flocked to the shame­ful hit sin­gles I’d been turn­ing up on the radio all these years, but only when I was alone in the car. Songs I was too cool to like, or songs that were the one decent track made by Dis­ap­point­ing Artist X. I wouldn’t buy DAX’s album, but 99 cents seemed to be the right price point to buy the one or two Madonna songs I enjoy (“Don’t Tell Me,” “Ray of Light”), or Lou Gramm’s “Mid­night Blue.” You have ear­buds in all the time any­way, so it’s not like any­one knows you’re a secret Eminem fan.

And then dig­i­tal music became the only music to buy, you hook the iPod to your stereo now, and so I have an iPod clut­tered with crap, and more than 1,000 songs to sort into “ear­buds only” playlists, lest one pop up at a din­ner party and embar­rass me. (I down­loaded Chakakas’ “Jun­gle Fever” after watch­ing “Boo­gie Nights,” OK? And I regret it! I always fast-forward past it!)

I don’t want the same thing to hap­pen with my e-reader. Yes­ter­day I asked Laura Lipp­man what’s bet­ter for her, as an author — ink on paper or pix­els on a screen — and she men­tioned the obvi­ous use for Kin­dles, et al:

I use it pri­mar­ily for travel and I stock it with B-reads, things I don’t care about own­ing in hard­cover format.

In other words, pretty much the way I used my iPod at first.

I also asked Hank Stuever about this, and he got his own blog post out of it, and you should go read that, too.

It’s the news­pa­per model I’ll be watch­ing most closely, of course. These are my peo­ple, they pro­vide my health insur­ance, and I have a stake in see­ing them sur­vive. Late in Hank’s post, he quotes a lovely para­graph from another essay about news­pa­pers, about the authen­tic expe­ri­ence of actu­ally hold­ing and touch­ing your authen­tic expe­ri­ences. I keep com­ing back to the 3A Tiffany’s ad, run­ning daily in the New York Times and Wall Street Jour­nal, upper right-hand cor­ner of the page since for­ever, and how much I look for­ward to see­ing it every day. The other day it was the engagement-ring ad, four big Tiffany soli­taires tum­bled in a row. I always take a minute and appre­ci­ate it. I will never own a Tiffany’s soli­taire. I don’t par­tic­u­larly want one. But it’s a beau­ti­ful photo, and I allow myself a few sec­onds of mild envy, the way if you were walk­ing past Tiffany’s in New York, you might stop to look in the win­dows, like Audrey Hepburn.

Over to Face­book. Upper-right-hand cor­ner: If you are a 52-year-old dri­ver from Michi­gan, your car insur­ance rates can be as low as $14.98 a month. Click to learn more. Ear­lier today, it told me 52-year-old women could get a free pair of Uggs for par­tic­i­pa­tion. Click to learn more. I’ve asked this ques­tion a thou­sand times, and no one can give me a good answer: If all the college-educated eye­balls are online, if the smartest and the wealth­i­est peo­ple are look­ing at com­puter screens all day and most of the night, why are the ads the equiv­a­lent of the free Amish fireplace?

Oh, and as to the name of the iPad: Are all you peo­ple chil­dren? When did Beavis and Butthead join the focus group? Do you snicker when you hear “heli­copter pad” or “note pad” or “pad Thai?” Maybe because I was always a tam­pon girl, and grew up in the era when men­strual pads were called “san­i­tary nap­kins,” one of the great euphemisms of its day, I don’t imme­di­ately asso­ciate the word “pad” with men­stru­a­tion. Grow up.

I also thought Barry’s speech last night was pretty damn good. I liked how he called out the party of No. Fuck you, Sammy Alito, you smug piece of shit. And great job on that GOP response — find the XY equiv­a­lent of Martha Coak­ley, flank him with a black woman and an Asian man, and have them nod and clap on cue. Way to bring it, you soul­less toads. I’m stick­ing with Barry.

OK, then: Yesterday’s work spilled over into today, so I’d best hop to it.

