The wife, the kids and I were watching the cute game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” and all of a sudden some kind of game theory/philosophy seminar broke out.

The contestant, a woman named Stephanie, had reached the final question, worth $1 million. She had earned $500,000 by correctly answering the previous question. If she got the million-dollar question wrong, she would walk away with $25,000.

She could see the subject of the final question before deciding whether to answer it, and she could walk away at that point with the $500,000. But once she saw the question, she had to answer.

The subject was music. Stephanie looked disappointed, but she also said she’d taken violin lessons for 10 years. She was 25 years old, I guessed and a post-show Google search confirmed. Her name is Stephanie Wambach. She’s from St. Louis, where the wife and I used to live—and which requires that I say she went to Marquette High School. And she went to the wife’s alma mater, Indiana University. This is all foreshadowing, in a kind of lame way.

Here’s a clip of the last few minutes of the episode, uploaded to YouTube in 2007.

Stephanie had mostly breezed through the answers, on questions ranging from second- to fifth-grade level, struggling only a little and using just one of her three “cheats.” “Fifth-grade level” makes these questions sound easier than they are. They’re not rocket science, but fifth-grade questions aren’t pushovers. If you’re not familiar with the subject, or don’t remember it from fifth grade, you’re sunk. One of the fifth-grade questions Stephanie had answered asked what country Sweden shared its longest border with.

Now she thought over whether to go for the $1 million on the music question or “drop out” with $500,000.

“You have to go for the million,” I said to the wife. Oh, no, said the wife. You have to take the half-million. “If she gets it wrong she’d be giving away $475,000,” the wife said. That’s how the host, Jeff Foxworthy, had phrased it as Stephanie struggled with her decision: “If you answer the question incorrectly … you give back $475,000.”

That comment seemed designed to push her toward not going for the million, which struck me as odd, since a contestant winning the million bucks would be a home run of a moment for the show. Foxworthy should have been all Dr. Evil: “Think about it: A MILLion dollars,” as if $1 million were a lot of money or something. But he explicitly said he wanted to “talk about the downside.”

“She’s not giving back anything,” I said. “She walked in empty handed. The floor for her, the worst thing that can happen, is she walks out with $25,000. That’s a pretty damn good floor. She’s ‘giving back’ $500,000 by not trying for the million.”

And there you have it. Two fundamentally different ways of looking at risk.

The wife: How can you live with herself if you’d “given back” $475,000 by getting the last question wrong.

Me: Any time I can bet $475,000 of house money to win $500,000, I’m putting the money down as if it weren’t mine—which it isn’t. I never really “had” dollars 25,001 through 500,000 any more than Stephanie “had” dollars 500,001 through 1 million.

Get the last question wrong and the consolation prize would be $25,000. I’d live with myself just fine. I’d walk out thinking, “Losing stinks, but it was the right bet.” And if the same situation came up again, I’d do the same thing.

Stephanie opted out. Interesting: A male person close to her had been in the audience the whole show holding up a sign that said “Go for the $1 million.” Is this a gender thing? Sample size of two so far. The guy, a friend, later wrote a blog post about it.

Foxworthy asked Stephanie if she wanted to see the question and she quickly said, “No!” That followed from her first decision. She didn’t want to risk feeling terrible if she knew the answer, even though, given her decision, she must have thought there was a good chance she wouldn’t know the answer.  Wouldn’t it have felt great to know she’d made the right call?

Fortunately, she quickly changed her mind, since it’s hard to imagine the show not revealing the question. She said, “All right, fine,” I think in response to shouts from the audience. Foxworthy revealed the question: “In the 1720s, what man composed a series of violin concertos known as ‘The Four Seasons’?”

When Foxworthy, reading the question off a video display, got to the word “man,” Stephanie put her hands on her head and gasped, “Oh my God!” Then she crumpled onto the podium. She recovered quickly, took it well, flashing a smile. Foxworthy had her look into the camera and say what I gather is the show’s tag line, but she customized it:

“I guess I’m not smarter than a fifth grader,” she said, “but if I woulda answered the question, I would have been!”

I think that’s right. Even if her answer had been wrong.

Ann Curry tweet

Here’s the text you get when you “share” the video report Curry’s tweeting about:

Overwhelming response to Dateline’s poverty report

A development to the story we brought you about struggling families in Ohio who have been pushed over the edge by this recession. ††There’s been a response from people wanting to help.

http://bit.ly/btt50h

So it’s that old TV thing. NBC does a story on “Dateline” about families struggling through the recession in rural Ohio, and letters and donations and job offers come pouring in from all over the country.

