These last few weeks of editing shifts have been a disaster for family dinners, but interesting as professional development. I used to think I could never be an editor. I lack the patience to be good at it. I’d look at some steaming heap of raw copy and say, get this outta my sight. I knew it was bad, but I really didn’t know how to fix it other than flush it down the toilet, and that’s sort of demoralizing for most rookie reporters.

But if you’re diligent about improving your own copy, you pick up a few tricks, and now I’m not the worst line editor you ever met, although I still strive to be merely mediocre. After seeing more than a few sorry-ass writers — who struggled with writing complete sentences and getting their minds around the concept of subject/verb agreement — grow, through hard work, into something resembling real competence, I know great improvement is possible. But the best many of these folks could do was write with simple sentences that got the point across and didn’t embarrass them to have their names at the top. The ear for music — and call me a crazy dreamer, but that’s what good writing is, to me — is something you have to be born with, and develop throughout your life.

I thought of this when I read Jon Carroll’s column this morning. Here’s how it started:

No one can say when a relationship starts to go bad. The changes are subtle, barely noticeable. One might sense an easing of commitment, but one might put that down to outside pressures.

It’s bad enough when it happens to one person. But when it happens to an entire nation, it becomes a sickness, almost an epidemic. So I ask you to join with me to answer the following question: Is it possible to reunite Americans with their turn signals?

That’s four paragraphs, a long time to wait for the punchline, especially in a newspaper. I sat back and read the whole thing several times, marveling at the trick — the string of Oprah banalities, piled atop one another like fish in the market, slap slap slap, with just that little hint, midway through ("You are not the boss of me"), that this isn’t going to be a deadly exegesis about a divorce, or about our falling-out with the United Nations. One more would have been too many; one fewer wouldn’t have been enough to make you wonder, what the hell is going on here?

(PAUSE FOR DISCLAIMER: Not all senses of humor are alike. Your sense of the humorousness of the example cited may vary.)

That sort of ear you just can’t teach. You think it’s easy to write a column about why people don’t use turn signals and not sound like Andy Rooney or some desperate, sweating Seinfeld manque? Try it sometime. Go ahead and give me 700 words on that topic right now, see how you do.

Things have gotten so bad that I fear some of my readers may not even know the phrase "turn signal." In every automobile, there is a device (mine, like many others, is mounted on the steering column) that allows the driver to make his or her intentions known.

Before you turn right, simply flick the lever, and a blinking arrow on the dashboard will confirm that your right taillight is sending out rhythmic pulses of light. I should perhaps mention that the same procedure can be used for the left taillight (in case of left turns), although the lever must be flicked in a different direction.

"Rhythmic pulses of light" — that’s just right. That’s funny. I laughed, anyway.

One reason I like reading good webloggers is that, being "amateurs," many of them haven’t had the creative stuffing beaten out of them by bad editors. If they have the ear, and the confidence, it comes through as something really fresh. Once again, I offer The Poorman, Andrew Northrup, who as far as I can tell is some sort of science guy, but then I read something like this and I think, he’s got it:

I hate to even bring it up, because it’s just so "I read a stupid editorial and now I’m going make snide comments about it in my New Media Web Log," but I really think that this Norman Mailer editorial is the single stupidest event in the history of writing stupid things in newspapers.

I like the way he manages to distill bloggers’ most irritating habit — the so-called takedown — into something that sounds like a teenager said it, which is about the level of most takedowns, and as for "the single stupidest event in the history of writing stupid things in newspapers," well. I read the piece in question. That might be the most succinct summation possible. I know veteran editorial writers who can’t get to the point that fast.

OK, enough of this. I should teach a little course in brevity, one-a these days.

Instead, I’m going to go peruse the Ann Arbor City Guide I was given at my fellowship interview last month, try to figure out where to live.

Here’s one fellowship story before I go. It’s really Ron’s story, but Ron doesn’t have a website, and what the hell, it’s a good story: So Ron has to go to the airport in Detroit one day in March, to pick up Mike Wallace, yes, that Mike Wallace, who gave the Knight-Wallace Fellowship half its name. And he’s driving back, gets into Ann Arbor, and his car just … stops. Dead. No mas go. They’re in traffic, and there’s honking, and while Ron is trying to figure out what to do, Mike jumps out and starts directing traffic. Imagine what a sight this would have been to passing motorists: Honey, is that–? But then, while Ron’s looking for the four-way flashers, he feels the car jostle a little. Looks up, into the rear-view.

Mike Wallace is pushing his car. Eighty-four years old, this guy.

"When you have your interview," Ron advised, "say that you have a brand-new car."

I couldn’t fit it in, but I guess it didn’t matter.

See you tomorrow.

OK, then. How my life changed yesterday.

If you follow that link, you’ll find me, hiding behind my married name, on a list of 12 of the luckiest people in my field, these days — the 2003-04 class of Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan. We were all just awarded an academic year in Ann Arbor to study anything we want, plus a generous living stipend, plus overseas travel, twice-weekly seminars and a cool house to play in. Spouses invited and welcome, too. Those of you who asked what the Undisclosed Project I was working on last winter was? It was the application. That picture up there? I took it at my interview, earlier this month. I didn’t speak of it because I was afraid I’d jinx it.