We’ve had a few sunny days this week, sunny and warmish, so of course these must be paid for in blood, and today is the pay­back — cloudy with a chance of leaden. I started to go for a third cup of cof­fee and reminded myself to let the first two do their thing before I mak­ing the call on a poten­tial stomach-sourer. But if there was ever a day for it…

Despite the sun­shine, yes­ter­day sucked the big one all around, didn’t it? The Supreme Court deci­sion promises to be a shit tsunami; about the only good thing I can see com­ing out of it is the final strip­ping away of all that who-me?-a judicial-activist? pos­ing by Roberts, Alito, et al.

Actu­ally, I can see other good out­comes, too. If there’s one thing jour­nal­ism has taught me, it’s this: You never know. You really don’t. Any­thing can hap­pen to any­one, any­time. One or two elec­tion cycles jam-packed with corporate-sponsored lying could lead to a great pop­ulist revolt in this coun­try. Scalia could drop dead, with Clarence Thomas throw­ing him­self into the grave right behind him. (“Papa!”) I have faith the Obama admin­is­tra­tion is not over, not by a long shot.

For now, I’m choos­ing to be opti­mistic. It’s really the only one for a day like this.

I have to be out of the house in just a few min­utes, so let’s just go to the blog­gage and let you guys take it away, eh?

Farewell, Beck­ham. Tbogg’s dog died yes­ter­day, too.

Via Hank, a con­ser­v­a­tive dares to speak truth to the con­ser­v­a­tive movement.

Some­times, when your side loses, it helps to imag­ine the oppo­si­tion in its under­wear. Or in other sit­u­a­tions where you just know they wish there hadn’t been a cam­era around. This pic­ture (the fes­tive clam­bake one, that is; scroll down) has been around for­ever, but in light of yesterday’s events, let’s make  sure it lives another day, eh?

And now I’m off.

Warn­ing: Major lan­guage ner­dos­ity ahead.

There are a bunch of bill­boards around town right now. Adver­tis­ing a new smart­phone, they pro­claim it “a bare-knuckled bucket of does.” Every time I pass, I think of deer. Every time. The ads sug­gest a cer­tain dystopian men­ace, and does — as in a deer, a female deer — are not men­ac­ing crea­tures, for the most part. I’m not alone. Lan­guage con­sul­tant and blog­ger Nancy Fried­man writes:

Only the tagline, buried at the bot­tom of the ad, solves the rid­dle: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.”

What we have here, folks, is anthime­ria gone bad: a verb (third-person, present-tense to do) treated as a noun. And because said verb ends in an S and is spelled exactly the same as a real noun, we end up in a buck­et­ful of don’t go there.

Anthime­ria, I learn from fur­ther research, is the use of any word that’s nor­mally one part of speech as another. For years I’ve been rail­ing against impact — a NOUN, peo­ple, a NOUN — used as a verb: The cuts impacted the teacher’s union, or, if you really want to pile on the 21st cen­tury usage, The cuts neg­a­tively impacted the teacher’s union.

As fre­quently hap­pens when the forces of good bat­tle the forces of evil, how­ever, we’re los­ing. A drug­store dis­play I saw the other day:

Yikes.

In the case of the bucket of does, this might be one case where I’d advo­cate hip-hop spelling. At least it would make sense that way: bare-nuckled bucket o’ duz, yo.

OK, then. About once a week I feel the need to sleep in, and today was one of them. I’m get­ting a late start on a busy day, so we’re going to make today a grab bag of this ‘n’ that and links ‘n’ stuff. Ready? Let’s begin with that other always-evolving insti­tu­tion, marriage:

I’m won­der­ing what it would do to the atmos­phere at our break­fast table if I marched in one morn­ing and said, I’m telling my lawyer I’d like a hefty seven-figure sum to stay with you. Prob­a­bly it would crack every­one up, but that’s what you get when you don’t look like Mrs. Tiger Woods in a bikini — comedy.

