You’ll notice I don’t say much — anything, really — about the war here. Many reasons for this. The smoke curling out of my ears stinks up the room, for one. Unwillingness to become a so-called warblogger, which requires flights of self-deception I don’t really feel up to at the moment (or at any moment, I devoutly hope).

But I saw this story in my hometown’s other paper yesterday, and, well.

Guy gets called up as a reservist. Like lots of soldiers from this unit in Fort Wayne, he doesn’t go to Iraq, but instead to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to guard prisoners there. And he suffered an injury:

McElroy will never know whether his problem was the result of a fighting prisoner or a simple scratch he got on his leg somewhere else. But sometime last summer the scar from an old injury on his right leg cracked open. He developed an infection.

It was a staph infection. But wait, it gets better:

Whatever the cause, doctors there said they couldn’t treat it. He had to get out of Guantanamo Bay to a regular Army hospital. That was in mid-July.

Within 24 hours of arriving in Fort Wayne, he had seen a doctor and had his first surgery to clean up the staph infection, which by now had entered his bone. He had two more operations to try to control the infection, but it was too late. On Dec. 23, McElroy lost his leg.

Yep. Lost his leg, to an untreated infection. Not in a war zone. Not from a land mine or homemade explosive. From a goddamn infection, which was allowed to fester and get worse because of goddamn stupid military turf battles. Guy goes into the reserve, serves thousands of miles away from the fighting and comes back without a leg, without even seeing the war zone. From a goddamn untreated infection in a military that apparently is more interested in protecting the patient-base integrity of its various hospitals than in helping one poor soldier keep his leg.

There are so many things about this story that make me want to smash crockery — the flat affect of the storyteller, a columnist who aims more frownie faces at Mike Rowe than at evil idiots in the military and administration who cost a good man his leg; at the column’s conclusion, which identifies the problem as apathetic Americans who “don’t care enough” about the maimed, as opposed to the glorious dead; even at the soldier’s own lack of righteous anger, although I suspect that will come in time.

But mostly I just want to go to bed with a headache and rekindle my all-but-dead belief in God, so I can imagine an afterlife in which a furious angel clubs George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Condie Rice and everyone else with the remains of this guy’s leg for all eternity, screaming “Weapons of (thump!) mass (thump!) destruction?! (thump!)

So I may have missed the singalong “Sound of Music” in town at Christmas, but I had a second chance of sorts — the “Singalong Wizard of Oz” came to the Michigan Theater this afternoon. The tickets were outrageous ($20 for adults, a chest-clutching $15 for kids), but it was a benefit for the city’s summer festival, so.

But it didn’t disappoint. The digitally restored print was almost too vivid — did the witch’s guards (the o-ee-o guys) always have green faces? — and I’m happy to say it passed my test for a movie I’ve seen over and over, i.e., it revealed new details about itself. I lost myself in the details of the Munchkin costumes, in Judy Garland’s charming impersonation of a young girl, in Bert Lahr’s cowardly lion. I never noticed how physical that performance was, how Lahr’s vaudeville grace comes through in every cower and tremble.

The singalong part was fun, too. Many Friends of Dorothy in the audience, two directly behind us. “Sing your song, Dorothy,” one caroled as Ms. Gale warmed up for her big number. They knew all the big lines, too. (My own favorite: “What a world, what a world.”) There was a costume contest, of course. The big winner wore a scarecrow outfit with a truly creepy-looking flying monkey sewed to his back.

But the best moment, for me anyway, came when Miss Gulch came riding onto the screen on her bicycle, and my very own daughter added her voice to the chorus of boos: “You stink!”

Maybe it’s because I’ve been walking down the leafy green pathways of Athens County’s own Memory Lane (see below), but I thought I’d point out Gene Weingarten’s column this week, in which he tries to track down the origin of the phrase “a condom stuffed with walnuts,” as used to describe the new California governor’s appearance.

So, you’re thinking, the connection? Oh, I dunno, I was just remembering this girl at OU, who was described as looking like “a sack of basketballs,” a phrase that precisely summed up her combination of ripeness and pudge, the same way “a condom stuffed with walnuts” captures Gov. Schwarzenegger’s musculature.

