Friday Stuff

Another Book Blog to Consider. The New Yorker magazine starts a book blog. In the past, I've pointed you to book blogs maintained by the NYTimes and Washington Post. But you can never have enough good ones. What do you think of the new entrant, Darby?

The Yuck Factor. Slate asks the burning question you've all no doubt been wondering about: should you drink your own urine if pressed by extreme thirst?

Tired of Reading or Thinking About Baby Boomers? I'm not, since I'm among them. So I did check out this list of supposed myths about boomers. Nothing too earth-shaking in there.

Godin on Nonprofit Marketing. My favorite marketing guru, Seth Godin (whose fresh, literate insights I've often pointed you to in the past) recently fielded questions on marketing nonprofit causes in an online discussion with the excellent Chronicle of Philanthropy.

McCain Tops List of Senators Missing Votes. I'm a little surprised we haven't heard more about this from the Obama campaign. But give them time. Until recently, all the opposition research has been targetted at Hillary. It's now turned to McCain. So expect to hear about this soon, unless the Obama folks figure that their guy coming in at #3 on that same list would render this a little less useful.

Leonard's First Rule of Writing

'My most important rule is one that sums up the ten (rules): if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.'

--from master crime novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard's exercise in minimalism, Ten Rules of Writing. Please note that he uses the word "sounds" rather than "looks." You can check out his books here and his official website here. Salon.com did a nice profile of him nearly a decade ago in its splendid Brilliant Careers series, and he was the focus of the New York Times' similarly interesting Writers on Writing series here. Alas, both series are no more.

Making the Most
Of Your Regrets

'Make the most of your regrets. To regret deeply is to live afresh.'
--Henry David Thoreau. For earlier mentions of that scruffy-faced 19th-century transcendentalist poet with a hankering for secluded ponds, go here, here, here and here.

Race, Bigotry and the Voting Booth

The Chicago Tribune discovers that--stop the presses!--race still matters to some white voters. Anyone who lives in this country and occasionally keeps their eyes open might have already figured that out. Psychologists, meanwhile, explore the effects of the subtle bigot in our brains. One eye-opener from this excellent (latter) article: "Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other."

Here's Latest Twist on

Absentee Landlordism

I have the good fortune to belong to a small group of seasoned Cleveland writers who occasionally gather for lunch at irregular intervals. Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, everyone's favorite earnest local pol, happened to join us for our last session. As I was sipping my soup, he startled us (or maybe just me) a bit with this surprising tidbit, an outcome of both the online auction revolution and Cleveland's home foreclosure crisis. "I get emails all the time: 'I just bought my house on Ebay. Can you tell me what my taxes will be?'" Last year, I noted this op-ed on the region's foreclosure crisis that Jim wrote for the Washington Post. He's also been active on the issue of trying to force wealthy nonprofits to ante up their fair share of the tax burden, as I noted here. Next week, Jim will be addressing the foreclosure crisis at the City Club. I expect to be there, and hope to see a few of you as well.

Happy Birthday, Studs

Chicago's reigning bard of the working class turned 96 today. We celebrate his longevity, as well as his stubborn lack of modernity. After all, he's an unreconstructed New Dealer in the age of...well, whatever this political age might be called, it surely doesn't have much to do anymore with FDR's radically egalatarian vision. To review earlier mentions of Stud, go here, here and here.

Thursday Stuff

Best Headline and Subhead of the Week...goes to the Weekly Standard, for this little gem of wiseassery (my coinage) at the expense of the magazine's favorite targets, the Clintons. If you don't immediately get the joke, just give it a moment and think about it. Hint: it harkens back to the Lewinsky scandal.

Read It and Weep. Ohio Attorney General Mark Dann, once positioned to be the second coming of the crusading AG in the likeness of Eliot Spitzer, has followed him into disgrace by resigning yesterday. If you're a glutton for punishment, here's the investigative report that prompted the whole thing, although it's been criticized by some as being a partial whitewash. But you decide.