The retired Air Force vet has “job offers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, Iowa.” Someone sent him $5,000. A woman reads through tears from a letter she’s received: “In a couple of weeks I will be able to send you some money to help with expenses. I hope this letter raises your spirits and that you know I really do care. Most of all, you have a friend in me. You are going to be OK, and so are your children. I will be thinking of you, sweetie, and praying that lots of other people send you much-needed money.”

She says, “It’s really hard to believe that someone you’ve never met could actually care that much.”  

The food pantry lady has gotten 500 phone calls and donations from Texas, California, Florida, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine, Canada. She says, “I just cant even describe how good it feels to know that there are so many people out there that really do care.”

This is absolutely par for the course, it’s what happens every single time there is a sob story on the TV, but here’s the thing: People don’t care. They just respond to what’s on television.

There are folks right down the street in Texas, California, Florida and Iowa who need food and basic supplies. There are good, capable people, some of them retired military, right down the street in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa who are looking for work. And after NBC’s report those people still need the basics and are still looking for work. And those people who sent the heartfelt letters and the donations and the job offers likely never moved a muscle for those people down the street.

A guy who drove to the food pantry with a Hefty bag of donations tells the food pantry lady, “Cincinnati Ohio’s thinkin’ of ya,” and she gives him a big hug. Really, guy who drove 170 miles to Lottridge to find someone to give your Hefty bag of stuff to? Because where were you and the rest of Cincinnati before NBC aired its report?

Waiting for food -- or a TV camera -- in Denver.

Curry, who is among the best in the business and whom I don’t mean to beat up on, gets “a smile” out of this, as she should. She did a good piece about people who are struggling, her viewers responded in overwhelming fashion and the people she reported about are deeply moved by their good fortune.

If you focus in tightly enough, it really is a wonderful thing. That relatively tiny group of people in Ohio actually did get a lot of help they weren’t going to get without that TV report. It was like a little miracle, and you’d have to have a hard heart indeed not to be touched by the young mom reading the letter or the hard-working food pantry lady who is suddenly able to provide so much more help to so many more people. I love America too.

But back your view out to the larger picture and what you see is something much more depressing.

Obviously, the people who sent money and goods and job offers had both the means and willingness to help their neighbors in need, but instead they helped some people they saw on TV. Now, I suppose it’s possible that every one of them, from the donor of $5,000 to the Hefty bag guy from Cincinnati to the job offerers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa, are doing just as much for lots of other people closer to home and not on the TV.

I would just be willing to bet a lot that they aren’t.

What Curry’s story suggests is that the generosity of the American people can solve the problems of a lot of folks who need help — as long as they can get on TV. Getting on TV is a lottery ticket, and the depressing part of it is that if you’re in trouble, your chances of getting on TV are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery.

What about all the desperate people who didn’t have a TV network drop out of the sky into their local food pantry? How do we turn their story into “a smile”? Because there are clearly people out there willing to help. There just isn’t enough TV to go around.

Photo by Jeffrey Beall, Creative Commons license.

The online auction is here.

A blog with a lot more detail about the artists, authors etc. who are donating items, as well as details about the items themselves, is here.

And now, the actual post

So I’ve been sick. Really sick. I’m getting better now, and the doctors say I will eventually, in a few months, get all the way better. This is one of the nicer things doctors can say to you, I’ve discovered. It definitely beats when they snap the one glove on and say, “And if you can lower your pants.”

I had a case of something I’d never heard of before, Guillain-Barre syndrome, described here by the Mayo Clinic. Your immune system attacks your nerves, resulting in weakness and numbness, to the point of paralysis. Stupid immune system. Fortunately, either through time or treatment — the docs and researchers don’t actually know which — the process reverses and you get better.

I was in the hospital and a rehab center for 23 days, and I have been on sick leave since the only day I’ve worked so far in 2010: Jan. 4. I’m slowly getting stronger, almost ready to leave my cane at home when I venture out, and I hope to return to work in a week or so.

Here’s another thing I’ve discovered: My friends and family and co-workers are amazing. They flew in from three different time zones to help the wife take care of the kids and various details of life. They brought food, cleaned our house, took our kids places, visited without becoming a burden, told encouraging tales of relatives who recovered fully from GBS, planned and threw our son’s birthday party. And then they brought more food. These people are astonishing. They could not have been more kind.

Imagine if I were a nice person!

And it hasn’t stopped there. My medical expenses have not been overwhelming, but I’ve missed six weeks of work, and might miss a little more than that. State disability makes up for some, but it’s still a financial hit, a few thousand bucks.

As much as my friends have done, there were more who wanted to do something and didn’t know what to do. And not just for me. My friend and co-worker, Cary Tennis, who writes the great advice column Since You Asked for Salon, has also been sick, even sicker than I. He underwent major surgery for sacral chordoma, a rare form of cancer, just before Christmas, and he too remains out of work.

