If you send me an e-mail on the week­end and I don’t respond imme­di­ately, please to for­give. I’ve started try­ing to make at least 36 hours of the week­end internet-free. It’s an inten­tion that doesn’t always work out, but when it does, I’m able to go almost a day with­out know­ing the biggest polit­i­cal story of the day was that Sarah Palin wrote some­thing on her hand.

Peo­ple, please. Obvi­ously, it’s funny. Obvi­ously, it’s what she might call kinda ironical-like, given that it came in a speech with yet another crack about Obama and his TelePromTer. But as they say: Con­sider the source. This is she-who try­ing to recap­ture what turned out to be the high point of her career — her speech in St. Paul at the GOP con­ven­tion. And based on what I saw and read (and cousin, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch the whole thing) it wasn’t even that good — your basic goulash of god-bless-America and thank-you-soldiers-for-our-freedom, and the oblig­a­tory back­hand to the “pro­fes­sor of law” cur­rently occu­py­ing the Oval Office. Your basic red meat for the knuckle-draggers, all deliv­ered com­pletely off the top of her head, because of course she doesn’t use a ‘prompter. Nei­ther did George W. Bush.

If you want to get upset, read…well, you bet­ter read this first, the Cliff’s Notes ver­sion of yet another I-think-I’ve-got-Obama’s-pedigree-doped-out think piece, and then, only if you dare to swim in slime on a crisp win­ter morn­ing, should you read the com­ments on the orig­i­nal piece, because cousin, noth­ing any­one ever said about Sarah Palin’s baby even comes close.

That’s the sec­ond time I’ve used “cousin” as an inter­jec­tion today. Can you tell I saw “Inglou­ri­ous Bas­terds” this week­end? A hoot. We ain’t in the pris’ner-takin’ bid­ness, we in the Nazi-killin’ bid­ness, and cousin? Bid­ness is a-boomin’. Finally, a use for Brad Pitt’s lazy tongue. But he’s not the star of that movie; Christoph Waltz is, and look­ing at the other Oscar nom­i­nees for Best Sup­port­ing, all I can say is, if he doesn’t take it home, we live in a cruel world where jus­tice is an illusion.

Which means he could very eas­ily lose, because: See above.

So, how was y’all’s week­end? I spent part of it in the dusty stacks of the Detroit Pub­lic Library, and part of it writ­ing (with the inter­net turned off!), so I saw lit­tle of note. Oh, except for the Super Bowl, which I watched with one-third of my atten­tion (I was work­ing at the same time, but it was a slow night for non-football and non-advertising news). As I believe I stated, I was root­ing for New Orleans, on the usual irra­tional grounds: New Orleans is more fun than Indi­anapo­lis, Pey­ton Man­ning needs that smug smile wiped off his face, it’s always fun when the under­dog wins. Usu­ally my back­ing is the kiss of death, so it was nice to see some­times it isn’t. I see we’ve already had the red-state chime-in in the pre­vi­ous thread, about how now all Katrina-related wounds are healed and we must hear no more about it. I was unaware of this atti­tude; is it preva­lent? If so, some news: Ain’t gonna hap­pen, cousin.

Also, it would seem we finally, finally have a major snow­storm headed our way. If it comes, it will be only the sec­ond shovel-able snow we’ve had this sea­son, which must amuse you east coast folks. Nev­er­the­less, I’ll take it. Droughts are droughts no mat­ter the season.

Blog­gage? Not much, but there’s this: Nate Sil­ver on she-who. I’m going to do some rounds and study Russian.

Almost for­got! My favorite com­mer­cial.

I’m mov­ing to Coozledad’s veg­e­tar­ian farm.

The Ice House wasn’t hav­ing a very good day. The sun was out, and the tem­per­a­ture was on its way up to a high of 36 or so, and the roof was melting:

Appar­ently this has been a prob­lem all along. The hipsters-in-charge weren’t too happy about the unco­op­er­a­tive weather. The bus and tarp were along the south­ern expo­sure, try­ing to block the sun from the very nice ici­cles. Oth­er­wise, they were hold­ing up OK:

I can never resist the Tri-X set­ting on the new cam­era for long:

Over­all? Eh. It’s an inter­est­ing achieve­ment, but ulti­mately — ice on a house. Per­haps I lack imagination.

