Open Wire thread. Oh, my, but I’m going to have to sleep on this one. The pieces, they are falling into place. Who wrote this episode? I missed the credits. Best show on TV.

Finished “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” It’s great. And depressing. And funny. His takedown of that barking nitwit David Brooks is tremendous. He’s dead-on discussing the class differences between conservative and moderate Republicans. And, finally, he’s even deader-on as to how all this happened — how the dwindling working class was abandoned not only by the right but by the left, too. The right, however, at least knows well enough to throw them a little fresh meat every now and then. I finished it over the weekend and spent the next several hours brooding and snappish — always a good sign. Writing ought to give you heartburn once in a while.

Excerpt here, if you’re interested.

Of course, the weekend’s other big wad of verbiage was Ron Suskind’s examination of our faith-based presidency. Talk about a heartburn-inducing piece of work:

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ”road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

This wasn’t presented as evidence that Bush is stupid — although you can draw your own conclusions about that, or certainly about the worth of an Ivy League education — but about his dangerous bullheadedness, which he describes as decisiveness:

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world’s most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ”By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.”

Wait until you get to the part about the “reality-based community.” You’ll die.

I don’t want to bring you down, though! Fall is finally here — crisp days, crisper nights. I brought the potted rosemary in for its winter dance with death, which we avoided nicely two winters ago but nearly hit head-on last year. I can only pass along the lesson learned: SOUTHERN EXPOSURE, PEOPLE. Also, more water than you might think, but the sun is more important. If you don’t have a sunny southern window, you might as well kiss it goodbye today. I also retrieved the potted tarragon and put it in the same window, but I have no illusions about that. It’s toast, but maybe I can keep it alive long enough to do a little more cooking with it.

Now I smell like rosemary — they were big pots, required lots of wrestling — and they look lovely in the front window, with the lemon-yellow maple in the park strip as a backdrop. Why is the good part of fall so short? After Halloween it’ll be grim November, my birthday month, the Year’s Most Depressing (r). One reason I find it so is that not only is it my birthday month, it’s Alan’s and Kate’s, too (same day), which is followed swiftly by Thanksgiving (my actual birthday, this year), and then the holidays. I’m always a little relieved on Jan. 2, after which crushing depression sets in and I set about adding to my thigh’s fat stores.

But I don’t want to bring you down! After all, you didn’t have to endure “Shark Tale” this weekend, as I did. It’s always depressing to see a movie that appears to have been made by a marketing committee AND features one of your heroes (Martin Scorsese), making an ass of himself by being connected with such a stinker. Sharks as gangsters — huh. I also tired of the constant inside jokes. Maybe you thought it was funny that they cast Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore as the mobster’s right-hand man and named him “Luca” and made him an octopus (get it? GET IT?!?), but it just depressed me. Year after year for, what, eight years? Nine? Pixar has been teaching Hollywood how to make a kids’ movie that parents will enjoy in equal measure, and it’s so, so, exquisitely simple: The story is the most important thing, and it has to be honest. Is that so hard? It is not. You don’t need songs by Mary J. Blige and a million pop-culture references and stinky double-entendres. The “keep swimming” scene from “Finding Nemo” still moves me, but when the little shrimp in “Shark Tale” said, “Say hello to my li’l frien’,” my God, but I was…offended. I don’t want to think about “Scarface” when I’m sitting in the movies with my kid! What kind of person would?

Some Hollywood asshole, that’s who.

But I don’t want to bring you down! Take the title of this entry — Whassamatta U. I had to look it up; I wanted to get the spelling of Rocket J. Squirrel’s alma mater correct. Rocky and Bullwinkle — now there was a cartoon.

Late update: Forgot to add this, although everyone’s seen it by now, but what the hey, maybe you haven’t: Jon Stewart cuts out Tucker Carlson’s heart, shows it to him, then eats it slowly. Either transcript or video is worth the time.

