OK, this may be a hard swallow for those of you not in the newspaper business, but for those who are, you must read this Ron Rosenbaum piece on the incursion of evil management consultants into our business:

To me, the pi�ce de r�sistance of the Raines essay�the anecdote that captures the true texture of management-guru culture�is his description of the elite management retreat in which a management-consultant guru painstakingly explains to Times executives the management-guru-approved method for firing people. …At this particular retreat, Mr. Raines tells us, the “coach and facilitator” announced the lesson for the day: “how to fire people.” The poor Times execs were coerced into dividing up into groups to role-play firing scenarios Or, as Mr. Raines puts it, the groups “practiced termination interviews.”

Anyway, Mr. Raines tells us, the “main precepts” communicated by the “termination” guru were “to sit directly facing the employee in a posture that indicated openness, receptivity�legs uncrossed, arms resting loosely on the arms of the chair. After saying to the person in a calm tone that he or she was being dismissed, and giving a brief, neutral explanation of the reason, we were to listen patiently while the employee vented freely. If he or she became angry, we were to say we understood the anger. At every turn we were to express personal sympathy but to offer no concessions. Once the soon-to-be-exiled worker realized the hopelessness of his or her situation, we were to collect the person�s identification card, if that could be accomplished without a wrestling match.” In other words: break them down, treat them like children and kick them out while disguising your contempt for them.

Man, winter can be hard on a house. It’s especially hard on a 90-year-old house, although, in houses and in humanity, preventive maintenance helps.

This is our Indiana house I’m talking about here. We ran home this weekend to sweep the cobwebs out of the joint, mow the grass and see how badly the cold weather treated everything. Answer: Not as badly as the never-ending sewer project on our street, which has disrupted everyone’s lives since Thanksgiving. “Boy, did you pick a good year to be gone,” all the neighbors said; evidently they pray for rain these days, to settle the dust that drifts into every eye and dulls every house.

So, I guess the lesson is: Even with cobwebs and a mummified mouse in one of the cold-air intakes, it could have been much worse.

The kitchen faucet did spring a fatal leak, however. Alan replaced it, leading me to thank the lucky stars once again that I married a man who can repair plumbing. Why do so many love songs concentrate on liquid eyes and strong muscles? Show me a man who can handle a pipe wrench, and there’s your good husband material right there.

I took some time to walk around the neighborhood, just to see who’s moving and who isn’t. After nine months in Michigan’s Second-Most-Expensive City, it’s a shock to hear neighbors taking umbrage at the gall of another, who is asking $165,000 for that house, which is merely roomy and well-located and well-maintained and has a brand-new patio with a fountain and water garden. I mean, who the hell does he think he is?

Michigan’s first-most-expensive city (or so I’m told): Birmingham. Now you know.

After sweeping and dusting and scouring and mowing and uprooting and cutting back and filling a thousand lawn-and-leaf bags, it was back to A2 (the Fellowship is over, but Kate’s still in school), which is increasingly feeling like home, although God knows why because I really miss my kitchen equipment. Alan has a theory: “I don’t think I’ve seen a NASCAR jacket since I’ve been here.” Nor a Sam’s Club, nor a Wal-Mart. Even fast food can be hard to track down; there’s a Wendy’s way out that way and way out this way, but not close by. Ypsilanti, which I’m told has all of these things and the famous Brick Dick, does the dirty work for us.

And today? I’m recovering. Some vestigial Fellows are coming for dinner, and Alan and I are going over to the Nichols Arboretum to see Imagine/Align, “a site-specific, community-based art installation blooming now at the University of Michigan Nichols Arboretum. This project, conceived by artist Susan Skarsgard, is a line of 20,000 yellow daffodils as far as the eye can see, traversing the environment, mapping thought and inspiring contemplation on the idea of lines, borders and imposed definitions.”

Yes, that’s Ann Arbor for you. Back in the Fort, they just call it a flower bed.

…And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood” (fragment)

Congratulations to the Knight-Wallace Fellows, Class of 2004. Now I’m going to bed for a week.

What a find in the film/video library in these last days of the Fellowship: “The Lifestyle,” a documentary about swinging among the Social Security crowd that was, according to Salon, judged too hot for even the film-festival crowd:

The film was eventually accepted at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and later at the Seattle Film Festival. Every other film festival in North America rejected it. Schisgall says that the person who runs one of the best known, most prestigious festivals in North America was convinced the film had been paid for by the Lifestyles organization and “did not want to take the film because he thought it was too positive a portrayal.”

What’s got people so hot, if not under the silks, then certainly under the collar? Good question. “The Lifestyle” presents an utterly banal world of group sex, where wife-swapping is pursued only a little more avidly than recipe-swapping. You have never in your life seen a less erotic take on the subject, although I laughed out loud many times, as when one subject noted that — how to call it? — er, multiple serial-partner intercourse is now called “marathon,” since “those black bastards up in L.A.” ruined the term “gang banging.”

You might find this one via Netflix, but not at your local Blockbuster. Wherever you stumble across it, Joe Bob says check it out.