It all starts in September. I can’t believe I actually got one.

Nine whole months to go to any classes I want, meet fascinating people, travel, rollerblade to Starbucks, use all available resources of a great American university and have enough money to buy beer? Pinch me.

Journalists are pretty well-acquainted with these programs. There are three of their kind in the country — the Neimans at Harvard, the Knights at Stanford and the Knight-Wallaces at Michigan. I applied for only this one because of aging-parent issues (since resolved, at least on my end — grim smile), and because, hey — it’s the University of Michigan, the school I would have gone to if I’d had some decent high-school counseling and, of course, the grades to get in. What girl raised in Columbus, Ohio, irritated by Buckeye mania, wouldn’t relish the idea of staking a claim to the maize and blue? I can hardly wait to wear a MICHIGAN sweatshirt shopping in Upper Arlington.

But mostly I can hardly wait to get there. If you’re the jealous type, I advise you to avoid the Fellowship website. (I avoided it myself, once my application was in the mail. It was like standing outside the world’s greatest bakery, hours before opening, and you weren’t even sure they’d let you in.)

Before you do, though, you all have to hold still for a minute while I distribute thanks all around. I truly believe I wouldn’t have gotten this opportunity without NN.C, which opened a world of possibilities. You’ll notice my study topic is old/new media synthesis, all the ideas for which came through running this site and corresponding with readers here. This — not NN.C, but what you’re doing now — is the future of our business, and the sooner we start claiming it, the better.

I also have to thank Ron French, 2002-’03 Fellow, who encouraged me to apply, wrote a "friend of the court" letter on my behalf and was extremely supportive and helpful all the way around. I knew I wanted to do this when I was in Detroit last December, and called to say, "So, you want to meet for a drink?" and he said, "Sorry, I’ll be in Buenos Aires."

Some of you might be wondering if NN.C will continue through the fellowship year. Are you kidding? Of course it will. Some things will be off-limits; the twice-weekly seminars, in which various speakers are brought in to edify us, are officially off-the-record. Individual privacy will be respected. But the rest of the experience would seem to be the richest possible fodder for my mission here — Daily Life, With Links, in case you forgot — and could easily support a reality-TV series, much less a website.

Speaking of which … 18 strangers and an eccentrically decorated house? I may have to rename it "The (Un)Real World: Ann Arbor." But we’ll see about that.

So, then. Go Blue.

As you can imagine, I’ve been able to think of little else over the past two days. Forgive me one more short entry, and we’ll be back to our normal schedule of blather tomorrow.

My former colleague Mike Harden once offered a basic rule of homeownership — nothing outside the house breaks in August and nothing inside breaks in January. I’d add a corollary — smoke-alarm batteries never start failing at 3 p.m. Only 12 hours opposite.

And when they start failing with two dogs in the house, you’re going to be up for a while. Sprig hates the ear-splitting scream of the smoke alarm, and an accidental blast can reduce him to a trembling spaz in seconds. Buster dog doesn’t like them either, but settled for leaping to his feet and wuffling his muzzle in mine. And all for not even a full-fledged alarm, just the half-second chirp that warns of low batteries.

Alan locked them all out of the bedroom after that. I thought it was cruel. On the other hand, when Buster went home this afternoon, I was pretty happy. He’s just too big for our house. I can open my bread drawer now without having to push a strawberry blonde dog butt out of the way. The Other Alan, Buster’s owner, is divorcing and lived for a time in a camper parked at the KOA up in Auburn. I simply can’t imagine how the two of them found room in such cramped quarters, but it was summer, after all. You could go outside and socialize with the neighbors, who were mostly Irish Travelers, Alan said. "They didn’t say much," he said.

What a place for a man whose home is falling apart — Pullman quarters with a 100-pound dog and Irish travelers.

Anyway, that was last night, an evening of not much sleep. This morning, my life changed. More on that tomorrow.

Last Friday, it changed in a more mundane way: I was examined for my first pair of bifocals. Personally, I don’t think you need bifocals if you can take your old glasses off, move the telephone book four inches from your nose and read it just fine, but my husband, the nag, won’t hear of this. He wants to drag me down in the hole that he’s in, wearing bifocals for several years now. He’s just jealous, since he needed them way before I did (which I don’t). In the interest of keeping a harmonious marriage I’m going along with his little charade.

My optometrist wears me out; you can’t get out of there in less than two hours, after you take the glaucoma test and the follow-the-little-light-around-the-box test and all the rest of it, choose your glasses and finally get your pupils dilated so he can shine the light of a thousand Hiroshimas into your pupil and see your optic nerve and maybe your tonsils. Then they shove you out the door with those old-lady plastic shades and best wishes for a safe trip home. Ha. I was halfway there before I figured out what the problem is, why having your eyes dilated is such a trial. It’s not the light, it’s the depth of field, or lack thereof.

I felt like Mr. Science, figuring this out after having my eyes dilated maybe eight times in my life. If you open your camera’s aperture, or f-stop, all the way, you lose its ability to see in depth. It’s a great way to blur out a background for a nice portrait or sports shot, but it’s a hell of a way to see the world; everything looks like that picture of the buds up there. It’s what makes certain drugs so trippy to take, and made me something of a hazard to my fellow motorist on the way home. But I made it. In a week to 10 days, I’ll have my lineless bifocals, and then I’ll really be a menace to safe drivers everywhere.

