Because it’s bad to start the day — or the lunch hour, or the weekend, or anything — with a sour taste in one’s mouth, or bad feelings about one’s newspaper, here’s something from the Freep today that I liked. Why walking is a spiritual activity:

Skip Davison, 56, a retired insurance agent, described an almost Buddhist technique: “When I’m with other people, my mind is constantly thinking. So, when I walk, I try to empty my mind. Sometimes I count my paces and I can feel my mind opening up.”

Yeah, me too.

I hate stories like this.

In one, a man injects heroin frequently and cheats on his wife repeatedly. In another, a man seriously considers killing somebody, and then does. In the third, a mentally ill man locks himself in a room where he collects his own urine in jars.

If you’re going to see any of these Academy Award-nominated films, why not bring along your favorite 13-year-old? The Motion Picture Association of America says it’s OK.

Oh, poo. The story is about “ratings creep,” a legitimate topic — how what was once an R-rated movie is now a PG-13, and so on. I only wish such stories would focus on the dreck that’s in theaters with PG-13 ratings, not the tiny handful of decent movies with semi-objectionable material that are actually worth seeing, by teens and adults.

Stories like this, in other words:

These days, you could say that there are essentially three kinds of PG-13 movies: movies that are teenaged through and through, but often in the worst and most puerile sense, technically eschewing adult fare like nudity while substituting scenes that are in fact smuttier and more disturbing (for example, a scene in which a young woman — shown from the rear — lifts her top to flash an onlooker). In addition, there are children’s movies that essentially reach for PG-13: movies that probably could have been rated PG, but which have been juiced up with enough gratuitous sexuality and violence to earn them the higher rating. And finally, there are fundamentally adult movies, like “S.W.A.T.,” whose true nature is R but which are increasingly able to make a few deft excisions and extract a PG-13 from the board charged with rating films. As a result of this last technique, says Stephen Prince, a communications studies professor at Virginia Tech, in terms of content the PG-13 and R ratings have become virtually interchangeable.

I hope this isn’t the dawn of a new, CAP-alert era — the Freep story helpfully tells us that “Ray” includes “26 damns and 19 hells.” All I want to know is if it sucks or not.

But as long as we’re on the subject…

I may have mentioned our Family TV Hour, which evolved over the last few months, the Wheel of Fortune/Jeopardy block from 7-8 p.m., during which the three of us unwind, play word games and jeer at the contestants who scream “Big money! Big money!” too loudly. And let me add this: Thank God the February rating period is over, because that hour was a favorite for multiple promos for the upcoming evening news, which, during rating periods, is heavy on the big three — sex, sleaze and fear. We’ve been told about tsunami orphans sold into sex slavery, the secret your teen is keeping from you that may ENDANGER HER LIFE (anorexia bracelets), and the like.

The other day Kate said, “Sometimes the news scares me.”

“Me, too,” I said. “But mostly it just pisses me off.” (OK, I really said, “irritates me.”)

The last two weeks I’ve been letting her stay up until 9 to watch “Survivor” with me. After 8, the fun really starts, promo-wise. If you know that “CSI” follows “Survivor,” you know what I’m talking about.

“Is that show rated R?” she asked, after I covered her eyes to avoid a split-second shot of a sex swing (IN THE PROMO).

“No,” I said. “It’s rated S. For stupid.”

Enough, then.

I’ve been saying this for years: “It�s so interesting that one of the chief critics of smut in television, Brent Bozell, who runs a right-wing media watch group [Media Research Center], is silent when it comes to the public standards of Rupert Murdoch�s sleaze empire. They do have a double standard. They are silent about the fact that it�s capitalism, and that it�s the media tycoons who are polluting the public sphere.”

Now that Bill Moyers is saying it, maybe some people will listen. But I doubt it.

…if you haven’t discovered Lifehacker, you really should.

You may have noticed the evening update is now the morning update. I guess that’s how it’s going to be for a while, as the household rhythms at NN.C central settle into a groove. Morning — it’s the new evening. Tell all your friends.

One reason I’ve been shutting the laptop at dinnertime, though, is my rediscovery of my old friend, analog media, i.e., books. Read “The Inner Circle” last week, T.C. Boyle’s novelization of the Kinsey years back in the Hoosier state, and I can say it didn’t disappoint. (Boyle never disappoints, if you ask me.) One of my biggest regrets of my time there is this: I never got into the Kinsey Institute, not that I tried very hard, but I always hoped they’d have a media event and I’d have a chance to wander through the library. A friend and colleague penetrated that inner sanctum (it’s only open to researchers, and he was working on a paper about premarital cohabitation), and his account of it was fascinating — a vast holding tank for everything from rank porno to scholarly papers on the physiology of erections, all shelved together, cheek-to-cheek, so to speak.