Yeesh, what a week. You should not be sur­prised to hear that cur­rent events have schaden­freude thick in the air in Michi­gan. One of my Twit­ter fol­lows is retweet­ing every Toy­ota joke that comes down the pike. My favorite is the new Toy­ota mar­ket­ing slo­gan: “There’s no stop­ping us now!” They make good cars; they’ll pull through, but stuck accel­er­a­tors are scary things, and han­dling a PR dis­as­ter like this is not for the weak of stom­ach. Ay yi yi, but being No. 1 is sud­denly seem­ing a hol­low victory.

They may think dif­fer­ent in Sil­i­con Val­ley, but man­u­fac­tur­ing is not for the faint of heart. A mil­lion wid­gets that can fail you any num­ber of ways, and now all this soft­ware. Alan was hav­ing a prob­lem with the throt­tle on his Sub­aru a few months ago, and asked the dealer to check it out. The diag­no­sis? Some old code in the com­puter. No won­der the best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne can’t work on his own car anymore.

I don’t want to bug out early, but I must. Another redonku­lous day ahead, capped by yet another middle-school dance. I haven’t heard any Lady Gaga in a week — this’ll do me good. A lit­tle blog­gage before I go:

A woman who col­lects Play­boy mag­a­zines. Because why not?

Not every­one work­ing at a news­pa­per is mis­er­able. My old col­lege class­mate Mark just spent a month in Afghanistan for the Min­neapo­lis Star-Tribune, and came back with one of those great old expen­sive series news­pa­pers do so well. Part 1 com­mences here.

For you writer fans, a new inter­view with Mar­tin Amis.

Christo­pher Beam looks at that weird sheep ad. EDIT: Bad link fixed. Sorry. And thanks for the heads-up.

And I’m off to the shower.

If luck smiles on my sched­ule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The man­agers of the project haven’t announced its loca­tion yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s dif­fi­cult to keep an aban­doned house that has been care­fully cov­ered with ice much of a secret. They’ve sur­rounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get dis­turbed before the offi­cial project pho­tographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the tem­per­a­ture should be high enough that things should be a lit­tle drippy. High pres­sure promises preser­v­a­tive tem­per­a­tures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guer­rilla art projects going on around here — a pre­vi­ous cadre of hip­sters painted aban­doned houses, from roof to foun­da­tion, includ­ing win­dows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I won­der if we’re on the tip­ping point of becom­ing a play­ground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bar­tender become a real-estate devel­oper, but now it’s even eas­ier. In “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Bar­low remarks that Detroit is a pretty big can­vas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated con­cern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attach­ing a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while cer­tainly wor­thy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judg­ment until I see it. One of the very few con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big expla­na­tion text, that when an artist has to post a sign­board telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint sig­ni­fies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “ref­er­ence the con­tem­po­rary urban con­di­tions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look for­ward to see­ing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of say­ing, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Sat­ur­day, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban con­di­tions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, any­way. I’ve reached the stage of win­ter where feel­ing bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get out­doors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hiber­nate the sea­son away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stew­art on? And Stew­art said Fox has “taken rea­son­able con­cerns about this pres­i­dent …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next com­ing of Chair­man Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If every­one is hip to this, why do these things keep get­ting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to sud­denly read a mil­lion words to get up to speed, and sev­eral hun­dred of the words involve morons whin­ing that they should have to pay for some­thing and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last week­end seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announce­ment. Ama­zon is using cheap e-books to sell Kin­dles, and MacMil­lan is try­ing to hold the line on sell­ing its inven­tory at a loss, for obvi­ous rea­sons. Here’s Vir­ginia Postrel at the Atlantic with some­thing of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stu­pid things peo­ple are say­ing in the wake of last week’s events, includ­ing (in so many words), “it’s not like writ­ing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for any­thing I can steal with impunity.” (I’m think­ing this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those peo­ple say­ing, “E-books are great, because then the last bar­rier stand­ing between the ded­i­cated ama­teur and his vast read­er­ship will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile read­ers any any pub­lisher within dri­ving dis­tance. And please, in keep­ing with your views about the real work of pub­lish­ing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental pro­posal to help little-seen inde­pen­dent films get a lit­tle more-seen, offer­ing feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the com­ments have already started:

“The begin­ning of the end,” wrote one user in com­ments; “i thought the pur­pose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seri­ously [sic] sell­ing out,” appar­ently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where peo­ple think noth­ing of pay­ing $4 for a cup of cof­fee could they balk at the idea of pay­ing a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy break­fast, step one to improv­ing one’s per­spec­tive on win­ter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

A great time was had by me at the Mit­ten Movie Project last night (and prob­a­bly at least some oth­ers). The monthly fes­ti­val of short films fea­tured the director’s cut of “The Mes­sage,” our Decem­ber 48-hour chal­lenge short, and please don’t laugh — unlike most director’s cuts, this one really was bet­ter than the orig­i­nal. (Yes, of course it grew. By two minutes.)