Cary has been chronicling his illness and recovery when he’s been able. In his latest piece, he writes about how, having cheated death, even a trip to the hardware store feels like a miracle.

Now I have this dazzling friend and co-worker named Mignon Khargie. I call her Dazzling Mignon, is how dazzling she is, because she is, I think, a genius of an artist. She has organized a fund-raiser for both Cary and me in the form of what she is calling an online bake sale. She asked some of her artist friends, some of whom know me or Cary, to donate some art for an auction on eBay. But word got out and more people wanted to participate. Not all of them are artists, so there are now all sorts of things for sale.

There’s a lot of art, of course, such as signed prints of the Zach Trenholm caricatures of Cary and me that have adorned our columns for years. Plus! A personal sketch of the purchaser, or whoever the purchaser wants. And there are paintings and illustrations and comics and photos and signed first-edition books and even actual baked goods by a collection of ridiculously talented people, some of whom are famous, some of whom ought to be, some of whom will be someday, some of whom are friends of mine or Cary’s and some of whom are strangers to us.

So you can buy personalized stuff from the likes of Dave Eggers and Heather Havrilesky and Keith Knight and
Janelle Brown and Kate Moses and David Talbot and Scott Rosenberg and Elizabeth Kairys and Mary Elizabeth Williams and Ruth Henrich and Kirsten Menger-Anderson and Laura Miller and Sasha Wizansky and all I’m doing here is listing some of the people who have worked at Salon.

And I can’t leave out my boss, Joan Walsh, a regular on “Hardball” and similar cable news shows, who will debate that relative of yours who most reminds you of her frequent TV foe, Pat Buchanan — or teach you how to do it over coffee.

You can bid on all these things now through Sunday night. Look them over and make your bids at the eBay store or browse through the items, with much more detail — and “bid” links — at the bake sale blog. Everything starts at $9.99.

I’m sure I speak for Cary when I say thank you, from the bottom of our ailing but improving hearts and other body parts, to the talented friends who have donated their work and time, and also to you for reading this and for even thinking about making a bid.

One housekeeping note: In the event that this bake sale raises more money than is needed to cover Cary’s and my medical expenses and lost wages, we will donate the excess to a non-controversial charity to be determined.

And which wasn’t that recent. It’s been a busy week.

“The papers that ‘got it’ fared no better than those that didn’t,” Beau wrote, citing the Raleigh News & Observer, which practically invented online news with Nando.net and which recently offered buyouts to every employee. “Papers who started blogging and trying to open up reader input in 2003 rather than 2006 aren’t in any better shape.”

He goes on to say, “We could place plenty of blame on the ad side but (A) it’s only with the bias of 20/20 hindsight that we could pin that on the editorial side and (B) I’m not sure papers could’ve invented Craigslist, anyway.”

That echoes a comment by another virtual friend, TVerik, a frequent poster at the Baseball Primer Newsblog, where the piece was linked to.

He says my assertion that “there’s no reason that a newspaper couldn’t have conceived of Craigslist misses the point. The reason for the breakaway success of CL is that it’s completely free. An up-and-coming newspaper man would have been laughed out of the executive offices had he suggested a virtually revenue-free way to destroy a major revenue source for the newspaper business.”

So, some replies.

First of all, papers that started blogging in 2003 were about eight years late to the game, and were simply tacking blogs on top of their print-newspaper-on-the-Web model.

Just because Nando.net, which really was great in its day, didn’t make it doesn’t mean nobody could have made it. One valiant effort that ultimately failed does not mean that the entire industry would have failed had it turned its considerable brainpower to trying to figure out a model for this new medium.

Part of Nando.net’s business, as I understand the history, was being an Internet service provider. That arm of it was later sold off.

I don’t know enough about the ISP business — I figure “nothing” is not enough — to really say this, but it seems to me that was the business for newspapers to get into. Everyone who complains about readers who are unwilling to pay for content on the Web is missing the point that readers are paying for content on the Web. We pay our ISPs.

Newspapers and other Web sites — like this one — might be giving away content, but we’re not giving it to readers. We’re giving it to ISPs.

As a reader, I’m not getting the newspaper and everything else I read for free. I pay for my Internet service every month. Like a lot of people I read a lot on the Web while I’m at work — though it should be noted, especially by my bosses, that that’s part of my job and I never, ever read a single word on the clock that isn’t work related. So I don’t pay for what I read at work, but my company does. Someone does.

Newspaper publishers are whining to the Senate and anywhere else someone will listen about how the Internet hasn’t provided and can’t provide a sustainable business model for journalism. But it has. ISPs are happily selling Internet access to those of us who want to see what’s on the Web, as well as get our e-mail and instant messages and share pirated movies.

