I guess I should save this entry for Monday, Nov. 10, but the way my brain is working lately it’s best to blog when I think of it. Why November 10? Strike up the ghostly band, Mr. Lightfoot:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitchegumee… Yes, thanks to this Detroit Metro Times piece, we’re reminded that the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is upon us.

Like the author, I take a guilty pleasure in Gordon Lightfoot’s mournful ballad, which plucks every predictable string, but still manages to do it well. Maybe you have to love the Great Lakes, but I always get a little chill over the line, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” You can imagine all those men, on that huge ship, in a freezing hurricane, waves big as houses, the middle of the night, knowing they’re probably not going to make it, waiting for the end.

I have friends who live up there, and say the storm that night was beyond anything they’d seen before or since, with six-foot breakers in sheltered channels you could safely cross in a canoe on any other night. You can imagine what it was like out on the big lake. Where those 29 men still lie, 28 years later. It’s very cold down there.

And speaking of news analysis, what a segue to the news coming out of NPR, still a major news source in this household but one I’m becoming a bit, oh, vexed with.

It’s their ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin. First was his preposterous defense of Bill O’Reilly in that ridiculous blowup with Terry Gross a couple weeks ago. Now he’s going after one of the few Supreme Court reporters worth your time, Nina Totenberg, to make a point that reporters should never express an opinion publicly. Note: The column has been updated, but the old one hasn’t gone into the archives yet. We’ll have to hang fire until it’s updated. Sorry. Such actions are “fraught,” he believes, because it confuses the public, who will therefore come to doubt the objectivity of any reporter who does so.

Oh, hogwash. (Although, in a world where Fox News continues to claim it’s “fair and balanced,” he may have a point.) This issue is too tiresome to non-journalists go into much detail here, but if you’re interested, I think Jay Rosen has it just about right.

My own paper hasn’t weighed in with its election coverage, but the a.m. rag has, and based on my extensive research of the Fort’s mayoral election — which I happily define as “checking in with the local papers online most days” — I think I know what happened.

The race was the incumbent’s to lose. Graham Richard instituted a new organization of the police department that didn’t do much to reduce crime, presided over a city in economic freefall and retains the personal magnetism of Ari Fleischer. Plus, an illness kept him off the campaign trail for much of the critical final weeks. And yet, when he went up against a well-funded Republican he just barely beat (129 votes) four years ago, he stomped her like a steamroller. What happened?

His opponent, Linda Buskirk, went negative when Richard got sick, with at least one ad that insulted the intelligence of anyone with 1/4 of a working brain — the soft-on-drugs one mentioned here a few weeks ago. I think she was pushed to do this by Comrade Shine, the GOP chairman, and other moneymen whispering in her ear. I think they told her she couldn’t win otherwise. And I think it underlines the problem she had then and now, and why she’s now most likely headed back to her career in public relations — she’s too easily manipulated. Everyone who’s ever come in personal contact with Linda knows she’s a very nice person, not a raving wacko, and probably didn’t have her heart in stuff like the soft-on-drugs attack. But she’s a political novice and she put too much trust in her advisers — stone culture warriors, the sort of people who care less about governance than winning. And it showed. And voters are not stupid.

Fort folks, feel free to discuss.

UPDATE: Buskirk’s campaign manager, quoted in The News-Sentinel:

But Buskirk campaign manager Jim Banks said he was “very proud of the campaign.” Referring to endorsements by fire and police unions, Banks said, “This was all about police and firefighters. It was very personal for them.”

Another miscalculation. It’s widely believed that the opinions of safety workers are coin of the realm in city elections, but no one ever explained to me why the opinion of some police officer or fire fighter is more important than that of a waitress or stockbroker. I’m not surprised they endorsed Buskirk; Richard did reorganize the patrol districts, and that always pisses off people whose power rests on the old model. Make me understand why it’s the public’s problem, and I’ll listen.

Who can resist a baby? David Letterman’s latest Top 10 list. My favorite was No. 9: All of America will get to watch him grow up on television, just like Cody Gifford!

You can read the rest of the story for an update on that demon spawn — Cody Gifford, that is.

Oh, my. Another Tuesday night, another Fellows presentation, another meal suitable for the Romans. It was soul food from the Asian subcontinent tonight — dal, chutney and a lovely, spicy stew.

“Is this lamb?” I asked, in raptures.

“It’s mutton,” one of the cooks said. “We got it from a halal butcher.”