Moore's At It Again. The Iraq war is increasingly slipping out of the news pages and the larger cultural conversation. But director Michael Moore isn't letting up on it. The New York Observer reports (well, it really just reprints a press release about it) that the rotund lefty auteur is now working on a followup to his devastating anti-Iraq war flick Fahrenheit 9/11. Like many, I found the latter film to be a little too emotionally manipulative to be completely effective, or as effective as it might have been (and there was considerable speculation -- which I think was warranted-- that it boomeranged and left some voters sympathetic to Bush, thus helping him squeek into a second term). But it was nevertheless quite interesting, and an important contribution to the debate. I would expect this next one will be as well.

Finally, We Bring You what I would consider to be perhaps the best blog autobio ever written, in this case by a veteran Chicago sportswriter whom I first came across only yesterday. "They tell me I have to write this bio thing to go along with my blog. Not sure you care, but the bosses apparently do, so here you go: I've covered sports for more than 30 years in print, on radio and now in cyberspace. In that time, I've smoked cigars with Michael Jordan, Mike Ditka and Red Auerbach, I've been thrown on a table by NHL all-time bad boy Dave "Tiger'' Williams, I've covered the Super Bowl, NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals, I've had former Bears lineman Stan Thomas act like he was going to squeeze my head like a zit, I've interviewed Roger Clemens, Hank Aaron and Donald Trump, I've been cursed at by Mike Keenan, I've watched Denis Savard go into the Hockey Hall of Fame, I've been yelled at by Bill Wirtz, I talked sports with Ben Affleck at the World Series of Poker, and I cry almost every time I see Jim Craig skate up the ice looking for his dad in the stands as the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team wrote the greatest sports story ever. Ever. I have a diva going to fashion school in Los Angeles and a power-hitting DH who's a junior in high school. Got enough on me? Good. Now read the other stuff." After that wild & wonderful riff, who could resist reading more? If you've seen anything that can compete with that, dear reader, by all means do let us know.

Stamps & Taxes

In the "New Rule" segment of his show recently, comedian Bill Maher suggested the country needed to institute this new rule: "You don't need to use stamps to mail in your taxes. They're going to the same people who sold you the stamp! It's like a collection agency calling you collect." You can review previous mentions of Maher here, here, here, here and here.

One Complimentary Weekend Writers' Retreat

I mentioned not long ago that I'd be presenting a workshop at a weekend writer's retreat my friend Claudia Taller has organized at a marvelous Victorian bed & breakfast along the Lake Erie coast. It's coming up this weekend, and there are just two or three spots left. As a token of my esteem for you all, gentle readers, I want to offer one complimentary registration to the reader who sends the best brief description of why they're the one who deserves it (we pick up the conference registration, by the way, you cover the room). You can do it either publicly through adding a comment to this entry, or privately via email at john.ettorre@gmail.com (though we ask that you let us post your description, even if it's not accompanied by your name). So check your calendars, make sure this weekend works for you, and then send along a brief expression of how you might benefit from such a session. Tell us anything you think is germane to the subject: where you're at in your writing, how you've always thought about attending a writer's conference but somehow never got around to it--whatever it might be. Don't be shy, and please don't think of this as a daunting homework assignment. A short, heartfelt paragraph will do. If we get two great ones (and there are still two slots available), we might just spring for two freebies. After all, who deserves more support and encouragement than readers of this blog (your task, after all, can't be easy)? In last week's edition of Cool Cleveland, Claudia nicely explained some of the sources of her inspiration for putting this together. She's a nut for Julia Cameron's The Artist Way philosophy, just as I'm a hardened disciple of the Bill Zinsser On Writing Well approach to craft, and the combination is powerful, indeed. We're talking about possibly collaborating on something even bigger and better for the fall season.

Best Lead of the Month

'Who is Barbara Walters? She is a journalist who cannot write ("just before the ax fell, lightning struck and my life changed, never to be the same again"). She is the veteran of a major TV network's news division who once wedged a piece on her own apartment into a prime-time broadcast. She is a celebrity who is most famous for her orbital relationship with other celebrities. Immensely rich and familiar to all, she has been around forever without anyone quite knowing why. And now she is a memoirist.'
--from a Wall Street Journal review of Walters' new book. The review was written by New York Post staff writer Kyle Smith. Besides enjoying the appropriately wicked, slashing language he uses to dispatch with Walters' book, we marvel in the rich irony of a writer for the trashy NY Post criticizing someone else for lack of seriousness and faulty ethics. To review past best leads of the month, go here.

