Good God, I never thought I’d say it, but here I am, saying it: I miss the year when Rob Lowe chatted up Snow White in the big Oscar opening. Is it just me, or is Billy Crystal stinking up the room? This is ghastly! No one is laughing! And that red-carpet opening? I wanted gowns and are-you-wearing-a-corset, not an uncomfortable stand-up with the Sarandon-Robbins extended family. Is it so hard to get this event right? Stars in unguarded moments, nasty political jokes that make the audience howl, and a few water-cooler embarrassments — this is what I want from the Oscars.

Oh, well. Spring break has tottered to a close. Cookie Tour ‘04 is complete. The week, after starting off with a small snowstorm, finished springlike — it touched 60 degrees today, and I celebrated by getting my dusty bike out and pushing it around town for a while. Although the snow is mostly melted, the world still has that dirty, matted-down look that a winter thaw exposes, and I felt the same. I thought my heart would explode on the big hill home, but it didn’t, so I expect sooner or later I’ll regain my customary warm-season semi-fitness, if you define that as “can walk the dog without wheezing.”

(Renee Zellweger? Good lord, and they played that awful “h’it’s RAY-nin’” speech, which was in the trailer and may have singlehandedly pushed “Cold Mountain” to the wait-for-the-video column for me. Her character in the book was not the sort to dither about RAYn, but what do I know?)

I had the day pretty much to myself, which I planned to spend writing. What I wrote: Three sentences. Not good ones, either. I don’t believe in writer’s block, only laziness, and that’s pretty much what the problem was, today. Also, a library copy of “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” perhaps the first best-seller I’ve ever read originally published in Danish. I read it when it first came out, and recall loving it up until the end, which was just sort of muddled and strange and mad-scientist-y. You want a mystery novel to have a satisfying ending, but when all the stuff leading up to the ending is so good, it’s not so bad. About a year after I read it, I went to London and found a British edition in a bookstore there. Title: “Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.”

Maybe the ending was better in that one.

I don’t think we’re leading up to a good ending of this entry, either, so let’s go with a few links and call it a night. Steve Lopez in the L.A. Times takes an obvious topic but has some fun with it:

When your neighborhood is always referred to as “artsy,” it’s code for you-know-what. The neighbor across the street was gay. Some of the regulars at the Coffee Table were gay. The couple we bought our house from was gay, and we became dear friends.

“No. A constitutional amendment.”

Christopher Hitchens goes off the deep end with the Mel Gibson movie, but he gets off an amusing line or three: … It came back to me this week that an associate of his had once told me, in lacerating detail, that an evening with Mel was one long fiesta of boring but graphic jokes about anal sex. I’ve since had that confirmed by other sources. I don’t know what makes that passage funny — the fact Mr. Catholic tells jokes about Oz-style lovin’ or “I’ve since had that confirmed by other sources.”

You tell me.

Photoshop a new ending to “The Passion of the Christ.” I think I like “Senator and Mrs. Yeshua Bar Yosef” best.

Sorry for yet another unexplained absence. Short version: The downside to having relatives your kid can sell Girl Scout cookies to is, you have to go deliver the things, and sometimes this means hundreds of miles of driving.

But Aunt Pam and Uncle Charlie got their Peanut Butter Patties. Uncle Charlie did, anyway; Aunt Pam ordered nought but Shortbreads.

And Kate and I had a chance to travel through Ohio on two bright winter days. I made notes — mental notes, because I was driving — for a creative-writing assignment that’s due, like, Tuesday. Theme: Travelogue. Task: Craft a rough short-short plot around a trip. I tried to think of fiction set in northwestern Ohio. Came up with one, “A Simple Plan.” I read that book once, loved it, and could never bring myself to read it again, and put off seeing the movie until it had left the Current Releases shelf at Blockbuster. The book was so evocative of the feeling a person might have, being stuck in a dead-end town very much like the one my husband is from, that I couldn’t bear to go through it twice. It actually made my chest feel tight.

I don’t think my short story will be that good.

Tomorrow, we deliver cookies to Fort Wayne. On Sunday, back to Ohio. God help me, these are some expensive cookies.