The newspapers are mostly giving away their journalism — to the ISPs — and that seems like an issue between the newspapers and the ISPs, not between the newspapers and us.

But the newspapers have pretty much always given away the journalism. Back when you paid a quarter for your daily paper, you were buying the thing, the hunk of paper with ink marks on it, maybe a rubber band. You’re still buying the thing now, the Internet service.

The newspapers got boxed out of the thing-selling business is what happened. Tough break, but maybe they should have been thinking about how to use this new medium rather than spending years attacking it as nothing more than a lair for pedophiles and basement-dwelling freaks.

I don’t think it’s “20/20 hindsight” to place blame on the editorial side. The point of the piece was that I saw it coming, and I was a nobody with almost no experience. I agree the failure is probably just as great on the ad side. I just didn’t see it firsthand, so I don’t have much to say about it.

To answer TVErik, papers wouldn’t necessarily have invented Craigslist, sure. Craigslist is a nonprofit. Why would papers invent something that makes no money to replace something that does? But newspapers could have invented something. If they’d come up with a version of classified advertising that wasn’t free but was significantly cheaper and better than the old print model, there might not have been the demand that led to Craigslist being invented.

Then again, Craigslist might have happened anyway. I don’t know. We’ll never know what would have happened in the last 15 years if newspapers had been smart, will we?

David Leonhardt’s fantastic interview with President Obama appears in today’s New York Times Magazine. Leonhardt writes that he interviewed Obama on April 14 after the president gave his speech on the economy at Georgetown University. To help readers better picture what day that was, Leonhardt notes it was the day White House dog Bo was introduced.

The magazine article is, Leonhardt writes, “a lightly edited transcript of that interview.” So unless Leonhardt edits by hammer and chisel, the entire reason for the three-week delay is the lead time for the magazine.

Why are we, the great unwashed readership, mourning the passing of this model?

Obviously the Times decided to run the piece in the Magazine because the Mag is prestigious and the advertising in it is lucrative. From the Times’ perspective, a major interview with the president is a natural for the Magazine.

But how does that do any good for us, the teeming, mouth-breathing masses? “We now present,” the Times is saying, “an interview with the president of the United States about the issues of the day that we could have presented three weeks ago, but that just didn’t work so well for us.”

Well, thanks for the interview, New York Times. It’s really, really good. We knuckle-draggers out here who don’t care about the indispensable role of newspapers in the functioning of our democracy would have liked seeing it three weeks ago.

This is the kind of thing that might partially explain those falling readership numbers, don’t you think, Times?

Repurposed from Facebook status updates!

It was July 1989 and I was on my first night on the San Francisco Examiner night copydesk, my first real professional job.

The gig was to look in the “In basket” — a computer file named for an actual basket that used to sit on the copydesk when everything was done on paper — for stories with my name on them, copy edit them, write the headlines and captions, then move them into the cleverly named “Out basket.” The copy ebbed and flowed with deadlines, so there was some down time.

I filled it by exploring on the computer. I could read the Associated Press wire and, if I recall, United Press International was still around. There was the Scripps-Howard wire and the Knight-Ridder wire and the Hearst wire. I was reading news and feature stories from all over the country and the world, full-length stories for every baseball game in the major leagues, columnists from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News and so on.

Behind me three machines were spitting out several photos a minute, each, from around the globe. Guerrillas in Afghanistan, kids at Coney Island, President Bush at a Cabinet meeting, a play at second base in Milwaukee. For every picture that appeared in the paper, there must have been a thousand that didn’t.

I thought: “Wow. Why can’t I get all this at home?”

I’m not going to lie here. I didn’t envision the Internet. I didn’t see the Web coming. I’m not kicking myself for not founding Yahoo or something.

But I could see that something was coming. I didn’t know exactly how this stuff worked, how those pictures got from Afghanistan to the machine behind me or the Mike Royko column got from Chicago to the green type on my black computer screen.

But I was vaguely aware they came over phone lines of some sort. I had just learned about e-mail that summer while writing a story for the East Bay Express about Chinese students at Berkeley who were using every method at their disposal — including this e-mail doohickey that someone patiently explained to me, several times — to get news about the Tiananmen Square protests in to China, where those stories were being censored.

And I was conscious of the speed of innovation. Just since adolescence, for example, I’d seen calculators, microwave ovens and VCRs go from practically nonexistent to monstrous novelties to much smaller everyday items. I’d seen computers go from room-sized things that technicians ran to desktop items high school kids typed papers and played games on.