Death of the Novel Foretold

Author Tom Wolfe tells an interviewer for National Review TV that "the novel is dying a horrible death--it really is." But it's not preventing him from working on his fourth novel, due out next year. Its subject is immigration. You can watch the video here. To review an earlier item on Wolfe, go here.

Friday Stuff

Deconstructing The Daily Show. A journalism group issues a detailed study on Jon Stewart's Comedy Central show. Does it amount to a bit of humorless overkill? Who can say? We report, you decide. But we found this passage particularly interesting: "...at times, The Daily Show aims at more than comedy. In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature—getting people to think critically about the public square. In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers."

The Top 'Ugh' Story of the Week. This needs no comment.

The Editing Wars. A veteran Middle East correspondent takes an interesting look at how the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict has now moved to Wikipedia.

Geeks Stalking Airports. This one was just plain interesting. And it's doubly nice that it's from a source--Popular Mechanics, of all places--that we wouldn't normally read. But we were pleasantly surprised at how good the pub is. A reminder that good work can often be found in the most surprising places. Last year, for instance, we noted some superior writing in the fashion magazine Elle.

ESPN on the Browns' Quarterback Controversy. The sports bible takes a peek at the continuing question of who will emerge from the spirited competition over the starting quarterback's job. This is a nice problem to have.

Finally, I hope you can find some time this weekend to luxuriate in this luminous gem of a story in the wonderful Smithsonian magazine by my friend and fellow John Carroll graduate Mike Thomas, a staff writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. The Bossard family of which he writes will be familiar to most Cleveland sports fans. Reading this remarkable story reminded me of a conversation I had with Mike some years ago. He was not long out of college, stuck in a non-satisfying job at a manufacturing company in Cleveland, and dreaming of making an escape to a writing life. Most people, alas, never seriously follow up on that dream. Mike did, and I shudder to think of what the world might have missed had he not gone for the brass ring. I shudder even more at what it might have meant for Mike. After all, as we noted recently, there's a big price to pay for deferring dreams. May all of yours come true this weekend, gentle readers.

Drawbacks of Being

An Elder Statesman

'I don't like that term elder statesman. A lady came up to me in a restaurant and said, 'if you died your hair black, you'd look like Al Gore.'

--Al Gore, in an interview on Tuesday with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air program, pooh poohing the notion that he might have to be called upon as a party elder to help break the Obama-Clinton logjam.

Wednesday Stuff

Our Favorite Headline of the Week: 'Welcome to America...You're Under Arrest.' A close runner-up: 'I'm Not Lying, I'm Telling a Future Truth. Really.'

Director Spike Lee says "Obama will change everything." But I'm not sure I want to put too much stock in a guy whose next "film" project involves piecing together various bits of video taken by cellphones. Sounds more like a marketing stunt to sell phones than a movie to me.

Here's How You Can Play Like Lebron. Just follow his exercise regimen and you'll be on your way. Looks easy enough, doesn't it?

Former Newspaper Guy Picks Up Blogging In Record Time. This fellow just left a staff job at a newspaper after a career spent at a series of such jobs. Judging by this sublime description of why people blog, we think he took to the blog format in record time. The bad news: he'll soon find out that some, including this hipster who recently took up shaving, think "blogs seem so yesterday." The big thing now is video, or vlogs (that sound you hear is me snoring). So what's a recycled writer to do? We advise against chasing the latest fad. Just make sure it's good, whatever you do. Everything else has a way of taking care of itself.

If Writing Text is So Yesterday, Reading is Too. Apple CEO Steve Jobs caused a small stir not long ago by saying no one reads anymore. But his Macs certainly are in no danger of dying out. Due to their rising popularity, a geek digest (E-Week) says company IT departments now must deal with what it calls "Mac creep," the growing demands from internal users to accomodate Macs instead of PCs. Anyway, this piece nicely demolishes the absurd notion that people aren't reading anymore. On the contrary, the web has helped launch an explosion of reading and writing by millions of people. The alarmists attempt a nice parlor trick by simply not counting any of that. How convenient, and how ridiculous.

