So yesterday I read that the “embattled” president of the University of Colorado (which is “CU” on second reference, and if you know why, please explain) resigned. Just resigned? Oh, hell no. She resigned “amid turmoil.” Journalese strikes again.

Journalese is, of course, the language spoken only by journalists, although it sometimes pops into conversational speech, and it always sounds strange when it does. Take the word “controversy” in its many forms. Have you ever used that word casually? “That T-shirt will stir controversy with your principal,” say? Of course not. Which is why I’m always amused when someone does, like my friend John, who will sometimes ask a waitress, “Where are these alleged fries?”

Speaking of language, sooner or later we’re going to have to answer the “masturbate” question. I was raised to believe that “masturbate” is a, whaddayacallit? intransitive verb? Meaning, I think, that it ends where it ends. He masturbated. She masturbated. They masturbated. You don’t masturbate someone; it’s self-contained. Right? You can only do it to yourself. If you did it to someone else, it would no longer be masturbation, it would be manual stimulation that may or may not lead to orgasm.

But maybe I’m wrong. I keep reading about Michael Jackson masturbating some kid, sometimes while he’s masturbating himself. This just sounds wrong to me. Grammarians? Chime in.

I could check the transitive/intransitive thing if I could find my dictionary, but it’s in a box somewhere. The online dictionary I use just calls it a v.

That said, if I were assigning reporters to cover the M.J. trial, I’d certainly send Hank. I’m so glad someone did.

After a month that was, weather-wise, like the Bataan Snow March, the sun appeared Saturday and hung around Sunday. Lo, the temperatures topped 50 degrees, and there was much melting of snow and joy in the land.

Today: Gray, raining, still warm, with temperatures falling throughout the day. Low tonight: 16. Goddamn Michigan.

Also, the cold that’s been stalking me for weeks now finally got up to speed on the forwarding address. Throat: Raw. Spirits: Mid-to-low. If it stops raining, I’ll take the dog for a walk, to bid goodbye to our brief glimpse of spring. Then I’ll go to the basement and unpack albums. That is, LPs. I started yesterday, and realized if I had done this before the move, I might have saved the movers a few muscle fibers. Is it safe to throw out my Holly and the Italians album? Yes, I think so. The only track I really liked was “Tell That Girl to Shut Up” (something I’ve heard a time or two in my life), and honestly, I don’t want to hear it again. It’s like having 1982 cast in amber somewhere. And what about these two David Bowies? Verdict: Keep “Aladdin Sane.” Pitch “Let’s Dance.”

Alan advised, “Keep everything.” Easy for him to say. The compromise may be: Save everything for a garage sale if and when the temperature rises above 16 degrees.

On to bloggage, then: Yesterday’s NYT had a long but wonderful read on “Chinese Democracy,” the Guns N’ Roses album that’s been in the works for 11 years, has cost $13 million (so far) and still is about as elusive as Chinese democracy. If you’re not a GN’R fan, be not daunted; the story’s still worth your time, if only for the priceless look it offers at life inside the music business. Every time my attention flagged, it was whipped back by yet another wonderful detail. Like, oh, this:

In 1997 Todd Sullivan, who was then a talent executive for the company, sent Mr. Rose a sampling of CD’s produced by different people, and encouraged him to choose one to work on “Chinese Democracy.” Mr. Sullivan says he received a call informing him that Mr. Rose had run over the albums with a car.

Or this:

So the studio technicians burned as many as five CD’s per week with various mixes of different songs, which were driven to Malibu for Mr. Rose to study. The band’s archive of recorded material swelled to include more than 1,000 digital audio tapes and other media, according to people who were there at the time, all elaborately labeled to chart the progress of songs. “It was like the Library of Congress in there,” said one production expert who spent time on the album there.

Or this, about the famous Buckethead:

But Mr. Rose’s renewed energies were not being directed toward the finish line. He had the crew send him CD’s almost daily, sometimes with 16 or more takes of a musician performing his part of a single song. He accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.

Or this!

The band went on a successful tour, but in the hours after their triumphant Madison Square Garden appearance, Mr. Rose was reportedly refused entry to the Manhattan nightclub Spa because he was wearing fur, which the club does not allow. That killed the mood. He didn’t show up for the band’s next performance, and the promoter canceled the rest of the tour.

No wonder people want to be rock stars. It’s like kindergarten, only with drugs for snack time.