There was a computer on my desk in my apartment that wasn’t that different in size to the one at work, only it wasn’t hooked up to a mainframe that was in turn connected to the rest of the world. But I knew that in the future — and I knew it wasn’t the distant future — I’d be able to sit at home, in front of my own computer, and do what I was doing at work. Read the wires, read newspaper stories from all over the world.

I spent a lot of time talking to friends — I was fresh out of J-school, so I had friends willing to talk about such things — about how in a few years we wouldn’t be stuck with our small group of local beat writers and columnists and movie critics. We’d be able to read anyone we wanted!

Here’s something I didn’t think, though, while I was busy not envisioning the Internet. I didn’t think: Newspapers are doomed!

I figured each individual paper would be thrilled at the chance to reach readers outside its delivery area. The Examiner and Chronicle were already trucking papers as far as they could go by morning, rushing to get them to Reno and Fresno and Chico and maybe even farther than that. Why wouldn’t they jump at the chance to get the product to people in Seattle and Philadelphia and Mexico City?

In other words, I assumed newspapers would adjust, adapt. Most of the country’s major papers, including the Examiner, were more than a century old. I figured they’d rolled with a few massive changes over the years. I was sitting at a computer, not a typewriter. The paper was pasted up and photographed — already becoming an antiquated method by 1989, though I didn’t know that — not set on Linotype machines as it had been a few years before. It seemed to me that newspapers were OK with technology and change.

If I had known about the Internet, I would have thought, “Who is better positioned to take advantage of a new text-based information medium than newspapers? We have a giant roomful of people who report, write and edit.”

It was my first night on the job. I hadn’t yet learned how hidebound, how slow, how downright stupid newspaper management could be.

The Web came along as a medium to be reckoned with about five years later. As an industry, newspapers failed to see it as an opportunity and instead treated it, almost unanimously, as a threat, something to be fought and vanquished. It was a mistake the industry made not for weeks or months, but for years. It was the newspaper industry’s fatal error. The way the kids say it now: its epic fail.

My old boss at the Examiner, Phil Bronstein, has been marketing himself as this sage statesman of journalism now that he’s no longer piloting the Chronicle. A few weeks ago, writing on his SFGate.com blog about newspapers in general, he said the industry had been “marched to the gallows by an uncaring and unappreciative public, sentenced by shifting technological and cultural habits and a few bonehead moves of [our] own.”

Oh, brother. Marched to the gallows by an uncaring and unappreciative public? More like reluctantly left behind by a public that had been ignored for more than a decade as it screamed, “This is how we want information delivered to us! Not the way you’re doing it! This other way! Look! Over here! We’re over here now! Hey!”

A few bonehead moves? How about a consistent, industry-wide pattern of ignorance and fear that produced what might as well have been a coordinated smear campaign. Almost every story about the Internet in the mid-’90s was about how it was awash in pedophiles and other predators.

And maybe I’m getting a little Psych 101 here, but what the newspaper was really afraid of wasn’t so much the Internet as a technological thing, it was the way it brought the readership closer. Oh, man: Not the readers!

Here’s Bronstein again, telling the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that “the public was seen as kind of messy and icky and not something you needed to get involved with.” Note the third-person, passive-voice construction there, as though this were some sort of natural occurrence, not a colossal blunder by Bronstein and almost everyone in similar jobs.

The crops were destroyed by drought. The public was seen as kind of messy.

Scott Rosenberg, who also worked at the Examiner, recently told me that he wanted to put his e-mail address on his newspaper stories way back when, but Bronstein told him, “You can’t do that.” If he did, people would write him, and he’d have to respond. Egad!

I’m picking on Phil here, but I’ve heard and read enough stories from all over to know that he was simply representative, of the Examiner, of Hearst, of the entire industry.

You hear a lot about how eBay, Craigslist, Google and others killed newspapers. The Internet killed the classified business, a major bulwark of newspaper revenue, the story goes. But there’s no reason Craigslist, for example, couldn’t have been invented by a newspaper. No reason except newspapers’ years-long refusal to compete on this new playing field.

Instead they grudgingly shoveled the newspaper online. And I mean really, shoveled it. In the ’90s — a long time ago but still way too late in the game for this — on some newspaper Web sites you used to see print business in the stories online. “Please see Page 12, column 1,” it might say, right in the middle of a story, followed on the next line by “Continued from Page 1.” They were so contemptuous of the Web they didn’t even bother to have a copy person re-code the stories.

In the last few years most newspaper Web sites have added a few blogs and photo galleries and such, but they’re still essentially the newspaper, online.

Even the newspapers that have shut the print operation are still doing it. The Internet-only Seattle P-I is pretty much the Seattle P-I, just online. Didn’t the Seattle P-I get the message that what it was doing wasn’t working?