Now Here's a Book

Worth Checking Out

The title of this book grabbed my interest, as did the cover photo. And this brief Q&A with the author further seduced me. I haven't seen it in bookstores yet, but I'll surely be looking for it next time I'm there. To learn more about the author--who's been described as "the most entertaining tech policy geek in the world. Imagine Dennis Miller with a cyberlaw degree"--you can check out his website.

Just How High Will Gas Prices Have to Go
For Americans to Change Driving Habits?

That's a question that's often been asked in the media over the years, amid all the crush of stories about how cheap our gasoline is compared to much of the rest of the world. But when the number at the pump went over $60 for the first time ever when I recently filled the family van, I know I hit a tipping point. Now, with prices growing ever nearer to $4 a gallon, with no end in sight, I can't decide whether to curtail my driving, or storm the White House and Capitol Hill in protest. Instead, I'm thinking about a few small changes I can make around the edges of my life. Which causes me to read features such as this one in Time. Not exactly breakthrough stuff here, but a couple of the ideas might be worth looking into. Please, dear readers, share your ideas with us also. Links are welcome. And by the way: I really appreciated and enjoyed the interesting conversation that continued here while I was gone over the weekend. Thanks, gentle readers, for adding value to this venue even when I couldn't.

We're On Vacation Today...

...Preparing for what we hope will be the Cavs final series game tonight in Washington. Rather than rehash my thoughts about the Cavs, Lebron and our long-suffering major league sports teams and what they mean to Cleveland, I'll instead link to this disquisition on those subjects that I served up two years ago at NBA playoff time. I'll be traveling this weekend, and will take a rare two consecutive days off of my writing here. But I'll be back in the saddle on Monday. Talk to y'all then, my lovelies.

He Has Plenty
Of Company
In The Current
Election Season

"Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against."
--the late comedian W.C. Fields.
To learn more about his career in the movies, you can go here. To read one person's take on Fields' "absurdist politics" go here.

New York Magazine Poses a Key Question:
Which of These Loose Cannons Is Louder?

Bill Clinton or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Can you believe these pathetic narcissists? I'm considering taking up a collection to send them off together on a months-long vacation, so the rest of us can put our focus back where it belongs, on the candidates. But where do you think we should send them?

A Couple of Events That May Interest You

I'll be taking part in a couple of writing-related events in coming days and weeks that I thought I should provide links to. Tomorrow, I'll be moderating a panel on the evolution of digital content (that's a fancy term for the words that appear on websites) at the Web Association. My friends Dan Hanson and Marc Majers will be among the panelists. The Web Association has become a wonderful learning environment and a great place to meet fellow webbies and to share ideas about better leveraging the medium. Next month, I'll be joining my scribbler buddy Claudia Taller, who's president of the group Skyline Writers, for an idyllic weekend retreat devoted to the writing craft. That should be an especially wonderful event, and she tells me there are still some slots open (attendance is being capped at 20, due to limitations on overnight accomodations). Hope to see some of you at one or the other.

If You Read Only One Article Today,
We Would Humbly Suggest This One

For at least 20 years, since analysts nervously predicted the imminent eclipse of America's world dominance by the juggernaut that was then Japan, we've been treated to a series of learned books and articles about how America's global dominance would soon come to an end. But I can't recall a better, more nuanced exploration of this subject, ever, than this wonderful piece by Fareed Zakaria, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Excerpted from his soon-to-be published book, it brilliantly explores the pluses and minuses of America's chances of remaining the world's pre-eminent power in coming decades.

I think he makes a persuasive case that America's steady flow of immigrants and continuing pre-eminence in higher education and such foundational sectors as nanotechnology and biotechnology suggest that the country can maintain its global edge for decades. But he does rightly worry about how our "dysfunctional politics" keeps us from making relatively modest course corrections. "As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. What was an antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with (now about 225 years old) has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia -- politics as theater -- and very little substance, compromise, or action. A can-do country is now saddled with a do-nothing political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving."

In any case, I look forward to your thoughts.