We were preparing to move during ReaganFest ’04: The Funeral, so I was a bit distracted. What’s more, we were living in Blue America, which probably had a different take on the week than the places we were seeing on TV did. But never mind that. It seemed the week just got stranger as it went along — the weeping louder, the mourning more hysterical. Just like when Diana died, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

So when, a few weeks ago, some local Republicans proposed renaming our semi-outerbelt the Ronald Reagan Freeway, I wasn’t surprised. It’s preferable to blasting the crap out of Mount Rushmore.

But I have been surprised by the public reaction, at least as far as you can gauge it by letters-to-the-editor and other public bulletin boards. It’s getting slaughtered. Some hate it because it’s silly (these are my people). Some hate it because it’s a public-works tribute to a man who loathed them. Most just think it’s a bad idea to take a road everyone knows by one name and then give it another, for no real good reason — the guy’s dead, after all.

I’m amazed.

Ho, hum. Another day, another right-wing family-values torch-carrier exposed as a big fat hypocrite — with something other than the Sword of Truth in his hand, no less.

Bill O’Reilly, sued for sexual harassment. You can read the whole thing or, as The Smoking Gun has thoughtfully partitioned it, just the really dirty parts.

Lance did a nice job with Christopher Reeve today, devoting way more time to his acting career than anyone else I read on the subject. He pointed me to another blog, which helpfully sampled the Free Republic on the subject. The gist: It’s good that he was dead, and now he’s burning in hell because he promoted the bloody slaughter of unborn babies just to ease his suffering. Selfish, selfish bastard.

(Shudder.)

But remember, it’s the left winning the vileness derby. I read it in the New York Times, so it must be true.

If you don’t understand the reference in the above paragraph, you’re…just not keeping up. And I don’t have the energy to go hunt down all the links in what is essentially a story that can be boiled down to this: A man sent a hideous e-mail to a New York Times reporter, signed his name, had it printed in the Sunday ombudsman’s column and lived to regret it. John Scalzi had the best single take on it (including all those links I’m too lazy to include), with this refreshingly vulgar but amusing bit of cornpone commentary, which you’ll never read in the NYT: …anyone who e-mails a reporter expressing a wish that a specific reporter’s kid gets his or her head blown off has set up a sphincter kiosk on Asshole Avenue and is doing gangbuster business.

I’m going to remember that one. “How’s your sphincter kiosk doing, anyway?”

Wish I had more to report, other than: It was a cold, dreary day — Los Angeles weather has flown, it seems — and I had a mood to match. But! There’s a roast chicken in the oven with my name on it (on part of it, anyway), and Alan did all the work. How bad can a day be with this as its coda? I ask you.

So, ciao.

Oh, one more thing: I read stuff like this and I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still have a capacity for outrage. Do you?

Well, that’ll teach me to procrastinate. There will be no photograph of the 125-pound pumpkin because, believe it or not, SOMEBODY STOLE IT.

For the record, I never thought the thing weighed 125 pounds. Alan could lift it without risking hernia and so could I, although it was near the end of my capacity; call it maybe 80-90 pounds. Still, it was a big mofo of a punkin. I bought it weekend before last at the farmers’ market, when it appeared for the second week running. Price: $10, down $2 from the weekend before. I passed, thinking Alan would complain about how-the-heck-are-we-going-to-throw-that-away, Nance.

I shouldn’t have worried. When I came home and said, “Wow, that was a big pumpkin.” Alan replied, “Well, why didn’t you buy it?” I squealed, raced back to the market, and did just that. We wrestled it out of the car and set it up in front of the house. I always wanted a huge pumpkin, and it was a beaut, if a little smashed on one side — a real neon orange. I gave myself a month to imagine whether and how we would carve it.

Then last night it disappeared, in the early evening, probably when we were eating dinner and the household security system was patrolling the kitchen table for falling ravioli.

Well, I hope whoever he was, he got a hernia.

I did my civic duty today. Got called for jury duty. Oh, how anticlimactic it was. I left work at 8:15, appeared on time, and sat forever after watching an orientation video that was informative, but not nearly as entertaining as an “L.A. Law” episode. At the end, the judge came down, thanked us for our civic-duty-doing, but the case in question was pleaded out just that morning.