Jim at Sweet Juniper had an event­ful Thanks­giv­ing. Read all about it. May I just pause here and thank the blog­gers of the world who write about par­ent­hood and fam­ily life as well as Jim does? Say what you will, but very few news­pa­pers ever pre­sented any­thing as won­der­ful as that brief essay. Par­ent­hood — or, almost always, moth­er­hood — was either pre­sented Bombeck-style or Albom-style and very rarely like this.

I have a whole rant cued up for the Asian carp issue, prob­a­bly not one that’s of inter­est to you peo­ple who live out­side the Great Lakes, but I’ll spare you today. Just know that once again, we’re learn­ing about the haz­ards of non-native species intro­duced into com­plex ecosys­tems. The hard way.

Gym, shower, cross­word, shop­ping. I’ve got a whole bucket of does on line today. Have a good one.

Sarah Palin names George Orwell’s “Ani­mal Farm” as one of her favorite books back in the day, when she was a vora­cious reader. Hey! We have some­thing in com­mon. I liked it, too. I think I was around Kate’s age when I first picked it up. It’s the per­fect starter novel for a kid tran­si­tion­ing to adult mate­r­ial, just seri­ous enough to let you know you’re read­ing some­thing Impor­tant, but at its most basic level, sim­ple and easy to follow.

Or as my old col­league Bob once noted, it’s so sad when Boxer dies.

In honor of the five hours of sleep I got last night, in antic­i­pa­tion of a week­end spent lolling and cook­ing and mak­ing birth­day cakes and study­ing Russ­ian vocab­u­lary, just for the hell of it — let’s make today a short one.

Go ahead, laugh, I did: Irish priest kid­napped in Philip­pines released by MILF. Don’t they have dirty-minded copy edi­tors at the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor? Or are they just hav­ing a laff? You could spend all day writ­ing sub­heds for that one: Pleads for recap­ture, say, or Announces engage­ment, plans to leave priest­hood. If you must know with­out click­ing, it’s Moro Islamic Lib­er­a­tion Front.

Worth your while: A 3-D recre­ation of Capt. Sully’s genius flight, and thanks to crinoid­girl for find­ing it.

Even cooler: Star­lings in flight. About the only time you’re going to see star­lings appre­ci­ated in this space.

Now I must shop. See you Monday.

I found a note­book yes­ter­day. Noth­ing like a full soft­ware rein­stall to send what should stay buried tum­bling from the shelves. Keep­ing note­books is one of those things all writ­ers are sup­posed to do, and I sort of do, but not enough. There’s the how-to-carry thing, for one. There’s the atro­phied writ­ing mus­cles thing, for another. And note­books are dan­ger­ous items, not unlike your seventh-grade jour­nals. Scrib­bling one’s inner­most thoughts, or even amus­ing words, phrases, jux­ta­po­si­tions and church signs con­tem­po­ra­ne­ously inevitably leads to a 99-to-1 chaff/wheat ratio.

(Lance Man­nion is an excep­tion. See his Min­ing the Note­books tag.)

Any­way, the note­book I found yes­ter­day was from my Ann Arbor year. Dan­ger, Will Robin­son. That was the last year I felt bound­less opti­mism and infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, before it ended and all the crabs reached up and dragged me back into the bucket. (Yes, I am jok­ing about the crabs. Poor me.) It wasn’t as excru­ci­at­ing to read as I’d feared:

2/10/04: Nor­walk virus in a dorm — lines out­side the stalls in com­mu­nal bath­rooms, signs on doors read­ing “sick.”

I have no idea where I got that, as I stayed out of dorms. Prob­a­bly over­heard some­one talk­ing about it in class, and just liked the image. I don’t recall my own dorm years as happy, fun ones, although they were instruc­tive. You dis­cover how peo­ple really live, and hope you don’t draw a room­mate with a vastly dif­fer­ent thresh­old of Gross than yours. Once I walked into a shower and found an empty bot­tle of dis­pos­able douche lying on the floor. Straw­berry. Hav­ing to line up to barf is all part of the same hell of other people.