Saturday Stuff

Best Headline of the Week. From the British paper The Telegraph: "Polygamy Doesn't Work, Says Father of 77."

Consumer Reports Does it Again. Last week, we ridiculed the silliest "coverage" of Earth Day. So we owed you the opposite. The best of the bunch, we thought, was this comprehensive Earth Day Guide from Consumer Reports. Simply sublime.

Thuggish Scalia Goes Public to Plug His Book. If I could still be shocked by anything our thuggish federal government does, one of the most shocking things would be that a creep named Antonin Scalia could actually sit on the Supreme Court. Scalia (who spent a few years in Cleveland, working for the law firm Jones Day) is so disdainful of democracy and of democratic traditions that he really would be a better fit to preside over a court somewhere in a banana republic, where his creepy views and thuggish tactics wouldn't stick out so obviously. The Reuters news agency notes that the famously private justice, whose security detail once forced reporters to erase the tape they made of a public speech he gave (it would have taken about five of them to hold me down for that), is now opening up with the media. Why? He happens to have a new book out. Here's hoping the public will treat his book the same way he treats the public.

Okay, I Admit It: I'm Shallow. I would have loved to attend this presentation the other night. Wilson is a first-class thinker and writer on a crucial topic, probably the leading authority on the issue of urban poverty. But it would have meant missing part of the Cavs playoff game. Sorry, but that's simply not going to happen. For my penance, I've assigned myself the task of reading/listening to a few articles by and interviews of Dr. Wilson (if you'd like to do the same, you could start with this, this and this). Eventually, I hope to read his classic book.

Okay, I Admit It: I'm Shallow (Part 2). Rush Limbaugh famously observed on his idiot radio show, in a knock on the idea of electing Hillary Clinton, that Americans don't want to watch a woman age in the White House. Perhaps Hillary could take a page from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently wore a dress with an alarming (for some people) abundance of decollatage for a world leader. It apparently received considerable media attention. I thought it was wonderful, though. She'd get my vote. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Hillary to duplicate it any time soon.

Doing What Wild Animals Tend to Do. I loved this small detail from a Los Angeles Times account of the tragic killing of an animal trainer by a 700-lb. bear used in several Hollywood films. "For unknown reasons, the bear lunged at 39-year-old Stephan Miller..." Unknown reasons? How about the fact that it's a wild animal doing what nature groomed it to do?

Stop the Presses! Party girl Jenna Bush may not support McCain for president. Gosh, can his campaign ever survive such a blow? After all, who has more moral authority than she?

Finally, NPR's Michael Feldman got off a good joke this morning. During a riff about the Texas polygamist clan, he noted that the state is being forced to decide whether the children have been abused. After all, their knowledge of the outside world is so spotty that they didn't know who the president of the United States is. He concluded with the observation that "it's the state's burden to show why that's a bad thing."

He Was There at the Dawn of Spam

'There was a first oh, no moment. That was the first time I saw spam pop up. It could have been as early as '79. A digital-equipment corporation sent a note around announcing a job opening, and we all blew up, saying, 'this is not for advertising! This is for serious work!''
--Vint Cerf in the current Esquire Magazine, recalling the first time he saw spam on the Internet, which he is often credited with helping to develop. Now the chief evangelist for Google, Cerf was in Cleveland two years ago for a memorable address to the City Club. I'd post a link to the podcast, but it seems to be inoperable at the moment.

Craigslist Keeps Growing

Craigslist continues to confound Internet-watchers. Its founder seems to happily pass up the chance to become a billionaire, refusing not only to sell the site, but even to charge for the ads people place on the sites (it only charges modest fees for apartment listings in a handful of cities). Traffic has doubled in the last year, and with another new round of expansion into lots more cities, Craigslist now operates sites in nearly 600 cities. And yet its founder, Craig Newmark (a graduate of Case Western Reserve University) is one of the most truly down-to-earth guys you'd ever want to meet. Not long ago, I wrote a media column that mentioned Craigslist, and emailed him with some questions. Not long after, he replied, courteously apologizing for taking a day to respond (he had been on a flight back from Korea). Every company should have a leader and founding visionary like this. Of course, few do.

