It strikes me this blog has lost its way. Freed from my self-imposed obligation of a long, end-of-day data-dump, it’s noodled its way into irrelevance. I’m so glad I don’t have any site-statistic software; it would be too depressing.

On the other hand, one of the nice things about this year, after 18 years of being a columnist, is the freedom from having to say something about anything. “Shut up and learn” was my bumper-sticker resolution for this year, and while I haven’t always been successful at the first part, I think I’ve been pretty diligent about the second.

Also, the way the news is these days, commentary seems like such a dull sword. From the Department of You Can’t Make This Shit Up, today’s memo:

* NBC’s entertainment division made an offer to derail a story by its news division, in hopes of gaining an interview with — who else? — Michael Jackson. Read it and weep, in the NYT.

* I’m always saying that if Republicans and/or conservatives want more of a voice in pop culture, they ought to send their kids to film school instead of business school. Well, it looks like they already have a representative deep inside not only the movie business, but the indie/film festival movie business. The bad news: It’s Vincent Gallo.

* Perhaps you’ve been following all the brow-fanning over the MoveOn fete earlier this month, in which many of the speakers made the usual tired George Bush = Adolf Hitler connections. It shouldn’t surprise you to know this is a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do thing for some conservatives. Eric Zorn does the dirty work; scroll down to “the H word.”

With that, I’m off to my Bible as Literature class. Now that’s a whole entry on its own; later for that one.

Certain inventions just sort of … change the landscape, say. Wheeled luggage. Automobiles. Birth-control pills. Wireless broadband connectivity. And so it was, when our old iMac came up needing a $300 repair, right on the razor’s edge of my fix it/junk it threshhold, our household did an assessment of our computing needs. No, really we just sat around for a couple weeks with our thumbs up our butts, fighting over the laptop. Then the second term started, and the fighting became more pitched — you really can’t underestimate the importance of a computer to today’s student, and with one of one and two of the other, we needed to fix things. I’ll spare you the details, the endless whirl of research, price lists and the like, and cut to the chase:

We are now a two-laptop household. I expect God to strike me dead any minute now.

The new iBook joined the household yesterday. I upgraded the PowerBook to Panther, and now they’re talking to one another, sharing a wireless printer and getting along oh-so-Mac-liciously. I changed my desktop pattern to celebrate. We are a walking Yuppie cliche, is what we are.

On the other hand, there was this revelation: Guess what the Microsoft Office suite costs if you’re a student? This is, mind you, a $400 package out there in the real world. Ready? Forty-five bucks. Downside: It comes as a raw disk in a cheap cellophane envelope. “So the molded clamshell box is what’s driving the price up?” I asked the cashier, who at least got the joke. Final Draft, the $200 screenwriting software I’ve been begging and borrowing through last term? Eighty dollars. Tuition may be going up at five percent a year, but if you have a kid in college? Go visit the next time you’re doing an upgrade, and recoup at least some of your investment.

Since our winter recreational activities have now been broadcast to the greater Comcast service area, perhaps you’ll be interested in what we did today: Visited the Plymouth Ice Festival. Above, Kate with SpongeBob IcePants.

You think these events are fun with your own family, try visiting with a bunch of international Fellows: “This is who? Sponzh Bob?” (Burst of Spanish to children, probably: “And they lecture us about soccer riots.”

Last week we went sledding at the very steep and very fun Veterans Memorial Park sledding hill here in Ann Arbor, and oh what a time we had. Once again, the elderly wooden sleds with metal runners proved the best ride around, but we covered this last January.

About halfway through our outing a woman appeared with a video camera on a tripod. She wasn’t driving a branded NewzVan, but she and her equipment looked professional enough. This is Ann Arbor; she could have been anything from a well-equipped mom covering every instant of little Savannah’s blessed childhood to a grad student doing an impressionistic film about snowflakes. You just never know.

Tonight I was surfing on our antique TV, the one in the kitchen that doesn’t have a remote and requires you to change channels the old-fashioned way. This being Ann Arbor, all the public-access stations are at ridiculously low and sought-after spots on the dial — 16-19, I think — and as I zipped past en route to CNN I thought I saw a familiar sight going by under the community calendar. It was our sledding hill! And that was me, in my new polar-expedition parka, standing at the top getting ready to send Kate down the hill! And there was Alan, on the run where his hat flew off! And Kate again! And we all saw it! We experienced the screaming-monkey thrill of seeing ourselves on the teevee!

What are the odds we’d see something like this? A zillion to one? Why can’t those odds work when I’m buying lottery tickets, is what I’d like to know.

…has an air of great power. The dudes have envied him for so long.

Wil Haygood of the WashPost gives us a nice appreciation of Ron O’Neal, aka Priest, the original Superfly, who died last week of cancer.

Bonus for Central Ohio readers: Some nice details of black life in my hometown circa the era of the film’s release. I flipped when I saw the reference to Lee’s department store on Mount Vernon Avenue, which advertised on the Top 40 stations for years, using the Bobbettes’ “Mr. Lee” as background music.

I saw Ron O’Neal as Superfly, in a similarly memorable evening, and also as Othello at Stratford. In between, there was his turn as the Cuban commander in “Red Dawn.” That, folks, is some range.

It snowed yesterday. Hardly an out-of-the-ordinary event in southeast Michigan; it wasn’t even that bad a storm. Having shoveled the sidewalk, I’d say we got, oh, five or six inches.