Here’s another:

1/28/04: Snow day casu­al­ties — Cindy, pale and tired, color bleached from even her lips. Smok­ers, ban­ished to the out­doors, hud­dled together like dull spar­rows in the cold.

Whoa, poetry. An unat­trib­uted quote:

1/20/04: “The golfer plays to save the land from builders.”

Some­one should answer for that.

2/18/04: The psy­chol­ogy of oppres­sion: Make mem­bers of the oppressed group over­seers of the group as a whole. Thus, women ini­ti­ate oth­ers into pros­ti­tu­tion, Jews guard oth­ers in con­cen­tra­tion camps, Hebrews over­see work on the pyramids.

Again, no cite. Notes on watch­ing an onstage inter­view with Arthur Miller, 4/1/04:

AM on UM: “A testing-ground for all my prej­u­dices.” …30’s the­ater in NYC: “rad­i­cal out­cry” against the Depres­sion (Welles, Odets) …Never trust an inter­viewer who uses the word “per­spi­ca­cious” …“[We] weaned the [Michi­gan] Daily away from the fraternities.”

But what I remem­ber most with­out the aid of my note­book, I didn’t even write down: When Miller said that within five years, cli­mate change would change the route of the Gulf Stream and plunge the British Isles into a Siber­ian ice age. I thought, Hmm, he’s senile. He died not quite a year later.

I sup­pose my note­book has done what note­books are sup­posed to do — prod­ded mem­ory and data-mined a unique year in my life. Every year is unique, and we for­get so much of it. That’s why I started this blog — so I could remem­ber more of it. Ruby just hopped up and nib­bled a cres­cent out of the Arthur Miller page. Another memory.

The last page has a sin­gle line: “food and wine.” I have no idea.

OK, then. Another early exit, more scant bloggage:

Hank Stuever has a book com­ing out this fall. You’d think writ­ing a book would be the hard­est part, but it isn’t. He explains.

Finally, I was going to wait for Moe to bring this up her­self, but I see the com­ments in the pre­vi­ous thread have uncov­ered her recent news, so here goes: Moe, our fre­quent com­menter here, recently got some very bad news about what started as a raspy throat. It’s the kind that includes lan­guage like “biopsy” and “stage 3 or 4.” Moe, courage to you on what must be a ter­ri­fy­ing jour­ney. Details on her blog.

And now off to my meeting.

Spriggy, 1991 – 2009

I’ll have more to say about this later. For now, this is just to let his vast fan club know he’s no longer with us.

I’ve had more con­fer­ence calls in the last week than in the pre­vi­ous (mum­ble) years of my life, which is to say: Two. And they weren’t even for busi­ness. After fail­ing to learn our les­son last year, our lit­tle troupe of Mickey-and-Judy ama­teurs is enter­ing another 48-hour film chal­lenge. This one. Pos­si­ble gen­res: Buddy Film, Com­edy, Detective/cop, Drama, Fan­tasy, Film de Femme, Hol­i­day Film, Hor­ror, Mock­u­men­tary, Musi­cal or West­ern, Romance, Sci Fi, Super­hero, Thriller/Suspense. Lord save us. If we don’t like any of these, we can reject them for one from the wild-card pool, which con­tains such agony as Mar­tial Arts/Stoner, Silent, Tragedy. And so on.

Well, it is a chal­lenge, after all.

For those who care, I’ll be tweet­ing the expe­ri­ence, with pic­tures when I can, which will update my Face­book sta­tus. It starts at 7 p.m. July 24 and ends 48 hours later.

Lately I’ve been think­ing about the Mock­u­men­tary idea, prob­a­bly because “Bruno” is all up in my grill wher­ever I look. The New York Times has a story this morn­ing about male shav­ing, and reports that Sacha Baron Cohen had to endure “repeated waxathons” to get hair­less enough to play his gay Aus­trian char­ac­ter. We know what his nat­ural state is, so I hope he had Jackson-strength drugs to help him get through.