Departing from the Herd

You must have heard that there's a new museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Called the Newseum, it's a half-billion-dollar temple to the First Amendment and the professional news industry. You didn't really need to read all the dozens of stories about it, because they pretty much all said the same thing. Too bad they couldn't have used the money to instead endow a newspaper (I'd agree with that) and how ironic that it's being opened now, when the media is in such notable decline. On and on went the media herd, repeating each other ad nauseum, like editorial robots.

It wasn't until I came across this piece, in a refreshing online-only magazine called Flak, that I finally learned something new about this museum: that it subtly, or perhaps not-so-subtly, tilts its message rightward. That wouldn't be too surprising, given that the main force behind it is the Gannett Foundation, controlled by the idiot founder of USA Today, Alan Neuharth (famous for his editorial edict in the early days of McPaper to put the "tits above the fold" when publishing a photo of a pretty woman on page one). Anyway, it was nice to finally read a fresh take on a tired subject. And it took an obscure, underfunded publication (which operates on an all-volunteer basis) to deliver it all up. I think there's a lesson in there somewhere for the news industry as it obsesses about its future.

Our Favorite Book Titles, Part 11

Once more, we have a tie this month, folks. Here are a pair of books with the kinds of titles that would at least cause me to take a moment to study the book. The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted--And Other Small Acts of Liberation. Also, while I've always found Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz a hyper-irritating weasle, I do nevertheless like the title of his new book: Is There a Right to Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11. To review earlier favorite book titles, you can go here.

The Enduring Satisfactions of Craftsmanship

'The laborer with a sense of craft becomes engaged in work in and for itself; the satisfactions of working are their own reward; the details of daily labor are connected in the worker's mind to the end products; the worker can control his or her own actions at work; skill develops within the work process; work is connected to the freedom to experiment; finally, family, community and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence and experiment in craft labor.'
--The late sociologist C. Wright Mills, quoted in the new book, The Craftsman. As his biographer noted recently, Mills, a "broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding anarchist" sociology professor, also wrote a line a half century ago that sounds eerily contemporary: "For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end."

A Haunting Story About a Doomed Brother

Cleveland writer Erin O'Brien published a remarkable article this week, a tender memoir about her brother John O'Brien, author of the novel Leaving Las Vegas. Please, do yourself a favor and set it aside for when you have a few quiet moments. But be warned: you may need a small box of Kleenex to get through it. While you're at it, you might also check out Erin's blog. Her writing is always a treat, but with this piece, I think she launched herself into another league entirely.

Be Prepared for Tsunami of Stupidity
Related to Hipster Holiday, Earth Day

Hey, I'm just as interested in the environment as the next guy, but what I have no stomach for is idiocy parading as regard for the environment. With Earth Day about to happen (this Tuesday), be prepared for a blizzard of fake "news" and soft trend "stories" about eco-friendliness. Here's my nominee for dumbest story yet (though we'll no doubt find lots of others to rival or surpass it). It's a reminder that NBC's Today show continues to get softer and sillier, making the Katie Couric era seem downright serious by comparison. I loved this Washington Post critic's description: the show "might best be described as a women's magazine -- pre-"Feminine Mystique" -- brought to life. It is an hour dominated by extreme weight-loss stories, ambush makeovers and recipes for carrot cake so good that it will make a man propose." Anyway, you're welcome to add your nominees for worst, but also for best, Earth Day coverage via the comments section.

Friday Stuff

You're the Winner! And what have you won? An internship at the cheesy New York Post or Fox News. No thanks.

Coming Soon: A Total Waste of Paper. Raise your hand if you believe that bully boy Don Rumsfeld's memoir will add significantly to our understanding of the Iraq war fiasco. Anyone?

Thinking About Retirement Yet? This handy feature from Smithsonian Magazine will clue you in to some good places to consider.

Probing the Sources of Your Obsession with Reading This Blog. Are you tired of losing hours of work, sleep and time with loved ones while engaging in the silly habit of reading this and other blogs? If so, this Wall Street Journal blog does its level best to explain your addiction.

Dee Dee Weighs in on Veep choices. Former Bill Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers has some interesting thoughts on presidential VP choices.