Sorry to sound like such a dope today — and sorry for no links — but really: Life changed today. Details tomorrow. How’s that for a teaser?

See you then.

Buster the houseguest, the world’s biggest golden retriever, is calming down. He still pants too much. He’s still worried that his owner, the Other Alan, will never come back for him. But he’s a smart dog. In just a couple of days, he’s learning the rhythms of our household, knows you can’t yank your hostess off her feet without paying for it with some serious heeling and obedience work, knows if you come when you’re called you get a biscuit, knows that if you lie quietly next to the bed and don’t pant, you get to stay in the bedroom, if not exactly on the bed itself.

And I’m learning the trick to keeping a dog this size is to run him off his feet. Unfortunately, we were only able to do that Saturday, when we went up to the lake to open the cottage and put in the dock. This meant two hours of dry fetch and two hours of wet fetch, enough workout for a superbly conditioned retriever in the prime of life, although my arm is sore.

That might be from being yanked off my feet, too. The Other Alan has owned a succession of goldens, and trains them all the same way — they take walks off the leash, and are trained to stop at street corners, wait for the person to catch up, and then heel across the street. On the other side, they’re free to romp ahead again.

I can’t do this, sorry. This is a very expensive dog, and no way am I trusting him to stop at Rudisill Boulevard, so an on-leash walk it is. Unfortunately, he knows: Walkies that pass by a body of water = wet fetch! The Other Alan lives near a nice pond ideally suited for this. I live near the St. Marys River, not suited for this. He saw the river and bolted; I braced; he hit the end of the leash; I went down like an amateur water skier. Many grass stains, much swearing. I made him heel for the next half mile.

He goes home tomorrow. I will miss his silky head, his expressive face, his great flews filling like parachutes when he sticks his head out the car window, his deep voice, the way he doesn’t mind if you use him for a footrest, and improvising dialogue between him and Spriggy using a very deep voice for Buster and a high squeaky one for Sprig. I will not miss the bowel movements the size of canned hams (nothing like a big dog to make you appreciate a little one), his constant anxious panting or the walks that resemble playing a marlin in the Gulf Stream. We will all be relieved.

It feels good to be doing some labor outside again. On Saturday, at the lake, we raked and burned leaves, cut the grass, ran the trimmer, moved stuff around, did this and that. On Sunday, I hung storm windows and other stuff. What I didn’t do is spend much time in front of the computer, so I’m very grateful to Kirk for passing along the following story. I don’t know about you, but there are few things more satisfying to read than a story that starts like this:

A prominent Republican fund-raiser who once said former President Bill Clinton was "a lawbreaker and a terrible example to our nation’s young people" pleaded guilty yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court to production of child pornography.

I mean: Snicker. The rest of the story.

For those readers who used to live here — and there are a few — the news of the upcoming week is this: Kevin Hough is finally getting the needle. May 2, if all goes as planned, which it may not. In typical wheels-of-justice fashion, the execution comes not quite 18 years after he iced a gay couple in West Central, just a few days after torturing and murdering another man. He was a one-man wrecking crew and as bad-to-the-bone E-vil as murder defendants come, as I recall. His final hearing before the Indiana Parole Board was last week, and contained this amazing statement: He said he didn’t kill anyone. Not: I’m a changed man, the usual spare-my-life-please defense, but I’m innocent. The stories don’t record whether anyone on the board did a spit take over that whopper, but it was mentioned in their unanimous rejection of his final appeal. This guy was so guilty the jury did everything but chant "guilty guilty guilty" when they read the verdict, although he was right about one thing — he had idiots for counsel. At one point, the victim’s sister testified that a certain ring found in Hough’s possession when he was arrested was, indeed, her brother’s. He wore two, she said; that one was missing when he was found dead.

Somehow, Hough’s attorney got them mixed up. He strolled up with a photo of the corpse wearing the ring he thought she’d said was missing. "You mean this one?" he crowed, flashing this picture of her brother’s dead staring face, his hand next to it.

"No!" she cried, bursting into tears. "The other one!"

Oh, the guy said, sitting down. I think the judge actually rolled his eyes. But it wasn’t enough for appeal.

Of course, Alex, has a story:

Did I ever tell you about my close encounter with Hough? He used to be a Pearl Street whore, though straight. There were a few like that. …In the weeks before (the victims) were murdered, I’d noticed Hough as one of a group of toughs who’d started working the strip. At that time the Pearl and Fulton circuit was getting overrun with straights who were gay prostituting–aggressive, nasty guys who accosted quite a few sissies to let them know this was their turf now.

I gave Tom quite a scolding. And when Hough’s picture was on the front page two weeks later, I thanked my lucky stars we weren’t his first double homicide.

Alex has a book in him "Fort Wayne Fag: Queer in Quayle Country." He knows it, I know it, we all know it. One of these days, he’ll write it.

Me, I’ll see you tomorrow.

