I let myself backslide a bit this week. My total for the week was 21 miles — three less than the 24 miles I pushed through last week. The breakdown:

• Tuesday, June 24, 4.5 miles
• Wednesday, June 25, 4.5 miles
• Thursday, June 26, 9 miles
• Friday, June 27, 3 miles

Though a marathon week still eludes me, I did manage to hit a new personal best: nine miles. Eight miles last week taxed me more than Uncle Sam. Nine miles this week was a chore, but my body took it better than that eight-mile run. Afterward, my muscles had a tenderness to them, but I didn’t feel like I’d been clubbed. Go me.

Today while running, I cased out a Japanese maple sitting on a curb a few streets from my house. Discarding such a potentially beautiful tree seemed alien to me: Is it diseased, or just gangly? You tell me. The picture, unfortunately, does it justice.

After the run, Mrs. Blocletters and I cruised by in the Saturn. We drove back slowly, the tree sticking precariously out of the open trunk. Now, it lives in the backyard awaiting planting.

The owner apparently though better days had passed this poor guy by. If I have anything to do with it, his sunniest days are yet to come.

Update: Alas, it might’ve been salvageable, but … It was too ugly for the front yard, and there wasn’t a good space for it in the back yard. Out to the curb. Maybe next time I’ll think things through before I go curb-raiding.

Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society, rebuts “In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors,” by Lawrence Downes, which I wrote about here. Downes’ piece appeared in The New York Times.

Late update: Maybe copy editors are dying after all — at least in Orange County.

I just finished a week where I ran 24 miles, and I’m still in awe.

As I’ve written before, my strong points don’t include discipline (rugged good looks, wicked high intelligence, a flair for cooking, and modesty … but not discipline). Still, over the last few months I’ve surprised myself and hope to keep it up.

The week’s rundown:

• Monday, June 16, 8 miles
• Wednesday, June 18, 5 miles
• Friday, June 20, 4.5 miles
• Saturday, June 21, 6.75 miles

Let me focus on the first one. Eight miles is a new personal best. Eight. Long. Miles. After I finished, I felt like James Caan’s character in “Misery.” “Shh, darling, trust me — it’s for the best,” Kathy Bates’ character said, right before hobbling him with a sledgehammer. It hurts, but it’s for the best. At least that’s what I tell myself as my left knee sings notes I didn’t know it knew.

Running calls for more endurance than anything. I’ve read that a mile, depending on stride length, falls in at about 2,000 steps. That amounts to 16,000 hits to the asphalt in 8 miles. It’s punishing. But, I find that the more I run, the quicker my recovery between runs. I felt Monday’s run but, after a day of rest, I begged for more punishment.

A programming note: I don’t write posts like these to crow, though I do feel like crowing. Making these small successes public, in a way, strengthens my commitment. In writing about them, I make a kind of contract between me and my two readers that I don’t want to default on.

I’m in the middle of Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston, and it’s as gripping and scary as a horror novel. Call it economic-horror nonfiction.

Johnston goes into a lot of detail about the commodification of labor, and how that trend works through a kind of outsourcing osmosis. To break it down to Duplos: Labor, including that done in front of a computer screen, will naturally move from high-cost countries (e.g., the U.S.) to low-cost countries like China and India. That process amounts to a third Industrial Revolution.

Here’s a scary passage:

“The first two jobs revolutions had in common one trait — people of average or even below-average intelligence could do many of the jobs with no more than a high school education. Will that be true in the digital, high tech third wave? And if it is not, what will be the consequences of living in a society where the brightest and hardest working are rewarded and almost everyone else is reduced to servant-level jobs and wages?”

Ponder that.

I generally consider myself a smart guy. I thought of copy editing as a safe career choice for a long while. Specialized knowledge of an area is critical to what I do. But then, a lot of what I do at work involves Googling this fact or that fact. As much as I hate to admit, that could be done from Bangalore. Is there value in a copy editor living and working where the copy originates? I’d like to think so.

But then, a friend caught up in the recent McClatchy layoffs tells me her job is going to India. She’s a page designer, but if a media company can outsource design positions, copy editing isn’t far behind.

I don’t want to be “reduced to servant-level jobs and wages,” but what happens when what I do evaporates?

I have a new policy: slow. It saves gas.

