Good lord, but “Fresh Air” was a tough one to listen to today. Terry Gross interviewed Jody Arlington, the sole survivor of her brother’s homicidal baseball-bat rampage 21 years ago, which left her parents and little sister dead. She hasn’t talked about it publicly in all that time, but after a similar case in Ohio earlier this year, she wrote an op-ed piece for the WashPost on how people might spot these events coming down the road, and stop them.

It was a remarkable 45 minutes, mainly because Arlington was so clear-eyed and insightful about what happened and why. Her brother was a sociopath, but her parents were crazy and abusive, and there you are. The two parties were on a collision course that, in hindsight, was probably pretty well-marked. It was refereshing to hear a person who’s obviously been spending the last two decades thinking, and thinking well, about a life-changing event. Most of her solace seems to have come from study and contemplation. She actually used the word “elucidate” in a sentence. Mind-blowing.

But tough to hear, just the same. Did you know Althea Leasure Flynt, the late Mrs. Larry Flynt, the one portrayed onscreen (and pretty well) by none other than Courtney Love, was a similar family massacre survivor? It was her daddy who did the shooting, and Althea survived by hiding under a bed. Althea went to live in an orphanage. It didn’t go well. She ran away and became a stripper, then a tycoon, then a junkie, then dead. Probably never used the word “elucidate,” but they said she made a mean sloppy joe.

So, the bloggage:

I’ve long believed the extremely religious, whether Jew, Muslim or Christian, have more in common than they’d ever acknowledge. Why do I believe this? Oh, I don’t know.

There are rants, and there are rants, and then there’s the Poor Man’s Weekly Wanker. Respec’.

Richard Cohen points out the obvious: Gaza today, Iraq tomorrow.

Finally, sometimes the death penalty just isn’t enough, you know?

Well, the fish tacos were grand. The best food is the simplest food. Also: The best food is peasant food. The French aristocracy may have invented bearnaise sauce — and big ups to the French aristocracy for that one, because what the world needs now is tarragon, sweet tarragon — but the rest of the great food in the world came from people who didn’t have enough, or didn’t have the best cuts of the animal, thinking, “What can I do with this?”

The rest of the evening was perhaps a bit too grand. Beer + wine + margaritas = not a good idea. But there was key lime cheesecake for breakfast Sunday. Always a good thing.

(You ask me, the genius of Nigella Lawson’s show is the end-credits shot of her raiding the refrigerator after her big meal. Leftovers are another great peasant-culture pleasure.)

But Sunday’s “Six Feet Under” — whoa. Also grand, but in an entirely different way, the way experiencing the sensation of plunging toward the ground at a high rate of speed on one of those Cedar Point rollercoasters is “thrilling,” as opposed to “bladder-emptying.” Next week’s the last episode, and I’m going to miss the Fishers and their soapy lives. And yeah, I’ll watch “Rome,” because HBO is batting about .900 with me (sorry, Mike Binder), but I wonder where it is written that all movies about Rome must feature actors with British accents. In fact, Brit cadences are the default “we have to say it in English, but we want you to imagine it’s in another language” accent for American entertainment. William Hurt used a British accent in “Gorky Park” to play a Russian police detective. I ask you.

OK, bloggage:

I was knocking around Laura Lippman’s Memory Project sorta-blog when I came across her entry on “The Godfather,” the book. She wondered if the time is right for a Godfather mash-up, maybe a retelling of the story from one of the female characters’ perspective, and then wonders, and wouldn’t it be refreshing if Lucy was finally allowed to say: “My vagina’s not too big — your penis is just too small!”

(You only get that joke if you actually bothered to read the horrible book, but it’s a funny one. A woman with a too-large vagina — only in Mario Puzo, eh?)

From San Francisco, an update on the liberal media, this time on the comics page.

Live in exurbia? Not for all the tea in China. Actually, the NYT had another story about suburbia last week, sort of tangentially, about the efforts of Waukesha, Wis., which is depleting its ground water, to draw surface water from nearby Lake Michigan. The community is considered outside the lake’s watershed, so the effort has so far been unsuccessful. But what struck me is the same thing that strikes me when I read about $3-a-gallon gasoline or other scarce and expensive resources: Only the fringe suggests the common-sense answer of using less in the first place:

For critics like Emily Green, who oversees Great Lakes issues for the Sierra Club, Mr. Duchniak’s arguments are a dodge. Her complaint, like that of Mr. Murphy, the Milwaukee alderman, is the absence of conservation as the growth spurt of the western exurbs, in towns like Oconomowoc, has accelerated.