The Mit­ten is curated by one of our pro­duc­ers, Con­nie Mangilin, who keeps a relent­lessly upbeat atti­tude about film in Michi­gan, large and small. She fre­quently works on the large pro­duc­tions, in part to finance her par­tic­i­pa­tion in the small ones. Know­ing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amaz­ing to see how many peo­ple even bother to do it, and grat­i­fy­ing that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the prob­lem was, and for­give them for it. When you can’t pay peo­ple, you get peo­ple will­ing to work for noth­ing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Ama­teur actors are more likely to have grat­ing upper-Midwest eeac­cents that can reduce even well-written dia­logue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hip­ster types, which becomes a prob­lem when you’ve writ­ten a role for, say, a gang­ster. A word to direc­tors: Putting sun­glasses on a guy with a soul patch and a vis­i­ble pierc­ing doesn’t make him look par­tic­u­larly threat­en­ing. He just looks like an arty hip­ster douchebag. By the way, many pro­fes­sional actors have voice prob­lems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska south­ern Mis­souri, but has a per­sis­tent con­tem­po­rary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludi­crous in many roles, par­tic­u­larly as Achilles.)

Among the high­lights last night: “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” a short about Toby Bar­low, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Cov­ing­ton, the inspir­ing soul behind the Geor­gia Street Com­mu­nity Col­lec­tive, a recla­ma­tion of a bat­tered neigh­bor­hood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has fea­tured the GSCC a time or three, and when I men­tioned it here some months back, one of you fab­u­lous NN.C read­ers hit their Pay­pal but­ton and donated $50. I learned of this some­time later, and while I know who­ever did it wasn’t look­ing for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doc­tor but an awe­some karaoke singer — in Tel­ugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actu­ally worked in var­i­ous Telugu-language films; it’s the one spo­ken in south­ern India, and the videos play­ing dur­ing his karaoke per­for­mance fea­tured him­self in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance num­ber. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Pee­wee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The exis­tence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our eas­ily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a final­ist in the com­pe­ti­tion (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bit­ter tears.

So, then, blog­gage? There must be some:

I was struck by this pic­ture of she-who, pre­sum­ably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she def­i­nitely has the Fox Paren­the­ses, the styling of the hair into punc­tu­a­tion marks fram­ing the face. For some rea­son this is the pre­ferred hair­style of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pic­tures and be care­ful how often you kiss them. I pre­dict we’ll start see­ing a lot more caramel-colored high­lights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The for­mer Sen. Coats was one of the bird­brains behind the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Decency Act, an early attempt at reg­u­lat­ing smut on the inter­net, a stag­ger­ingly dimwit­ted piece of leg­is­la­tion that was over­turned by the Supreme Court unan­i­mously. When you can get Jus­tice John Paul Stevens and Jus­tice Antonin Scalia to agree on some­thing, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a bet­ter tomorrow.

I’ve been so dis­ap­pointed by the fourth sea­son of “Big Love” I’ve taken to send­ing jeer­ing e-mails to a friend who still likes it. My lat­est said I’m start­ing a peti­tion to send it back to Uni­vi­sion and restore the orig­i­nal Span­ish dia­logue, because surely this allegedly pres­ti­gious HBO drama was kid­napped from its ances­tral home in the telen­ov­ela big house.

But then, watch­ing it, I real­ize it’s been like this since at least the third sea­son, although that one stopped just this side of the line between incredible-but-entertaining and ridiculous-and-insulting. This sea­son is turned up to 11.

What hap­pened? In the first sea­son, the story of a polyg­a­mous Utah busi­ness­man bal­anc­ing a house­hold of three wives was promis­ing and inter­est­ing. It raised ques­tions: What is fam­ily? How do we inte­grate reli­gion into our Monday-through-Saturday lives? What do we owe our com­mu­nity, and what do they owe us? When we’re pulled in more than one direc­tion, how do we keep from being pulled apart? And so on. The sec­ond sea­son was even bet­ter, once the pro­duc­ers fig­ured out that sex with three women on con­sec­u­tive nights isn’t all that inter­est­ing, even by HBO stan­dards, and started look­ing at the toll polygamy takes on women, both in the sub­urbs and in the creepy rab­bit war­ren of Juniper Creek. It was in many ways a replay of Carmela and Meadow Soprano’s tango with the mob in that other show, but it was still worth explor­ing, and raised another ques­tion: Why do we cling to the chains that bind us? (Answer: Because they make such pretty jewelry.)