One of our better seminars this year was about the 9/11 memorial, and in the course of reading this and that about it, I came across this idea: That memorials to horrific events should not be erected too soon, that even bright-line tragedies should be viewed and understood from a distance of some years before we try to memorialize them. That’s not to say al-Qaeda will improve with age, only that time tells, and it may be telling us something different about 9/11 in a few years.

Of course, this is Manhattan real estate we’re talking about here — in other words, a long mellowing isn’t possible — but it’s an interesting idea to consider. The one clear criticism of the Oklahoma City memorial I’ve read is its lack of context, that still-grieving families simply refused to allow a memorial that gave any significant presence to the event’s perpetrator, and so you can visit it without learning a thing about Tim McVeigh, the anti-government subculture of the mid-’90s, and what it led to. Those who don’t remember the past, etc.

And so it goes with Columbine. As the anniversary journalism passes through, I’m amazed at the persistence of the bullying myth, which I thought was discredited years ago. Evidently, though, lots of inattentive Americans still believe the teenagers behind that massacre did what they did because they’d been picked on.

Slate has a much better look back today.

In keeping with one of the great themes of my life — If It’s Happening, It’s Not Happening Anywhere Near Me — I must take note of this.

I went out for some final-week Fellowship last night, and stayed out clear past 11, a curfew imposed more by my early-rising daughter than by my own circadian rhythms. But because this is my life and not that of a person lucky in such things, I was in the grown-up section of Ann Arbor and not the student neighborhood, and hence, I missed the Naked Mile.

OK, I’ll admit it. I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been wandering the campus, kicking piles of leaves and brooding. Not to mention indulging in the traditional end-of-term rituals — big gatherings at restaurants with pushed-together tables, and cookies and soda in creative-writing class, along with the festive announcement that the teacher’s husband won a big Hopwood award. The heat of last weekend has abated for more seasonal temperatures, but I’m back on the bike again, which always gives me an excuse to stick around; the last mile is all uphill, and I look for every excuse to avoid it. But! Quadriceps! They’re emerging from the winter fat again, so it must be true: The world is coming to life again.

Yes, but it’s dying, too. Today’s was the last Daily of the term, or close. The graduation issue was steeped in nostalgia, prepping the kids for the most important emotion of the rest of their lives. I’m trying to stave it off; the most valuable piece of information I got in the last week was news my fave history prof will be teaching a summer-term class starting the first week in May, which I’ll be able to attend at least a little of — War in the Modern World. I won’t be a Fellow past Thursday, but I figure no one will care if I slip in the back of the lecture hall for a few weeks. I suspect lots of people do this, and as long as they don’t turn in blue books or ask lots of questions, it’s probably possible to get a fairly good seat-of-the-pants education this way.

Someone could make a movie about this. Oh, I forgot: Someone did. A lousy one.

This weekend was our near-final obligation to the Fellowship — playing host to next year’s prospective Fellows, who had their interviews this weekend. While they marched in one by one to face the fearsome Committee of Eight, we sat in the living room with smelling salts and cool compresses for their anxious, fevered brows.

Although, I must say, hardly any of them seemed even the least bit nervous, at least not nearly as nervous as I was a year ago. I remember leaving the interview room, getting a plate of fruit salad and a tall cranberry juice, and just staring into space for about 30 minutes. Then I walked around town in freezing temperatures, went to Zingerman’s, bought nothing, walked back to my car and drove home. I ate lunch in Jackson, of all places, at a Cracker Barrel, of all places. I spent three weeks chewing my nails to the quick. Then, the phone call that changed everything.

So the year is dwindling. But there’s still hope for the warp in the space/time continuum that freezes the clock forever on this unseasonably warm April weekend, when I still have a key to the house and I’m still a current Fellow. Not much hope, but you never know.

Speaking of that warmth, is there a better place to watch spring arrive than a college campus? The temperatures go above 75 and the Diag fills with pretty young people, playing hackysack, having class outdoors, proudly showing winter-whitened flesh for the first time this year. (Note to self: Never buy those shorts that have MICHIGAN written across the ass. I’d have room for several more states back there, including NORTH CAROLINA.)

I don’t get Howard Stern. My mind is as filthy as anyone’s but…I just don’t get him. Granted, I’ve never given him much of a chance. Fort Wayne is as far from Stern Country as you can get, but parts of his show used to run on the E! channel, and I think I get the idea. Still don’t get him. But it’s a big country, and there’s lots of stuff I don’t get — “The Passion of the Christ,” Star Wars/Lord of the Rings in general, Tom Clancy novels, books by CEOs. Live and let live, etc.

That said, what’s happening to Howard Stern — the fining by the FCC, which is starting to look like a vendetta — is flat-ass wrong. You can’t argue that the public’s airwaves are being polluted when Stern is so hugely popular with…the public.

Roger Ebert, the hardest-working man in showbiz, gets it about right today, I think.

OK, I just thought of something Stern does that I do think is funny — when he asks Playboy Playmates questions about American history. Sample:

“Who won the Civil War?”

“We did!”

“Who’d we fight?”

“Germany?”

…the weird move to Florida:

Erin Rivera was looking forward to breakfast with Disney characters while at the vacation resort with her husband in June 2000.

“I don’t think it was a mistake,” said Rivera, who has a picture of her embrace with the character. “Everybody who goes through my photo album says, ‘Tigger is groping you.’ “