“Yes, people need a place to live,” Ms. Green said. “But do they need McMansions on five-acre lots?”

I know Americans are like toddlers on these issues, the idea that maybe you need to make do with less, even temporarily, but this is ridiculous. We’re having a drought in the Midwest this year, so what is the sound you hear on every corner? Cicadas? No. Lawn sprinklers. And not just once-a-week emergency water, to keep the grass from getting entirely baked, but daily drenchings so that it stays lush and emerald-green and California-like in its perfection. No one even suggests it might be a good idea to just write the lawn off this year, in the interest of acknowledging reality. Noooo. Grosse Pointe Shores waters its damn median strips. Constantly, it seems like.

Don’t even get me started on the war and gasoline. I’ll sound like Claire on “Six Feet Under” last night.

What a way to start the week! Let’s have a good one, eh?

People say cynics are blackhearted and miserable, but I gotta tell you, we certainly have more fun. I’ve been chuckling all day over the case of Msgr. Eugene Clark, rector of none other than St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC and a leading right-wing Catholic blowhard, railing on TV about our sex-saturated culture and the insidious liberal homo priests who brought this whole altar-boy scandal down on everyone’s heads. Called “staff chaplain” for the National Review, and blah to the blah to the impeccable conservative orthodox credentials blah.

He is 79 years old, by the way. And the punchline?

Apparently he’s been boning his secretary. In a motel.

The secretary is 46, by the way. In true NYC tabloid fashion, the story already has a name: “Beauty and the Priest.”

At least he has an excuse: The culture made me do it.

Bloggage:

It’s a tough town, Detroit, as a trip to the local multiplex will demonstrate. Fort Wayne, however, seems even tougher at the moment. Once I puzzled out this Crocodile Dundee-like story of a parking-lot struggle between a beer thief, a store cashier and the good Samaritan who tried to help her, that is. In my old neighborhood, natch.

Actually, the old hometown a.m. rag was a bouquet of amusement this morning. From the letters to the editor:

I heartily endorse the sentiment expressed so well in several letters to the editor that foreign immigrants to Indiana should assimilate into our culture by adopting our language.

Given their example, it is only reasonable for us to expect present-day immigrants who speak Spanish, Burmese, Hindi, Mandarin or whatever to show the same respect for American language and culture that our ancestors did for the languages and customs of the Native Americans among whom they settled.

I’m calling boolsheet on that. “Abandoned English…to a person?” Don’t think so. And just for the writer’s information, in my travels around northeast Indiana I met several people who spoke a different language at home, only it wasn’t Spanish, Burmese, Hindi, Mandarin or whatever — it was Swiss. (That’s not a language, I know, but it’s what some people of Swiss heritage, including the Amish, speak at home. It’s a dialect of German.) And these folks had been in the country for a century, most of them. And yet, amazingly, this is seen as preserving our unique history, not a failure to assimilate. Hmmm, puzzles abound.

In L.A., the other shoe drops in the business deal between American Media and Gov. Conan. Which you knew it would.

We have dinner guests coming this weekend. On the menu: Fish tacos. I’m looking for side-dish ideas. All you Californians, time to step up.

Have a good weekend. I plan to.

Yesterday I had an errand in Monroe, Mich. A friend/colleague of mine grew up there. She describes it as “the home of General Custer and general boredom.” Got that one right — even the outlet mall is a sad affair. But it has a Gap, so I took Kate along and we bought a few things for the upcoming school year.

Having a child has rekindled my interest in shopping — it’s like having a big Barbie doll — and made me newly amazed at the wonders of the human body. Kate will be 9 in November, and as she got dressed for the pool the other day I realized she had been wearing that bathing suit for four years. No, five. She has two suits we bought early in 2001. They were a little loose on her bottom, but oh well, kids grow and this problem takes care of itself. By the following year, everything fit well. Since then, the space between the top and bottom grows by an inch or so every year, but only in 2005 have the bottoms started getting Daisy Duke-ish.