“I have a rule that I never allow plea bargains on the day of the trial, because that’s not respectful of your time,” he said, a classic set-up for why, just this once, he was making an exception. Turned out it was a good one: The case was a child-molestation charge, and the star witness was six years old, and everyone thought it would be in her best interest not to have to testify. Can’t say I disagree.

I was back at my desk two hours later, and I’m out of the pool for three more years.

Of course I wouldn’t have minded serving, but I’ve done this before, and it’s pretty predictable: You go in, reveal yourself to be a journalist and become one of the peremptory challenges. One of my colleagues was called and questioned: “You’re a journalist? So you understand how the court system works?” As though this were a bad thing. He got the hook immediately.

Nonetheless, the waiting was good for 80 pages of book-reading. While changing position on my seat, I sneaked a look at what others were reading. “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” “The Purpose-Driven Life,” etc. And I wonder why I feel out of place here.

Bloggage:

I have to confess, Christopher Reeve made me uncomfortable. Lots of reasons. I was an equestrian when he had his accident — that was a biggie. A lot of his I-will-walk-again statements were excruciating; I believe in optimism, but that seemed to be going way too far. His implication that a cure for paralysis is as close as a few more lines of stem cells was simpleminded. The way Hollywood liked to roll him out (literally) to clap and cry made me cringe. And that commercial? The one that showed him walking again, via CGI? That was the last word in tasteless.

Still.

He did seem like a truly nice person, and if nothing else, you had to give him credit for looking on the bright side, such as it was. He never shrank from discussing the ugly reality of quadriplegia — see this WashPost appreciation for the details of what it took for him to have a bowel movement — and it certainly helps you see why he fought so hard to be something more.

Anyway, I thought Richard Cohen’s column today captured the ambivalence of the situation just about perfectly.

Danger in your bathroom! Film at 11.

Peace out.

There are women who think breastfeeding is disgusting. And there are those who go far in the other direction; nursing becomes the core of their identity (see “Mothering” magazine, La Leche League, etc.). A true wishy-washy moderate, you can put me square in the middle of this continuum. I loved nursing (and was amazed by how much I did), but I must confess, part of the reason was that it allowed me to catch up on magazine reading and “Law & Order” reruns. I spent a fair amount of time gazing down at my adorable baby like the ladies in the LLL, but I also read almost all of “American Tabloid” with Kate at my breast, and I’ve sometimes wondered if some part of James Ellroy traveled from my brain into my milk. I guess I’ll know if she starts smoking at 11.

Anyway, every year around this time the shagbark hickory outside Kate’s bedroom window turns a vivid shade of yellow, and we have about a week when the inside of her room is bathed, all day, in magic-hour light. It’s so peaceful, and it always reminds me of the weeks leading up to her first birthday, when I enjoyed one of those brief periods of ease that convince you you have this parenthood thing knocked. I nursed her in the rocking chair in her room, looking out at the yellow tree, singing little mom-and-baby songs, enjoying it all so much.

The other day the tree yellowed up in about 24 hours. I took this lousy picture, which couldn’t even come close to capturing the effect of the light on the sponge-painted sky-blue walls. It’s not magic to you, but it is to me.

So, then: Bloggage!

“Dr. Strangelove” is rotating through the AMC channel of late, and I’ve caught a bit here and there. For years, I rented this movie every year — on New Year’s Eve, not that it’s significant except as a comment on Fort Wayne NY celebrations — and Roger Ebert is right: It just gets better. The NYT had a Sunday story on the upcoming DVD release, with the not-very-surprising news that it’s not so much satire as documentary.

Lance Mannion is hot lately, but thinks no one is reading him. Go prove him wrong. Or just read this one.

Confession: I only watched the first third of Friday’s debate. The rest of my evening was spent catching up with “Family Bonds,” which I haven’t been able to catch until now. I…well, I loved it. How can you not love a show that uses AC/DC’s “TNT” as its opening theme? A reality show about a family of Long Island bail bondsmen? It is to swoon, particularly if, like me, you enjoy eavesdropping on women in nail salons, where the bail-bonding ladies seem to spend every other day. I’m alone in this assessment — the show’s getting killed by critics — but care I do not. Here’s one of the kinder assessments.