“There’d be someone’s PhD thesis right next to ‘Doctor’s Naughty Nurse,'” he said.

But even better was the art, everything from ninth-century Japanese erotica to X-rated doodles by famous American artists. He described one by, I believe, Thomas Hart Benton, featuring an artist at an easel in an office somewhere, the door opening as the boss enters, while a naked lady slips out the window, trailing a line that connects to the artist’s pencil.

And all this at Indiana University, in the heart of Bible-belt Hoosierdom. Amazing.

Boyle tells the experience of a fictional member of Kinsey’s research team, the men who combed the country with him throughout the ’40s and ’50s, taking “sex histories,” his famous 350-question survey that produced the two Kinsey reports and — you know the rest of it.

Dr. Kinsey was the focus of the usual right-wing attack when the movie about him came out last fall, a little pop-cult palate cleanser between the Swift Boats and the election. This is typical, a sneering dismissal that manages that famous right-wing trick of assuming a certain historical rewrite: Let�s face it: Alfred C. Kinsey was a weirdo. And what made me laugh–I agree with TOC that “Kinsey” was the funniest flick I�ve seen all year–was director/screenwriter Bill Condon�s lugubrious efforts to persuade us in the audience that this was not so, that the sex- and cooked-statistics-obsessed Kinsey was actually a martyr to American midcentury prudery.

Conservatives got away with this with civil rights, too — once the issue was settled, their opposition was simply forgotten, at least by them. The debts were forgiven; of course they always supported racial equality, they were just misunderstood and misrepresented. Boyle’s book does a good job of capturing the sexual confusion of the era, when the messages were dirty-dirty-dirty and leave-the-light-off and good-girls-don’t-do-that. Those snickering twits at the IWF should be thanking Kinsey’s ghosts that their husbands know where their clitorises are, but…no. Of course.

This week, “The Chrysanthemum Palace.”

Dog drags human leg from abandoned factory.

If we have any Arizonans among the vast and teeming NN.C readership, could they answer this question: Are people as insane on the subject of Daylight Saving Time there as they are in Indiana?

The Hoosier state’s new governor, Mitch Daniels, wants to lead the state, kicking and screaming, into the bright new day of DST. And I do mean kicking and screaming;

Daniels keeps saying that no one wants to do business in or locate a business in Indiana because the state is not on daylight time. I know a farmer who will sell you a load of road apples for a buck apiece, too. Wake up and smell the profit margin, Mitch buddy. What does Indiana have to offer to CEOs who are used to a certain style of life? Zip, zilch, nada, nothing. Indiana is not a cultural mecca and never will be, and a big part of drawing a business to an area is what an area has to offer other than tax relief benefits.

Or this calm, well-reasoned argument:

I spent 10 years in New Jersey, where clocks were changed twice a year with the rest of the country. More than just the clocks get changed. The body has to adjust to a new sleep cycle every time the clocks are moved backward and forward. I remember being tired for two weeks after every time change. I was either falling asleep on the couch at 9 p.m. and waking up too early, or lying awake at night trying to fall asleep and still feeling exhausted when the alarm went off in the morning. I came to dread the semi-annual time change because of the sleep deprivation that occurred. Daylight-saving time is unnatural and hard on one�s sleep cycle, and for that reason, I am definitely against daylight-saving time.

But I don’t want to wreck all your fun. Go and cavort among the Hoosiers.

During my KWF year, we had a seminar with Richard Pound, an IOC bigwig and head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. We had lots of guests that night, mostly people from the university’s athletic community. He spoke about the upcoming Olympics and drug testing, and it was all very interesting. The discussion period skated off into sports in general, and kids and sports, and I said something like, “You know, I’d like my daughter to play sports, to get the good things out of it. The physical fitness, the leadership–”

I was interrupted by the coach of a major women’s sport at the U. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I haven’t seen a leader on my teams in more than 10 years.” She went on to explain: Today’s collegiate athlete was yesterday’s child athlete, and child athletics is, overwhelmingly, the parents’ game. When the coach was a child, she went on, you played sports by getting your ball and going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and getting a team together. You made your own rules, decided whether the manhole cover was home base or out of bounds, and played together. You learned arbitration skills by being your own referees, leadership by being your own coaches. Organized competitions didn’t come until junior high.

“Today,” she went on, “my players have been dragged around by their parents starting in kindergarten. They’re very docile, but I have to tell them everything. When to warm up, when to cool down, when to get a drink of water, what uniform to wear. If I don’t, they just stand there. They have no idea how to take the initiative.”

When Kate was 5, I enrolled her in a summer soccer league. She seemed to enjoy it for a while, but when the novelty wore off, it was just drudgery. She liked to go to games because of the concession stand and her friends, but her attention wasn’t there. And who could blame her? It’s fun to run around kicking a ball with your friends. It’s no fun to play organized soccer, on a schedule, in blistering heat, when you’re 5. I decided not to enroll her for the fall season, and to let her tell me what — and whether — she wanted to play.