On the other hand, she can’t wear last year’s jeans. Too short. I think she needs a motto: Adding length but not circumference, since 1996.

So every year around this time we have a closet cleaning and reorganization, figure out what’s still viable and what isn’t. And we shop the outlet malls. I pulled a halter top from the clearance rack, an item of clothing I have been unable to wear in three decades, and you ladies out there know why. Watching Kate try it on, I was stabbed with jealousy, realizing how badly I’ve wanted to bare my back to the summer breeze all these years.

But my Barbie still has a few summers to enjoy a bare back, so I bought it. Besides — clearance.

“I can’t wear this to school,” Kate said. “They’re not allowed.”

“Yeah, but you have a bit of summer left. Enjoy it.”

We were going to tour the rest of the mall but recalled what our contact in Monroe said about leaving: “If you don’t get out of here by 3:30, you might as well spend the night.” She wasn’t speaking of an evil spell that descends over the place at mid-afternoon but the story of summer ’05 around here — road construction. Virtually every major freeway in southeast Michigan is being torn into riprap simultaneously, and traffic horror stories are standard small talk. I checked my watch as we left the Gap: 3:19. We burned rubber heading for I-75, and beat the rush by the skin of our teeth. Southbound travelers weren’t so lucky — it was bumper-to-bumper all the way into the city.

Just for the hell of it, I must note: I-75 may be the only interstate highway in the country that I have driven every inch of, from Sault St. Marie in the U.P. to wherever it ends in Florida. My favorite parts are in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan (Sea Shell City! The Mystery Spot!) and the Kentucky-Tennessee stretch that goes through the mountains. Noted.

Bloggage:

I love Jack Shafer’s media writing in Slate. Today’s, Why does drug reporting suck?, does not disappoint. I tried to do a story once on why the so-called “street value” of seized drugs was so widely inflated, how two pounds of marijuana could have a street value equivalent to the GDP of a small western nation. The police basically told me, “because it makes us look good.” I think the story got buried inside.

I’m looking forward to seeing “The Aristocrats,” but I admit I’m a bit baffled by the joke itself. It just doesn’t work on the page. I trust the movie will be better.

Finally, a particularly wise line from the Tao te Ching today:

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

Step away from those tools. More later.

Busy morning today, so no time to chat. Here’s this, though, an interesting story about the struggle over a memorial plaque for a dead soldier in his hometown:

In the quest of politicians and veterans to find the appropriate heading on the existing township monument, they considered titles like the Global War on Terrorism, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, Operation Iraqi Freedom and War in Iraq. The Board of Trustees eventually settled on simply: Iraq.

Some years ago, a friend of mine — OK, it was Lance Mannion — noticed the military’s “branding” campaign. “Operation Overlord was a code name,” he said. “Operation Desert Storm is marketing.” True. And so now we’re engaged in a war that even the bereaved don’t know what, exactly, to call it.

The result is still the same, regrettably.

I’ll try to be back this afternoon, but maybe not. Last night at writing group someone made the comment that everyone in the world has shoplifted something, at some time in their lives. I raised my hand: “Uh, no.” So they all said for next week I need to write a piece of short fiction on shoplifting, something I’ve never done in my life. I guess I need to start researching the topic.

Today in the Free Press, the obligatory local angle: Peter Jennings visited Detroit often, was regular guy. See page whatever.

It was an amusing read, if for no other reason than the quotes are funny-dumb, and the facts presented contradict the story’s central premise. His last trip to the D was a few months after the 9/11 attacks, and what the local TV type recalls him reporting was “the further you got from New York, the more different the impact was.” No! Get OUT!

“In a Free Press interview in 1996, he waxed rhapsodic about visiting the Eastern Market during a weeklong stay in 1975. ‘I was very moved by the whole experience,’ he said then. ‘I have a fond recollection of that time.'”

The Eastern Market, I remind you, is a produce market. Useful, yes. Interesting, certainly. But moving? Huh. Never had that feeling there.