Most days I can ignore stories like the Rick Santorum thing. I read, I judge, I move on. In this matter, it shows how unqualified I am to be a blogger; I simply run out of patience with discussing it endlessly. If I can’t vote for the guy or his opponent, what’s the point? I have my own religious right-wing congressman to worry about.

So I was slow getting to the transcript of the Santorum interview. I was struck not by Santorum’s pinheadedness, but by the responses of the unidentified AP reporter:

AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?

Oooh, don’t gross me out! "Without being too gory or graphic?" Why not say, "Please, don’t give me any good quotes. Keep it nice and bland for the ol’ AP, ’cause we can’t print it anyway, and I certainly don’t want a good story to tell my colleagues over beers on Friday, you know?"

Another passage:

SANTORUM: …In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —

AP: I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.

Hmm. "Sort of freaking me out" to hear the phrase "man on dog"? For a minute there, I thought we’d found the Catholic girl who worked briefly at our college paper, an outstanding beauty preserving her Grace Kelly-ish self for her future husband. You might think we didn’t like her because she was a Catholic and would likely have freaked out over any "man on dog" conversations, but that wasn’t it. It was because she was utterly offended by the idea of a deadline. She simply couldn’t believe that her news-reporting professor expected her to write a story and turn it in by the bell (the class was 90 minutes long for just this purpose). Why, at the women’s college she’d recently transferred from, they had three days to do their assignments! We took one look at her and figured: Public relations professional in the making.

It took a bit of Googling to find the byline on the original story — not her.

Anyway, once again, Richard Cohen had the best Santorum column. He’s betting 1.000 for the week.

I’ll show you man on dog. Buster’s lying at my feet. He really is enormous — 100 pounds at least, and at the moment, 100 pounds of panting anxiety. His owner, Alan, whom we will call for the sake of clarity the Other Alan, takes him everywhere, and while this makes him excellent company in a variety of situations, he is a little freaked over the separation. And Spriggy, who’s also a bundle of nerves to have this interloper in the house. Visiting Spriggy, for a dog, is like visiting a crank addict on a five-day binge — he just never leaves you alone. The boys have already had two snarling spats, and I’m really hoping those are over with.

"Where does he sleep?" I asked the Other Alan.

"Wherever he wants," he replied. He already jumped onto Kate’s bed and gave her stuffed animals the once-over, so now I have another nervous soul under my roof. I told her, on the way home from picking him up, all about retrievers, how soft their mouths are, how they naturally pick up things on the floor but never chew them, how the worst we’ll see this weekend might be a drooly shoe or two. So what does Buster do in the first 15 minutes? Find one of Spriggy’s toys — a tennis ball on a rope — and instantly chew the ball into fragments.

I will say this: I have never seen that kid’s room so clean. You talk about picked up? "Take these shoes and put them in your room," I said. "In my closet," she said. "With the door closed."

Kids learn lessons everywhere. I hope this one sticks.

Must go measure kibble into bowls. Have a swell weekend, OK?

Technical issues: My sister wrote the other day and asked why I haven’t been updating the site lately. I’m all like what the–?! and she’s all like, no, it hasn’t changed since April 15; I’m looking at the page now, and I’m all like hit Reload, and she like does it, and it still doesn’t change, and damn if I know what the problem is. But she said this only happened at work, where their network was recently hit by a virus called Slammer, and the system’s now so restricted she can’t visit half the web, and maybe I’m in that half. My own system guy says, "It’s something at her end." Sounds about right.

But then she said she got a note from a friend of hers in Atlanta, works for a different company entirely, same problem.

So just for the hell of it, I’m taking off the little referrer script at the bottom and the Amazon thingie, making NN.C as plain-vanilla as it can be. Any of you have problems, let me know, ’cause I’m mystified.

Mystified ain’t all I am at the moment. I realize these entries must sound like one long whiny diary of chronic fatigue syndrome, but keep in mind I walked out of work about 90 minutes ago and my enthusiasm for spending another hour in front of a monitor is a little shaky at the moment. Besides, when you’re editing, nothing happens. No, things happen, but they’re very small things. Example: Today I spent five minutes trying to find "shinny" in the dictionary, which, I contend, is what you do when you climb a rope, a pole or other slender object. The reporter had written "shimmy," and we had a nice chat about that. "’Shimmy’ is when you shake your tits," I said. "’Shinny,’ I’m sure, if I can ever find it, comes from the posture, where you must support yourself by clasping your lower legs together. Your lower legs are, of course, your shins. Shinny. …Hey! Wake up!"

Let’s ask MacDICT, the world’s quickest (if you have broadband, if you’re a Mac user) online dictionary: shinny v : climb awkwardly, as if by scrambling [syn: {clamber}, {scramble}, {shin}, {skin}, {struggle}, {sputter}]

Oh, crap. No way is "sputter" a synonym for "shinny." But I’m right about the rest of it.

And yes, "shimmy" is also a chemise; ref. Scarlett O’Hara: "He looks as though he knows what I look like without my shimmy." But in its verb form, it means "to shake one’s breasts and/or booty."

Several more gripping minutes were consumed trying to think of what you call the toy consisting of a peg board and colored pegs, which are arranged to make pictures or patterns. The best anyone could come up with was the mid-tier-famous Lite Brite, an electrical version. I’m sure there was a well-known low-tech version, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I settled for "mosaic," a poor substitute but hey, that’s editing.