The crisis in newspapers, and especially the decision to move online only by individual newspapers, has been a perfect opportunity for them to reinvent themselves, to redefine what a newspaper is and how it performs its core mission of informing the public and acting as a watchdog on our institutions.

That’s something newspapers should have been doing all along, just as they had been doing, in much slower motion, for most of their history. A newspaper in 1990 was a very different animal than the same newspaper in, say, 1920 precisely because newspapers had changed and adapted with the times.

But when the change sped up, the newspaper industry responded by displaying an astonishing lack of imagination and creativity, instead lashing out at the Internet, warning readers to stay away from it, practically lighting torches. They’ve put the torches away by now, but the response is largely the same to this day, a dogged refusal to truly engage with the way their world now works.

I guess I should have seen it coming on that first night, when I peered into my computer and saw that they’d named the files “baskets.”

But at some of the country’s most prominent papers, it’s much worse than that. The New York Post lost 20 percent — one in five people who was reading the Post a year ago is no longer reading it. Same goes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Miami Herald, Newark Star-Ledger and San Francisco Chronicle lost about 16 percent, or about one in six readers. The Houston Chronicle and New York Daily News about 14 percent. And on and on. Sunday numbers are similar.

The only news event in my lifetime that I can compare this to is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late ’80s. I remember reading the stories coming out of Moscow in 1988 and ‘89 as the USSR dismantled itself and thinking, “I’m watching the end of something I never dreamed would end in my lifetime — and I’m not that old!”

I’m saying that again, though the not-that-old part is quite a bit less true.

It’s not quite the same with newspapers. They’re not going to disappear completely. But right before our eyes, they’re collapsing as a central institution in our culture. It’s as if streetlights or shoes or sliced bread went away. You just never thought you’d see it, did you? Life would go on without those things, but it would be different. Something would replace them. Maybe better, maybe not.

Because I’m excited about the possibilities of what might replace newspaper’s role, I know it seems like I’m happy to see them go, that I’m dancing on their grave. I’m not. I’m sorry to see them fail like this. I’m sad and worried about the many people, some of whom I know, who have lost their jobs and the many more who have an ax over their heads.

And I’m sorry to see the decline. For all the brave new worldness of my first online job in 1996, I missed working at the newspaper. I missed being in a big-city newsroom with seasoned newspaper people, the most senior of whom had hired on after returning from World War II. I missed being a part of something with direct ties, a straight historical line, to the 19th century. I missed helping to produce a product that I could see people using as I rode the bus home from my shift.

Still do.

That said, the utter failure rampant in newspapers couldn’t have happened to a more deserving industry. It didn’t have to happen, and it isn’t just happening because the Internet came along and changed everything. More on that next time.

“It comes in a year when a lot of newspapers are on the ropes, it is a reminder of what newspapers can do that others can’t,” Editor and Publisher quoted Bill Keller saying after the prizes were announced this week. “I am a fan of citizen journalism,” he continued, “but there is some stuff that only an experienced professional news staff can do.”

In related news, the chief executive officer of the National Buggy Whip Company said his firm’s strong showing in the 2009 Buggy Whip Awards proves the continued viability and relevance of buggy whips.

“I don’t think they’d be handing out awards like that if our product wasn’t still extremely important,” said Chester Heidecker of NBWC, whose Giddyap 5000 won Buggy Whip of the Year. The company also took home the prize for best innovation (NFL logos on the handle) and Most Ergonomic Whip.

“I’m a fan of cars and airplanes and helicopters and motorcycles and hovercraft,” Heidecker said, “but there is some stuff that only a horse can do. Like pull a wagon. If you only have a wagon that can’t ge hooked up to a car.”

Makes things a lot easier.

It’s a whole school of thought. I won’t bore you with it.

I also like how 25 Things became a little phenomenon. It struck a chord and became bigger than Facebook. I used it as the basis for my Super Bowl preview and I’ve seen other writers use the same gag over the last month.

And here’s a funny thing. It took me about a week to write it, thinking about it off and on and tapping out an item here and there in between work and other duties, and since I finished, I’ve found myself thinking of other random things about me. In that week my brain seems to have trained itself to spit them out at me once in a while. I’ll be making a sandwich and my brain will go: “I shook President Ford’s hand at an airport once.”

What’s that, brain?

“I shook President Ford’s hand at an airport. I was in the Boy Scouts and they bused us down to LAX to be part of a crowd that greeted him and he came along the fence shaking hands. That’s a random thing. Write it down.”

No, I’m done with that. I’m making a sandwich right now.

“I’ll eat almost anything except American cheese.”

All right, brain. That’s enough now.

Here are my 25 Random Things, by which I mean 35. Maybe I’ll make it a project to post one more random thing every day, see how long that lasts. I’m not that interesting, but I’m definitely random.