Finally, “Jennings made a point of calling people at Channel 7 by name and treated interns and tech people with the same noblesse oblige he bestowed on station brass, Drutz said. That is, as long as he had a Fresca in his hand. Seems Jennings enjoyed the diet drink that has been eclipsed in many markets by other brands. Drutz, in charge of keeping Jennings happy, panicked until she came across a small cache of the drink at a Kroger’s not far from WXYZ’s Southfield location.”

Misuse of fancy Frenchy phrase, check. And the just-plain-folks regular guy requires an obscure soft drink that sends staffers scrambling to find it? I’m amazed he didn’t want the brown M&Ms picked out.

So far no one has mentioned my favorite Peter Jennings memory: The time he was doing a live phone interview from Beirut, and the operator came on to tell him the time was up. Without missing a beat, he negotiated an extension of time — in French! — then returned to the interview, cool as the noblesse oblige-y Francophone Canadian he was.

Or “cool as Fresca,” as we say here.

A friend of mine worked on Captiva Island when Michael Mann shot parts of “Manhunter” there. Mann required Tab, which sent junior-level staffers into a DefCon IV state of emergency, rounding it up. You ask me, the mark of true regular guydom is a man who can say, “Sure, whatever,” after being told his drink of choice is not available and will a Diet Pepsi do.

Bloggage:

I don’t trust John Roberts, but I enjoyed this column by Richard Cohen, about some of his friends.

Not only is it great to be out on the water, the scenery is pretty, too. (I’m not talking about Alan’s shirt. Nor his neck.)

Okay, then. Here’s a wheels-of-justice anecdote. Some years ago here I made passing notice of one of those talker lawsuits filed in Fort Wayne. It was filed by a man who claimed, to reduce many words to just a few, that a stripper broke his dick. Basically. He was in a strip club for his bachelor party, and the girls rigged a party gag where they had him lie down on stage straddling the pole. Two held him down while several others grabbed the pole and free-fell onto his groinal region.

His suit claimed this stunt caused him to miss the main event of his wedding night because his wee-wee was being held together with butterfly tape.

The unlucky groom himself wrote in response and in our exchange, he promised to give me an interview when the suit was final.

Well, how time does fly. He finally settled, and I no longer a) write a newspaper column; and b) live in Fort Wayne. Of course, neither does he.

And the point of the above anecdote was…? Hell if I know. I’ve been out in the sun all day, and my brain is addled.

More tomorrow.

A few years ago, the editor of my ex-newspaper had a big idea: We were going to make our obituaries super-duper. No longer would they be printed in itty-bitty type — the No. 1 complaint among its target audience, old people — and no longer would they be held to a strict content code. If you wanted to say Grampa didn’t “die” but “was called home to Jesus,” well, you could. (Within reason.) You could also say he loved bowling and fishing. If his legal name was Roberto but everyone in the world called him Bobo, you could call him Bobo. The pictures got bigger. The obits did, too. Frankly, they threatened to take over the metro section, but I will give the editor this: They were very popular. And they were free, a longstanding tradition in our paper, pretty rare in newspapering above the small-town level.

The problem with newspapers is, the readership is aging. The average newspaper reader is now about 106, and gaining two years every three months or so. Editors have slain whole forests just for the paper to exchange memos on how to appeal to younger people. (They all boil down to, “Let’s run more stories about pop music.”)

So when we instituted the New and Improved Obits, it was… a signal of sorts. Not that we’d given up, exactly, but that we’d made peace with an inescapable reality. We were going to wow the nursing homes.

The new obits lasted a few years, but couldn’t survive the terrible swift sword of cost-cutting. The last publisher shrunk them back to their previous size, turned them over to the ad department and, inevitably, started charging for them. (This was dressed up and presented to readers as a huge improvement. Astonishingly, letters to the editor revealed they weren’t buying that line of crap. Good for you, readers!)

My old paper must be accepting reality again. They recently expanded The Rant, a one-paragraph, anonymous sound-off bitchfest, to a daily feature. It’s like eavesdropping in the sunroom of death’s waiting room.

I used to read the Rant aloud on Neighbors day. I do this old-person voice, and I could always find the Rants that came from old people, usually because they said so up front:

I don’t like the city’s plan for the new larger trash containers. I’m a senior and I can’t lug these heavy containers to the curb. Why doesn’t anyone think of us? (There’s a whiny sort of old person you’d just like to slap, isn’t there? “Go read about pop music!” you want to tell them.)