Drivers tailgate and pass me on Woodward. Doesn’t matter. In fact, I now chuckle a little when an Escalade or H3 speeds by. My Saturn has a 12-gallon gas tank. At $4.01 a gallon, the last fill-up cost me almost $45. An Escalade has a 26-gallon tank. That’s more than $100 to fill it from E (if you use regular; the manufacturer recommends premium). When such a gas hog whizzes by, I think about the relative percentage of the driver’s hard-earned cash that goes right into the tank.

When I drive slowly and steadily I can get more than 30 mpg, even in city driving. An Escalade, according to this site, gets 13 mpg in the city and 19 mpg on the highway. I can’t even imagine. Using that 13 mpg figure, the Escalade can go about 340 miles from F to E in the city. On my last tank, I got 368 miles. I’m going 8 percent farther for 45 percent of the cost. I fill up about every 10 days in my Saturn. If I drove an Escalade, I’d be filling up every nine days, and paying more than twice as much.

Laughing yet? I am, at least as much as anyone paying twice as much for gas as five years ago. And we all are; it just hurts more for those driving monster trucks. So I may laugh, but it’s a nervous one.

Which brings me to my conservation tactic: Drive it like you borrowed it. Drive it like it’s not yours. Drive it like you borrowed it from Charles Jefferson of Ridgemont High and you’re afraid a crash could mean a wicked beating from the star quarterback. (“It’s okay. My dad is a TV repairman. He has this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.”) Coast a little. Clutch on the way up to lights. Enjoy the scenery. If the posted speed limit is 45 mph, try 40 mph. Or even 35. What’s your hurry? I drive about 30-35 mph all the way down Woodward to work. While it does take me a few minutes longer, gas isn’t something I can afford to take lightly anymore.

Let the H3 drivers point and laugh.

After a week and a half in Paris, I have two observations about the cafes there.

Thing 1: Many of them have outdoor seating, and most of that seating faces the sidewalk.

Thing 2: When you order coffee, you get espresso.

On the first point, initially I thought it was odd. Diners sit next to each other, table between them, watching the pedestrians go by. I quickly came to appreciate it. I’m an unabashed people watcher, and Paris has a wild assortment of humanity to watch. The simple act of changing chair orientation also had the effect (for me, anyway) of changing the dining experience. When two diners face each other, a natural capsule forms between them. Sitting next to each other and facing the street, that capsule felt no less strong. Yet it also now included a whole world of other diners and passers-by.

On the second point, drip coffee appears to be a rarity. I think I only saw one coffee maker – the one in our rental apartment. I love coffee in all forms and concentrations, but Paris gave me renewed affection for espresso. Even the quick crepe stops – places where you might expect an inferior shot – did it justice. I savored every demitasse, especially since a single shot cost 3 euro, or about $4.50.

About a week after returning the the States I had a chance to go to Caribou, one of my favorite java haunts. Guess what I ordered? After I got my drink, a double shot for under $2 (Go U.S.A.!), I strolled to the outdoor seating. With my chair facing the sidewalk, I sat and whittled away at a stack of library books. Between chapters, I’d take a sip and watch the world go by.

Long live the copy editors!

In The New York Times, a elegy for my profession.

“… In that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.”

Consider this a rebirth, of sorts. My brother/collaborator and I fashioned Blocletters.com more than four years ago. He did the heavy lifting in the form of database programming and other coding, and I got the easy part: the ideas.

Now, we introduce version 2.0. If you have an RSS feed to the old site, you can subscribe to this one by clicking “RSS Subscription” on the right side of the banner at the top of the page. If you’re finding the site for the first time, I hope you’ll subscribe (or at least make it a point to come back now and again).

And, if you are a new reader, you can find out a little about me here. I can also save you a click with a little introduction. I work as a copy editor at the Detroit News. I write headlines and photo captions, and wrestle with stories to force them to conform to grammar and style rules. My current fascinations include: politics, the media, coffee, beer, mead brewing, Apple products, cooking, bread baking and running (in no particular order). I tend to write on those topics the most so, if one of them tickles your interest, I hope you’ll read on.

Again, welcome, and I hope you’ll like the new site. Look around. The archives include all the posts from version 1.0. Going forward, I have a whole new bandolier of tools available: video, audio, comments and photos. I hope to take full advantage.

Our buddy Stanley stopped by the office.

Go Wings.