Had a little academic diversion today — Alan’s entrepreneurship class had a guest speaker, Ari Weinzweig, so I tagged along to the luxe U of M B-school. (Yes, luxe. They could fund some more scholarships if they just sold the very nice print collection — Stella, Longo, Close — that lines the hallways.)

You’re forgiven for not knowing the name. Weinzweig is a founding partner of Zingerman’s, Ann Arbor’s peerless deli/bakery/catering business, generally acknowledged to be on a par with Dean & Deluca and Zabar’s, and hardly anyone else. I was interested in what he’d be like, since Zingerman’s is one of those hippie success stories, a retail business with the sort of structure every employee wants — health insurance, open-door meetings, bottom-up communication and all the rest of it.

Weinzweig told the story briefly, stressing his core beliefs, particularly the importance of having a vision for your life and business. That is to say, not a windy masala of business-speak, but an idea of where you want to be and what you want to be doing in X time period, so you at least know where to steer your vessel. When he opened the floor for questions, I asked him how much customer education he had to do, if for no other reason than to soften people up for items like an eleven-dollar loaf of bread.

He said something really important: That “we sell nothing anyone needs, and a lot of things nobody wants, until they’ve tried it a few times, and then decide they want.” For instance, he said, gesturing to the cream cheese he’d brought, to go with a loaf of the $11 bread (cranberry-walnut, mmmmmm), that cream cheese grew out of the company’s stated vision: to sell high-quality, full-flavor and artisan-quality food. To make the cheese, they first had to research what cream cheese was like before mass food processing. Then they had to figure out how to make it. Then they had to sell it, and people didn’t like it at first, because it didn’t meet their expectations of what cream cheese should be. But because they trusted the business, they sampled it, and after a while they started buying it, and now they won’t eat anything else.

The same rejection-acceptance-devotion curve happened with the bread, and most of the other products they sell.

So, in other words: In order to thrive, they first had to lead. Which is, it seems to me, the secret of most business, especially ones that sell products no one needs. It’s one thing, if you’re selling disposable diapers, to ask people what they want a disposable diaper to be. But if you’re selling expensive, high-quality bread that most people have probably never tasted in their lives, or any product people don’t get up every morning needing to get through the day, you have to show the way.

If you’re suspecting this is not evidence of a newfound interest in entrepreneurship but a warmup for a rant about the newspaper business, you’re half-right. I really don’t have the energy for a rant, but yes, it occurred to me: Publishers should save the money (not all, but some) they spend focus-grouping, market-researching and pulse-taking, trust their guts more and lead the way. Of course, when those publishers and their top editors are, increasingly, carpetbaggers (the last corner-office crew at the Indianapolis Star stayed a little under two years before moving on to greener pastures), they probably need the help.

The cream cheese was delicious, by the way.

I first encounted Lily Burana’s byline in a funny story, and fabulous read, about NYC strip joints — from an inside perspective, because Burana’s a long tall drink of water in a brick shithouse. Or, you know, whatever. She’s a stripper with a keen wit, a sharp eye and a pen. And not afraid to use it.

Later, she was New York magazine’s spy for a story on plastic surgery. They sent her around to all the nip/tuckers who advertise heavily in the city, collecting on the free consultations they all offer. I forget what she asked for, but based on the discreetly draped nude photo of her on the cover she had nothing to ask for. Her body is, how you say, perfect, and her face is nothing to hide, either. Would it surprise you to learn that only one of these doctors had the confidence to tell her so?

“You look like an ‘after’ picture that any one of my patients would kill to resemble,” this brave man of medicine told her. “It would be criminal to touch you with a knife.”

Anyway, she wrote a book a while back, a farewell-to-the-pole valedictory, and I haven’t heard much from her since.

Until this week, when she popped up in Slate as a diarist. Surprise, surprise: She married an Army officer, and she’s living at West Point. Isn’t life strange.

Poor Columbus, another perfectly respectable city with a towering inferiority complex. To understand why, you need only glance at the WashPost story on the highway shootings.

It’s datelined Chicago. Columbus lies nearly at the halfway point between the two cities.

Whew. It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, eh? Sorry about that. My week has been, as they say in the business world, front-loaded. And I have chores galore to finish out the week, leading up to the crown jewel of our Fellowship experience:

Yes, it’s an all-expense-paid trip to Buenos Aires! (Cue wild applause.)

We leave in a week. You are permitted to be envious. The almanac reports it’s summer there, or nearly so.