I’m finally able to make serious progress in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” You should, too — it’s fabulous. More on that when I finish it.

This week’s open Wire thread. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to this show the way I used to look forward to my birthday. It’s a big pink cake with gooey icing, and my sole regret is I can’t watch more of the reruns. What will I do when the time changes and HBO’s eastern feed goes back on standard time? Get TiVo, I guess.

Anyway, much to enjoy last night: Major Bunny’s legalization push isn’t going well; Cutty’s tragic fall (with spicy sex! nudity! send the kids to bed early!); Stringer’s string-pulling.

Also, maybe our inside source can explain: Why is Jay Landsman’s badge Photoshopped out in this picture, but the other guy’s isn’t? Just wondering.

Have at it.

All I can say is, I’ve been to many, many charity events with le tout Fort Wayne over the years, and it’s mostly the same thing — cocktails, dinner, silent auction. Above, a selection from the Gay/Lesbian Dinner Dance silent auction.

It wasn’t a basketball signed by Gene Keady, that’s for sure.

Which was fine — there are enough signed basketballs in the world. Although I was wondering who bought this item; I’d like to know how a person stifles the laughter when one’s partner emerges from the bathroom in this getup.

Oh, it was a fun Saturday night — a huge expo room at the Coliseum packed with every differently oriented person in town with $30 to spend and a hankering to get down with a lot of other differently oriented people:

“Which entrance do we use?” Alex wondered as we pulled into the vast parking lot.

“Follow the well-dressed men,” I suggested.

The party itself was fun, but the after-party was more so. I recall a conversation with a gourmet cook, who every year donates dinner for 8, prepared in your own home, to the silent auction. I bid on it two years ago, setting $400 as my absolute upper limit — it went for $1,100. This year it got to $900. He told me about his specialties (southwestern) and his presentations (something about a salad that resembled Rubik’s cube) and at one point I looked up at the stars — this was on the patio — and thought, I’ve had worse evenings.

And I have.

More tomorrow, with the weekend’s linkage. I’m beat now.

No pumpkin picture again today. Sorry. Busy. Later.

Although really, I don’t know when. I’ve got lots to do in the next two days, and then! The fabulous Gay/Lesbian Dinner Dance to benefit our local AIDS Task Force! On Saturday night! With Alex! I thought I’d have time to shop for a new dress — you know how sharp-eyed those fellas are — but alas, I didn’t have time. I’ll have to settle for shaving my armpits. Alex is wearing the same suit he wore the last time we went, two years ago; it’ll have to do for me, as well.

By Sunday, things should settle down. We’ll see about that.

In the meantime, here’s this: Our friends John and Sam swung through town the other day, and when they left, I noticed they’d left a bottle of wine behind. Something called Charles Shaw — merlot. OK, whatever. I stuck it in the wine rack. Only later did I realize it was a bottle of the famous Two-Buck Chuck, sold exclusively at Trader Joe’s, which, needless to say, we don’t have around here. Market price: $1.99 Bargain? Ohhhhh, yeah. I’ve paid four times that much for a single glass of far worse.

So go find some. Me, I’ll be back Sunday. Sober!

I’m busy and have no time and besides…I don’t know about you, but I’ve been soaking my pillow with tears all day over Rodney Dangerfield. Let Richard Avedon go worms; who cares? But Rodney! Oh I must weep again.

Mark Brunswick used to tell a Rodney joke: I sat down to tell my kid about the birds and the bees. He told me about my wife and the butcher.

Here are some more, from the NYT obit:

“I was an ugly child. I got lost on the beach. I asked a cop if he could find my parents. He said, ‘I don’t know. There’s lots of places for them to hide.’ ”

“I was ugly, very ugly. When I was born, the doctor smacked my mother.”

Leave your favorite Rodney joke in comments. And while we’re on the subject, Here’s Hank on Janet Leigh. Good stuff.