But even in a latitude accustomed to this sort of thing, a snowfall like this is a nuisance. Predictably so — commutes lengthen, school and other events are cancelled. It happens.

So last night, we watched the local Detroit news. First story: Snow. Second story: Snow. Third story: Snow. (Yes, friends, it was a “team coverage” event!) Next story: Snow. Then the weather report: Snow. Next story: Snow.

At this point I went to bed. (The reporter was gesturing to the snow at her feet — which the camera operator helpfully tilted down to show us — and saying it “could give drivers trouble.”) Alan reported the ENTIRE REMAINDER OF THE BROADCAST was: Snow.

The new wrinkle seems to be the device reporters are now issued along with their logo-branded jackets — little wooden rulers, like the ones in your desk in fourth grade. They’re occasionally commanded by the anchors to thrust these things into the snow and report how deep it is, so the anchors can then chuckle about being warm and dry in the studio and “Stay warm, Jill!”

The closest we came to anything approaching real news was the hospital angle, when a reporter went to an emergency room and reported people were arriving with injuries from “falls.” (Why they don’t go to dry cleaners in summer thunderstorms to see whether people are bringing their good gabardine suits in with water damage, I don’t know.) A woman wearing a cervical collar on a gurney was interviewed live, to report that it was slippery out there and she did, indeed, fall. “So be careful,” advised the somber reporter. “Back to you!”

Today’s forecast: Bitter cold. I’ll keep you posted.

Comments have been hosed for a couple days. Fixed now.

On the way to the auto show last week, a truck passed us on I-94.

“What the hell is that thing hanging from the axle?” I asked my brother. “Is that…balls?

It was. Behold the latest automotive accessory for men who have no doubts about their manhood.

I know what you’re thinking: Can I buy these on the net? Why, of course. At several places.

I have ripped my first headline. Whether I can separate a story from it for my nefarious purposes remains to be seen, but what a yarn in the AA News tonight:

Seven Eastern Michigan University football players and one former player were arrested early Sunday after a series of parties in Ypsilanti turned into a donnybrook with police from three agencies, authorities said.

At one point, a female police officer was lifted nearly to the ceiling by a player, then body-slammed across the back of a couch as police tried to break up one of the parties, according to police reports.

The link’s worth following, if only to get a feel for how these situations get out of control, not to mention what sounds like some police sorely in need of major backup:

EMU Public Safety officers and Washtenaw County Sheriff’s deputies also responded to the scene. Police said the anger escalated when officers tried to ticket the player who lived in the apartment for a noise violation, and he refused to take the ticket. He swore at the female officer, she reported, so she threw the ticket into the apartment as police tried to back out.

The first officer tried to spray the second player with pepper spray, but said the 6-foot-2, 205-pound player hoisted her nearly to the ceiling in a bear hug, then slammed her back and shoulder into the back of a sofa while she screamed for help.

It sounds like it was fortunate they didn’t have a riot on their hands.

Oh, and just in case you’re tut-tutting at the sensational media coverage, rest assured: They put it on the metro page, not out front where it belonged. You couldn’t find it on the website with a magnifying glass. Move along, nothing to see here.

Fellow fellow Vince and I decided, on the spur of the moment (relatively speaking), to attend the Bette Midler show at the Palace at Auburn Hills last night. It was the only spontaneity an evening like this can accommodate, because face it: Shows like this cannot do spontaneous. If, like me, you had your formative pop-concert experiences in the ’70s, and somehow believed that people in the audience shouting “Free Bird!” translated into Skynyrd’s performance of that number later in the evening, you may have been led to believe that performers are capable of spontaneity in performance. They are not. At least, they are not in shows like the one at the Palace last night. There is a schedule. There is a computer-controlled carousel horse on wires arriving from the wings in 45 seconds, and you’ve got to get on and fly out, whether you want to or not. There are two dozen more cities to visit. The jokes individually tailored for each city will be written by a professional, and the magic will come in the performer’s delivery of same, making it seem they just popped into her curly little head.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. It’s theater, not improv. You gotta rock the cheap seats, too, and I appreciate the effort with the scenery, the effects, the everything. You also gotta give Bette her props: This is a girl who can still tear the roof off the sucka when she wants to. I happily believed she made up the snappy patter right there on the spot. (Sample: “Ah, Detroit, home of Joe Louis’ fist. I saw it today; it was wearing a glove. It’s cold out there!”)

It was kind of a poignant evening for me. I loved Bette Midler in the ’70s along with all my gay friends, and then all my gay friends died, and Bette and I lost touch sometime after “The Rose.” You can’t fault someone for making hits where she found them; I’m just not one of those girls who feels the need to stand up with a lit match in hand when she hears “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”

But the first part of the show was fabulous — the Rosemary Clooney homage, the Fishtails Over Broadway bit (whatever else it is, mermaids rolling around the stage in electric wheelchairs is just funny), the Sophie Tucker jokes. The trick to aging well is not taking yourself too seriously, and no one ever accused Bette Midler of that. Speaking of Christina Aguilera performing in little more clothing than would fit in a Barbie doll’s pocket, she said:

“Do these girls ever call and say thank you? Do they? No. And I opened the door for trashy singers with bad taste and big tits!”

She did. And she did it so well.

In conclusion, here’s a Sophie Tucker joke:

“My boyfriend Ernie said, ‘Soph, if you’d learn to cook, we could fire the chef.’ And I said, ‘Ernie, if you’d learn to fuck, we could fire the chauffeur!'”

Thank you very much. Drive carefully. I love you, Detroit!