If anyone’s ask­ing ques­tions now, they’re right out loud and in the script: Don, will you take the bul­let? Was that baby you’re car­ing for kid­napped from an Indian reser­va­tion? Could it be because you’ve never really dealt with the mis­car­riage you suf­fered in Sea­son 3? And so on.

I swear, if it weren’t for David Simon, HBO would be toast with me. “Entourage” moved from ridiculous-but-entertaining into just-plain-offensive vir­tu­ally overnight; when­ever I land on it now I stay long enough to see whether they’re still serv­ing the same tired salad of misog­yny sprin­kled with screech­ing homo-hatred (“Ari: Keep your eyes on Andrew Kline. Lloyd: Keep my eyes on him how? Ari: Pre­tend he’s Zac Efron’s ball sack.”), with a side of sure-I-believe-Jamie-Lynn-Sigler-likes-short-fat-penniless-guys. Look, one of the gang has a new girl­friend! She’s tall, beau­ti­ful and anorexic. Look, Ari’s on a ram­page! He’s insult­ing his gay assis­tant again. Actu­ally, Ari’s the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter on the show, in the sense that it’s inter­est­ing to watch the blackly self-loathing Jeremy Piven deliver lines like this:

Mrs. Ari: What time is it?
Ari: I don’t know. My cock doesn’t wear a watch.

And he ran away from a David Mamet play? I’m not the world’s biggest Mamet fan, but he’s William Shake­speare com­pared to this.

Hurry hurry hurry, “Treme.” Which is sort of a nice segue to the blog­gage. (Yes, I know, a bit early, but I’m hav­ing a bad morn­ing, peo­ple. I am Ari Gold today.

Any­way, I’m told the par­ents of this young actress will be fea­tured extras in “Treme.” Although now I’m look­ing for­ward to their daughter’s career:

And for any­one who’s ever had a rel­a­tive whose last words were “Hey ever’body, watch this,” the sad tale of one man’s attempt to top his last wacky party stunt. Must read­ing. For once, the com­ments on a Free Press story are worth a look: He’s GOTTA be a white guy. Well, hell yes.

The cock crows 10:30. Time to start the day.

Alan and I are hav­ing one of our occa­sional squab­bles (“The Atlantic is a bet­ter ocean! The Pacific is a bet­ter ocean!”) over the lede on this story:

DETROIT — The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speed­ing out of con­trol on High­way 125 near San Diego.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accel­er­a­tor is stuck … we’re in trou­ble … there’s no brakes … we’re approach­ing the inter­sec­tion … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The story is about Toyota’s sudden-acceleration prob­lem, of course. The dri­ver is described as an “off-duty Cal­i­for­nia High­way Patrol offi­cer.” We both agree that when one is in a car with an appar­ently stuck accel­er­a­tor, the first thing to do is shift into neu­tral. How­ever, I main­tain that any­one in a high­way patrol would have advanced train­ing in high-speed dri­ving and would know this in his bones, and if he didn’t do so, there must have been a rea­son — per­haps the car couldn’t be shifted into neu­tral at speed, I dunno. He main­tains I am “over­think­ing” it, and the guy just pan­icked and forgot.

And then I real­ized that this is just about the five-year anniver­sary of our move to Detroit, and we must be natives for sure now, because we are argu­ing about cars.

Every­one in that Lexus died, by the way. This just under­lines why I am bound and deter­mined that Kate learn to drive on a stick shift, and I don’t care if she burns out a clutch doing so; dri­ving a man­ual requires you to pay more atten­tion to the task at hand. And there’s another reminder: When we moved here, Kate was in sec­ond grade. This time next year, she will be months away from get­ting her learner’s license. Of course Michi­gan teens can start dri­ving under super­vi­sion at 14 years, eight months. Utter insan­ity, but that’s how an auto­mo­tive state rolls. I’m sure kids in Ken­tucky and Vir­ginia were expected to start smok­ing at 12, once upon a time, to help the state’s economy.

First of Feb­ru­ary, today. This is always around the time I notice the light is chang­ing, not so much the time the sun shines but the angle — ask a sci­en­tist why, I pre­fer the poets. The same thing hap­pens the first week in August, when, on lower-humidity days (it never quite gets “low” here), the sun seems dis­tinctly autum­nal. As any ground­hog will tell you, there’s a lot more win­ter ahead of us, but today, you can see the high-water mark. And it’s dry.