Experiment in Ad-Driven Books. We don't necessarily endorse this idea, but found it interesting nevertheless. Kelly was founding editor of Wired Magazine.

Finally, we bring you this depressing story about the massive philanthropic need this criminal war in Iraq continues to create. It speaks to two important issues: the fact that the Bush Administration's attempts to put a number on the war don't begin to cover the real costs, and it also highlights the nauseating reality that, as a military veteran and father of a current soldier once observed to NPR, "we are a military at war, not a nation at war." Shame on us all.

Cleveland's Best Writer

So who is the best writer in the Cleveland area? It's a question I've been asked occasionally. And of course there's really no definitive answer. This is an utterly subjective category, and resists any authoritative answer. Besides, there are so damn many great writers in this town, who pursue such different kinds of writing. How could you parse them all down to a single best?

Having said all that, however, I do have a favorite Cleveland writer, one who I think of as possibly the best on several levels. He's a quiet craftsman who has been writing great stuff (without any personal drama or attempts to call attention to himself) for decades. While our paths have crossed through various publications, and we apparently have some mutual friends and acquaintances, I've never yet met him (though perhaps I will try to soon). But I have been reading his work for about 20 years now in various venues, and have always marveled over it. It's always interesting, fluid, sometimes (maybe often) even hypnotic. Best of all, his work always manages to accomplish that hardest thing of all in writing, a subject about which I've talked before: as a writer, he gets out of the way and lets the writing take center stage. To me, that's the mark of a consummate pro.

After that introduction, perhaps you think he's a household name. Well, perhaps to some discriminating readers, he might be. But to the vast majority of readers, it may be more accurate to call him an unknown. His name is John Hyduk. You can sample his latest work here. I've only mentioned him twice (here and here) before in this venue (shame on me, and double shame for once misspelling his name). You can also see his work here, here, here, here and here.

Best Lead of the Month

'Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.'
--from a review in a recent issue of the New Yorker of a new biography of the Dalai Lama. Talk about packing an entire profile into a single opening paragraph. We especially enjoyed the detail about Larry King's confusion. To review past best leads, go here.

Three Good Reads

A brilliant Fortune mag cover story on what makes Target stores tick. An illuminating profile of cable yakker Chris Matthews in the New York Times magazine. And a fun, offbeat take on the tipping plague, from Canada's leading newsweekly, Maclean's. To review the inaugural installment of TGR, you can go here.

Time on Sex-Starved Wives;
But Do They Actually Exist?

Time talks about a phenomenon called "sex-starved wives." Sorry, but I just have a little trouble imagining they exist, except in the rarest of circumstances. Chalk it up to gender confusion, political correctness, journalistic contrarianism or something else. But it just doesn't conform to any reality most males have observed.

Bush: An Easy Act to Follow

'They're saying that McCain is better on the environment than Bush, which is like saying 'I have a roommate who's not a werewolf.''
--Comedian Bill Maher. Want to learn more about how this administration has hobbled its own EPA? The National Journal serves up the story, in nauseating detail. Law prof Jeffrey Rosen argues in The New Republic that Bush's legal war against the environment backfired. And U.S News & World Report notes that historians are giving his presidency an early thumbs-down.

Artists and Pricing

A couple of weeks ago, I got an interesting and unusual invitation. The Community Partnership for Arts & Culture, the group established to sell the region on public funding for the arts (they were successful in getting Issue 18 passed, which generates about $15 million a year in cigarette taxes for arts organizations), convenes classes for artists that help them with the business side of their pursuits. They call it the Artist as Entrepreneur Insitute. The classes attract mostly visual artists, but a smattering of writers have also been showing up, and so CPAC decided to add a few writers to the mix of presenters. And so last night I joined a panel devoted to the subject of pricing one's services. A charming woman named Joan Perch, of the Red Dot Project, knew way more about this subject than I do, so I listened and learned along with everyone else. And then I tried to add my two cents about establishing one's creative brand, and leveraging the web to build your practice. While none of the assembled artists seemed to be using the web to promote their work, Red Dot (funded by the Civic Innovation Lab) does a wonderful job of it, and even has an excellent blog. All in all, an enjoyable session yesterday afternoon at Kent State, followed by an equally enjoyable catch-up dinner with my young friend Theresa, about whom I've previously written.