“No one sells mutton anymore,” I said. “Mutton is sheep. And it’s tough. This is tender. No way.”

“Well, it’s supposedly mutton. It’s what the butcher called it.”

Back and forth, back and forth. Mutton, lamb, what was this mystery meat?

I finally went to the cook who planned the meal. It was goat. And you know what? That was one tasty sucker. I’ve never eaten a goat before. I like goats. They’re cute, the way they butt you and stick their noses in your pockets and baaa at the petting zoo. But you know what? If the goat had to die to feed us, this was a worthy fate for that goaty soul. It was plain delicious.

MOMENTS LATER UPDATE: What a lame-ass entry. What I Had For Dinner. What, the Traffic Patterns of My Evening Commute weren’t interesting enough? Yeah, I know. It’s just what when you share a delicious meal in fine company, it turns you into Jesus, sharing the good news with the rest of the world, you know?

Also, I’m a little stunned. I came home and got online, thinking I’d be looking at a knuckle-biter in the Fort’s mayoral election, and whaddaya know? It’s a freakin’ blowout for the Dems, and I sure didn’t see that one coming. The newspaper websites have nothing up at 9:30 or so, but the TV stations are calling it Richard over Buskirk, 58 to 42 percent with 99 percent of precincts in, and any way you slice that, that’s a stone stomping. Given that Graham Richard is the most charisma-free politician I’ve yet met, and that he’s presided over a city in decline for most of the last year, well, give the man his props, you know?

What’s more, it looks like Alex’s pick John Shoaff is close to getting an at-large spot on the city council, unseating a cemented-in-place Republican. Whoa. More news as it happens, I guess.

I know I’m old and curious and stuff, but I’m disappointed by how little class discussion there is during our Russian class’ weekly “culture” lecture, a welcome break from all those goddamn verbs.

Yesterday our native-Muscovite professor gave us an overview of the Russian educational experience, with a short detour to a village most students have great familiarity with — cheating.

Cheating, she explained, has its own moral code. In her time (I’d estimate she’s roughly my age), it was considered wrong to cheat on any important subject, but a badge of honor to cheat on the obligatory Marxist-Leninist dogma classes everybody had to take. All Russian students of that time are well-versed in crib sheet techniques, the better to pass exams in which they were required to memorize the dates of specific party congresses in which resolution 101.342.(f) was adopted, not to mention rote mastery of long chunks of the speeches of Leonid Brezhnev. You know, Brezhnev, that dynamic, easily quotable speaker.

Girls had an advantage in these things, she said; they used their thighs as canvases, raising their skirts to reveal the answers. Boys favored accordian-fold notes slipped into sleeves.

The Russians have a great respect for higher learning, but these classes, she estimated, is why a university degree there takes five years, rather than our four.

It would be wrong for me to steal Dong Resin’s thunder on this one, so go behold it yourself.

The ombudsman’s column in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram makes it all clear for you:

The “Commentary” label that runs beneath news-page columnists’ mugshots and names has been changed. From now on, it’ll say, “In My Opinion.” That should make it as clear as possible that columns by Bud Kennedy, Monica Anderson, Bob Ray Sanders, Jim Reeves and others are strictly those writers’ opinions.

So much for literacy.

No one has the time on Monday that they do on Sunday for those long Sunday-magazine reads, but I think the WashPost magazine’s take on nudity yesterday might be worth a bit of your coffee-break time, if nothing else:

Our forefathers got off to a bad start with nudity. Unlike in so many European cultures, where nudity has always been idealized, serving as the inspiration for countless portraits of deities and military heroes, here it was just another wild foreboding frontier, on the other side of which might lurk damnation and disgrace.

Puritan modesty in the American Northeast, and evangelical fervor in other parts of the Colonial land about the need to sublimate the libido, doubtless played a role in the disfavor of exposed flesh. But so, too, did 18th-century American artists who, according to some art historians, looked for ways to distinguish the portraits of prominent Colonial settlers from the depictions of Native Americans. While one group of Colonial artists depicted Indians as barely clothed, in what they regarded as a celebration of the natives’ physicality and freedom of body, another group sought to ensure a flattering contrast by rendering distinguished Colonials as elegantly attired models of modesty. It was nothing less than an effort to characterize nudity as the way of a savage, and the clothed as pious and enlightened.

On the other hand, if heartbreak is more your cup of tea this a.m., there’s this NYT piece on smuggling children across international borders (Latin America, mainly), to join their parents, most of whom are illegal immigrants themselves. The pictures alone will take all the wind out of your sails.

