Even the owner of the drowned Hummer admits it was “stupid” to test his vehicle’s amphibious capabilities after a recent storm, but the rest of us can still enjoy a chuckle over it, can’t we?

From the Free Press, with a helpful story on why you shouldn’t assume your car can swim.

Finally made it to history class yesterday. A large chunk of the lecture was on the Schlieffen Plan, the 1914 German strategy to defeat France in a six-week campaign that would allow them to then move the bulk of their forces to the eastern front for a longer campaign against Russia.

It didn’t work out that way. There were a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was this: If you follow the link and look at the map, you’ll see the campaign sent several armies on a wide flanking maneuver to the north of France’s fortress towns south of Luxembourg. Put your fingertips on a table and rotate your hand around your index finger. Your little finger has to cover a lot more ground to make it around the semi-circle, doesn’t it? The guys on the little-finger path arrived at their destination emaciated and exhausted, having fought and marched and fought and marched and then marched some more, cut off from their supply trains.

In other words, the plan didn’t take into consideration the simple and obvious human factor. The human factor — so often the cause of those bedeviling unintended consequences. Ask the soldiers in Iraq if anyone has thrown flowers at them lately.

One of the things I thought a lot about in the past year is how people use technology in ways different than the inventors perhaps intended. Kids swap iPods as a shorthand way of saying, “This is who I am.” Text messaging is a new way to cheat on an exam. The inventor of the birth-control pill was a devout Catholic who thought he’d finally found a “natural” method of planning children that would be used primarily by women in their 30s and 40s who had completed their families; oops, he caused the sexual revolution. TV was supposed to be a great educational tool, which it is, I suppose, but not in the way we thought it would be.

You can never predict exactly how people are going to use new tools at their disposal. In my husband’s family, women cook the same meals they’ve been making since the ’50s; there’s no quicker way to freak them out than to take them to a restaurant where the phrase “pesto mayonnaise” is on the menu. But they all embraced the microwave oven like a long-lost friend. The MP3 algorithm was written to solve the problem of bulky sound files, and now it’s changing a whole industry. You want white-collar job outsourcing? How about having your MRI scans read by a radiologist in India, who can pull them up in an instant and charges a fraction of what the American guy does?

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that it’s interesting. Because this is a blog post and not a newspaper column, I don’t have to have a nice concluding paragraph. Except maybe this:

Have a nice day. I’m off to have lunch with Ron.

The headline on the Freep story today was bad enough — Girl, 9, shot dead at sleepover — and the story was worse, which you can imagine. But the closing paragraph was almost too much to bear:

Detroit Police Sgt. Eren Stephens said parents should secure any weapons around the house.

Now there is some helpful advice.

The Knight Ridder fellowships take staffers from jobs and puts them in classes at various universities or other venues, with the idea that, perhaps, hopefully they will, when they finish up, go off to other work, not necessarily at Knight Ridder-owned operations.

Convincing an idiot he’s an idiot is a no-win situation. But would it really be so much to ask that the enemies of yours truly who actually talk to this sucking orifice get their facts straight before pressing their quivering lips to his liver-spotted ear?

A commenter below wants to discuss the Sopranos. Fine with me — so do I. And fortunately for me, I think Amy sums up the season pretty well right here, so I don’t have to.

But I will say, even I was stunned by last night. David Chase has thrown it down for the last time: This man is truly evil. Enjoy him if you must, but we’re gonna make you squirm.

Every so often, when I’m feeling self-pitying and a little drunk, I’ll tell someone that my greatest regret in life is not having more children. Only the boldest among them ever point out that whenever I’m actually in charge of more than one child, I behave like Courtney Love with PMS.

This weekend was Mass Garage Sale weekend back in Fort Wayne, when two adjoining neighborhood associations urge all members to sell all the crap in their house. The association buys classified ads, and at the crack of 8 a.m. the whole neighborhood fills with crap-seekers from all over northeast Indiana. (To understand why this is one of the two or three social events of the year in my neighborhood, it would help to be a Hoosier, but if you can imagine, you know.) Kate’s been bugging us to let her invite her Ann Arbor friend Sophia to spend some time with us in the Fort, and it seemed like this was the perfect opportunity. We’d sell our crap and hang the screens on Saturday, then head up to the lake on the way home, weather permitting. We’d have takeout and cookout and ice cream at Zesto, and oh what a time we’d have.