So far, we’re still in the run-through-the-sprinkler-and-ride-bikes phase. Fine with me.

Last summer, when I was editing sports copy, I handled a story about knee injuries in young women athletes. Apparently ACL tears are routine in high school now, and this is invariably chalked up to female anatomy — wider hips mean more stress on the knee’s lateral flexing. Female athletes past puberty, especially those in sports like soccer or basketball, must work out with weights to strengthen their quadriceps and hamstrings if they want to avoid ACL injuries.

I tried to think back to my own high school, which was no slouch in the girls-athletics department, and how many girls I remember going around on crutches. Can’t think of any, but my memory could be faulty.

Also last summer, when I was watching ESPN as part of my continuing education, I saw a piece on Tommy John surgery in players barely out of Little League. Tommy John surgery is named for the pitcher who first had the reconstructive elbow procedure — while he was a major leaguer. Pitchers whose voices were still changing said, “I’ll just have Tommy John if I have a problem.”

Now comes this New York Times piece today, on young athletes falling apart the way old athletes do — with injuries that only come from overuse. A sample passage:

In his office in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. Andrews hands the parents of new patients a piece of chalk and points to a blackboard in the corner.

“And I say, ‘You all know why he’s here seeing me?’ And I point to the blackboard. That’s when the light bulb goes off.”

I think about what I’ve been reading about getting into good colleges, which used to reward what’s called “well-balanced” kids — smart, plays a sport or three and volunteers at the soup kitchen. Now, top schools want the “well-imbalanced” kid — smart enough, but an Olympic swimmer, and forget about volunteering, because you don’t have time when you’re an Olympic swimmer.

Overuse injuries, the NYT article points out, are not just because of too much time playing, but too much time playing just one sport, instead of running around with your friends playing soccer, football and baseball, all in one day.

Being “well-imbalanced,” that is — the Tiger Woods effect. All the chips on soccer, or basketball, or whatever.

I remember another story I handled last year, about a young basketball player whose team of adult “supporters” — which includes his parents, but also a minister, coaches and maybe even an agent, but I can’t remember — are grooming him to be drafted by the NBA either right out of high school or very soon after. They’re looking for a college that will help him achieve that goal, i.e., not finishing college.

I ask you.

Read the story.

I suppose everyone has their Hunter Thompson story. I suppose everyone’s Hunter Thompson story is boring. From a quick run through the links on memeorandum, it looks as though everyone is: a) expressing shock and/or no shock; and b) using the word “brilliant.”

So I guess I shouldn’t do that.

Here’s my boring Hunter Thompson testimony: In many ways, HST is the reason I’m a writer today, and I say that as someone who was appalled by much of his later work, and by “later” I mean “everything after the ’72 campaign book, with the exception of his coverage of the Pulitzer divorce trial.” (I can still remember a single line from the latter piece, and trot it out whenever it seems appropriate: “Servants are the Achilles’ heel of the rich. It’s hard to find a maid smart enough to make a bed but too stupid not to wonder why it’s full of naked people every morning.”)

I guess that means HST peaked before 40, not an uncommon story, and spent the rest of his career coasting. So be it. But still, I feel as though I owe him respect, and here’s why: At a time when a succession of mediocre teachers had convinced me writing was all about Topic Sentences, Thesis Paragraphs and the rest of it, “Hell’s Angels” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” came along to teach something else — that it could also be fun. This was something I needed to learn at precisely that moment, and maybe I would have learned it from some other nouveau journalist, but Thompson’s the one I learned it from, and so.

That’s not to say, I hasten to add, that topic sentences aren’t important, too. As I’ve tried to explain, with virtually no success, to eager-beaver HST wannabes whose copy came under my blue pencil: It’s not about the drugs. It’s not about the attitude, even. It’s about the technique, and you can’t master the technique until you know the rules you’re breaking. John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” is great in part because it started as Julie Andrews’ song. Thompson’s journalism was great because of the hidebound journalism that came before it, the just-didn’t-get-it crowds of reporters who looked at something they didn’t understand — motorcycle gangs, drug culture — and tried to cover it the way they covered city council and political conventions.

I recall reading that one way Thompson built his writing skills was to open a book by, say, William Faulkner to a random page and just start transcribing the prose, hoping some of the rhythms would find their way to his fingers. This was not a man who thought rules were stupid. He just bent them to his will, which is what great writers do.

Besides, to me, the best parts of his best work are the not the I-was-so-wasted parts, but the relatively straight reporting — the description of the sound system and program at the district attorneys’ convention; the deep American roots of motorcycle culture. That stuff will last.

