… That is the way I’ve come to think of “ttstark,” the person who posts flames on this blog that have zero to do with either the topic under consideration or the general tone of mullentown.

I’m probably insulting wolves by saying that. Wolves are known for their strict social order and for being good parents to their young. “ttstark” simply comes across as a boor with a poor upbringing. Also, I have the distinct feeling he’s drunk when he writes these posts. And a bitter drunk at that.

I hadn’t even checked in this weekend, mostly because I took a dream bicycle ride halfway to Big Mountain (at the Salt Lake/Morgan County line) on Saturday and truly enjoyed Mother’s Day on Sunday. My family gave me time — the best gift of all. I planted my tomatoes and then sat on the porch drinking pinot grigio from a box while reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book. I’ve always been a fan of Kingsolver, and this new non-fiction work is a cross between her fabulous essays and a journalistic foray into how we get the food we eat.

So, I called up mullentown this a.m. and found yet another flame by this character (See “Girl and Fire,” May 9 post). I saw all your kind efforts to defend me. I’ve also received a couple of e-mails from readers encouraging me to somehow shut off his access to the site. I guess that decision is partially up to all of you. What do you think?

I’m naturally anti-censorship. But as my brilliant Webmaster Joey pointed out to me a few minutes ago, I’m paying for this site and I should have some power over who uses it. He compares it to owning a restaurant. My blog is open to the public and it benefits from varied opinions. But I wouldn’t sit by and allow someone to come into the restaurant, throw trash all over and scream insults at me, the proprietor, or at the patrons. Joey suggests if ttstark has a problem with me kicking him off the blog, maybe he should pay to keep the domain name — and all the others costs associated with the site.

Of course, shunning him the way many of you already have might work. I tried ignoring him, but that didn’t work. If you would like to take up this topic on mullentown, go ahead. Right now, I’m inclined to kick him off, but I can be swayed the other way with a good argument.

Peace out.

No, I can’t take credit for that headline. It’s the work of Bill Frost, a City Weekly staff writer whose writing always makes me laugh out loud. He gets all the credit.

Go here for Bill’s blog post on the silly, overhyped debate between Hannity and Anderson. It’s the best review I’ve read anywhere of last Friday’s event, and believe me, I read more criticism than than my gut could take.

A lot of you have posted on my previous blog entry about the Hannity-Anderson thing. I’m all but finished with writing/talking/thinking about it now, as the story is going on four days old and has just about grown fur at this point. I did, however, hear an amusing take on the whole drama while listening to KSL radio’s Doug Wright on the car radio this morning.

(My husband always asks why I listen to Wright’s talk show, and I always tell him it’s my best yardstick for measuring the way our garden-variety Utahn who marches in lockstep with authority thinks. For me, the show is a cultural magnifying glass. Today’s show did not disappoint.)

You’ll recall that KSL has been blowing every gasket since it learned the debate was a go. They went all wacky with promotion, including billing it as a “smackdown.” Those who watched it either live or on TV know it was anything but. Anyway, this morning Wright was doing his usual “woe unto us” hangdog analysis of our wretched, values-crossed society. The horribly insensitive audience, he said, was the real loser.

Wright simply couldn’t believe how rude, uncouth, how positively barbaric the crowd was. What with their heckling, interruptions and catcalls, why, the two narcissists on stage could barely get a word in edgewise. How, he asked, does an audience get off on behaving this way? What possible excuse could those people have?

Naturally it never dawned on Doug that his very own Sean Hannity has built a whole industry on interrupting callers he disagrees with, on name-calling and heckling and on pushing public discourse lower than an earthworm’s abdomen. You reap what you sow, Doug, and KSL has cultivated quite a garden of idiocy and social intolerance by choosing to syndicate Hannity year after year. Even though many of the outbursts came from pro-Rocky forces, we have a whole society that feels it’s perfectly fine to belittle others and cut them to their quick in a disagreement. I’d have to say both sides have learned the technique from the master: Hannity.

Hey, it’s always worked for him. So why not a crowd of heckling hayseeds at Kingsbury Hall as well?

It’s getting crazy as all getout in this town, leading up to the big Rocky Anderson/Sean Hannity debate tomorrow night at the University of Utah. Smart U. students, who got tickets for $5 a pop, are selling them on eBay for more than $75 a piece. Now that’s free enterprise.

Anyway, at City Weekly we have this thing in perspective. Resident funny man Bill Frost has made it easy for people intent on keeping score between our mayor for life and Hannity the showman. If you missed Bill’s take on the frenzy, check it out here.

