Legendary culture writer Stanley Crouch has committed a strange piece of verbal dawdling to the pages of Tina Brown experiment The Daily Beast today. Liberally using his down-home turns of phrase, Crouch slowly comes to a conclusion we're not sure a man of his stature need take the time to reach: nobody's all good or all bad and there's good people everywhere. Um, thanks?

Crouch apparently felt this piece necessary after hearing "many phony baloney positions and purported experiences that are delivered and claimed to be truer to 'black reality' or to 'white America' than others." Many! For instance, Crouch says a young black friend of his told him that a lot of his friends claim to have never before encountered a person of color like Barack Obama. That is to say, a person of African heritage who is studious, intelligent and ambitious. According to Crouch, his friend's friends are telling "a damn lie."

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A little girl in Detroit is being celebrated as a hero after she shielded her mother from an onslaught of bullets while they sat in a car at a gas station. The mother's ex-boyfriend shot the woman in the head, and when the first-grader threw herself over her mother's body, the man shot the child six times, in the head, chest, and arms.

"Officers said they found [the girl] huddled on the floor under the steering wheel, covered in blood, surrounded by spent cartridge casings, a spent bullet on the floor and teeth on the seat," the News reports. "There were bullet holes in the windshield and blood inside."

The suspect, Calvin/Kelvin Tillie, was arrested at the scene and taken to jail, although, from the looks of his rap sheet, I'm not sure why he wasn't already there already.

Both the girl and her mother are recovering at the hospital. [USAT]