I haven’t been watching much TV news in the last few years, but I couldn’t help but see the video of that poor little girl in Florida being led away by Mr. Creepy. I wondered why she went so willingly, then reminded myself this is no mystery. We raise children, and especially girls, to be obedient to adults. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this is good. Sometimes, it isn’t.

Today, riding home on the bus, a staggering drunk boarded at a park-and-ride lot. Everyone else got off, making us the only two riders. He weaved back to his seat, sat and said “Shit! I need a transfer.” He got back up and weaved back to the driver, shoving a palm in her face. I noticed his coat was split all the way up the back seam, exposing the lining. Also, he was so redolent of his intoxicant of choice I felt it at the back of my throat. He weaved back, only this time he plopped down next to me. “Lady,” he started to say, warming up for a panhandle.

“NO!” I barked, with about 2,000 percent more vehemence than I felt. “You are NOT sitting here.” The driver actually took her foot off the accelerator; was she going to have a Situation? I waved her an all-clear in the mirror and she drove on. The drunk, looking stunned, went back to his original seat and put his head in his hands.

This is the second time this has happened to me in recent years. The last time, a drunk on a bicycle acted squirrelly on a bike path, then raced ahead about 100 yards and stopped, seemingly to wait for me. As we came abreast, I pointed a finger at him and snarled, “If you TOUCH me, I will HURT you.” He, too, looked as if I’d lashed him with a whip. When we passed again, he actually left the path and rode his bike up against a line of trees, averting his eyes as though I was the alpha bitch and he, just a cowering cur.

Where did this Inner Xena come from? When I was 23, a man sat down next to me on a bus and practically jerked himself off, and I sat there like a lox. When I was a teen-ager, creepy guys shouted things from cars all the time, and I put my head down and walked on by.

A lot is different now. The bloom is long-gone from my rose; this just doesn’t happen very often. And I know that while assertiveness is the recommended response to unwelcome attention, I don’t know that finger-waving, driver-startling assertiveness is the right idea — I worry that someday this anger is going to be met by more of it. Either that, or I’ll start resembling the crazy old ladies with the bulging tote bags whose eye everyone else avoids on these very same buses.

But mostly I wonder: How can I teach Kate to take care of herself like this? How can I teach her to recognize dangerous aggression, separate it from garden-variety assertiveness and react instinctively to it, without turning her into a fear-ridden little mouse who walks everywhere with her keys sticking out from her clenched fist? I want to let her walk home alone from a friend’s house at 11 without fearing she can be abducted by a stranger who simply takes her by the arm and walks off with her.

Gavin de Becker wrote an excellent book on this very subject, which I read back when Kate was a wriggling infant. Now that she’s out in the world, I think I need to read it again.

One day last month I missed the bus home by about 30 seconds on a bitterly cold day. I was hungry and freezing and the next bus wouldn’t come for another half hour. Poor, poor pitiful me.

I went across the street to the public library. It’s nothing like the fabulous Allen County facility, but they try to keep up with new fiction. They have a “browsing” collection, which seems to consist of one copy of sought-after new releases, with the rest put in the reserve queue. I walked right up to the browsing shelf, and there it was: A gleaming, virginal copy of Elmore Leonard’s new one, “Mr. Paradise,” only days after it arrived at Borders. Can a day turn lucky on the fortunate acquisition of a mystery novel? When it’s Elmore Leonard? Yes.

So I snatched it up, and it did not disappoint. I’ve kept it the whole term of the lending period, if only to reread his great dialogue scenes, hoping some of the magic will rub off on my own misbegotten efforts. Of course, I have selected some favorites; his best work is literary jazz.

Then yesterday I heard the master Himself on NPR, and he read a passage. My favorite one!

I know what the teeming dozens have been missing with the dearth of long Sunday-night entries! The dinner report!

Well, I’m glad you asked. Alan’s been hankering for red beans and rice lately, New Orleans-style. To satisfy this, I bought a single can of kidney beans on my last swing through Kroger. Contemplating this wan item at 4:30, it just didn’t seem like it would fill the bill. But! I had a package of chicken thighs, and some crushed red pepper, and the usual this, that and the other thing of a well-stocked kitchen. So I…

…browned the thighs and set them aside. Into the pan went a handful each of chopped onion, carrot and lettuce, a little thyme, salt, pepper and the aforementioned crushed red. When that softened up, I threw the thighs back in the pan and added the kidney beans, a can of diced tomatoes in their juice, a lot more crushed red pepper and enough chicken broth to mostly cover it. Let it simmer for about a half hour, during which I cooked me up a cup or two of white rice. In that time, the chicken stuff thickened a bit and got all spicy-flavory. Ladled it over the white rice, and served it with knife, fork and spoon. I’m calling it Sorta Cajun Chicken Stew But Not.

Yes, it was delicious. I’m firmly committed to chicken thighs now, rather than the insipid, omnipresent breast. Thighs are where the flava is.