Speaking of promoting my newspaper, I’m regularly pimping each week’s issue on FOX-13 here in Salt Lake City. For the next nine weeks, I’m on live with “Good Day Utah” anchors Kerri Cronk and Dan Evans each Thursday at approximately 8:50 a.m. We talk, we laugh, we act vapid just like the best morning show people do everywhere. Check it out.

Besides a fabulous office that overlooks Salt Lake’s gritty and largely abandoned Main Street at the Gallivan Plaza TRAX stop, I get other goodies. It amounts to some pretty impressive swag, all right.

Today my mail slot yielded two small boxes of “compressed tobacco lozenges” — trade names Stonewall and Ariva. Manufactured by a firm with an absolutely perfect “Thank You for Smoking” sort of name — Star Scientific Inc. — the little white nuggets are nothing more than dissolvable chewing tobacco. Kind of like pillows of Pepto-Bismol, only addicting and cancer-causing.

I gave them to Brandon, the smoker who sits closest to my office. “Will they help me quit smoking?” he asked.

Well, the press kits says no. Neither one is a “smoking cessation product.” The packaging and brochures do point out in giant typeface, which if it could talk would be SCREAMING RIGHT OUT LOUD: PRODUCT IS SPIT-FREE!

Yum. And, as the company’s website points out, their spitless property should make Ariva and Stonewall attractive to “both genders.”

I gotta say, it’s one big cheer for our government-subsidized tobacco industry. Like any good business model, Star Scientific isn’t content to rest on old technology and is eagerly seeking out new users and promising demographic groups. Also noted: Star has hired a new addition to its product development team, Richard Milam, formerly of tobacco leviathan Brown & Williamson. He has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Auburn University.

Now that’s assuring.

Besides, this company has big goals. It emphasizes that “smokeless tobacco sales have been a minimal part of the company’s revenue stream, by the end of the second quarter Star expects to increase its national distribution to include all three of the largest U.S. drug store chains.”

Where there’s a will there’s a way, by golly. High-minded marketing goals and merchant of death all at once. And isn’t this all that’s right about America?

A few days ago, when I was belly aching about maintaining this blog while working full-time, I got incredible responses from people.

Most of you suggested the posts don’t need to be long or involved. One of you advised I periodically toss out a question, and see what kind of discussion evolves/erupts.

Here’s an easy one: What book are you reading at this very moment, and can you/would you recommend it to others? Why? If you are reading several books simultaneously (one of my bad habits, as I tend not to finish one before moving on to another), choose the best and tell us about it.

One brief paragraph should do it.

Not a new idea, this virtual book club notion. Yet who could resist biting on it? Particularly the readers of mullentown, who are the wisest and most literate bunch I know!

I’ll start. Still high from my India binge, I plucked Ted’s aged copy of “The City of Joy” from his office bookshelf this past weekend and set to reading it. It’s a 1985 novelization of French author and journalist Dominique Lapierre’s experience living among the wretchedly poor in Kolkata (Calcutta). Lapierre based his book on a polish priest he met in West Bengal, India. The priest is living in a slum and trying to minister to the poor and sick in a slum called Anandnagar (City of Joy).

I’m not very far along, but the premise is that human beings who by all rights should be miserable and achingly pessimistic about life in this pitiful slum somehow manage their existence quite well, even celebrate it.

I’m not sure how I missed this book or the 1992 film of the same name, starring Patrick Swayze.

I’m hoping “City of Joy” provides me with a deeper understanding of how the beggars, the orphans, the totally disenfranchised of India survive with what they have. I am not looking to somehow “happy face” abject poverty, or to gloss over a government so mired in bureaucracy it barely tends to the needs of its suffering masses. But there is an intriguing human survival skill at work in that country. I want to know it better.

And now, what are you reading and why should I want to read it? Or anyone else?

Thank you, India.
Thank you, terror.
Thank you, disillusionment.
Thank you frailty, thank you consequence.
Thank you, thank you, silence.
– Alanis Morissette

VARANASI, India–Something changed me here.

I can’t say that about some destinations. I am by no means a world traveler — my first trip to Europe came only two years ago. When my college friends, 25-plus years ago, were backpacking through France, or flopping in youth hostels in London, I was schlepping orders as a cocktail waitress and finishing my degree.