Why do we have to look at obscene bumper stickers on an increasing number of vehicles? They are most offensive, but one cannot avoid observing them when they are on the vehicle in front of you.

I think there’s a new strain in the Rant lately — the Whiny Mommy. You know these women, the ones who stay home with their kids and wonder why the Nobel committee hasn’t stopped by with their medal yet. What’s worse, they suspect it will NEVER HAPPEN, and boy does that piss them off. You can spot them by their incessant, Santorum-like use of the word ‘family”:

People need to stop speaking disparagingly of families that drive SUVs � a definition that has become meaningless as people define smaller and smaller vehicles that happen to be boxy as SUVs.

Some Rants spark others: Someone complained in a recent Rant that it�s not proper to disclose in Business Monday the sale amount of real estate transactions. Well, you better be glad you live in Fort Wayne because in Springfield, Ohio, that�s normal. Everybody knows what everybody paid for their house, who bought it and all of that.

Some people nurse their Rants all day, waiting to get home to bitch about them: The sun hits the Wells Fargo ATM screen located in front of Kohl�s at State Road 37. I have to get out of my car to block the sun to see the screen. What�s the point of a drive-thru if you can�t see the screen?

I’m beginning to think they ought to add a line to the masthead: “Now indulging the self-pitying, daily.”

Bloggage:

I hate Red Delicious apples (except for those just picked from the tree) and have ever since I notice how much they suck. The WashPost explains why.

I don’t care what anyone says, this Robert Novak story is a stitch. Wonkette has a roundup.

And meanwhile, if you really want to know how to run a newspaper, I think Hank has some great ideas.

Have a good weekend.

As you might imagine, this was the big news in our household today, if you define “big” as “the sort of event that starts your back teeth grinding.” Alan went to work as an employee of Gannett and came home an employee of MediaNews Group. So did several hundred other people today, in one way or another (some were Knight Ridder employees and became Gannettoids). Just another day in corporate journalism.

This has many implications, and I’m speculated out. All I know is: a) I don’t want to move again; and b) I really don’t want to move again. So keep fingers crossed.

When I’m stressed, I clean. It beats chain-smoking, and at least the toilets are all sparkly when you puke into them later. When the bathrooms are clean, I open a bottle of wine. Tonight, pinot noir to go with a really greasy and good pasta-with-sausage-and-cream thing. I figured after a hard day of shedding one corporate identiy and assuming another, Alan deserved calories and alcohol. The early indications are that things might work out (although I remain deeply skeptical). I’m thinking about getting a real job, but nothing available appeals to me. What I’d really like to do is replace the voiceover guy who does the promos on NBC, the guy with the low, growly voice who says, “And on ‘ER,’ Dr. Carter makes a very special…goodbye.” Why should he get all the work, roughing up the pipes all day with Marlboros and whiskey, then running through the day’s assignment:

“A ‘Law & Order’ twist you won’t believe”

This is a job for me.

Bloggage later. I’m too tired now. Oh wait, there’s this, a neat skewering of press tour week for the upcoming TV season. In keeping with our journalism theme today, doncha know.

When I was at Cedar Point, I saw someone wearing a T-shirt reading, “Santorum is Latin for asshole.” Want to know why? Read this, a story which, I guarantee you, has nothing to do with the Pennsylvania senator’s feelings about abortion, homosexuality or man-on-dog relations. It’s about Santorum’s support of a home-state business, Accu-Weather, and its “competition” with the National Weather Service. It’s just another stupid way that free-market Republicans can twist their arguments every which way:

Some people think the entire weather service should be privatized. I don’t happen to agree, but it’s an argument you can advance without making a fool of yourself. But Santorum doesn’t want to block the NWS from the tedious business of collecting weather data; he wants NWS to collect weather information and then to turn over that information to private companies to disseminate it. It’s as if FedEx wanted the post office to gather together in one convenient location all the mail packages people sent, leaving actual delivery to FedEx. That would save FedEx a lot of trouble. But why would the rest of us choose such an arrangement?

As someone who now carries a weather radio on open water — in other words, as someone for whom accurate weather information is no longer merely interesting, but actually important — I have two words for Santorum. You already know what they are.