Take that, Michael Medved, you tiny little man.

UPDATE: Well, the clothes were just fabulous. I read this Slate essay arguing otherwise, and I see her point, but I can’t say I miss the days of Cher in a feather explosion, either. Joan and Melissa Rivers may be plagues upon the land, but when Charlize Theron came out in that blue confection, my heart fluttered. Great fashion is great art, and I’d rather my jaw drop for all the right reasons.

That said, does Hilary Swank have an ass crack? I guess only the back of her chair knows for sure.

Just because everyone’s dressing tastefully, it doesn’t mean there isn’t still fodder for pre-game hooting. Hollywood will be giving us plastic surgery victims for some time yet. And I guess we’ll always have Star Jones.

Also, poor Marty, passed over again. Well. I think, if he wants to win, he needs to stop showing up. If all those acceptance speeches from other “Aviator” winners weren’t enough to shame his colleagues into giving him a statue, nothing will. As a refugee from perhaps the only business more fond of award-giving — journalism — all I can say is this: It don’t mean nothin’. Marty’s the best, always will be, end of story.

Quick, complete this sentence: Thanks, Belgium, for all the…”

Made you think, didn’t it? If you came up with anything more than “waffles,” I guess you get a prize (even if you’re still holding those sprouts against its capital). Me, too. But now that I live in a thriving multi-ethnic metropolis, I can say I’m a little more savvy.

Let me back up — we went out Saturday night with John and Mary C. John’s a longtime occasional reader of NN.C, and recently checked back in after a long absence to discover we’d moved. Turns out he lives in the Pointes. Small world. Anyway, he and Mary took us out on a grownup’s Saturday night in the eastern suburbs — dinner at Steve’s Back Room, then a nightcap at the Cadieux Cafe, a true east-side landmark and a Belgian hangout.

Really. Hang around there, you learn about buffalo and walloons, but mostly the odd sport of featherbowling. The Cadieux Cafe claims to offer the U.S.’s only featherbowling venue, and I believe it. How this hasn’t ended up in an Elmore Leonard novel by now, I don’t know. A cross between bocce and shuffleboard and maybe horseshoes, it’s played in a concave lane of packed dirt, the object being to roll a flat-sided ball (think of a wheel of cheese) down the lane and land it as close as possible to a pigeon feather stuck at the other end. Close calls are settled with a measuring stick.

John plays in a league. He explained some of the game’s unique challenges, among them where to find replacement balls for a sport that’s so obscure as to redefine the word. They’ll have to have them custom-made. (The good news: the current set has been going strong for 70 years.) Then we watched for a while. The ball doesn’t roll straight; it makes a sine wave down the alley, wandering up and down the banked sides as it approaches the feather. It’s goofy, in an elegant way, and goes well with beer (Belgian, of course; we had Chimay).

John said sometimes the regulars ask, “Oh, you’re from Chicago? Where do the Belgians live in Chicago?” The answer to which must be, “Ummm…”

Anyway, it was a lovely evening. That it’s the only evening we’ve had out in weeks and weeks didn’t hurt.

Bloggage: My opinion of Halle Berry just rose tenfold.

Tomorrow, let’s dish the Oscars.

OK, this is funny.

My fave: “For the Love of Scottie McMullet.” Yours?

(Thanks: Eric Zorn.)

Because it’s bad to start the day — or the lunch hour, or the weekend, or anything — with a sour taste in one’s mouth, or bad feelings about one’s newspaper, here’s something from the Freep today that I liked. Why walking is a spiritual activity:

Skip Davison, 56, a retired insurance agent, described an almost Buddhist technique: “When I’m with other people, my mind is constantly thinking. So, when I walk, I try to empty my mind. Sometimes I count my paces and I can feel my mind opening up.”

Yeah, me too.

I hate stories like this.

In one, a man injects heroin frequently and cheats on his wife repeatedly. In another, a man seriously considers killing somebody, and then does. In the third, a mentally ill man locks himself in a room where he collects his own urine in jars.

If you’re going to see any of these Academy Award-nominated films, why not bring along your favorite 13-year-old? The Motion Picture Association of America says it’s OK.

Oh, poo. The story is about “ratings creep,” a legitimate topic — how what was once an R-rated movie is now a PG-13, and so on. I only wish such stories would focus on the dreck that’s in theaters with PG-13 ratings, not the tiny handful of decent movies with semi-objectionable material that are actually worth seeing, by teens and adults.

Stories like this, in other words:

These days, you could say that there are essentially three kinds of PG-13 movies: movies that are teenaged through and through, but often in the worst and most puerile sense, technically eschewing adult fare like nudity while substituting scenes that are in fact smuttier and more disturbing (for example, a scene in which a young woman — shown from the rear — lifts her top to flash an onlooker). In addition, there are children’s movies that essentially reach for PG-13: movies that probably could have been rated PG, but which have been juiced up with enough gratuitous sexuality and violence to earn them the higher rating. And finally, there are fundamentally adult movies, like “S.W.A.T.,” whose true nature is R but which are increasingly able to make a few deft excisions and extract a PG-13 from the board charged with rating films. As a result of this last technique, says Stephen Prince, a communications studies professor at Virginia Tech, in terms of content the PG-13 and R ratings have become virtually interchangeable.