I’m talking about dinner to avoid talking about all the work I didn’t get done this weekend, although the bathroom is clean, the rest of the house is relatively so and I learned the Turkish word for “hat” (shapka — no promises on the spelling). The latest came at a birthday party for one of the Fellow children, a Turkish boy a year younger than Kate who is already multilingual, and after only six weeks in the U.S., is rapidly losing the British accent he arrived with. The other kids at the party were Italian and Argentine, with Kate the only Yank, and guess what the extent of her foreign-language vocabulary is? Yes, uno through diez en Espanol. The scorching shame! Does this ever end, I beseech you, fellow parents?

No, I didn’t think so. Note to self: Start Kate in foreign language classes, and soon.

On the other hand, even excellent facility in a tongue other than your own doesn’t guarantee success. “Who’s ready for sausages?” our Turkish host asked the assembled children, and was faced with expressions ranging from blank stares to open revulsion.

“Who wants a hot dog?” Alan asked a beat later, and everyone under the age of 10 responded enthusiastically. Such a subtle difference, and yet it made all the difference.

Who wants leftover Sorta Cajun Chicken Stew But Not? Yeah, I thought so.

One advantage of this year away from work has been the luxury to read newspapers the way regular people read newspapers. Freed from the backstory on things like design, layout, headline and the like, I find it thrilling to open a newspaper — or not open it, in the case of the AA News, which I should really save for 2 a.m. fits of insomnia, since it resembles a Soviet experiment in non-pharmaceutical sleep aids — and judge it as harshly as any other reader out there.

Anyway, today I click onto the Journal Gazette home page. Headline on the lead story: 8 injured so far this year; aficionados stress safety tips and training. The lead: He didn’t see the pier. And! Just like that! I know I don’t have to read another word. The pamphlet-type nature of the story, the faux-dramatic lead, and I can tell you everything that will follow:

This is a story about snowmobiling. “Pier” is northeast Indiana lake-speak for docks, and the lakes are well-known playgrounds for high-octane buttheads who love to overrun their headlights, smash through soft ice and otherwise crack themselves up. While I have no particular objection to snowmobiles, I have precisely zero interest in feeling sorry for them over my Sunday coffee.

Judge for yourself. Did I get it wrong?

I gotta tell you, whenever your down-at-the-heels hometown makes Page One of the Wall Street Journal, it’s news. On the other hand, this piece is a fanciful pile o’ crap, yet another effort to smell a trend in the hinterlands and deliver the news to a readership who wouldn’t go there on a bet.

That said, I met the reporter years ago at the Miss America pageant, and he was swell then and surely still swell today. We all have to write crap stories sometimes.

In other news at this hour, I think Neil Steinberg, a conservative columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, sums up the evolving attitudes toward gays and gay marriage pretty neatly.

So what is Richard Hatch’s strategy in this “Survivor,” anyway? Nudity as a psychological tool of domination? Gotta love that, even while you wonder how the hell this guy can go clamber in and out of a wooden rowboat in salt water with his boys flopping around like that.

Oh, well.

Anything to take the old mind off the weekend’s chore, stretching ahead like fifty miles of potholes: Gotta write a new step outline for the ol’ screenplay. It’s the most vital step, and the biggest pain in the ass — you have to write down what happens in the 80 scenes or so in your movie, just a line or two, but oh how it hurts. It’s the armature of your little sculpture, without which everything collapses into a damp heap.

And so you sit down. Oh, this will be easy. You gallop through 20 scenes. You realize this won’t make a movie. So you start making stuff up: “Bob walks down the street.” “Bob sits and thinks.” And so on. This is your first draft. On my second, I expect I’ll whip through, oh, 35 good scenes, and then have to pull only 40 or so out of my butt.

Art hurts!

Just kidding.

Kind of a quiet day today. Class, writing workshop, seminar on the intractable Israel/Palestine situation. I wish I could tell you I left feeling hopeful, but I didn’t.

So, then. Maybe a few bright spots on the web out there? Sure, there are a few:

Beato rounds up the shocked, shocked Super Bowl commentary.

Low Culture catches Rummy doing the way-oh, way-oh thing.

Hey! My newspaper makes Romenesko!

It’s amazing how many house fires start this way. “Treated for smoke inhalation,” huh. Is this, like, meta, or just a mirror looking into a mirror?

Go have fun.

If it’s Wednesday, it’s time for the Fellows’ double feature, i.e. the Bible in English, followed by Post-Civil War U.S. History, two big lectures held in the same classroom, by teachers of polar-opposite teaching styles. It’s a Fellows’ double feature because the attendees include me, two other Fellows and a Fellow spouse, who’s also a journalist and, as far as I’m concerned, a Fellow ex officio. Whatever. It’s a nice two-hour block three times a week, after which we sometimes all go out to lunch.

Anyway, I’m hopeful that the Bible class will get out of Genesis by the end of the term, and hey! We flew today! After spending a month on Genesis 1-4, we zipped ahead, like, five chapters. Noah is now behind us. Job awaits.

But the revelation today was an announcement that preceded history, taught by a whip-smart, no-nonsense professor who is as down-to-earth as the preceding hour’s is all over the place. He began by saying he was presently coping with a dozen grade appeals from the previous term, most or all from people who were making this argument: My paper was fine, but the teacher wants to knock down my grade because it’s badly written. And this is wrong.