Both bits of blog­gage are old, but not every­one has time to read the inter­net every day. So here goes:

A Texas politi­cian declines to seek news­pa­per endorse­ment, and the news­pa­per calls this a “major rebuke.” Ha. Endorse­ments are one of those holdovers from not just an ear­lier time, but a way-way ear­lier time, and flat-out refuse to die. The best guessti­mates I’ve seen is that in a hotly con­tentious pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year, all the news­pa­per endorse­ments in the coun­try might have an influ­ence over 10,000 votes, tops, and that’s being gen­er­ous. Locally, who knows, but the fact that can­di­dates work so hard to get them, and make such a fuss when they do or don’t, always struck me as sort of pathetic.

Endorse­ments are based on editorial-board inter­views with can­di­dates, fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion. The pub­lisher usu­ally wins, and the pub­lisher is usu­ally either a pro-business con­ser­v­a­tive and some­times a generic center-left lib­eral. A windy, bor­ing edi­to­r­ial will be pub­lished, using the royal “we.” (I some­times won­der if that royal we isn’t why edi­to­ri­als are so bor­ing; a pre­vi­ous ed-page edi­tor of in Fort Wayne referred to the board as “the page” or “this page,” and solicited columns from “friends of the page,” which is how they were des­ig­nated: Bob Butthead, Friend of the Page. I once asked why they didn’t ask oth­ers to be Ene­mies of the Page, a far cooler col­umn head if you ask me, but as usu­ally hap­pens when you’re deal­ing with peo­ple who con­sider them­selves not an I but a We, it didn’t go over well.

Any­way, the whole editorial-page struc­ture — Hear Us, Voice of This August Insti­tu­tion — was blown out of the water by the inter­net, but many of them haven’t got­ten the news yet. And so: “Major rebuke.” Now there’s a col­umn I’d read: By Major Rebuke, Enemy of the Page.

And speak­ing of media insti­tu­tions that refuse to change, even while the foun­da­tions are washed out from under them, Char­lie Brooker on how to report news, TV-style. A YouTube link, but funny and worth your time. Wasn’t I just talk­ing about this the other day? If only I’d taken the time to make the video.

Manic Mon­day is already under­way, a day with a per­pet­u­ally stuck accel­er­a­tor. Ciao for me, and off to rounds ‘n’ Russian.

Jan­u­ary is National Soup Month. Before it slips into the books, let’s recall a few of the month’s steam­ing pots here at the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere:

Sweet potato bisque: I hap­pened to be at the Rus­sell Street Deli, an East­ern Mar­ket insti­tu­tion known for its spec­tac­u­lar soups, the week before Christ­mas, when this was on the menu. It was…mouth-gasmic. It fogged my glasses and my mind. I tried to con­sider what the “Top Chef” judges call its “fla­vor pro­file,” but my taste­buds were happy-dancing so, it was hard to get them to set­tle down and give some sober feed­back. It had many of the notes of a sweet potato pie — cin­na­mon, nut­meg, gin­ger — but was savory over­all. I found a recipe online that seemed to come close, using but­ter­milk for the tang, and whipped up a batch. It was very good, but not as good as Russell’s. Three stars (out of four).

Cur­ried but­ter­nut squash: An early impro­vi­sa­tion, inspired by Mark Bittman. I make a ver­sion of this every fall, basi­cally squash soup with curry and a tart apple thrown in the mix. For this, I left out the apple and added a can of coconut milk, and my friends? It was fab­u­lous. I’m buy­ing coconut milk every other week now. Four stars.

Cream of cau­li­flower: Another Bittman inspi­ra­tion, brought on by the peren­nial Jan­u­ary real­iza­tion that I could eat a lot more veg­eta­bles if I tried. Sauté onion and gar­lic, throw in a whacked-up head of cau­li­flower, cover with broth, sim­mer to soft­ness, puree and swirl in a half-cup or so of cream. Yum. Three-and-a-half stars.

Roasted gar­lic with white ched­dar: I make this in the win­ter most years, but not for the last few. It’s an old Betty Ros­bot­tom recipe, sim­plic­ity itself: Break up and peel two heads of gar­lic, cover with olive oil and roast in the oven for 40 min­utes or so. Mean­while, soften some leeks or onions or both, add a few pota­toes, cover with broth, sim­mer sim­mer sim­mer, etc. When it’s soft, throw in the roasted gar­lic [EDIT: Remove the gar­lic from the oil first] and puree. Fin­ish by stir­ring in a hand­ful of grated white ched­dar cheese. Serve with a green salad and crusty bread you can sop in the oil from the gar­lic roast­ing. Refrain from kiss­ing for the rest of the night. Four stars.