Years later, with an income and some freedom, I’ve traveled a bit more. Only a bit, though. I do know that when a place speaks your name, you must listen. This is what Varanasi did for me. It’s been three weeks since we returned from a long trip to Uttar Pradesch province in northern India. Still, at least every couple of days I am momentarily distracted from some mundane task by scenes or memories of that ancient city on the Ganges.

Sunrise on the Ganges, March 2007

How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out?
How about not equating death with starving?
Thank you India. Thank you, providence. …
– Morissette

Some say that Varanasi, about 400 miles southeast of New Delhi, is the oldest city in the world still functioning largely as it did centuries ago. Narrow streets snake through the neighborhoods bordering the famous ghats, a series of stairways that line the banks of the holy Ganges River. The scent of incense fills the alleys. The aroma of exotic flowers being woven into leis for burials is intoxicating. You walk through the streets, your eyes popping at the color, your ears throbbing from the rattle and hum of commerce. You watch the ground to avoid stepping in piles of fresh cow dung, even dodge a lazy cow or two tromping near you or grazing through stacks of trash.

The ghats, Varanasi

Follow the winding streets, and and all at once the Hindu Golden Temple is upon you. In keeping with the security concerns of the moment, armed Indian soldiers and city police stand guard every few feet. Visitors go through three separate searches, then enter the sacred shrine, barefoot. Inside, a brahman priest blesses each pilgrim. No photos allowed inside.

It took me a couple of hours to even begin clarifying the power of Varanasi. I’m still sorting it out. The city’s magnificent impact has everything to do with its life force–which is to say, death. This is the city of the Ganges, or in Hindi, Ganga. All devout Hindus believe that after death, their ashes must be committed to the Ganges’ sacred waters. If there is a city in the world whose very life depends on the death industry, it is Varanasi. At a traditional crematorium (there also is an electric one, farther down the river), bodies burn on pyres all day and night, often four to five at a time.

Once an elaborate burning ritual ends, the oldest male member of the surviving family walks to the banks of the river carrying a small urn of the departed’s ashes. He wades into the water, then tosses the ashes from the urn over his shoulder. He does not look back, thus signifying the finality of this relationship. Then he returns to the riverbank and joins other male family members. By tradition, women do not participate in the cremation ritual.

No pictures are allowed at the cremation site.

On the rare chance that the dead person may have reached the Hindu state of “enlightenment,” he or she will not return to Earth again. This is the greatest hope, of course. But with the Hindu belief in reincarnation, it’s quite possible the departed will return in some other life form.

People also come here in preparation for dying. Entire buildings on the river are devoted to hospice care, where dying Indians can live out their final days — in full recognition of their limited time — while only yards away from Ganga, the mother to whom they will soon return.

Just 25 yards down the river, daily life proceeds in most ordinary ways. People wash laundry in the water. Pilgrims bathe and swim. It’s expected that Hindus will make at least one pilgrimage to the Ganges in their lifetime, to partake of the holy water. Westerners have trouble with this — it’s an understatement to describe the water as “dirty.” Its headwaters are a small stream in the Himalayas, but by the time the water reaches urban India, it is a wide, churning expanse of murky water, scarcely the pristine mountain water of its origin.

I find beauty in that, too. People live on the earthy reality of this water. Raw sewage runs into it. Human remains sink to the bottom of the river (including the ritualistic commitment of the female pelvic bone and male ribs after cremation). Everything begins and ends here.

The day that we left Varanasi, as we loaded back onto the bus for the hotel, I found myself gazing out the window, my eyes puddling with tears. For a moment I found it hard to breathe. The more I fixated on what I had seen in Varanasi, the harder I cried. I bawled like a baby, with no sign of the tears drying up. Of course they did, eventually. But I learned more about myself and my own struggle with the concept of death that day than I could ever have guessed.

It’s no great revelation that Americans can’t quite grip the finality, even the glory of death with the same art that other cultures do. We fear it, run from it, do everything we can to stave it off — from multivitamin regimens to botox to dumping decent, age-appropriate spouses for trophy wives and husbands. For the first time, there on the Ganges, I had seen an entire culture face death honestly, matter-of-factly, and with love and respect. On one end of the river, bodies burn and survivors mourn publicly, then finish the ritual and go home. On another end of the river, people wash their laundry, bathe, cup the river water in their palms and drink.

The lower caste washes laundry daily in the Ganges

Laundry drying on the ghats

Freshly washed women’s saris, drying on the ghats

Varanasi. Where life meets death, and commerce goes uninterrupted. Thank you India.