Did you know there’s an web version of Lite Brite? Now you do.

Obsessing over minutiae like this also keeps my mind off the disturbing images in the news of those bloody Shiites marching and wailing in Iraq, as creepy a sight as those guys in the Phillippines who actually have themselves crucified on Good Friday (do they still do that?), in a show of solidarity with you-know-who. My religious upbringing was Catholic, but I think I’m basically a Presbyterian at heart, and I gotta tell you — people that whack on the subject of faith frighten me. I don’t even like to raise my arms above the level of my shoulders and I especially don’t want anyone touching me when they pray — the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode where Larry doesn’t want to join hands in the prayer circle is one of my favorites — so you can see how slicing your skull open, even if it’s just a flesh wound, freaks me out. I just don’t see these folks being ready for democracy; it’s like if we handed the keys to the U.S. over to Pat Robertson and said, "Drive us wherever you want."

Can’t they go pull down a few more statues, kiss some soldiers?

Here’s some actual news: Verizon held its annual meeting in the Fort today, which attracted a few hundred people and lots of union pickets to the downtown convention center. My mom and sister were both Ohio Bell alums, so phone companies feel familiar to me. The big news to come out of the meeting was the surprise passage of an anti-golden-parachute shareholder resolution, one of those things that almost never passes. The CEO said having to seek shareholder approval of lucrative bonus and exit deals would mess up their negotiations with executives, to which I reply: Cry me a river. There was lots of un-Midwestern acting-out at the meeting — a sizable union contingent stood and turned their backs to the CEO when he spoke — and it was probably pretty fun to be there. To cover it. I’m a reporter at heart, and I always will be.

I also wonder how many times shareholders stepped up to the microphones and made some play on the "can you hear me now?" line.

OK, that is all. I can see the tape, I can see the angels calling me home and, most of all, I can see that I have to be back at work in 10 hours.

Tomorrow: Meet Buster.

If I take another job in journalism, I hope they put me in circulation. I want to be the Mistress of Carriers, for which I will wear tight clothing and carry a whip. I will lay it on the buttocks of all who fail to take the job seriously. It will resolve some of my frustration over doing the best job I can up at my keyboard, of sweating over commas and adverbs and le mot juste, and then having the whole shooting match rest on the shoulders of a 13-year-old.

Not that all of our carriers are 13-year-olds. It’s just a helpful image to keep in your head when the phone rings with circulation complaints, which, after hours, all seem to end up in the hands of the shlub working the night metro desk, i.e., me.

Some say, "Yougottacallcirculationtomorrownotmyjobbusybye," but I’ve decided to make these customers my crusade. I follow up on them like a ponytailed public defender appealing a death sentence. It’s deeply satisfying.

"Mrs. Johnson, this is Nancy Nall down at The News-Sentinel," I said to one lady today. "Did you get your paper last night? I’m just checking."

"Oh yes," said Mrs. Johnson, sounding very happy. "I got two!" Good. Mrs. Johnson deserved it, if the story she told was even half true, which I should probably not relate here to protect parties who may not be guilty. Even better is when the customer recognizes my name, which they sometimes do — I still write two columns a week between moonlighting as a customer-service agent, after all. "Uh, yeah, I got the paper," one man said a couple weeks ago. "And I like your column." I felt like the Lone Ranger! (Although it’s entirely possible he was thinking, what the hell is going on down there that they got her handling circulation complaints?) But I’d do it even if they were only interested in the Jumble and Beetle Bailey — you pay for the damn paper, we ought to get the damn paper to your house, on time and dry. Accidents happen, people get delayed, presses break down, but customer service is extremely important, and if no one else provided it this evening, well, the buck stops at my desk. I will swing the Hammer of Thor on your behalf, navigate voice-mail mazes, follow up in person. If you knew how many times I’ve heard people say, "Oh, I used to get your paper, but my carrier couldn’t keep it out of the bushes, so I cancelled," you’d do the same thing.

Next week: I solve the crossword for you. Call me and tell me the clue, and I’ll give you my best guess.

Swinging the Hammer of Thor is hard work, though, and I’m teetering on the edge of collapse. I didn’t even have much time to go rootin’ for tasty links today, although I liked this column by Richard Cohen.

So hey, instead of me droning on in my exhaustion, here’s some of my mail about "Last Tango in Paris":

From Cousin John: The night, about 29 years ago this month, that my HS partner in crime and I saw Last Tango, the cops showed at the end of the first showing and confiscated the “obscene material”. Normally our third running mate, Arc Cosine Carter, would have been with us, but he was only 17 and we didn’t want to run the risk of getting the boot. The local judge viewed the film the next day (in his chambers?) and pronounced it “depressing, but not obscene” and allowed the show to go on. “Depressing, but not obscene” was pretty much my take on it too. Certainly not as entertaining as other films (Fritz the Cat, Oh! Calcutta) we had viewed that spring.