The story ref­er­ences the Gillette videos we dis­cussed here a few days back; once again, NN.c com­menters surf the wave first. I didn’t watch the one on male armpits, and it’s a good thing, too, because I don’t care what funny rea­son they give (“an empty sta­ble smells bet­ter than a full one”), a man with shaved armpits is an abom­i­na­tion to women. Men should be men.

We don’t have a Sacha Baron Cohen for our movie. But we do have a female ven­tril­o­quist who can sing and has 22 dum­mies. I’m hop­ing we draw Hor­ror. Noth­ing like a singing ven­tril­o­quist dummy for max­i­mum creeps.

A lot of blog­gage today, so let’s hop to it:

Not long ago a jour­nal­ist of very close acquain­tance, ahem, had to par­tic­i­pate in the destruc­tion of many, many copies of one of the sec­tions he helps pro­duce, because some­how a photo slipped through, in which an extremely sharp-eyed reader might notice that one of the peo­ple in the photo was wear­ing a T-shirt that read “Go Straight Edge or go fuck your­self.” They don’t do that in Nashville, evidently.

I posted this on my Face­book yes­ter­day. It’s a story about the lat­est Lit­tle Pho­to­shop of Hor­rors, a pic­ture essay in the New York Times Mag­a­zine that turns out to have been sub­stan­tially tin­kered with. This has hap­pened before, and it will hap­pen again, and for the life of me I don’t under­stand why, but then, I never under­stood photographers.

Short ver­sion: Pho­tog­ra­pher Edgar Mar­tins has an assign­ment — to travel the coun­try and doc­u­ment the sub­prime melt­down. So he sets out, and finds some lovely pic­tures (which you can’t see, because the NYT yanked them all off the web­site), but he can­not resist tin­ker­ing with them. Now he and the paper stand embar­rassed if not dis­graced, hav­ing handed their ene­mies a big fat stick to beat them with. And for what? Some sym­me­try. Like I said, I never under­stood pho­tog­ra­phers.* *Although I do appre­ci­ate them.

Think of an Amer­i­can vis­it­ing France who believes that if he just speaks louder, he will be speak­ing French. — the sub­lime Dahlia Lith­wick on Sarah Palin.

Man on dog? A Fox News host tries to explain how Amer­i­cans “marry other species.” I see so many of these Fox & Friends clips on Gawker, I’m start­ing to think they’re angling for the pub­lic­ity. Funny.

…now this is a suc­cess strategy:

Irate par­ents demanded last night that the school board and admin­is­tra­tors take action over sto­ries assigned in Camp­bell High School Eng­lish classes that they found objec­tion­able, includ­ing sto­ries by authors Stephen King, David Sedaris and Ernest Hemingway.

The sto­ries included Sedaris’ “I Like Guys,” which deals with homo­sex­u­al­ity; “The Crack Cocaine Diet” by Laura Lipp­man, which includes explicit sex­ual mate­r­ial, rape, mur­der and drug use; a Hem­ing­way short story that includes statu­tory rape and dis­cus­sion about abor­tion; and a King story called “Sur­vivor Type.”

I once met an author, who when I told him I liked his book replied, “Please, then call your local library and demand it be taken off the shelves.” Lucky Laura!

I’m so tired — how tired am I? — I’m so tired that a howl­ing thun­der­storm passed over my roof last night, the kind that every­one dis­cusses over break­fast and into the mid­morn­ing cof­fee break, and I slept right through it. Given that the hiss­ing of sum­mer sprin­klers at dawn can wake me up, that’s say­ing some­thing. I’m still not 100 per­cent func­tional, but a bike ride is on order now that the lovely weather behind the storm is on full dis­play. That will help a great deal.

Just what a stressed-out per­son needs — another to-do list.