The gods oversee the ghats

… is the theme of the annual Women’s Conference at the College of Eastern Utah in Price. And that is where Ted and I are headed in 30 minutes. Journalism professor Susan Polster asked me several months back to give a keynote address at the conference. I had some sway as a daily newspaper columnist back then. When I mentioned to Susan I had quit the Tribune, she was kind enough to keep the invitation in play. So I’m on the road.

I’ll be talking about all the shoes women have worn through recent history. From house slippers to spike heels, and everything in between. That in between includes running shoes, climbing boots, bike shoes, steel-toed work boots and more. At least in my own case. The point I hope to get across: We can, as women, trace our evolution as a species to a certain degree through the shoes we have worn (and wear).

If the shoe fits. Get it? I thought so. (And a big thank you to Ted Wilson, my speechwriter)

Meanwhile, I’m still shaking my head at the puffball questions our own Sen. Orrin Hatch pitched yesterday at that obfuscating AG Alberto Gonzales. Our senior senator clearly established with his hard-line interrogation that Gonzales has a busy job. A hard job (just like our president). I mean, more than 100,000 employees to supervise. It must be impossible to keep an eye on what all the underlings are doing. Go here for Tribune reporter Robert Gehrke’s, dare I say “acerbic” reporting on the Hatch embarrassment. (Very well-done, Robert. Insightful. I’m surprised your mangers let you get away with such brilliant little digs in the news section!)

I fear Utah will have Hatch in place for life. (At least the rest of his life, anyway) He’s our own homegrown version of Strom Thurmond, but without tangerine-colored hair. Now is the time for the Utah Democrats to start seriously planning for his replacement. 2012 has got to be the year they once and for all bring down Orrin. Has the all-out grooming of Rep. Jim Matheson begun yet? Or Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon?

Namaste. And be sure to pick comfortable shoes today.

First, I thank all of you delightful posters for your kind comments yesterday (post titled: “When Work Got In the Way”). On reading it again this a.m., it struck me as unbelievably whiny. So you are all wonderful and get (virtual) gold stars for buoying me up when I was tired. I’ll keep writing here, though maybe in an altered form. All of your suggestions are worthwhile.

At this very moment I have 31 minutes until my deadline for my weekly editorial/column in the front section of City Weekly. But like the rest of America today, I’m numb. Numb from the unspeakable violence that overtook Virginia Tech yesterday, and scrambling to find all I can about the student who went on that rampage. I feel I must write something in CW, but because it’s a weekly, whatever I manage to get on the page will feel old, dusty and probably insignificant as this multi-layered story plays out in the next several days.

What do you do? Visit the old tired arguments again about gun control or not? About safety on college campuses? Something is tweaking me right now, telling me there’s much more to focus on about anger in this society — how we simmer and boil over something, then shut ourselves down without truly resolving the problem we started with. This is especially true of boys and men, who seem to get bonus points in our world for toughening up against anger (or for exhibiting it in the most troubling ways: ultimate fighting, NFL football, movie sequels to “Die Hard.”)

And you know what they say: Unresolved anger leads to depression and depression is just anger turned inward. So if the shooter was simply mentally ill, how much of that had to do with never learning to express himself properly, to work through his anger, to put it somewhere constructive?

Oh, we are all Monday morning QBs today, aren’t we? Numb, but filled with post-game analysis nevertheless.

God save us all.

Maybe it’s time our Utah newspapers start writing about whether Santa Claus is the only true elf. Does the jolly old guy really exist? Is he magic? Can he and those reindeer really fly? What powers allow him to deliver all those gifts in one night?

I’m just wondering. Because if I see one more story giving coverage to accused child rapist Warren Jeffs and his prophet (or not) status, I’m going to start pulling out my short, chemically colored hair. In a manner of speaking, in the way that most of us understand people to be insane, Jeffs is one big nut job. But the guy is crazy like a fox. The skinny little coward wants out of jail. It isn’t exactly a celestial kind of place, after all. The food sucks and I doubt the company is all that warm, either. Warren wants to go home.

And now we have to keep reading/hearing about whether he’s a true prophet or not. Wha??? Is Santa Claus real? What about Tooth Fairy while we’re at it?

Jeffs, polygamist leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is melting down before the courtroom’s eyes during his pre-trial hearings in state district court in St. George. Jeffs’ eyes keep glazing over; he’s a little shaky. He keeps wanting to pass notes to the judge in charge. Yesterday, reporters were all atwitter about a half-page letter Jeffs asked Judge James L. Shumate to accept. The judge said no, of course.