From Michael in Cali: Last Tango has the greatest death scene in movies – ever. Bar none. When it came out I read a review in the" New York Review of Books" that was pretty worshipful. It (the review) also went on in some detail about how the movie was largely improvisational and what a great talent Brando was. I don’t know where La Schneider went. She didn’t really do it for me. At the time I had a fairly serious lech going for Italian actress Laura Antonelli who was in all those movies with Marcello Mastroianni. Also Claudia Cardinale and Clio Goldsmith. Probably a dozen others too.

Claudia Cardinale! Every man’s fantasy.

And finally, from Alex: I have a funny Indiana University story about "Last Tango in Paris"–from back in the ’80s when I was in school there.

I wish I could tell you that the school officials made fools of themselves breaking up this porno party. The showing took place without incident and few in attendance.

That’s "Last Tango" for you. At end, finally…anticlimactic.

Tomorrow, late (again! I have no life!).

At one point this weekend while I was lying in bed, too tired to do anything but channel-surf — yes, it’s possible to be too tired to sleep — I stumbled across a rare treat on Flix, "Last Tango in Paris." It happened that the last channel I’d visited was CBS, and "CSI: Miami" was on, so for a while I switched back and forth between the two. One is Bernardo Bertolucci’s groundbreaking X-rated art movie with a great Gato Barbieri jazz score, the other’s…well. It was a strange experience, moving from one to the other.

I saw "Last Tango" when it came out — I was 14 years old, using my height and boobs and the presence of my 18-year-old date to get into the theater, although I don’t think anyone in the box office cared. Honestly, I didn’t get it (neither did my date, a whey-faced boy from Ironton, in town for a Demolay ceremony), for good reason. Like "King Lear," it’s something you don’t really appreciate until you’re old enough to have lived a little bit of its subject matter — sex, loss, heartbreak, and at 14 I was innocent of all three.

But I do remember how "shocking" it was, and the questions it raised: Can sex ever be kept entirely separate from emotion? When we fuck before we love someone — before we even know someone — what sort of shadow does it cast on the future? As I recall, the answer to the first was no, and as for the second, well, it doesn’t have a happy ending. But you still want to see it again, if only for the score, which I have somewhere on vinyl.

No, you want to see it again, you should see it again, for how dated it seems now. Googling around, I found Roger Ebert’s review on the occasion of a 1995 re-release, and I think he got it exactly right:

This movie was the banner for a revolution that never happened. "The movie breakthrough has finally come," Pauline Kael wrote, in the most famous movie review ever published. "Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form." The date of the premiere, she said, would become a landmark in movie history comparable to the night in 1913 when Stravinsky’s "Rites of Spring" was first performed, and ushered in modern music.

"Last Tango" premiered, in case you have forgotten, on Oct. 14, 1972. It did not quite become a landmark. …The shocking sexual energy of "Last Tango in Paris" and the daring of Marlon Brando and the unknown Maria Schneider did not lead to an adult art cinema. The movie frightened off imitators, and instead of being the first of many X-rated films dealing honestly with sexuality, it became almost the last. Hollywood made a quick U-turn into movies about teenagers, technology, action heroes and special effects. And with the exception of a few isolated films like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "In the Realm of the Senses," the serious use of graphic sexuality all but disappeared from the screen.

Watching Maria Schneider loll around naked, with her natural breasts and unwaxed pubis, you’re reminded that even bodies go out of style, these days. Forget Marlon Brando. Yes, it was before he blew up like the Michelin Man, but he was still, what? Fifty? Stanley Kowalski was far behind him. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," remember, starred hot ‘n’ sexy Daniel Day-Lewis.

But still, this was something no one had really seen before in a movie that wasn’t playing in a part of town you’d never visit, and it had its impact. You can’t watch "CSI: Miami" and not realize the debt it owes to movies like "Last Tango," which were the first pebbles in the landslide. The boundaries are broken by artists, and then everyone else rushes in. It so happened, this night, that the Miami crime-scene investigators were looking into a murder at — anyone? anyone? — yes, a peep show! "He came, and he went," said David Caruso, and even though I’d just heard Brando give his "hap-penis" riff, which was juvenile even then, it just seemed…icky.

The whole CSI franchise is icky. I know lots of people like it, but every time I watch it, it reminds me that I didn’t know what autoerotic asphyxiation was until I was 25 years old, and Kate will probably be writing a paper on it in junior high. The way the investigators go on and on about semen and fetishes and "that smell? that smell, of bleach? that’s sex," and leather and whipping and ligature marks and the defense wounds on the rape victim and sadomasochism and drugs and needles and all the rest of it, it just seems like this is what sex in entertainment has come to — not just looking at the girl naked, but looking up her vagina with an ultraviolet light, and taking note of soft-tissue damage.

Sex and decay, sex and violence, sex and craziness. It makes sex with butter look like something Rotarians do.

And I don’t care what anyone says — I’ll take Gato Barbieri’s sax over that stupid Who theme-song trick.

Enough crepehanging. Whatever happened to Maria Schneider, anyway?

Not all TV is bad, of course; in fact, much of it is tremendous, these days, even the stuff about sex. I laughed more at this week’s "Six Feet Under" than in all the ones that came before, and "The Wire" rerun is even better. And even though I don’t watch "24," I thought Hank Steuver’s take on one of its characters, "Run, Kim, Run!" was really funny:

Kim, the danger-prone teenage daughter of Counter Terrorism Unit special agent Jack Bauer, fits a certain niche in these frantic times. Without meaning to, she has come to represent the vapidity and naive innocence of a Britney Nation caught up in something deadly serious, with only her wits and the occasional visibility of her nipples to save her.