The class went fine, thanks for ask­ing. As I men­tioned in com­ments, this is an independent-study deal, and so far my lit­tle crew seems ready to go. Wayne State stu­dents are dif­fer­ent from the ones I got to know in Ann Arbor a few years back, in that so many more of them work full-time, some­times with mul­ti­ple jobs. My stu­dent ques­tion­naire asked them about their work hours, and let me tell you some­thing — some of these folks work harder than any of us, and for no money, either, the paid sum­mer intern­ship hav­ing gone the way of the dodo.

When I was in col­lege, the luck­i­est and smartest stu­dents got sum­mer gigs at the big Ohio dailies, in Cincin­nati and Cleve­land and Day­ton, mostly. There, the News­pa­per Guild set intern pay in the con­tract, and as I recall it was 75 per­cent of a start­ing reporter’s salary, which even then was quite gen­er­ous for a col­lege stu­dent. The idea of work­ing free was unheard of.

Of course, that was before Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton came on the scene:

How bad is the job mar­ket for media types? A char­ity auc­tion for a two– or three-month intern­ship at the Huff­in­g­ton Post has col­lected bids as high as $13,000. …The auction’s ben­e­fi­ciary, the Robert F. Kennedy Cen­ter for Jus­tice and Human Rights, seems excep­tion­ally wor­thy. But are unem­ployed media wannabes really this worthless?

To be sure, she’s not the one charg­ing for the chance to sit at her feet — or, more likely, at the feet of her third assis­tant — for three months, but it’s fit­ting that the idea of pay­ing some­one else to make their cof­fee should be done at the Huff­Post. It didn’t invent the idea of “expo­sure” as pay­ment enough for one’s work as a writer, but it’s cer­tainly made the most hay of the idea.

A few weeks ago I read some­thing hor­ri­fy­ing. Is writ­ing for the rich? asked Fran­cis Wilkin­son, who worked for the devil herself:

In 2007, I was in charge of recruit­ing writ­ers for the expan­sion of The Huff­in­g­ton Post. I cal­cu­lated that I would need 75 unpaid blog sub­mis­sions per day, Mon­day through Fri­day, in order to make the site work. That tar­get seemed absurd at first. Yet within two months, hun­dreds of will­ing blog­gers had signed up, the major­ity of them cre­den­tialed authors pub­lished by major pub­lish­ing houses.

The high end of pub­lish­ing — books, mag­a­zines, The New York Times, The Wash­ing­ton Post, The Wall Street Jour­nal — has always con­tained a con­tin­gent of wealthy worker bees who don’t actu­ally live off their often mea­ger salaries. But even a cou­ple decades ago, a writer with­out inde­pen­dent means could still scrape together a liv­ing writ­ing about some­thing other than movie stars. Not a good one nec­es­sar­ily, but a living.

…But on the whole, the writ­ing game seems likely to become even more a province of the upper mid­dle class and flat-out wealthy than it is already. The off­spring of the afflu­ent, branded col­lege degrees in hand, can afford to give it a go. But any­one hail­ing from more hard­scrab­ble envi­rons may find it too dif­fi­cult to get trac­tion before suc­cumb­ing to the dis­mal eco­nom­ics of it all.

In other words, get ready for a lot more Megan McAr­dles. (By the way, has any­one summed up and flushed some­one in a phrase bet­ter than Roy Edroso, who described her as “Eloise at the Atlantic”? Don’t think so.)

What the world needs is more Jack Londons.

Actu­ally, what the world needs is me at my desk, on task. So adieu for now. A lit­tle bloggage:

David Edel­stein dis­poses of “Angels & Demons” in four tight para­graphs with sev­eral mem­o­rable phrases, my favorite being “loaves and red her­rings.” Also, this:

About that car­nage: Angels & Demons is rated PG-13 in spite of mul­ti­ple splat­tery shoot­ings, brand­ings, gouged eye­balls, and close-ups of holy men writhing in flames. Of course, there’s no nudity.

Of course.

Speak­ing of phrases, two that if you get them too close together? Will cause your skin to break out in rashes: “Gov. Sarah Palin has issued a state­ment” and “I applaud Don­ald Trump.” Get the cor­ti­sone cream!

Later, all.