I hope this isn’t the dawn of a new, CAP-alert era — the Freep story helpfully tells us that “Ray” includes “26 damns and 19 hells.” All I want to know is if it sucks or not.

But as long as we’re on the subject…

I may have mentioned our Family TV Hour, which evolved over the last few months, the Wheel of Fortune/Jeopardy block from 7-8 p.m., during which the three of us unwind, play word games and jeer at the contestants who scream “Big money! Big money!” too loudly. And let me add this: Thank God the February rating period is over, because that hour was a favorite for multiple promos for the upcoming evening news, which, during rating periods, is heavy on the big three — sex, sleaze and fear. We’ve been told about tsunami orphans sold into sex slavery, the secret your teen is keeping from you that may ENDANGER HER LIFE (anorexia bracelets), and the like.

The other day Kate said, “Sometimes the news scares me.”

“Me, too,” I said. “But mostly it just pisses me off.” (OK, I really said, “irritates me.”)

The last two weeks I’ve been letting her stay up until 9 to watch “Survivor” with me. After 8, the fun really starts, promo-wise. If you know that “CSI” follows “Survivor,” you know what I’m talking about.

“Is that show rated R?” she asked, after I covered her eyes to avoid a split-second shot of a sex swing (IN THE PROMO).

“No,” I said. “It’s rated S. For stupid.”

Enough, then.

I’ve been saying this for years: “It’s so interesting that one of the chief critics of smut in television, Brent Bozell, who runs a right-wing media watch group [Media Research Center], is silent when it comes to the public standards of Rupert Murdoch’s sleaze empire. They do have a double standard. They are silent about the fact that it’s capitalism, and that it’s the media tycoons who are polluting the public sphere.”

Now that Bill Moyers is saying it, maybe some people will listen. But I doubt it.

…if you haven’t discovered Lifehacker, you really should.

You may have noticed the evening update is now the morning update. I guess that’s how it’s going to be for a while, as the household rhythms at NN.C central settle into a groove. Morning — it’s the new evening. Tell all your friends.

One reason I’ve been shutting the laptop at dinnertime, though, is my rediscovery of my old friend, analog media, i.e., books. Read “The Inner Circle” last week, T.C. Boyle’s novelization of the Kinsey years back in the Hoosier state, and I can say it didn’t disappoint. (Boyle never disappoints, if you ask me.) One of my biggest regrets of my time there is this: I never got into the Kinsey Institute, not that I tried very hard, but I always hoped they’d have a media event and I’d have a chance to wander through the library. A friend and colleague penetrated that inner sanctum (it’s only open to researchers, and he was working on a paper about premarital cohabitation), and his account of it was fascinating — a vast holding tank for everything from rank porno to scholarly papers on the physiology of erections, all shelved together, cheek-to-cheek, so to speak.

“There’d be someone’s PhD thesis right next to ‘Doctor’s Naughty Nurse,’” he said.

But even better was the art, everything from ninth-century Japanese erotica to X-rated doodles by famous American artists. He described one by, I believe, Thomas Hart Benton, featuring an artist at an easel in an office somewhere, the door opening as the boss enters, while a naked lady slips out the window, trailing a line that connects to the artist’s pencil.

And all this at Indiana University, in the heart of Bible-belt Hoosierdom. Amazing.

Boyle tells the experience of a fictional member of Kinsey’s research team, the men who combed the country with him throughout the ’40s and ’50s, taking “sex histories,” his famous 350-question survey that produced the two Kinsey reports and — you know the rest of it.

Dr. Kinsey was the focus of the usual right-wing attack when the movie about him came out last fall, a little pop-cult palate cleanser between the Swift Boats and the election. This is typical, a sneering dismissal that manages that famous right-wing trick of assuming a certain historical rewrite: Let’s face it: Alfred C. Kinsey was a weirdo. And what made me laugh–I agree with TOC that “Kinsey” was the funniest flick I’ve seen all year–was director/screenwriter Bill Condon’s lugubrious efforts to persuade us in the audience that this was not so, that the sex- and cooked-statistics-obsessed Kinsey was actually a martyr to American midcentury prudery.

Conservatives got away with this with civil rights, too — once the issue was settled, their opposition was simply forgotten, at least by them. The debts were forgiven; of course they always supported racial equality, they were just misunderstood and misrepresented. Boyle’s book does a good job of capturing the sexual confusion of the era, when the messages were dirty-dirty-dirty and leave-the-light-off and good-girls-don’t-do-that. Those snickering twits at the IWF should be thanking Kinsey’s ghosts that their husbands know where their clitorises are, but…no. Of course.

This week, “The Chrysanthemum Palace.”

Dog drags human leg from abandoned factory.

If we have any Arizonans among the vast and teeming NN.C readership, could they answer this question: Are people as insane on the subject of Daylight Saving Time there as they are in Indiana?