…Kim is us. We are Kim. Every time your cell phone doesn’t work, every time you get kidnapped, every time you lose your car keys or, say, can’t get away from trained assassins, or every time you’re stuck in traffic (or causing a jam, like the time you set that deputy’s vehicle on fire, or the time the cops found your boss’s dead wife in the trunk of the car, which, technically, you stole from him), every time your boyfriend loses his leg trying to help you thwart disaster, just think of Kim and know you’re not alone.

And Hank is on to something, too, when he observes, Her mother, Teri Bauer, was also kidnapped a few times last season, and raped once. (The women of "24" are in serious need of a Take Back the Night march. Sexual violence is to the modern TV drama what being tied to train tracks was to the silent-movie era. The metaphor is almost too simple.)

Yes!

OK, then. Long night behind me, long, indolent morning ahead of me. I plan to take advantage of every minute. Drop me a note; I’ll have lots of time to reply.

See you tomorrow, then.

When I was young, I was one of those women who secretly sneered at women who suffered great menstrual mood swings, thinking them delicate little neurasthenic types. What you need is some exercise and a hobby, I’d think.

Of course life has a way of sneaking up on you, and I’m being punished by becoming, in my forties, a PMS murder defense waiting to happen. On Friday, I snapped at three oldish tweens hanging around the little kids playing next door: "Aren’t you a little old to be playing with kindergarteners? Take off!" I barked, which is exactly what my neighbor wanted to do but wasn’t PMSsy enough to say. Glad to be of service, neighbor; just be careful where you aim me, I’m loaded! On Saturday, I left a bitchy voice mail for my insurance agent, after I received a third bill for the Passat’s policy, something I thought was settled two weeks ago, following a series of about six phone calls trying to explain that no, I didn’t want liability only on my brand new car; that was an option I’d chosen on my ’87 beater, but that would be pretty foolish for a car that’s not even paid for, don’t you think? But I didn’t feel really crazy until this morning, when I went 10 rounds on the phone with the proprietor of the hated local ice-cream truck franchise.

Tell me what you would do, if you were stemming spinach at the sink at 9 a.m. and heard the cheery electronic melody indicating overpriced freezer-burned ice-milk products would be available for sale at curbside in just a moment, at an hour when many are still in bed and which is, after all, Easter-freakin’-Sunday. Nine ayem! Easter Sunday! I growled but let it pass. They came back through at 11:30. I reached for the phone. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to offend a non-religious person like me on religious grounds today?" I asked. "Would it kill you to wait until noon?"

"We got a city permit says we can be out anytime after 9," he grunted.

"On Sundays? On Easter?" I said.

"On any day," he said. Tone: Bite me. "Just trying to make a living, lady."

I have no problem with anyone trying to make a living, but most people’s work doesn’t come blaring through my neighborhood disturbing the peace several times a day from tulip season through Labor Day, and turns me into the Joseph Stalin of frozen treats, since I have to say no every single time, while the trucks themselves all appear to be driven by mullet-headed parolees and the actual treats themselves are repulsive, neon-colored representations of Tweety Bird with gumballs for eyes and frozen gumballs! Frozen gumballs! I ask you.

"I’m calling my city councilman," I finally said, slamming down the phone, although "slamming down" is something of a misnomer when you’re talking about a cordless phone, and threatening to call your councilman is not the sort of thing to strike fear into an ice-cream-truck business owner’s heart, but still. We have a noise ordinance in town, passed during the first days of boom cars, which is utterly unenforceable but still requires that vehicles be muffled and any music from same can’t be heard 40 feet away. What a joke.

OK, then! I guess that’s out of my system! At least the bunny cake(s) turned out well.

On to the bloggage:

Thanks, Miss Beth, for passing along proof, as if we needed any more, that aggressive Canada geese are a menace worthy of Donald Rumsfeld, once he’s done with Syria and Iran. And we know they’re terrorists, because only terrorists would attack a disabled man, right?

Perdue said the birds knocked him to the sidewalk and pecked him repeatedly as he left the store at 5110 Pike Plaza Road. Perdue, 43, said he had trouble fighting off the geese because of a work-related injury and surgery that has left him with rods and steel supports implanted in his back. The large geese eventually stopped attacking after several minutes of screaming as he was down on his hands and knees, he said. "I had blood all over my knees. One of them — I guess it was the male — bit me on the back," Perdue said Thursday. "They got me pretty bad. I’m hurt all over. I can hardly move."

Speaking of which, one of our other readers — from Canada, amusingly enough — says the trick is to make yourself big (arms out to sides helps) and make a loud noise, and they’ll back off.