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Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. I don’t really want to know more about you.

2. Once on tour with the Smokejumpers I bought this Elvis Presley commemorative magazine at a truckstop and one of the features in it was something like “Fifty interesting facts about Elvis.” I said that if we ever got famous and there was a magazine feature like that about me, it would have to be “Two interesting facts about the King Teen.” The interesting things were that I really like burritos and I’m very good at parallel parking. I’d forgotten the third interesting thing, which is that both of my grandfathers had the exact same name: Jack Kaufman.

3. I really like burritos.

4. I’m very good at parallel parking.

5. Both of my grandfathers had the exact same name: Jack Kaufman.

6. Other than the people closest to me, I don’t care much what anybody thinks of me. I mean, if you’re going to like me or hate me, I vote for like, but it doesn’t really matter.

7. I once spontaneously came up with an aphorism about that. I was talking to an aspiring singer of my acquaintance about performing. She could really sing but had bad stage fright. So she was my polar opposite. She was picking my brain about feeling comfortable onstage, and I said, “There are only two kinds of people. The ones who love you and the ones who aren’t worth a damn.” I was talking about audiences, but I think it works for the whole world.

8. I hate it when the party ends. Left to my own devices, I’ll always close the joint.

9. I wish I were good at useful things. I wish I could build things and fix things and tune up my car and tie good knots and draw. The best practical, useful advice I can pass on to my children is “Don’t use semicolons.”

10. I’m not good at too many things, and almost none of the things I’m good at — like parallel parking — are lucrative in any way, but anything I’m good at, I’m pretty egotistical about it.

11. As an editor, I’m reasonable and even fairly generous. I treat writers well. As a writer, I’m a shrieking, stomping, hateful prima donna who’s pure hell on any unsuspecting editor who dares threaten to move so much as a precious comma of mine.

12. I was a decent bass player, but I switched to guitar when I was about 30, and I never came close to even passable competence. Still haven’t. I was the least talented guitar player ever to make money with a guitar without hitting somebody with it.

13. I used to say, in press releases about my band and from the stage, that I was “the most Christmas-loving Jewboy since Irving Berlin.” I really like that line. It’s true. I love Christmas. The Smokejumpers did an annual Christmas show, which was a chore for everyone but me, and I made up several Christmas songs. Now I celebrate Christmas with my family. We have a tree and everything. I find none of this to be in conflict with either my Jewish upbringing or my hardcore atheist adulthood. Christmas is a secular holiday to me, and a great one.

14. I never say I wrote a song. I say I made it up. I don’t know why I do that. I guess I think it’s pretentious to talk about “writing” a song. It’s not like I ever sat at a piano with a pad of music paper all Hoagy Carmichael style. I did always just make them up, though of course I’d write the words down at some point. And it’s way more pretentious to purposely avoid saying I wrote it, but there you go.

15. You know how everybody has records in their collection that they’re embarrassed about and can’t believe they used to like, or how everyone looks at old pictures of themselves and says, “Oh my gosh, what was I thinking to wear that?” I don’t have that. I may have moved on, but if I used to like something, I’m probably still OK with it.

16. The only aspect of journalism that I’ve ever tried to do and wasn’t at least halfway decent at was photography.

17. I used to have a great memory. I could hear a phone number once and remember it forever, hear the lyrics of a song two or three times and have them down, that sort of thing. I had a job sorting mail once and my boss commented on how good my memory was. Not anymore. Now I can’t remember your name, never mind your phone number. It’s a struggle to convince myself of this, to get myself to write things down that I used to be able to just recall. I used to be able to jot a phone number on a scrap of paper, for example, and a year later if I came across that scrap, I’d know whose number it was. Now if I find it the next week I’ll be all, “Whose number is this? Damn!” But I can’t break the habit of not writing the name. My kids have good memories. Sometimes I’ll notice them remembering something, the exact words someone said, or the order something happened in, or where we left off the last time we were watching a movie or listening to a CD, and I’ll be conscious that it’s something that 10 years ago I would have remembered, but now I can’t.

18. I would never say to someone that they couldn’t understand what having kids is all about if they’d never had kids, and I’m still not sure it’s true, but now that I have kids, I understand what people mean when they say that.

19. One of the two most surprising things about having kids for me was how much it made me think about what kind of person I am and what kind of person I want to be. This seems obvious, but it wasn’t to me. If I wanted to bring my kids up to be good people, I had to think about what “good people” means. And when I did, gee, I didn’t always live up to that.

20. The other surprising thing was that changing diapers is fun. It gets old when they start getting bigger, but when they’re babies, changing diapers rocks. It’s one-on-one time. My kids and I had a lot of fun and a lot of good conversations when I was changing their diapers.