And, truth to tell, we did. But I’d forgotten the most important rule of parenthood: That one child has the maturity and IQ of one child, but two children have the maturity and IQ of half a child, and when you throw one more in, well, forget it. I was reminded of the days of Taryn, Kate’s playmate in the years 4 and 5, who would openly speculate that they could probably throw themselves in front of passing cars without bodily harm, because they could hang onto the bumper whooping down the street, the way the characters in Warner Brothers cartoons do. I gave each of the girls $5 and told them to go hit the sales until they’d spent it all. Moments later, Kate appeared in tears — she’d lost her fiver “and now Sophia will get all the stuff.” This was only the first eruption in what would become a long, hot day, made more so by the passing parade of crap-seekers.

Oh, look, here’s one: My age, minivan with bad muffler, teenager in the passenger seat. She chooses three clothing items thisclose to the rag bag, then goes back to the van to get her 75 cents. I follow her, to save her a return trip. The back of the van is a forest of car seats. “Wow,” I say. “How many you packin’ there?”

“Five,” she says. I ask if she’s providing daycare. Nope, that’s her grand-nephew, grand-niece, grandchild, two-year-old and I forget who the other kid was — maybe the fifth was the teen. Just another action-packed life in the Hoosier state.

Things improved, though, and we saw “Shrek 2” and got ice cream and doughnuts and ended up at the lake, where my first paddle back to the Puddle — a sub-basin cut off from most boat traffic by its narrow channel — was a veritable Marlon Perkins special. Sighted: A beaver (“Keep up the good work narrowing that channel!”), enough enormous leatherback turtles to cast a disaster movie, snakes, a pair of swans with one on the nest and tons of red-winged blackbirds. I got close enough to flush some nesting females, and saw their nests, which appear to be wispy grass cups held in the tenuous grasp of waving cattails. So much of nature seems to have such a tenous grasp in the world, it’s a miracle any reproduction gets done. Nevertheless, the blackbirds defended their nests as valiantly as the swans.

If you want to see action, you can go to a garage sale, or a swamp, two habitats with a wealth of observable behavior.

Is it foolish to post your AIM ID on a blog like this? Will it get you, instead of the occasional howdy from readers, just a bunch of come-see-my-webcam-I’m-down-to-my-PANTIES!!!!! IM spam? I did instant-messaging back when I was on AOL, and while it was interesting at first, ultimately I decided it was just a different form of CB radio, and gave it up.

But when I went to Mac OSX, with its much-improved iChat program, I realized I was wrong. I’m a writer with small-c catholic interests in capital-W Writing, which is to say, I’m interested in how we figure out each form for ourselves — how fiction is different from nonfiction, which is different written letters, which are different from e-mail, which is different from instant messaging, which is different from text messages on your cell phone, and all the rest of it. I like the way IM chats fill a niche between e-mail and phone calls, how you can do it while you’re doing something else. I also like the dog picture that’s my current IM avatar.

Which sounds, I realize, like a bunch of masters-thesis crapola to justify my occasional enjoyment of internet chatting. Nevertheless.

If you’re looking for me online, e-mail and I’ll send it. But right now I’m going for a bike ride.

…the short piece I wrote about screenwriting for the Journal of the Knight-Wallace Fellows is up.

(This runs counter to my naturally modest and exceedingly self-effacing nature, plus the picture shows the full effect of months of eating like a starving hog and hours of sweaty frolic on the Argentine pampas. I’ll have you know I’m exercising daily and eating stuff like turkey in hopes of getting reacquainted with my actual chin.)

Remember that scene in “All the President’s Men,” where Jason Robards/Ben Bradlee says, “We stand by our story.” Yeah, it’s fading for me, too. Maybe, someday, it’ll be gone forever. The better for me.

I’m just reading about an editorial in a Massachusetts newspaper, the Lowell Sun. The Sun published a photograph of two men kissing, to go with a story on the same-sex marriages happening there. Some people called to complain and others called to cancel their subscriptions, so what do you think happened?

1) The Lowell Sun’s version of Jason Robards said, “Tell ’em we stand by our story,” or

2) They published a cringing editorial apologizing for the terrible offense.

You know the answer. Here’s an excerpt: The Sun photo wasn’t intended to shock readers. Rather it was to inform them of the freight train arriving at “Massachusetts Station”, whether we like it or not. Soon that train will depart for other parts of the nation, and arrive with similar force.

If The Sun could turn back the clock, we most likely would select a less intrusive photograph not because the original photo was wrong but because it didn’t fit the go-slow approach we’ve endorsed for a better understanding of this sensitive issue.

Now, I didn’t see the photo. Maybe the kiss was really out-there. Maybe one guy was bent backwards, his throat bulging from the pressure of the other guy’s tongue waaaaay down there, plus someone’s hand was on someone’s ass and leather was involved. Maybe one guy was in Elizabeth Taylor drag. Who the hell knows? But I’d be willing to bet the picture was like dozens we’ve seen since this began in San Francisco earlier in the year — two men exchanging a rather tame kiss on the courthouse steps.