Chili: Because if it’s win­ter in the Mid­west, there will be chili. Every­one has their own favorite recipe. You don’t need to hear mine. Three stars.

No-cream of cau­li­flower and car­rot: This was last night. I had a head of golden cau­li­flower tee­ter­ing on the edge, so I made it the same way I did the other cau­li­flower soup, only I added a dou­ble hand­ful of car­rots and left out the cream and curry. Topped with some grated ched­dar, cocked my shot­gun, held it to the head of my daugh­ter and forced her to choke down 10 spoon­fuls or so, which she advised me were “gross.” Reader, it was not. It was deli­cious. Three and a half stars.

Note all the puree­ing. You can do it in batches in the blender, but that’s a pain in the ass. Far bet­ter to spend $30 on what Emeril calls a “boat motor” and most cook­books call an immer­sion blender. Mine broke last night, which seemed to be a fit­ting marker for the end of National Soup Month.

Although I will buy a new one this week­end. Because you really need an immer­sion blender. At least in our house.

Which takes us to the blog­gage at the end of a cold but sunny week here in the Mitten:

You want to know why peo­ple hate lawyers? Try the NFL’s jerk­ish­ness in try­ing to stop New Orleans retail­ers from sell­ing T-shirts and other mer­chan­dise fea­tur­ing the fleur de lis and/or the phrase “Who dat?” One of my Face­book friends, Ray Shea, said it best:

The fleur de lis pre­dates the exis­tence of the NFL by more than two mil­lenia. The fleur de lis has flown on flags over Lou­siana for more than four cen­turies. Black and gold has been asso­ci­ated with the Zulu Social Aid and Plea­sure Club for almos a cen­tury. The phrase “Who Dat” is more than a cen­tury old and exists in recorded New Orleans music since the 1930s.

The NFL is granted a tem­po­rary non-exclusive license to suck my balls.

Ray is an old friend of Ashley’s, and won my alle­giance to the Saints the night the team beat Indi­anapo­lis, and he posted, “Who dat push­ing Manning’s face in the turf? WHO DAT?” Indeed. Pey­ton Man­ning is a guy whose face can never be pushed into the turf too often.

I just surfed through Mem­o­ran­dum to see what’s going on in the world of pol­i­tics, and found this head­line: Palin to Obama: Stop the fin­ger­point­ing. And with that, irony died once again and I offi­cially declared the week­end under way.

So enjoy yours.

Well, I’ll get an iPad. Even­tu­ally. Not this year, but maybe next, when the hard drive gets big­ger and the price drops and I start doing all my work in cof­fee shops. If noth­ing else, it seems to be the e-reader that might tip me into e-reader ter­ri­tory, not that I’ve been wait­ing for one. But, you know, I like to keep up. And if the iPad and other tablet devices throw a life­line to news­pa­pers, then I’ll feel obligated.

You have to be care­ful, though. I some­times call my iPod my musi­cal id, because when I started buy­ing music online, I flocked to the shame­ful hit sin­gles I’d been turn­ing up on the radio all these years, but only when I was alone in the car. Songs I was too cool to like, or songs that were the one decent track made by Dis­ap­point­ing Artist X. I wouldn’t buy DAX’s album, but 99 cents seemed to be the right price point to buy the one or two Madonna songs I enjoy (“Don’t Tell Me,” “Ray of Light”), or Lou Gramm’s “Mid­night Blue.” You have ear­buds in all the time any­way, so it’s not like any­one knows you’re a secret Eminem fan.

And then dig­i­tal music became the only music to buy, you hook the iPod to your stereo now, and so I have an iPod clut­tered with crap, and more than 1,000 songs to sort into “ear­buds only” playlists, lest one pop up at a din­ner party and embar­rass me. (I down­loaded Chakakas’ “Jun­gle Fever” after watch­ing “Boo­gie Nights,” OK? And I regret it! I always fast-forward past it!)

I don’t want the same thing to hap­pen with my e-reader. Yes­ter­day I asked Laura Lipp­man what’s bet­ter for her, as an author — ink on paper or pix­els on a screen — and she men­tioned the obvi­ous use for Kin­dles, et al:

I use it pri­mar­ily for travel and I stock it with B-reads, things I don’t care about own­ing in hard­cover format.