But there’s still a little time left. Monday night was my last screenwriting class, rescheduled from Wednesday so our teacher could go do a “Lord of the Rings” press trip. We had to turn in our completed second act, and I did so. For you non-screenwriters, the second act is pretty much the whole movie, so it’s about 90 percent done. I still can’t believe I did it — there’s a certain Cletus-like joy in regarding this big thick stack of paper, thinking I wrote that thing! The mop-up will be done in the last 10 to 15 pages. I’m not saying it’s good, but it still feels like a huge accomplishment.

One of the seductive things — not in a good way — about newspaper work (and blogging) is this: At the end of the day, it’s done. You write a few hundred words, file, and go home. There are projects reporters who nurse single stories through months of research, but even those are rarely more than a few thousand words. Daily journalism isn’t terribly taxing work, and you can make a so-so living at it, and after a while the thought of actually writing something longer-form, like a book — 90,000 words or so — can be utterly terrifying. Yes, a book is written a day at a time, and frequently authors aren’t nearly as productive, on a day-to-day basis, as even average reporters, but still: A book. You have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You have to have a plot. You have to have characters. You have to have arcs. You have to pull the reader along. If you have any self-doubt, you can be sunk before you raise your sails.

It’s so much easier to stick to the who-what-where inverted pyramid lead, or a 600-word column, and call it a day at quittin’ time.

So just to finish this thing, not a book but a long-form fictional story — written in 10 weeks, one sweat-soaked page at a time — will be heady stuff. It’ll make the trip to South America that much more celebratory. And the opportunities for celebration look pretty cool. Tango, rare beef, polo, good cheap wine. These are a few of my favorite things. Yowzah.

But I’ll be here for a few more days. In the meantime, if you have any BA tourism tips, send them along.

Every so often, I’ll be talking to someone I work with, or used to work with, and I’ll say I’m living in Ann Arbor, and they say, “Oh, did you know Mark and Keryn are living there now?” Mark and Keryn are ex-Fort Wayne colleagues. He’s a graphics guy, she’s a copy editor.

And I say, “Sure, we had dinner with them a while ago.”

And they’ll say, “I know Mark’s at the News, but what’s Keryn doing these days?” And I’ll say, “Mostly she’s a mom, but she has a part-time job.”

“At the paper?”

“Why, no. She’s Twist ‘n’ Shout. She’s a clown.”

“Get outta here.”

Well, you get outta here. I have evidence.

I’ve read some version of this argument against a Defense of Marriage constitutional amendment too many times to count, but Dahlia Lithwick makes it so well:

Do you want to know what’s destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we’d get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: “Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? Room�honey what room is this�oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep.”

I know every time I visit Easton Town Center I say something along the lines of, “The guy who thought this place up is a damn genius,” but I’m going to say it again.

The gist: Easton Town Center is a faux-town, an open-air mall, stores laid out on a grid of narrow streets, with squares and fountains and sidewalks just narrow enough to be crowded, just wide enough to be passable. It sounds like a concept that wouldn’t work north of North Carolina, but friends, it works like gangbusters. It’s an upmarket Stepford Bedford Falls, like your memories — it’s all the good things you remember (or think you remember) about shopping in your hometown, but none of the bad stuff. No bums. No shuttered storefronts (not yet, anyway). No dusty inventory at old man Gower’s drugstore, just Pottery Barn giving way to Smith & Hawken giving way to Cosi giving way to Nordstrom’s giving way to the Apple store.

I always chuckle when I go there, because Fort Wayne has a similar mall, smaller, now two years old. The metro editor at the time swore this was an utterly crackbrain idea that would never, ever fly. “It’s too cold in winter,” she said. “Sure it’s full now — it’s August. Wait until Christmas.”

It was packed at Christmas. Wait until January. It was packed in January. Etc., etc. Soon she was insisting it would soon be a “ghost town,” just mark my words. Well. It’s not.

People don’t mind going into nippy temperatures between stores. They like seeing the sky, feeling the Christmas in the air. They like the atmosphere. Atmosphere sells, more so than comfort.

We went on Saturday. Standing on the corner of Spend Too Much and Charge Your Limit (the streets have names, but I’m blanking on them now), waiting to cross from in front of the jam-packed California Pizza Kitchen over to Williams Sonoma, standing shoulder to shoulder with my fellow Buckeyes, it occurred to me I’ve seen this scene before — in urban downtowns, before the malls sucked all the people away. I wasn’t in a downtown; I was in a replica downtown. But it still felt festive and merry. Entirely false, but in a good way.

Hey there. We spent the weekend on the road, which explains the unfortunate, er, spareness of the joint these days. Sorry about that. I thought I’d have time to update, but I indulged myself in turkey, retailing and Bugdom. Mostly at my sister’s house, in Columbus.