Journalism 101

'Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be—corporate and political and sometimes journalistic—there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government’s lies and contradictions, 'I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested.' Journalism 101.'
--Bill Moyers, in an essay adapted from an acceptance speech he made upon winning a journalism award. To review earlier items on the heroic Mr. Moyers, go here, here, here and here.

Some Things I Set Aside to Share

Head Shaving as a Form of Solidarity. Senator Arlen Specter was on NPR's Diane Rehm show some weeks ago, talking about his bout with cancer with the fill-in host, USA Today's Susan Page. He noted that at one point, he lost all of his hair, and his colleague, Sen. John Sununu, shaved his hair in sympathy.

Golden Arches Coffee Wins. Whenever I stop at a Starbucks, it's only to purchase a copy of the New York Times. I wouldn't pay for the designer coffee, which in addition to being overpriced, is really awful stuff. So I was pleased (if not altogether surprised) to learn recently that Consumer Reports last year ranked their coffee below that served by McDonald's. I think any real coffee drinker could have told them that.

No Ghosts Here. I think one of the too-infrequently-mentioned reasons why Barack Obama remains a favorite of the national media is the fact that he wrote what's said to be a pretty good book, and he didn't need the obligatory ghostwriter to do it. Not long ago on NPR, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg argued that the candidate's first book "is so good it's almost like he was a writer turned politician." On the other hand, the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus said of Hillary's autobiography that there are "long stretches where it sounds like a bad travel writer who's being paid by the word." Ouch.

Great Use of Metaphor. Not long ago, I linked to a great Wall Street Journal piece that I thought did the best at explaining the real stakes of the subprime fiasco. In an interview published in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill offered by far the pithiest explanation of the crisis. Asked how these subprime mortgages could spark a global crisis, he responded: "If you have 10 bottles of water, and one bottle had poison in it, and you didn't know which one, you probably wouldn't drink out of any of the 10 bottles; that's basically what we've got here."

He's Only Too Happy to Service Seniors. Finally, we couldn't help but bring you a quick outtake from a cover interview in the March/April AARP Magazine, with Hollywood bad boy Jack Nicholson. Asked if he would date a woman of AARP age (50 and over), he had this piquant reply: "Well, yes--I'd do everything to a woman of AARP age, and have."

Wednesday Stuff

Memorable Smooches. Time Mag chooses the best-ever kisses on film. Personally, I could have done without the one from Brokeback Mountain. Okay, so now you know that I'm a squeamish hetero. Use that information as you see fit...

Compare Your Salary. Mediabistro offers this interesting survey of median salaries in the Midwest for various creative industries.

Idiot on the Idiot Box. Here's a classic near-goof by CNN blowhard Lou Dobbs, the second coming of America's No Nothing movement.

Food for Thought. Some interesting tips for anyone who's trying to get a blogger to write about them.

Cleveland as Stand-In for Rust Belt. The humorist and Toledo native P.J. O'Rourke writes about China's Rust Belt for an obscure right-wing publication, and the editors add a provocative headline: "The Cleveland of Asia: A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt."

Finally, Some Book Thoughts. Prolific book reviewer John Freeman asks: has reading about books replaced actually reading them? And the NYT book blog warns against the seven deadly words used in book reviews. I especially liked the warning about using the fancy five-dollar word "eschew." When's the last time you heard anyone use that in conversation?

Seth Godin Suggests: Write Like a Blogger

This morning, I spoke to a journalism class at Cleveland State University, and was met with more questions--and great questions--than at any other time I've talked about writing, anywhere, ever. My friend (and their teacher) Cliff Anthony is obviously doing something right (two years ago, I wrote about him a little). These students were an invigorating reminder of what it's all about. This afternoon, the marketing guru and writer Seth Godin provided me with another important reminder of what it's all about. Below is his entire entry. His most important point, I think: "Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy." Remember, you can get closer to perfection with rounds of rewriting and revising. But nobody begins there, or even close to there. You have to work at it.

You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:

Use headlines. I use them all