In other words, pretty much the way I used my iPod at first.

I also asked Hank Stuever about this, and he got his own blog post out of it, and you should go read that, too.

It’s the news­pa­per model I’ll be watch­ing most closely, of course. These are my peo­ple, they pro­vide my health insur­ance, and I have a stake in see­ing them sur­vive. Late in Hank’s post, he quotes a lovely para­graph from another essay about news­pa­pers, about the authen­tic expe­ri­ence of actu­ally hold­ing and touch­ing your authen­tic expe­ri­ences. I keep com­ing back to the 3A Tiffany’s ad, run­ning daily in the New York Times and Wall Street Jour­nal, upper right-hand cor­ner of the page since for­ever, and how much I look for­ward to see­ing it every day. The other day it was the engagement-ring ad, four big Tiffany soli­taires tum­bled in a row. I always take a minute and appre­ci­ate it. I will never own a Tiffany’s soli­taire. I don’t par­tic­u­larly want one. But it’s a beau­ti­ful photo, and I allow myself a few sec­onds of mild envy, the way if you were walk­ing past Tiffany’s in New York, you might stop to look in the win­dows, like Audrey Hepburn.

Over to Face­book. Upper-right-hand cor­ner: If you are a 52-year-old dri­ver from Michi­gan, your car insur­ance rates can be as low as $14.98 a month. Click to learn more. Ear­lier today, it told me 52-year-old women could get a free pair of Uggs for par­tic­i­pa­tion. Click to learn more. I’ve asked this ques­tion a thou­sand times, and no one can give me a good answer: If all the college-educated eye­balls are online, if the smartest and the wealth­i­est peo­ple are look­ing at com­puter screens all day and most of the night, why are the ads the equiv­a­lent of the free Amish fireplace?

Oh, and as to the name of the iPad: Are all you peo­ple chil­dren? When did Beavis and Butthead join the focus group? Do you snicker when you hear “heli­copter pad” or “note pad” or “pad Thai?” Maybe because I was always a tam­pon girl, and grew up in the era when men­strual pads were called “san­i­tary nap­kins,” one of the great euphemisms of its day, I don’t imme­di­ately asso­ciate the word “pad” with men­stru­a­tion. Grow up.

I also thought Barry’s speech last night was pretty damn good. I liked how he called out the party of No. Fuck you, Sammy Alito, you smug piece of shit. And great job on that GOP response — find the XY equiv­a­lent of Martha Coak­ley, flank him with a black woman and an Asian man, and have them nod and clap on cue. Way to bring it, you soul­less toads. I’m stick­ing with Barry.

OK, then: Yesterday’s work spilled over into today, so I’d best hop to it.

I can’t get over the known facts of this (like a good journo, I say: alleged) wire­tap­ping attempt in Louisiana. Every part of it is a forehead-smacker, up to and includ­ing the price­less detail that this escapade is, hello, a felony, mean­ing right-wing hero James O’Keefe is now in very very big trou­ble. Which doesn’t make it any less funny.

If the facts of the case turn out to be any­thing like the alle­ga­tions of the case, it’s pretty clear what hap­pened here: A stu­pid, heed­less young man, drunk on atten­tion and look­ing for a fol­lowup to a coup that landed him on all the big Fox talk shows, made the mis­take of assum­ing that because he’s smarter than a crim­i­nally dumb Acorn office worker, he’s smarter than every­one. You have to admire his logic: I was on “Fox & Friends,” ergo, I am smart. In a bet­ter world, his ridicu­lous pimp out­fit alone would have got­ten him laughed out of any­thing other than a Hal­loween party; instead, he got a hidden-camera scoop. And so he learned the les­son every reporter learns after his or her first big story: Sooner or later your edi­tor is going to wan­der past your desk, stop and say, “So, what do you have com­ing for tomorrow?”

O’Keefe appears to have been lin­ing up his sec­ond act when he and his bud­dies were arrested, “wear­ing jeans, flu­o­res­cent green vests, tool belts and hard hats.” Because that would fool any­one, right? Every­body needs a hard hat to work in an office phone closet.