I finally caught a little of the Michael Jackson trial re-enactment on E! and found it to be more wonderful — in a wonderful/awful sense — than I’d been led to expect from the advance publicity. I encourage you to follow the link above, because it answers the question on everybody’s lips, i.e. “Did that guy put eyeliner on his nostrils?”

My favorite single character is the judge, who appears to have been dragged in from Skid Row and gives his lines — “overruled,” “sustained,” “I’ll allow it” — the sort of Method dedication you’d expect from someone who’d take a job in the Michael Jackson trial re-enactment.

You won’t be disappointed.

Latuh.

John Scalzi has an appreciation of a teacher who changed his life at his blog. Good lord, but it almost made me cry.

Fact of Michigan life: University of Michigan people hate Michigan State people, and vice versa. Of course this is an overgeneralization, but it’s a big, big rivalry. (Are you listening, Ohio State? People just don’t care all that much about you.) The differences break down along the usual lines, but the shorthand version is this:

U of M people are effete, nose-in-the-air, self-satisfied liberal intellectuals who think Ann Arbor is really just a smaller, snowier version of Athens (Greece, that is), and that they, as its residents, are so, so special.

MSU people are knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing lummoxes whose interests range from hockey to football. Anyone with a pulse and a nasal Michigan accent can get into MSU. They are, well, the dumb school.

MSU also has a vet school (because they’re so earthy, you know), and most of the vets who practice here went there. The dog had his first vet visit today, and we met the tremendous Dr. Larry. I was giving him the little man’s health history, and mentioned our stay in Ann Arbor, because the vet there had a different philosophy about treating his flea allergies than our Fort Wayne vet. (Short version: She considered our Fort vet a knuckle-dragger.) He listened, chuckled, and mentioned the MSU-UM thing. I told him my favorite Ann Arbor vet story, about when I took the dog in and he was doing his usual waiting-room act, boiling at the end of his short leash, moving back and forth, panting, getting all terrier-ific.

“Excuse me,” another man in the waiting room said. “Would you mind picking your dog up? I would hate for him to arouse my dog’s prey instinct.”

Dr. Larry chortled with satisfaction. “Tell me that again,” he said. “I want to write that one down.”

Grist for amusement at the next alumni gathering, no doubt.

God knows I’ve done enough picking on Bob Greene to fill me up for…ever, I guess. So I’ll keep this brief, and just ask: Does someone at the New York Times feel sorry for this guy, or what?

Take today’s op-ed piece, on how Great Plains Podunks are offering free land, tax incentives and other cash and prizes for people willing to move there. Reading the first few grafs, I had a feeling what was coming, and I wasn’t disappointed:

Yet there does seem to be a danger that, by all but begging outsiders to come, the rural communities will send a false and counterproductive message: that small-town life is so undesirable that the only way to keep people is to chain them down (or bribe them). It might be better to explain to the world exactly why a placid way of life is preferable to urban cacophony and chaos — and inform the outsiders that this kind of living is so valuable, they’re going to have to pay a little extra for the privilege of moving in. Make what’s inside the tent seem irresistible — a lesson that should have been learned on the midways of every county fair there ever was.

In some of these towns, a commute to work is four minutes; crime is all but nonexistent; at night you half-believe you can look toward the soundless sky and see the outskirts of heaven. And isolation, in our age of 500 channels, of easy Internet access and e-mail, does not mean the same thing it did to generations past.

Waahhlll, yesssss, a commute to work is four minutes. The only problem is, there is comparatively little “work” there to speak of, which is why people, particularly young ones who don’t see a future in farm-implement sales, are lifting their graduation gowns and bolting for the big cities as soon as they can. Call them crazy, but it isn’t all about having a Starbucks on the corner; most people are more comforted by a regular paycheck than a starry night.

I guess it’s too much to ask where Bob Greene is living these days. Having left behind the “small town” of Bexley, Ohio, which coincidentally is fully surrounded by the somewhat less small town of Columbus, Ohio, last I heard he was still living in Chicago.

In trying to hit command/A to capture an URL for blogging, I mistakenly hit command/Q, quit my browser and lost a lengthy but boring post.

At least, I’m telling myself it was boring, to justify my refusal to try to recreate it now. Here’s the short version: Snow, birdwatching, errands, writing, an upcoming photo project, bloggage.

I’ll just do the bloggage, then:

Greg Beato does a great job with Nathan Greene, a Christian artist, here. A wonderful read, and not what you’d think.

If you’ve ever endured a miscarriage, this lengthy but readable WashPost piece on the best research on the topic is worth your time. News flash: As many as half of all sperm/egg unions are miscarried.