I passed time in Ohio reading reviews of “The Passion of the Christ.” David Edelstein wins the Best Blurbs award, for “the film the Jews don’t want you to see,” “a two hour and six minute snuff film” and “the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.” “What does this protracted exercise in sadomasochism have to do with Christian faith?” isn’t really a blurb (nor is my first example, really — it’s his distillation of Mel Gibson’s marketing strategy — but I think it makes a good blurb, just the same), but it’s a good question.

Then I got home. Guess what? Someone — lots of someones, actually — have spotted an actual live wolverine in the Thumb, making this the first actual sighting of a wolverine in the Wolverine State, ever. So what does the Freep do with it? Makes a cute story out of it, complete with proposed fun names for the poor beast. Sigh. I give up.

Back in a day or two.

Oh, for the love of Pete. (By Paul.) I give up.

Alex is ranting.

John Scalzi has a word or two, as well. And a very good question.

I’m glad someone’s got the energy for this. Because I sure don’t.

Stipulated: Detroit is a city in which race is not just subtext, but the text itself. Stipulated: City officials, and the newspapers that quote them, are famously nervous about confronting these things. Stipulated: Last week two Detroit police officers, both white, were shot to death by a black assailant.

So this week, someone paints the Joe Louis memorial — a giant black fist — white. At the base of the sculpture, someone leaves photographs of the two dead cops, with “courtesy of the Fighting Whiteys” written across them.

But: Police said Monday they were unsure whether the white paint splattered on the sculpture early Monday symbolized racism or some other type of political statement against violence in Detroit. Ohhh-kay.

Two men are in custody. Make sure you click through for the remarkable picture of this remarkable piece of public art, which we were told on our KWF tour of Detroit was a gift from Sports Illustrated magazine. When I first read about it, in Zev Chafets’ excellent book on the city, I seem to recall it was pointed inland, at the suburbs. I don’t know if I’m misremembering or it was moved, but now it points to Canada, a suitable target for a swinging bronze fist, I’d say.

I always wanted to go to the sorts of parties that got written up in chic magazines, where mere mortals can only read about the fabulous food you ate and the lovely tables you sat at, and be consumed with envy over their tiny, tawdry little lives.

And what do you know? I did! Only I didn’t know it at the time!

Scott and Samantha’s wedding, which took us to New York last spring, made The Knot magazine. It’s not online, but that clipping above gives you an idea. (See the little petit fours? Those are the candles I tried to eat after I had too many drinks.) I wrote about this at the time, but I can’t find it in the bloggified archives, so just take my word for it: It was a lovely wedding, and now I have mass-media validation. What they left out: When I first knew Scott, he was living in a squalid apartment with only two pieces of furniture, an inflatable couch and a stereo (the latter essential for his job — pop music critic). Now he’s gettin’ married in a slick-paper magazine. Wonders, don’t ever cease.

If I’m ever going to become a work-at-home writer — yes, friends, it is my dream — I’m going to have to either a) develop the iron discipline of a yogi; or b) put the modem in the freezer. How the hell can anyone get any work done with always-on internet? One minute you’re trying to work on a little business, the next your famously short attention span is being rewarded in all the wrong ways. You all saw “Adaptation,” so you know the way the average lazy writer’s mind works. But you notice Charlie Kaufman wrote on an IBM Selectric, because God help him if he’d have had broadband:

“Boy, ‘Magic Carpet Ride’ really is the perfect ’60s single, isn’t it? Half pop hooks, half extended trippy stuff. Why hasn’t anyone ever written the definitive biography of Steppenwolf, huh? The Doors suck up all the attention from that era, don’t they? Oh, wait, now what am I saying? Let’s ask Dr. Google, no, Dr. Amazon:

“See, here you are: ‘Magic Carpet Ride: The Autobiography of John Kay and Steppenwolf.’ Four stars? Wow. What do the fans say? i really enjoyed this book.it told me many things i never knew about john kay,like the fact that he has never ridden a motorcycle because he is legally blind…yes it is written from his perspective but his version is a very important one.this book was an easy read and it kept me interested in it through out the whole thing.as a follow up to the book i watched the vh1 behind the music about steppenwolf which confirmed most of the things in the book..in my opinion i do think john should forgive the other guys or at least come to peace with it and them .we all do a lot of dumb things in life thats why we need friends to help us get back up again.i hope the wolf continues to rock much longer!its never too late to start all over again. Isn’t that nice? You know who else I’ve always wondered about? The girl from high school, ol’ what’s-her-face. Is she on Google? Why, she is!”