And thanks to the readers who wrote to explain the playing-card thing: It helps troops learn the faces of the guys we’re after while they pass their down time playing solitaire and euchre and whatever, a common-sense explanation I should have thought of myself. Wrote Dwight: It kind of makes sense to me: the troops are probably out there in the middle of the desert with not a whole lot else to do. No booze, you can only eat so much a day, they may not have sporting equipment or power for the Playstation/GameBoy, if they’ve got one: cards are cheap, highly portable, and require no power, so I’m sure they’re a recreation of choice. I’m sure the thinking is that, if they sit there staring at poker (cribbage? hearts? bridge?) hands long enough, they can’t help but pick up what Barzan (or the other 51 losers) looks like. Decks of cards are probably also pretty easy to distribute in bulk to the various outposts as well (or even print on the spot).

As for why Saddam’s brother-in-law didn’t rank higher than the five of clubs, wrote Jack, After the court cards and the aces, the assignments were random. DoD printed only a couple of hundred decks; there’s a free download at DoD’s site.

So there is.

And finally, if you’ve ever wondered what my brother-in-law looks like, well, now you know. (He went out and got a post-retirement job and ended up in one of those arty shots photographers love to get for a run-of-the-mill business story.) Sixtysomething and he still looks puckish.

See you tomorrow, late.

Of course I heard from Dispatchers, past and present, with Ned stories. Most said, How could you forget the tree incident? I didn’t forget the tree incident. I was there. Believe me, it’s burned into my memory, as it was that of everyone else who saw the aftermath. A brief synopsis, then my defense:

The paper has an annual off-site staff meeting called the Clinic. It’s a long-standing tradition, part year-in-review, part year-to-come, part wild card. It was the same year after year: Everyone left work at 3 p.m. and drove out to the Wigwam, the publishers’ corporate-retreat facility way out on the east side. (The Wigwam is another story, another day.) You sat through an hour or two of dull speeches, although sometimes they weren’t dull. There was a certain freedom to the program, which was left up to that year’s chairman, who had been named as the last formal event of the previous year’s Clinic. The program was always something of a surprise. One year the film critic was chairman, and he brought in Jean Shepherd, whom he’d met while up in Cleveland covering the filming of "A Christmas Story" earlier in the year. The first year I was at the paper, the national president of the AP gave a talk so soporific I could barely keep my eyes open, and was mystified by the giggling from the younger staff members seated nearby, but that, too, is another story (short version: pot-laced brownies).

After the speechmaking, cocktail hour started, and that was the real purpose of the Clinic — to get loaded on the company and commence the sort of behavior you couldn’t do in the newsroom. The bartenders poured as though liquor was perishable and they’d be fined for every bottle they let spoil. The card tables were uncovered; poker games ensued. Then dinner. Then more drinking, until around 11. Then maybe more drinking at a nearby Holiday Inn.

(Another ironclad Clinic tradition: Never, ever call in sick the next day, unless you were hospitalized. Which nearly happened to Ned, that year.)

I already told you Ned was a drunk, so you already know the story. Trying to get out of the parking lot, he mistook a sidewalk for a driveway and got stuck between two trees. Let’s let Borden pick up the story from here:

A security guard ran over and tried to help Ned, urging him to gun the engine and pull back. Ned did. No avail. Then, the guard suggested he floor it in forward. Ned did. The car became wedged even more tightly between the trees.

Naturally, the photographers came running and shot about 1,000 rolls of film. The car was so tightly lodged that one of the trees had to be removed. But there was, of course, a silver lining. Ned was presented with a T-shirt on which the photo of his mangled auto between the trees appeared.

It really was a magnificent fuck-up. The car was stuck as tight as a tick, up on two wheels, and it did, indeed, cost one tree its life to get the thing free. I recall one other detail: The publisher asking, "Where’s Ned?" and the guard saying, "He’s in the Wigwam, sir. He’s … lying down."

I didn’t mention that story because it’s only funny if you were there, and if you weren’t, it’s just another drunken-newspaperman story, and there are far better ones than that. My feelings about alcohol and the newspaper business have…evolved over the years, and I no longer see this sort of incident as proof of character or a colorful personality or heroism or anything else. Let’s face it, if he’d gotten out the driveway and killed somebody on the way home, no one would be remembering that night fondly. Booze is as strongly linked to our business as it is to many others, and I’m sorry that publishers are so worried about liability now that the bar has long since closed — the Clinic is now a dry event, no surprise there. A true moderate, I prefer the happy medium, with oiled conversation and without cars stuck between trees.

My point: I’m sure Ned’s family had some other stories to tell. My friend Deb, child of an alcoholic, dropped out of her book club the month they read "Charming Billy." "I don’t want to read a book about a drunk," she said. "I’ve had enough of that."

Here’s a much better Ned story, from Kirk: he was standing in newsroom when some young babe walked through. "there goes a winsome lass," he said. a few seconds later, a somewhat homelier young woman strolled past. "winsome, lose some," he said.

Happy Easter to you all. And our sympathies go out to NN.C reader Ashley’s wife Hana, who is Czechoslovakian, and must suffer the ritual of being beaten with a stick by the man in her life. It’s to ensure her fertility; she must give him an egg in return. Having given him a child in the last year, I don’t think she owes him anything on that score, especially if he comes after her with a hockey stick, as he claimed to do last year. Hana, if you read this, I suggest you leave it raw and aim for his face.

The rest of you, enjoy your holiday and think of me in the once-again-chilly Midwest (grrr…), eating barbecued turkey and deviled eggs.