I used to work with a bull­dog of a reporter who once tried to sneak into a hos­pi­tal ER — a homi­cide scene — wear­ing a white lab coat and car­ry­ing a clip­board. He was thrown out almost imme­di­ately, but it scored big A-for-effort points with the bosses and peo­ple called him “doc­tor” for a while after­ward. It’s funny how dis­guises work: Badly, most of the time. You can go to the uniform-supply store and stock up, but you almost always get impor­tant details wrong. You for­get the way nurses put stick­ers on their name tags. You wear the wrong shoes. (Maybe you’ve been watch­ing “House” and assume all female physi­cians wear stilet­tos and plung­ing neck­lines, like Dr. Cuddy.) You for­get to erase the expres­sion from your face and give off a ner­vous vibe. There’s a rea­son good actors make good money. A believ­able imper­son­ation is no small achievement.

That this ridicu­lous caper was attempted in the com­pany of the son of a U.S. attor­ney only makes it fun­nier. Things may look grim for Democ­rats in 2010, but as long as there are young men like James O’Keefe in the world, we’ll always have entertainment.

A tan­gent, but it just popped into my head: I remem­ber, in the film “Crumb,” a scene where Robert Crumb goes out mak­ing sketches of the lit­tle infra­struc­ture details in Amer­i­can cities. He was about to move to France, and wanted to get them down so he wouldn’t for­get to put them in the back­grounds of his draw­ings — high-tension wires, street lights, fire hydrants, con­crete blocks at the end of park­ing places, all visual clut­ter we see-but-don’t, and only notice when they’re miss­ing. That’s what peo­ple for­get when they’re try­ing to be some­one else.

A few years ago, I looked up from my desk in the news­room to see Sen. Evan Bayh walk­ing past, en route to a meet­ing with the edi­to­r­ial board. He is exactly what he appears to be in his pho­tos — tall, slim, blonde*, blandly hand­some in that vote-for-me kind of way. His suit fit him well with­out being overly Euro­pean. If Hoosiers can be Brah­mins, that’s what he looked like. Behind him scur­ried a num­ber of aides, the lead one car­ry­ing all the hard­ware; his pants sagged from the weight of the mul­ti­ple cell-phone hol­sters, pagers and PDAs he car­ried, this being before the era of con­sol­i­da­tion in a sin­gle device. The way his navy-blue blazer stuck out at strange angles at his waist — that was the detail a cos­tume designer try­ing to dupli­cate the look for a movie would strug­gle with. But it was the detail that estab­lished his sta­tion in life, the way Bayh’s slim weight­less­ness dis­tin­guished his own.

And with that, a dis­cus­sion of mis­be­hav­ior and one of the aide’s bur­den, we can segue neatly to the wisps of John Edwards’ dig­nity, blow­ing in the wind now that his own fac­to­tum is turn­ing on him:

Accord­ing to Young, (Reille) Hunter called him in May 2007 to say she was preg­nant. Young says that when he informed Edwards, the sen­a­tor told him to “han­dle it,” to which he replied: “I can’t han­dle this one.” Young writes that Edward unloaded on Hunter as a “crazy slut,” said they had an “open rela­tion­ship,” and put his pater­nity chances at “one in three.” Young says that Edwards asked him for help per­suad­ing Hunter to have an abor­tion. Young writes that Hunter believed the baby to be “some kind of golden child, the rein­car­nated spirit of a Bud­dhist monk who was going to help save the world.”

Crazy Agnes of God believed she was car­ry­ing the Almighty’s baby. Crazy new-age girls believe they’re Buddha’s baby mama. It’s all crazy, and it’s all cringe­wor­thy, through and through.

Guer­rilla bridge-makers step up to do what city won’t. I’m intrigued to learn this pipe has been leak­ing across a New York City side­walk for “years” — I thought that only hap­pened in Detroit. Down near Alan’s office a cou­ple years back, a bro­ken water main leaked into the street for months on end before it was repaired, and the city’s jury-rig for the win­ter was to come down from time to time and dump a load of salt on it, simul­ta­ne­ously appalling and funny. When we went to Buenos Aires, I noticed how bro­ken side­walks and other pedes­trian haz­ards were far less likely to be cor­doned off with tape or marked by cones. Walk at your own risk! It’s a dan­ger­ous world out there.

And I must turn to work. Enjoy Hump Day, how­ever you spend it.

* Hoosier read­ers object to the des­ig­na­tion of Bayh as a blonde, and after exam­in­ing the photo record, I think they’re right. I always pic­ture him as sort of an ashy dark blonde in my head, but now his hair is dark brown. He’s almost cer­tainly cov­er­ing the gray; maybe going darker is more believ­able than keep­ing him light. What­ever, only his hair­dresser knows for sure. Corrected.