Mostly I’m just amused at how some people have a gift for this sort of thing:

Michigan State plant pathology professor Dennis Fulbright, for example, said that you would more closely approximate the topology of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique if you crammed a condom with “buart nuts.” A buart nut, Fulbright explained, is a cross between a butternut and a heart nut, almost the size of an apple, and very, very Schwarzenegger-like in its surface appearance. “It looks like a nut on testosterone,” he said.

Sold. Arnold resembles “a pig bladder filled with wet sawdust.”

Whatever.

I hope it doesn’t come as a shock to anyone that I’ve long taken an interest in Joe Eszterhas’ career. The churner-outer of some of Hollywood’s shlockiest shlock shares an alma mater with me, and one of the most wonderful days I had at Ohio University was in my Mass Media and the Law class, senior year, when we studied the case that put Joe Eszterhas — yes, the writer of “Showgirls” — into journalism-law history (and out of the OU j-school’s Distinguished Alumni honor roll).

Eszterhas doesn’t talk about this case. After he became a success, he always said his career at the Cleveland Plain Dealer foundered on the fight he had with his editors there, over their refusal to publish photos of a then-unknown Vietnam atrocity at a village called My Lai. Never a word about Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing, which led to a landmark ruling that established invasion of privacy as a cause of action in defamation cases. (I think; it’s been a while.) What I most recall was the professor’s deadpan delivery of certain purpley portions of Eszterhas’ narrative, contrasted with the testimony at trial, all of which added up to: He made an awful lot of it up.

“Eszterhas has recently launched a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter,” the professor said. “He seems well-suited to fiction.”

So anyway, it’s always been my pleasure to take note of where Joe is at any given moment, and sometimes these updates are almost too coincidental, like the time, summer before last, when I took Kate to Cedar Point, and the woman at the next table in McDonald’s discarded her copy of the Plain Dealer features section — the one with the story about Joe’s relocation to Chagrin Falls and his change of heart about tobacco products. He confessed that he always included cigarette smoking in his movies as a big f-u to the forces of political correctness, and now he was real sorry, and he was going to make up for it by…I dunno. One hopes he’d make a good movie that featured no smoking, but you can’t have everything.

In any event, now he’s published a memoir — with the unsubtle title “Hollywood Animal” — and the New York Observer has a pretty fair interview with the guy this week:

In the 80’s and much of the 90’s, Mr. Eszterhas was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film’s director, who would usually find himself in a back-alley brawl with Mr. Eszterhas over their unshared vision. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren’t. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes, plenty of on-the-job hanky-panky and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms. “You like to play games, don’t you?” was a line that Mr. Eszterhas wrang out of his Olivetti manual more than once. Plots usually twisted around people who were not what they appeared to be.

That’s OU’s bad boy in a nutshell, isn’t it?

A good read that doesn’t disappoint. Enjoy.

“One-hundred-thirteen years of editorial freedom,” states the masthead on The Michigan Daily. But only about five minutes of simple grammar instruction, to judge from this column that ran in the student newspaper yesterday:

A disclaimer for readers: This column may offend some people, but due to popular demand and much discussion (and maybe even some coaxing), it has been brought to my attention that this column really needs to be written.

Many a Sunday morning I have risen from my bedroom, joined my housemates at our table and drank three cups of coffee, all the while discussing an issue that plagues this campus: The Michigan Hookup. Also known as man�s best friend, giving head, going down and other terminology that I shall never put into print, I am talking about the blow job.

I make it a policy not to jeer at student journalism, having produced too much jeer-worthy material myself. So I’ll leave the jeering to you.

OK, this is the second time this has happened:

I wrote a long entry, wandered off to check a link or three, and lost the whole goddamn thing.

Hence: No long entry today.

No long entry until Sunday.

It was mostly whining about the weather anyway.

Goddamnit.

Snow day yesterday. Snow day TODAY. It’s like: And here’s your second hot-fudge sundae, ma’am. I had enough cabin fever that I just went out to re-shovel the sidewalk.

Now, I’ve gone on at tiresome length here before about how this is actually sort of a favorite chore for me, because, unlike writing or cleaning or child-rearing, it’s a job that gets done and — at least until the next snowfall — stays done. Because I like shoveling, I do it often. Because I do it often, I never have all that much to clear at one time. Because the labor is usually light and exercise is the best aid to thinking invented, I get a little wool-gathering done.