The Deseret Morning News actually PAID a handwriting expert and for digital enhancement to determine the contents of the letter: “I have not been a prophet and am not a prophet.”

Oh. Ya think?!

This all makes my head spin. Yes, the press is just covering the story but it’s veering off into crazy town. Jeffs is a bully, a con artist, a federal fugitive and — I don’t really need a jury to tell me this — a pedophile.

But he isn’t mentally ill, and he isn’t all that weak and frail. If he succeeds in coming off as mentally unfit before all this ends it will be the greatest scam since the Easter Bunny.

Try keeping a secret in this town. Salt Lake City may be growing, and changing, and adding a big-ass mall downtown that promises to be life-changing. Still, you can’t keep something about a little job change quiet for long.

Today marks the official start of my new job. Yes, I am the new editor of City Weekly, a 60,000-plus circulation alternative newspaper in Salt Lake City. John Saltas founded the paper 22 years ago. Back then it went by the name Private Eye, which remains the title of Saltas’ regular column at the front of the paper.

We had hoped to break the news on our own deadline, which happens to be today, but so it goes. When Salt Lake Tribune business writer Dawn House called yesterday, I had just finished meeting with my new staff at CW’s very cool Main Street office. (More to come on the cool factor of the CW office) I was sitting in Saltas’ office when Dawn called. It was a hoot. Saltas told her he wasn’t ready to announce my appointment until Wednesday. House, like any decent reporter, refused to give up and demanded the story on her own timetable. I would have demanded the same thing were I in her place.

You go, Dawn.

Not that this is an earth-rattling story. We’re still fighting a miserable and losing war in Iraq, aren’t we? And didn’t the U.S. Supremes just bitch-slap George W. Bush for his administration’s hands-off approach to auto emissions and unbridled greenhouse gases in the environment?

Naturally, most of what I told House ended up on her cutting room floor. She spent an unbelievable amount of newsprint today trying to prove what I think she cosiders a conspiracy behind my predecessor, Ben Fulton, taking a leave of absence. BTW, if Ben chooses to return to CW in some other capacity in four months, I plan on keeping options open for him. But House didn’t ask me about that.

Oh well. I’m not sure she came close to capturing why I want to edit CW, but then most trad news people have never taken such a risk. Working at an altie paper is a total gas, I promise. Much more fun than sitting in press row behind a glass partition, a daily newspaper ID badge dangling from your neck and watching the state Legislature all day.

Here is what I’m looking forward to:

First, I’m back in my ‘hood, right where I belong and love to be. I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 26 years, and spent six of those as a reporter at the Twin Cities Reader in Minneapolis and the Dallas Observer.

Without hesitation, I tell you those were the finest and most productive years of my professional life. I had unlimited freedom. I received careful and creative editing. I developed an actual “voice.” And our staffs had high morale — a welcome change from the snarky, grousing comments and insecurity that punctuate life in most traditional newsrooms.

Second, as House mentioned in her story today, readership of alternative newspapers has been growing, while readership at dailies is either stagnant or declining. I like the idea of heading up a newspaper that, instead of constantly ruminating and stressing over how to gain readers in the elusive 18-34 age category, tries to attract them with basic, good journalism. What a concept.

Now. Does that mean CW is doing good journalism? Mostly, but certainly not enough of it. I told the staff we’re going to “own” certain stories in and around Salt Lake City. This is the purpose of “alternative journalism.” We’ll use traditional reporting and editing tools to get our stories. We’ll run all the traps. No one will accuse us of taking short cuts or lacking reporting or writing quality. The fact is, dozens of stories fly well under the daily newspapers’ and local TV news programs’ radar. Guess whose shoulders it falls on to dig them out and make them interesting and worth reading?

You got it. Your friendly neighborhood altie paper.

Do I sound crazy-excited? I am. I’m going to keep this blog going as well as contribute regularly to CW’s own site. If you haven’t access to the print version, please visit http://www.slweekly.com when you can.

Tomorrow’s issue is the annual “Best of Utah” — a record-setting 208 pages, publisher Jim Rizzi tells me. Can’t wait to read it. BTW, I’ll be pimping the “Best Of” in a guest appearance on FOX-13 early morning news tomorrow (that’s Thursday, April 5). Tune in between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m. if you can. I’ll be the one wearing the least amount of pancake make-up and with middle-aged woman bags under my eyes.