Anyway, that’s not the point. Anyway, it sort of ties in with what people have been saying lately about newspapers v. internet news sources, although it sort of doesn’t, either. (Can I see the hands of everyone ready to entertain the idea that some people searching for the Nick Berg beheading video aren’t looking for evidence of Islamofascism but just might be in the same demographic that made “Faces of Death” such a barn-burner? Thought so.)

Anyway, this was the gist of my Fellowship application, all those months ago: That newspapers have lost their nerve, and when you lose your nerve, you don’t have much more to lose. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked, in a newsroom, “Do you think this will offend our readers?” I wouldn’t be looking for a job today — I’d be living in my beachfront villa in Barbados. And it wasn’t over gay kissing and beheading videos, either; one editor fretted that running a photo of an Olympic beach-volleyball player going up for a spike would offend our readers, because her shorts had ridden up enough to show a sliver of her ass. It just never ended; for years we had an across-the-board no-dead-bodies-ever policy, which had a way of being suspended if the dead bodies were really far away. (In other words, we didn’t run the Pulitzer Prize-winning, iconic photo of the Oklahoma City bombing, but we did run an utterly gruesome picture of dead bodies in the Moscow theater after the hostage siege.) We didn’t run “grief” photos. We dashed out words like “hell” and “damn.” We trod on eggshells.

Now, it’s not as simple as just “throw the stuff in the paper no matter the content.” Your daily newspaper is one of the few general-audience publications left in the household, and in trying to offer something for every niche, it has to be careful. What offends Grandma doesn’t offend her grandson, but more grandmas than grandsons are subscribers these days, and so nine grannies on the phone to the editor can swing a hell of a lot more weight than the membership of the AARP in Congress.

Only guess what? Granny is dying, and her grandson isn’t taking over her subscription, and all over the country editors are tearing their hair out, holding meetings where everyone agrees: We need more pop music coverage in the paper! When the answer, in my opinion anyway, is really very simple: Lead with confidence you’re providing an indispensible product. (Also, this part is very important: Provide an indispensible product.) If Granny calls about the kissing men on Page One, you say, “Ma’am, this is what’s happening in your community. This is our job. Thanks for your call.” None of this go-slow crap. You can’t edit your newspaper to be inoffensive. The news is offensive.

If you’re now thinking, why should I listen to you, you big Hoosier loser?, well, go ahead. You can see where this bold thinking has led me in my brilliant career. It’s just something to consider.

On to other topics:

During my stay in the undisclosed location, I picked up Jane Smiley’s new book, “A Year at the Races.” It’s all about horses, and as a middle-age-horse-crazy gal myself, I’m enjoying it very much. You might, too.

However, avoid “Something’s Gotta Give” if at all possible. That’s unless you’re doing a master’s thesis on the fine art of the phoned-in performance across the board — actors, screenwriter, director, everyone — in which case it’s your foundation text. Roger gave it three and a half? God help us all.

The sky was so blue at 7 a.m. it was just…bluuuuuuuuuee. I’m talking unearthly. What can I do to honor such blueness, I thought. Decided: Go to history class. The KWF history subgroup’s fave prof is having a summer-term lecture on the History of Warfare, 1500 to Present; I thought I’d drop in.

Unfortunately, I remembered the day (MWF), the hour (9-11) and the building (chemistry), but not the room. I wandered through two floors of lecture halls before giving up and sending an e-mail from the Chemistry Learning Center, yet another computer resource available to anyone who walks in and looks like she knows what she’s doing. Not that I know what I’m doing in a chem lab. The warning signs on the doors — DANGER ACETYLENE DANGER HIGH MAGNETISM DANGER EXPLOSIVES — are enough to send me running from the building.

So I didn’t get two hours of war history. But just the act of pedaling down to campus, of riding across the Diag again — oh, it was a bittersweet feeling. I loved college the first time around, and loved it more this time.

(Just got a reply from the prof: The midterm’s Friday, and Monday’s lecture starts the opening campaigns of WWI. On the one hand, I’m not surprised — the guy does have a no-nonsense, move-the-ball-down-the-field teaching style. But I’m disappointed I missed 400 years in three weeks. Talk about snoozing/losing.)

Now the day is fleeting, and I have to get some work done. In the meantime, amuse yourself with this oh-for-God’s-sake angle on the death of Tony Randall. You’d have to look pretty hard to find an obit that ignored “The Odd Couple” to single out, oh, a lesser example of Randall’s work, but fortunately, I did the looking for you.