Today I contemplated libertarianism. Ann Arbor has a snow-clearing ordinance that is, I’m told, rigidly enforced. Fort Wayne has a snow-clearing ordinance that is never enforced. Guess which city has more pleasant winter walking conditions? Is man perfectable? I don’t think so. Hence, laws that dictate courtesy to your dog-walking neighbors. On the other hand, there’s talk of now requiring dog-walkers to carry “appropriate equipment” for poop removal, under penalty of law. As one who always does so, I do not fear this proposed ordinance. But I’ve never checked “The Turner Diaries” or “Fun Things to do With Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil” out of the library, either, and yet I fear the Patriot Act.

Just random thoughts while snow-shoveling. My neighbor came out and took a photograph of the piles left by the plow. As though anticipating I’d be wondering about this behavior, she came over to explain: See, she had devoted great time and effort last night to selective shoveling, making sure the snow pushed up by the plow remained in the street, and this morning the city had send a backhoe around to selectively dig out a few properties left dammed behind the plow-wash (if that isn’s a word, it should be), and clear the parts of the road the plow couldn’t reach. Said backhoe had picked up her carefully arranged piles and dumped them right on her park strip!

I admitted to being mystified by the offense here. She explained further that now the road salt in the snow would kill her grass.

“I gotta tell you,” I said. “I’ve never in my life seen a lawn that could be killed by winter,” thinking of the winter when the city of Fort Wayne failed to pick up the last pile of fall leaves from our park strip for weeks and weeks, and then it got snowed on and salted and otherwise abused, and then the idiot macho redneck across the street parked his idiot macho pickup truck with the right-side wheels over the curb on it, and yet — in the spring, tender green shoots.

I didn’t tell her all of this. But I should have, because she remained unsatisfied, and hmpfed back into her house, right past the Howard Dean sign in the front yard.

I went back to shoveling. I reflected that my idiot macho neighbor is smack in the target market for truck balls.

And now it’s 10:20 a.m., the sidewalk and drive are clear, I’ve gotten my cardio in for the day, along with my daily allotment of idle thought. Think I’ll take a shower.

…this must be Screenwriting. The rewrite class meets in the same fashion as the write class, a three-hour night deal, thankfully not on KWF seminar nights.

The big revelation, when you study screenwriting, is how formulaic it is — three-act structure, turning points here here and here — and yet there’s always room to make it fresh. It’s like making a dress. You need a hole to stick your head through, two more for your arms and it has to be open at the bottom, but beyond that, it’s up to you. Make a simple black sheath, make a ball gown, make some old thing out of potato sacks (this is the category my own work falls into). They’re all dresses, but no one confuses one with another.

Sometimes I think I have no actual talent as a writer, only a highly developed ability to imitate others. So I enjoy this stuff, because all you have to do is follow the well-paved path: This happens, then something else happens, then something else happens and you wind it all up.

Remind me of this in another couple months, when I’m sweating blood over this damn thing.

Bad weather has settled in like a curse, although frankly, I don’t mind it. I’m out walking around every day and I don’t have to go to work — if winter went on for six months like this, I wouldn’t mind, as long as I didn’t have to go back to work until spring. But tonight we’re expecting an ice storm followed by a snowstorm, and the strong possibility of a snow day tomorrow, at least for Kate. We haven’t had a snow day yet, a miracle by Fort Wayne standards, when six flakes falling from the sky is cause for at least a two-hour delay. Safety, you know. Liability. And so on.

Speaking of liability and screenplays, Alan had a good idea for one the other day, after reading a down-low paragraph is a story about a plane crash in Lake Erie. The aircraft came down shortly after takeoff from Pelee Island (note that I didn’t say “plunged into the icy waters of Lake Erie,” perhaps proof that the journalese is falling from my prose style), one of the lake’s islands that supports a small year-round community.

Anyway, the paragraph quoted a local woman who heard the crash and immediately went into hysterics. I think this was on a Saturday, but she thought it was Sunday, when, according to island ritual, all the high-school students on the island fly to the mainland for a week of schooling. She thought, mistakenly, that in one crash the island had lost all its teen-agers.