The Hoosier state’s new governor, Mitch Daniels, wants to lead the state, kicking and screaming, into the bright new day of DST. And I do mean kicking and screaming;

Daniels keeps saying that no one wants to do business in or locate a business in Indiana because the state is not on daylight time. I know a farmer who will sell you a load of road apples for a buck apiece, too. Wake up and smell the profit margin, Mitch buddy. What does Indiana have to offer to CEOs who are used to a certain style of life? Zip, zilch, nada, nothing. Indiana is not a cultural mecca and never will be, and a big part of drawing a business to an area is what an area has to offer other than tax relief benefits.

Or this calm, well-reasoned argument:

I spent 10 years in New Jersey, where clocks were changed twice a year with the rest of the country. More than just the clocks get changed. The body has to adjust to a new sleep cycle every time the clocks are moved backward and forward. I remember being tired for two weeks after every time change. I was either falling asleep on the couch at 9 p.m. and waking up too early, or lying awake at night trying to fall asleep and still feeling exhausted when the alarm went off in the morning. I came to dread the semi-annual time change because of the sleep deprivation that occurred. Daylight-saving time is unnatural and hard on one’s sleep cycle, and for that reason, I am definitely against daylight-saving time.

But I don’t want to wreck all your fun. Go and cavort among the Hoosiers.

During my KWF year, we had a seminar with Richard Pound, an IOC bigwig and head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. We had lots of guests that night, mostly people from the university’s athletic community. He spoke about the upcoming Olympics and drug testing, and it was all very interesting. The discussion period skated off into sports in general, and kids and sports, and I said something like, “You know, I’d like my daughter to play sports, to get the good things out of it. The physical fitness, the leadership–”

I was interrupted by the coach of a major women’s sport at the U. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I haven’t seen a leader on my teams in more than 10 years.” She went on to explain: Today’s collegiate athlete was yesterday’s child athlete, and child athletics is, overwhelmingly, the parents’ game. When the coach was a child, she went on, you played sports by getting your ball and going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and getting a team together. You made your own rules, decided whether the manhole cover was home base or out of bounds, and played together. You learned arbitration skills by being your own referees, leadership by being your own coaches. Organized competitions didn’t come until junior high.

“Today,” she went on, “my players have been dragged around by their parents starting in kindergarten. They’re very docile, but I have to tell them everything. When to warm up, when to cool down, when to get a drink of water, what uniform to wear. If I don’t, they just stand there. They have no idea how to take the initiative.”

When Kate was 5, I enrolled her in a summer soccer league. She seemed to enjoy it for a while, but when the novelty wore off, it was just drudgery. She liked to go to games because of the concession stand and her friends, but her attention wasn’t there. And who could blame her? It’s fun to run around kicking a ball with your friends. It’s no fun to play organized soccer, on a schedule, in blistering heat, when you’re 5. I decided not to enroll her for the fall season, and to let her tell me what — and whether — she wanted to play.

So far, we’re still in the run-through-the-sprinkler-and-ride-bikes phase. Fine with me.

Last summer, when I was editing sports copy, I handled a story about knee injuries in young women athletes. Apparently ACL tears are routine in high school now, and this is invariably chalked up to female anatomy — wider hips mean more stress on the knee’s lateral flexing. Female athletes past puberty, especially those in sports like soccer or basketball, must work out with weights to strengthen their quadriceps and hamstrings if they want to avoid ACL injuries.

I tried to think back to my own high school, which was no slouch in the girls-athletics department, and how many girls I remember going around on crutches. Can’t think of any, but my memory could be faulty.

Also last summer, when I was watching ESPN as part of my continuing education, I saw a piece on Tommy John surgery in players barely out of Little League. Tommy John surgery is named for the pitcher who first had the reconstructive elbow procedure — while he was a major leaguer. Pitchers whose voices were still changing said, “I’ll just have Tommy John if I have a problem.”

Now comes this New York Times piece today, on young athletes falling apart the way old athletes do — with injuries that only come from overuse. A sample passage:

In his office in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. Andrews hands the parents of new patients a piece of chalk and points to a blackboard in the corner.

“And I say, ‘You all know why he’s here seeing me?’ And I point to the blackboard. That’s when the light bulb goes off.”

I think about what I’ve been reading about getting into good colleges, which used to reward what’s called “well-balanced” kids — smart, plays a sport or three and volunteers at the soup kitchen. Now, top schools want the “well-imbalanced” kid — smart enough, but an Olympic swimmer, and forget about volunteering, because you don’t have time when you’re an Olympic swimmer.

Overuse injuries, the NYT article points out, are not just because of too much time playing, but too much time playing just one sport, instead of running around with your friends playing soccer, football and baseball, all in one day.

Being “well-imbalanced,” that is — the Tiger Woods effect. All the chips on soccer, or basketball, or whatever.

I remember another story I handled last year, about a young basketball player whose team of adult “supporters” — which includes his parents, but also a minister, coaches and maybe even an agent, but I can’t remember — are grooming him to be drafted by the NBA either right out of high school or very soon after. They’re looking for a college that will help him achieve that goal, i.e., not finishing college.

I ask you.

Read the story.