Finally, is anyone on the NYT op-ed page dumber than David Brooks? I mean, he makes Maureen Dowd look sharp as a stiletto. Especially in this piece on the death of family-based civilization in…separate checking accounts.

That said, I thought this post explicating it hits the nail on the head: This is not a column meant to persuade those who aren’t already convinced that the American family is in serious peril. It is a column meant to persuade those who are convinced. It is meant to persuade them that their fears are justified and that this is just another sign that things are getting worse so they better elect more Republicans if theywant to save the family as a fundamental American institution.

So should we take the concern about separate checking accounts seriously? No. But should we take the deeper, underlying concerns seriously? Most definitely!

So I guess it should keep my mouth shut.

And finally, a great Lance post. On the movies. And, as usual, on lots of other things, too.

All it does in this town is snow. While that’s good news for some people — the Great Lakes are up 18 inches, huzzah huzzah — it’s not good news for those of us yearning for spring. Last night we had about three inches. Today we’re getting about three more. Tomorrow? Perhaps more fun is in store.

Normally I don’t mind snow — a white landscape is far preferable to a brown, dead, winter-killed landscape — but this year I have 120 feet of driveway and one shovel.

Take that, Michael Medved, you tiny little man.

UPDATE: Well, the clothes were just fabulous. I read this Slate essay arguing otherwise, and I see her point, but I can’t say I miss the days of Cher in a feather explosion, either. Joan and Melissa Rivers may be plagues upon the land, but when Charlize Theron came out in that blue confection, my heart fluttered. Great fashion is great art, and I’d rather my jaw drop for all the right reasons.

That said, does Hilary Swank have an ass crack? I guess only the back of her chair knows for sure.

Just because everyone’s dressing tastefully, it doesn’t mean there isn’t still fodder for pre-game hooting. Hollywood will be giving us plastic surgery victims for some time yet. And I guess we’ll always have Star Jones.

Also, poor Marty, passed over again. Well. I think, if he wants to win, he needs to stop showing up. If all those acceptance speeches from other “Aviator” winners weren’t enough to shame his colleagues into giving him a statue, nothing will. As a refugee from perhaps the only business more fond of award-giving — journalism — all I can say is this: It don’t mean nothin’. Marty’s the best, always will be, end of story.

Quick, complete this sentence: Thanks, Belgium, for all the…”

Made you think, didn’t it? If you came up with anything more than “waffles,” I guess you get a prize (even if you’re still holding those sprouts against its capital). Me, too. But now that I live in a thriving multi-ethnic metropolis, I can say I’m a little more savvy.

Let me back up — we went out Saturday night with John and Mary C. John’s a longtime occasional reader of NN.C, and recently checked back in after a long absence to discover we’d moved. Turns out he lives in the Pointes. Small world. Anyway, he and Mary took us out on a grownup’s Saturday night in the eastern suburbs — dinner at Steve’s Back Room, then a nightcap at the Cadieux Cafe, a true east-side landmark and a Belgian hangout.

Really. Hang around there, you learn about buffalo and walloons, but mostly the odd sport of featherbowling. The Cadieux Cafe claims to offer the U.S.’s only featherbowling venue, and I believe it. How this hasn’t ended up in an Elmore Leonard novel by now, I don’t know. A cross between bocce and shuffleboard and maybe horseshoes, it’s played in a concave lane of packed dirt, the object being to roll a flat-sided ball (think of a wheel of cheese) down the lane and land it as close as possible to a pigeon feather stuck at the other end. Close calls are settled with a measuring stick.

John plays in a league. He explained some of the game’s unique challenges, among them where to find replacement balls for a sport that’s so obscure as to redefine the word. They’ll have to have them custom-made. (The good news: the current set has been going strong for 70 years.) Then we watched for a while. The ball doesn’t roll straight; it makes a sine wave down the alley, wandering up and down the banked sides as it approaches the feather. It’s goofy, in an elegant way, and goes well with beer (Belgian, of course; we had Chimay).

John said sometimes the regulars ask, “Oh, you’re from Chicago? Where do the Belgians live in Chicago?” The answer to which must be, “Ummm…”

Anyway, it was a lovely evening. That it’s the only evening we’ve had out in weeks and weeks didn’t hurt.

Bloggage: My opinion of Halle Berry just rose tenfold.

Tomorrow, let’s dish the Oscars.

OK, this is funny.

My fave: “For the Love of Scottie McMullet.” Yours?

(Thanks: Eric Zorn.)