“Now that would be a movie,” Alan said.

“Someone already made it. ‘The Sweet Hereafter,'” I informed him. I bet he’ll be happy when I give up my delusions of Hollywood.

Ice coming down! Followed by snow! Don’t fly anywhere! See you tomorrow!

OK, I got enough crapola from the Teeming Millions about falling down on the blog that I’m going to try — try, people — to reinstate the Big Long Daily Entry. I can’t promise 5 times a week, but I will do what I can. I need to keep a journal.

The problem is, some of the most interesting stuff that happens in the course of my day happens at Wallace House, where everything said is off the record. (Actually, officially it “never happened.”) This is to encourage honesty, of course, and what does that say about our business, I ask you? That when people are quoted in the news media, they’re not being honest? You draw your own conclusions.

I will say this: The twice-weekly seminars we’ve had, particularly recently, have been eye-opening in every good sense of the phrase. Thursday’s speaker talked about the iconography and etymology of judicial language, a subject that, on paper, could induce sleep in a meth abuser. And yet, we laughed with him for a full hour, had another 30 minutes of lively questioning and went home hungry for more. I’ve spent twice that long in comedy clubs and not had such a good time.

An e-mail acquaintance is doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard this year, and put me on her e-mail list to receive regular long, chatty updates on how things are going. I got one long, chatty update in September. The next one arrived around Christmas. She apologized, saying she’s been, uh, too stupefied: At the end of the day my mind is scattershot from the
ideas I’ve listened to or the classes I’ve sat through, she wrote, and I know exactly what she means. I feel more than scattershot, just…punchdrunk, maybe. Dull-witted. In any event, mostly what I want to do is sit and think, not sit and write.

Dr. Frank came for a mid-week visit the one before last, and left in a similar state of mental exhilaration/stupefaction. Regular readers might recall that he’s now unemployed, so he’s quote evaluating his options unquote. I think, after the week, that his first option is, “Figure out how to become a journalism fellow.” He was a KWF guest for one seminar and two dinner parties, and just the random small talk made him think he’d died and sped heavenward. “More oxygen in that room than any I’ve been in in a long time,” was his assessment.

Now, Dr. Frank is a smart person, and his joy at finding such bright company only reminds me of how dull regular life will seem after this gravy train pulls into the station. One former Fellow pulled me aside after a seminar and said, “Start the Prozac four weeks before graduation. It takes a while to kick in.”

Well, there’s a cheery thought. He also described the Fellowship in the stock line, “Best year of my life.” He follows his with, “Followed by the worst nine months of my life.” Hmm.

OK, then. Another weekend, another six inches of snow. Kate and Alan went sledding while I took care of the grocery accumulation for the week. I bought: Meat. Meeeeaaat. Yes, it’s Atkins, or at least Low Carb Days, around our little household these days. I hate it. I can’t do Atkins pure; it makes me hallucinate about potatoes. I can make a stab at Atkins modified, in which I try to keep my carbs around 30 grams a day or so (a pittance, really), and see what happens. Mostly what happens is, I feel really, really crabby. Then I hallucinate about potatoes.

Oh, well. For now my fat is serving to keep me nice and warm. It hasn’t been above 20 degrees in days, so it’s good for something.

Now, friends, I must go write “coverage.” Coverage, for the uninitiated, is a two- or three-page summary of a screenplay and the reader’s assessment of its relative qualities. It’s hard to forget that “cover” is also the verb horse breeders use to describe what the stallion does to the mare. I’m trying to be gentle, as I will be covered, too, and I’m hoping that what goes around comes around.

Tomorrow, then.

…says it all, doesn’t it? Eminem’s mom carjacked — on 8 Mile.

The morning paper was a harvest o’ amusements today. Elsewhere was this call for auditions for “Menopause the Musical.”

Women, age 38 and older who wear a size 10 or more, should prepare a 1-minute comic monologue and sing a song from the 1960s. Rehearsals will be Feb. 9-29 in Orlando, Fla. The musical is a celebration of women who are on the brink of, in the midst of, or have survived The Big M.

It must be for real. I mean, they have a website.