Columbus is having a run of bad luck of late. If you watch CNN, you must know there’s been quote an unexplained rash of highway shootings on the city’s outerbelt unquote. Quote officials are unwilling to call the shootings the work of a sniper but worried residents are still traveling that stretch of I-270 with increased awareness of the potential dangers unquote.

See how well I can talk that journalese shit? Just made that stuff up. Just now.

Anyway, the not-sniper has hit perhaps as many as 11 cars in the area, although ballistics link only two cases yet. In one, a 62-year-old woman was killed. But police don’t know too much more than that (that they’re telling). It’s early in the investigation, they don’t want to start a panic, etc.

All this leads to an involuntary shudder in those of us who’ve worked for new-style flood-the-zone editors. I’m imagining the staff meeting in which editors sit around and brainstorm half a dozen or more story ideas. These stories may or may not match the facts at hand, but any mention of this will be considered the mark of a disloyal worker not ready for management. Reporters will be sent out to chase them down, while graphic artists stay back in the newsroom to come up with an appropriately terrifying map/headline package: CITY SHOT BY FEAR, maybe, or “NOT A SNIPER” — YET. At the end of it all will be an impressively wrapped fact sausage, along with some heavy seasoning — in-depth coverage of the victim’s funeral “‘She was a saint,’ said the victim’s best friend.”), a slice-of-life piece on motorists who drive through the FEAR ZONE or something.

Two reporters will call in sick the next day. One will consider a career change to telemarketing. Another will drink late into the night and stare at the wall, wondering how it all went so horribly wrong.

So it was nice, after watching TV reporters wave press releases in live standups, to see the Big D, the Columbus Dispatch, the city’s non-flashy daily, do a mere two logical stories for Saturday, the news update and a sidebar on motorists’ avoidance on the area.

“Just wait until Sunday,” Alan said, grimly.

On Sunday, the lead story? EMERALD ASH BORER CONFIRMED IN CITY TREES. The shootings were played down, stripped down the side of Page One. The funeral picture was inside, shot from a discreet distance, and the news of same mentioned in two paragraphs.

Dare I say? I was impressed. Sometimes the old-fashioned way — let the story grow from the ground up, rather than the top down — works just fine.

Well, that was interesting. Today is the last day of classes before the holiday, and, if you recall your college days with any honesty at all, you know that means classes are half-empty for much of the week.

Some teachers cope by calling a holiday. My Russian teacher decided to give a lesson not in the curriculum, but worth coming to class for on a day when most people were cutting.

Kate was out of school and I only had the one class, so I took her along with me — what the heck, she’s a good kid and there’d be plenty of seats.

We arrive. We take our seats. And the teacher says, “You’ll probably not want to stay for this. We’re doing obscenities and vulgarities today. The very worst words.”

I left with the handout. He’s right. But I’m sorry I missed the class anyway.

Here’s my favorite: Na huya popu garmon? (P.S. That’s a terrible transliteration.) Translates to, “It’s irrelevant” or “Beside the point?” Literally: What the dick does the Pope need an accordion for?

I’d say I spent all day slaving over a hot stove, but I really spent all day slaving over a warm cutting board. If you had to sum up the difference between American cuisine and that of the rest of the world in a sentence, it would be this: We throw a hunk of meat on the table, add two vegetables and a loaf of bread and call it a meal, but in the rest of the world, you add a bunch of cilantro, some finely chopped garlic, pine nuts, cucumbers and an exotic fruit you have to go to three grocery stores to find (pummelo, in this case — it’s the grandfather of the grapefruit!).

The upside: It’s real damn good.

The menu: The Soup Nazi’s Mulligatawny, chicken-pummelo salad, Jerusalem artichoke salad, meatball kebab with tahini and, for dessert, a lovely bread pudding. We had enough to feed the Israeli army (at least the ones who don’t stay kosher).

It was a lovely dinner, and a lovely birthday.

We also had two presentations, and while we’re not supposed to publicly discuss what we talk about there, I don’t think anyone would mind if I linked the website of ffF Fatih, touting his book, new this fall. No English translation yet. (He tells me the title is a Turkish idiom that translates roughly to “I’ll pay two pence more, but I want it in red,” which is sort of a metaphor for bargaining — I’ll give you a little more, you give me a little more.) It’s a best-seller in Turkey; next time your travels take you to Istanbul, pick up a copy.

And now, to toddle my bulging stomach and fat-rich blood off to bed. Thanks for all the e-cards!