“You cannot separate history from writing,” he said, explaining that he’d instructed the grad-student instructors to judge a paper’s prose style “brutally.”

“It’s like separating chemistry from math,” he went on. “You cannot appeal a grade by saying, ‘I understand the chemistry, it’s just that the math gave me problems. Same with history. If you can’t write, you have been done a disservice by your previous teachers. But it’s not my job to help you learn to write.”

I’ve heard a version of this speech several times now, and I wonder what it says. The U of M is an elite university, and these are not stupid kids, I can tell you that; the one bad piece of advice my advisor gave me was to avoid undergrad classes — I’ve enjoyed learning with 19-year-olds as much or more as with grad students. But what the history professor said is true. Sloppiness in written expression is simply a given with too many of these students.

One of my screenwriting study-group classmates last term sent me 40 pages to read, without having even run the spell-check program, which might have alerted him that his favorite word in dialogue — among many others — was misspelled throughout. I don’t know about you, but reading, “Fuck off, deuchebag!” doesn’t incline me toward spending even five minutes preparing a careful criticism of same.

Someone tell the parents of the world, and all the primary-school teachers, and all the high-school teachers, and all the students, too: Writing matters. It matters more the older you get, so start teaching basics early.

Avoid this, in other words:

This doesn’t really have anything to do with the Super Bowl halftime show, except in the sense that it does, although it’s about the non-nippled part of the show. That is, the lip-synching.

“What lip-synching?” is the proper response from the music industry, the wrong thing to say to a person who just downloaded the “clean” version of “Hot in Herre” the night before the game, and then heard it reproduced, note for note, smudgy edit for smudgy edit, during the halftime show.

Anyway, the NYT (you’ll have to be registered to click that link through) gives us a pretty good overview of the situation, with this interesting passage:

Consider the Super Bowl halftime show. Last year, outraged viewers accused Shania Twain of lip-synching her performance (she sang; the instrumentals were canned). But these purists missed a far more intriguing development. According to Paul Liszewski, the project manager for the broadcast’s audio operations, one performer’s vocals � Mr. Liszewski wouldn’t say whose � were electronically altered, in real time, to correct off-key notes just as they were coming out of the singer’s mouth.

You don’t say!

This always happens to me: I left the room 30 seconds before Janet Jackson flashed her boob.

Fortunately, America has shocked, shocked Matt Drudge to fill us in, including a handy enlargement of the offending breast, blown up enough to reveal that was no pasty she was wearing, but ewwwww a nipple piercing.

Some thoughts:

1) I went to high school with Justin Timberlake’s uncle. America, I had no idea this would happen, and I’d have stopped it if I did.

2) I think “wardrobe malfunction” is a hilarious phrase in and of itself, and I intend to use it as often as possible in the future.

3) When it comes to the Super Bowl’s rather titanic cognitive dissonance, I still think Jon Carroll said it best a year ago. (I know I’m always linking to Jon Carroll, and I should stop. But he is a genius, so I don’t.)

4) I liked the donkey-who-wanted-to-be-a-Clydesdale ad best. The dog that bit the other guy’s crotch was a border terrier, in case you’re wondering, an up-and-coming breed for you scruffy-terrier fans.

5) My history prof, today: “This class has now hosted two Super Bowl MVPs.”

That is all. Wardrobe malfunction.

UPDATE: I think Sally Jenkins says it best, in the WashPost:

The blame game has begun. CBS, MTV and a slew of spokespeople are pointing fingers at each other over Justin Timberlake’s ripping away of Janet Jackson’s bodice on national TV to reveal that she has, in fact, a breast. (Lord knows what might have happened if the world discovered she has two of them.) No doubt most of the fingers will be aimed at Timberlake and Jackson for further eroding our society. It’s that dangerous rap music that makes kids behave this way, right? But I’d rather point my own finger directly at the league. If the Super Bowl halftime show was offensive and unsuitable for family viewing, I blame Paul Tagliabue and his fellow marketing executives at the NFL. It was their show, start to finish.

For years NFL marketers have preyed on the sensibilities of the nation to sell their sponsors’ products. They have appropriated sex, patriotism, war and even the tragedy of Sept. 11 as commercial vehicles, and used them all to peddle more Coors and cars. You can always count on the NFL, during any legitimate national outpouring of sincerity, to seize on the topic of the day and bend it as a selling tool, along with breasty cheerleaders, Britney Spears and faux-militarism, in search of higher ratings and ad revenues. A 30-second Super Bowl spot now costs $2.3 million. So for the league to be suddenly shocked and indignant at the behavior of a bunch of MTV entertainers it hired in partnership with CBS to boost its cool points and halftime ratings is utterly disingenuous, and craven. Exactly what did the league expect when it rented the MTV culture?

Bonus points for calling Ms. Janet’s orbs “weapons of mass distraction.”

I’ve seen Jennifer Weiner’s explanation of the writing life before, but John Scalzi’s is ever so much more down-to-earth. Both are true. Sorry about that, aspiring writers.