I haven’t talked much here about my brief sojourn in radio, have I?

Well, I’ve probably mentioned it. It wasn’t all bad. But it was brief, and it was many years ago, and sometimes it seems it took place in a galaxy far, far away.

Here’s what happened: The program director at the local 50,000-watt clear-channel (lower-case; not the evil corporation we’ll hear more about in a paragraph or two) AM station called me up and said this station, which, like most institutions in Fort Wayne, wears cement overshoes, was considering a maybe moderate not too fast slow easy experiment with possibly not to be hasty just thinking about it — transition to a talk format. And would I maybe like to have a show?

This was in 1993. Yes, five full years after Rush Limbaugh had raised AM from its deathbed. Things happen slowly in Fort Wayne.

Hey, I’ll try anything once. So I said yes.

And so I entered the strange world of radio, on a show destined to fail, on a station run by the clueless leading the blind, and I had an interesting few weeks before I got a memo from the station manager advising me to be “less liberal” and “keep my opinions to myself,” because “this is what the most successful national hosts do.”

See, I told you.

That’s when I quit. I quit because the show was one lousy hour, at 2 p.m., wedged between two music shifts, an hour that was neither drive nor much of anything else. And it was astonishing, how much preparation that lousy hour took. I kept my eyes open for interesting talk topics all morning long, frequently to the exclusion of everything else in my life. It wasn’t uncommon to come back from the station, exhausted, at 3:15 p.m., and only then start working on my column for the next day.

But the station had a big reach — 50,000 watts travel a long way, especially at night. Once, driving home from Atlanta, I heard a promo for my show. In Tennessee. So that was sort of cool.

Anyway, the problem is, I just don’t have the common touch. Whatever it takes to have your finger on the pulse of the nation’s water cooler — this is something I lack. I’d scan the wires, printing out a dozen or more stories I found fascinating, things I’d love to chat with anyone about, stories that raised Larger Issues and posed Interesting Questions, and run through those in about seven minutes. “What are we teaching girls when we allow them to do whatever was mentioned in this story I just read?” I’d ask. Radio silence. “What about Bosnia-Herzegovinia? What course should the world take with these bellicose Serbs?” Nothing.

And then, in desperation, “You know why Hoosiers are fat? Because they eat chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes, that’s why.” And the phones would light up like a Christmas tree! And stay that way. Dozens of old people called to offer their opinion of potatoes and noodles together on the same plate.

It was a very strange experience.

But along the way, I saw many things that stayed with me. One was the culture of radio, which was, at least at this station, belligerent, ignorant, frat-housey, paranoid and proud of it. There were some good guys there, but I was always being shocked by something around the place. Things went up on the bulletin board that would have gotten you sent to re-education camp at the company I worked for. “Proposed new uniforms for Clinton’s all-gay military,” was one, posted during the don’t-ask-don’t-tell debate. It showed a cartoon of a limp-wristed fairy wearing sort of a military drag, with little arrows pointing to details of the uniform: “Spurs. Oooh, baby!” And so on. After the gay march on Washington that same year, one guy was practically foaming at the mouth. He told me he was glad his daughter was deaf, so she would never have to hear such smut as was spoken there.

I also got a look at the meme-spreading function of radio, the daily memos and weekly newsletters sent by consultants and the industry press. They suggested hot topics, pointed to research resources, touted interview possibilities. It helped me understand how stories and slogans can sweep across the country in an afternoon (this was before the popular discovery of the internet), why the same “experts” kept getting interviewed over and over, saying the same things over and over.

(It also made me realize, too late, that I didn’t need to spend five hours preparing for a one-hour show. I could have gotten the faxes and sliced my prep time in half.) I’m convinced these newsletters are the prototype for the Fox News daily memo, but that’s another overlong post.

Anyway, when I read this story, about morning DJs in three different, far-flung Clear Channel radio stations suggesting the same hilariously funny punishments motorists can inflict upon bicyclists — a harmonic convergence that Clear Channel claims is, really, honest, entirely coincidental — well, it brought back some memories. It made me think that things haven’t changed much at all, that true creativity in this game is still a rare talent, that I’m glad my heavy radio-listening days came before the industry was taken over by outfits like Clear Channel, et al.

But mostly it made me glad I switched my j-school concentration from broadcasting to newspapers. Yes, even newspapers are better.

(P.S. There’s a chapter two in my radio career, which we can discuss another time. The theme: It pays to have a partner.)