And so on.

the wolf continues to rock. Somewhere out there. But I’m getting no work done.

Since Kate was born, the number of movies I see in theaters has dropped precipitously. The Baby-Sitter Surcharge (BSS), $20 at the very least for a standard dinner-and-movie combo, moves too many to the “wait for the video” column. The occasional hurray-we’re-free sleepover invitation usually comes on the spur of the moment, and we see what’s in town.

So it usually happens that I get to Oscar night having seen maybe one of the nominated Best Picture contenders and hardly any of the more obscure categories. But! Through the miracle of sleepovers and video, this weekend I increased my viewing of Best Documentary Feature contenders from zero to two — we saw “The Fog of War” in the theater Friday, and “Capturing the Friedmans” on video Saturday, and both rocked me on my heels. Can’t recommend them highly enough. Run, don’t walk! And so on. Even if we’d paid the BSS, they still would have been worth it.

“The Fog of War” has all the artistry you expect from Errol Morris, including the usual Philip Glass score, but it also has Robert McNamara at 85, speaking with perhaps as much honesty as you can expect from the architect of the Vietnam War. But the most interesting parts, to me, were McNamara on the Cuban missile crisis and the firebombing of Tokyo and Gen. Curtis LeMay’s role in both (I’m probably more familiar with LeMay than most, if only because he was a son of Columbus, Ohio, and he was included in our local-history units).

The first night “The Fog of War” was in town, students were lined up down the block to get in, which I at first thought was an encouraging sign but then I figured it out: They were there as a class requirement. The night we saw it, it was all gray heads, but then, spring break had already started, and most of the non-gray heads have headed off to warmer climates. One gray head I wish would see it, but fat chance: George W. Bush.

As for the sad, cursed Friedman family, I linked to David Edelstein’s Slate review because it revealed the amazing information that this movie started out being a documentary about children’s birthday-party performers and ended up being about a family riven by the sex-abuse hysteria of the mid-’80s, but had a pedophile at its head. It’s about, oh, family and guilt and love and the elusive nature of truth and about a million other things, and how often do you get all of that in 90 minutes? Not often, I’ll tell you.

I notice “Spellbound” wasn’t nominated, which is an outrage, but if it had been, oh my what a burden that would have been for Academy voters. (Local trivia note: The winner of the spelling bee in the movie is a student at the U of M.)

One Curtis LeMay story: A friend awas tasked with writing his prepared obit for the Columbus Dispatch, and let me listen to the interview tape. The “bomb ‘em back to the Stone Age” comment was taken out of context, he said. Hmm. Two views: Pro and con. Bonus: He was the model for Gen. Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove”!?

I don’t usually look to the Journal Gazette for poignance, but I found it today in a typically underwritten column about a Hoosier who couldn’t wait to get quit of the place, and the family who just couldn’t understand.

Read between the lines, and you see the outlines of what seems to be a remarkable individual, this Eric Johnson who traveled the world for decades: I’m guessing he was gay, although that’s only a guess based on the lifestyle-and-choices stereotypes (ballet and bachelorhood); curious about the world outside Fort Wayne; highly intelligent; restless.

Indiana loves to proudly claim native sons and daughters only after the local narrow-mindedness and Siberian cultural conditions have driven them far away to make their fortunes. It would seem that Johnson is only another in a long series, minus the fame.

Jeff Clark will never know why his brother chose to spend his life roaming the world. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to be like the people in his hometown, working humdrum jobs and going home to the same house where they would eventually die, never having left the corner of the world where they were born.

Maybe? You think?

…is an interesting photo project documenting the same-sex marriages last week in San Francisco. Fund-raising opportunities, too, if you’re interested.