21. I have a very weak sense of smell. This might be related to the previous item. It generally comes in handy, living in San Francisco.

22. My wife is the only person I’ve ever met who is flamboyant without being self-absorbed. That would be my favorite thing about anybody else in the world, but it’s only about my eighth favorite thing about her.

23. When my kids were babies, I talked to them like they were big.

24. Fairly often in my adult life, people have told me I seem like an East Coast guy. I’m not, and I don’t think I seem like one. I don’t think East Coast people think I seem like one either.

25. I’m a city kid. I like cities. Grew up in one, live in one now, feel most comfortable in them. Sometimes my friends say things like, “I’ve got to get out of the city. I need to see some trees.” I don’t feel that way. I like nature and camping and the outdoors and getting dirty and all that. But I don’t crave it. My favorite thing about camping trips isn’t the camping, it’s the overnight part. See No. 8.

26. I don’t like following rules that don’t serve any purpose.

27. I distinctly remember the first time I didn’t do my homework. I was in fifth grade, and it was spelling. I thought, “What would happen if I just didn’t do this?” I knew the spelling words. I never got one wrong. So I didn’t do it. I don’t remember if I got in trouble, but I was never the same as a student. Still a pretty good speller, though.

28. Also in fifth grade, I got chosen to sing in a district-wide choir at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which is where they used to have the Academy Awards some years. I didn’t want to do it. It seemed like kind of a girly thing to me, and the practice sessions happened when the rest of the kids were getting to have P.E. in the yard. To this day I’ll take sockball or kickball over singing. Not volleyball, though. Anyway, my parents and my teacher all attempted to change my mind by telling me that even though I didn’t appreciate the experience now, someday I would, and I’d be happy I did it. I was never convinced, but I also didn’t have a choice, so I sang with the choir. My parents used the same argument three years later when I didn’t want to have a Bar Mitzvah, which I also don’t remember ultimately having a choice about. It wasn’t true. I never did come to appreciate these things in the way the adults said I would. I wouldn’t say I’m bitter that I was made to do them, but I would be much more appreciative today if my feelings and opinions had been respected. I’m hoping to remember this lesson as my kids get older.

29. As a kid I used to hate it when grownups would say things like, “What do you have to worry about? You’re a kid. You don’t know from worry.” I’d think: Are you fucking kidding me? When’s the last time you were in serious danger of getting pushed around by someone twice your size? How often are there fistfights right around you? How often are you in them? When’s the last time someone tried to jack you up for your lunch money? Does someone with absolute power over you judge every single bit of work you do every single day, giving it one of five grades, at least two of which, and sometimes three, are totally unacceptable to other people who have absolute power over you? Do you have any control over your life at all? What happens if you’re not home when the streetlights come on, anything? If there’s somewhere you want to go that you can’t walk to, can you get there without relying on other people, who by the way have absolute power over you? Do you have the slightest freakin’ idea what the opposite sex is all about? If you need money can you get some? Do groups of your peers sometimes gang up on you to insult you and tease you just for fun, just because it’s your turn that day? When your workday ends, do you have a bunch of work still left to do, work that’s going to get judged by someone with absolute power over you? Do you ever get grounded? This is another lesson I’ve tried to keep with me. Being a kid is hard. Their worries are real.

30. I’m a slow reader but a fast writer.

31. I can’t surf, skate or do anything that’s anything like surfing or skating.

32. I don’t have any specific regrets that I can think of. I’m just not the type. But in the general sense, I wish I’d been more willing to take more risks more often.

33. I’ve met a lot of famous people, mostly because of my work. But my favorite famous person encounter wasn’t work related. It was during an airport layover. I usually don’t go up to famous people but I just thought James Brown, randomly standing there in the Salt Lake City airport — which, after another layover a decade before, I’d made up a song about that became a mini hit on Bay Area college radio — provided the potential for too good a story to tell for me to pass up. I was right. He was standing by while one of his people worked out some logistical mess. I walked up to him and said, just to have something to say, “Can I shake your hand?” He turned to me and said, and you can go ahead and picture that “Ha! Good god!” voice when you read this: “Can I shake YOUR hand?” And we shook hands. I think that’s a hell of a thing to say to some jerk who’s bothering you in an airport.

34. That same day I met James Brown, I met my wife. That was a damn good day for meeting people.

35. The best time I ever had on the clock was spending three days in Detroit with Ernie Harwell during his last season broadcasting Tigers games. I came away from the experience kind of secretly promising myself that I would try to be a little bit more like Ernie Harwell. More generous, more kind, more optimistic and likable and energetic and professional and down to earth. I have not succeeded at any of this, but I’m still 39 years younger than he was at the time.