In her semi-retirement, my sister has become an eBay entrepreneur. Her specialty is American glass, and a career in sales has served her well, not that you need a career in sales to figure out what works on eBay; a normal measure of common sense will do. Good photos with multiple views, clear descriptions, frank admission of flaws, decent customer service — is this so hard?

Here’s one of her current listings. It’s pretty typical.

So yesterday, I had the bright idea to do at least some of my furniture shopping via eBay, using the advanced-search option that lets you look in your geographical neighborhood. I found a couple of items for sale across the river, in Windsor. But, shall we say, I got bogged down in the description. Sentence after sentence of eBay boilerplate, ALL CAPS, OF COURSE, and then this swerve onto the detour to Crazytown:

USE THE BUY IT NOW BEFORE THERE IS A BID CAUSE THERE’S NO RESERVE!!!! ONLY ONE CHANCE FOR INSTANT PURCHASE!!! DON’T LET THIS ONE RUN AWAY!!! GO�LOOK AT THIS ONE!!!�PLEASE��BACK UP JESUS’S�VALUES , NOT OUR�HUMAN��ONES!!!! THE TIME IS�COMING FOR HIS RETURN, IF WE�BELIEVE�IT OR NOT!!! ALLOW�JESUS TO BE OUR�SAVIOUR TODAY�WHILE WE HAVE A CHANCE!!!�PLEASE ALLOW YOURSELF TO UNDERSTAND!!! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!!!

Then back onto the main highway — PUT ME ON YOUR�FAVORITES CAUSE IN THE NEXT 2 YEARS I’M GOING TO BE LISTING ITEMS THAT I’VE COLLECTED OVER 40 YEARS INCLUDING AN ENTIRE STORE STOCK FROM 1920’S TO 1953 EVERY WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY AND SUNDAYS — and then, screeeech, back to Crazytown: PLEASE PLEASE AND�PLEASE GO AND SEE MEL GIBSON’S� MOVIE ABOUT JESUS AND�ASK AS MANY OF YOUR�FAMILY (EVEN YOUR YOUNG CHILDREN TO�WATCH IT WITH YOU. REGULAR TV IS SO HORRIBLE LET ALONE THE�SECULAR MOVIES BEING�MADE AND WE LET OUR CHILDREN�WATCH THAT JUNK. THESE PEOPLE AND THE�MEDIA’S�ARE SAYING LIES�ABOUT�THIS MOVIE. DON’T LISTEN TO THE�SAME PEOPLE THAT’S SAYING (PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION AND ABORTION IS OK. FIND OUT�WHAT PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION �IS PLEASE) AND FRIENDS AS YOU CAN!!! IF YOU DO YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE WHAT WILL WILL WILL HAPPEN!!!�MAY JESUS CHRIST ALWAYS BE WITH YOU!!! JUST ASK HIM TO BE�YOUR SAVIOUR TODAY.

I don’t need to tell you the text changes color a few times along the way, do I?

Well, happy bidding.

In finding my way around the new neighborhood last week, I discovered the very strange border between Grosse Pointe Park and the city of Detroit. I was looking for what remained of the Lakeside Trailer Court, seen here on the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website, about which I can’t say enough good things. (Click on the other web tours at the bottom of the page.) People say the border between GPP and the D is “stark” and “dramatic,” and oh yes, it’s those things. You can sit at a traffic light on Alter Road and look to your left at urban squalor, and to your right at…suburbia. Odd.

Anyway, being such a newcomer, I have no idea what to make of this urban-renewal effort, but hey — luck be with you.

School vacations suck. School vacations with a sniffly kid suck more. School vacations with a sniffly kid who hasn’t yet made any friends in the neighborhood — at least, none who are also on break — suck the worst. Yesterday we went to the Detroit Science Center, another children’s museum that could be subtitled Short Attention Span Theater. Push this button, watch something happen, race to the next exhibit, push another button, watch something else happen, repeat until exhausted, etc.

Today we’re going to be done with education and go seek out a mall somewhere. My fervent belief is that somewhere in the metro D there’s a nice antique console table sitting around waiting for me to pick it up, along with a Queen Anne breakfront or some other piece of furniture suitable for storing my good china, and also lots of bookcases. And all these things are cheap. And all these things are destined to come home with me, and we will find one another, preferably this week.

In the meantime, I liked John Scalzi’s take on covenant marriage, one of those policies beloved of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do conservatives, but which turns out, even in GWB’s America, to be a total joke: A covenant marriage also requires a two-year wait before a divorce becomes final, except in cases of adultery, abuse or imprisonment for a felony. …The concept of covenant marriage, which, to put it lightly, has not been a hit, even in Arkansas: just over two thirds of one percent of Arkansas marriages have been covenant marriages since the new variation of marriage was enacted into law in 2001. Simple reason for that: As a concept, it’s pretty damn insulting.

I’ll be back later, with all my fabulous new furniture!