I won’t be seeing “United 93″ in the theaters, but not for the reasons being discussed in the public square at the moment. Like most parents with younger children, I rarely see anything with a rating stronger than PG in the theaters. (My plan for this weekend: “Brokeback Mountain,” finally. I suspect the next movie we’ll be seeing in the dark with strangers will be “Akeelah and the Bee,” but never mind that.) I’m paying attention to the discussion of “United 93,” and as usual, I’m wondering why it seems only Ron Rosenbaum is paying attention:

Why is this the third film made about Flight 93? I’ve watched them all: There was last year’s Discovery Channel docudrama “The Flight That Fought Back.” Then there was this year’s A&E cable re-enactment, “Flight 93,” directed by one of George W. Bush’s college classmates (coincidence?). And now the major new Hollywood feature United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass. When the controversy over the trailer for the new film erupted recently, the question was, “Is it too soon?” I wonder if the question should be, “Are there too many?”

Yes, exactly. In fact, I watched the hijacking portion of “Flight 93″ in, of all the grotesque places, the kitchen of a big fancy Grosse Pointe house, during an estate sale. Shoppers picked over the china and glassware while screams of panic erupted from the little TV on the counter. It was, how you say, a bit unsettling, especially since it appeared no one was paying attention to the show but me. (It’s hard for me to tune out TV; one of our household’s strictest rules is, if you’re not watching the TV, turn it off. I once interviewed a couple who’d recently won $9 million in the lottery. They seated me next to their ginormous new TV, which was left on throughout the interview, at considerable volume.)

Anyway, Rosenbaum is right. What’s all this “too soon” stuff? Doesn’t anyone pay attention to TV Guide anymore? Of course you can see why this is the latest, but most likely not the last — this story is as compelling, and as dreadful (as in “filled with dread”) as any in our history, and I suspect we’ll be chewing over it for generations.

I might watch when it comes around on cable, but based on the trailer, it might be a while before I can stomach even that. I still can’t look at 9/11 photos without feeling a lurch, and video of the second plane making impact still drops my jaw.

Actually, I don’t know how much I want to relive 9/11 and the aftermath. Writing this, I was just reminded of a column I read in the three-days-post time frame; I think it was by Mona Charen or Maggie Gallagher or one of those right-wing antifeminist lady scolds. The angle was, “Let’s hear it for men, because men aboard United 93 saved the Capitol,” and I think it went on to tie this all together with why women shouldn’t be in combat and blah blah blah. It even made a point of mentioning the detail about the stewardesses onboard Flight 93, who were said to be boiling water in the coffeepots to use as a weapon, and then dismissing it with a flip of the hand — well, that’s all very nice, but wouldn’t you rather be defended by a big strong man? I was a columnist and I remember 9/11, and I’m willing to forgive an awful lot of the crap that was said and written in the aftermath. We all went a little crazy. But I thought then, and I think now, that if you’re willing to climb to the top of a pile of 3,000 of your countrymen’s corpses to advance your stupid social agenda, you are beneath contempt.

For the record: I think a potful of boiling water to the face makes a fine weapon. It’s not like they were planning to hit the hijackers with their handbags, for god’s sake.

Anyway, the whole thing gets my stomach upset. So no “United 93″ for me, not yet. Maybe later.

I told Alan not long ago, moments after we’d been nearly sideswiped, at freeway speeds, by a driver whose inattentiveness to the road was inversely proportional to her attentiveness to her phone call: “The miracle is that we don’t have six fatalities a day around here.” And the scariest thing about our near-miss? I don’t think the driver even knew it happened. She was too busy blah-blahing.

Yesterday I came as close as I ever have to becoming a smear on the road. Pedaling my bike down to the library, on the sort of semi-deserted suburban street that I love to ride on, I approached an intersection. I had the right-of-way. A minivan rolling down the side street seemed to be slowing. I went on across. The minivan kept rolling. I threw up my hand in the universal gesture known to Supremes fans everywhere: Stop stop for the love of God stop you idiot I’m so much smaller than you. The driver slammed on the brakes, and stopped a whole 24 inches from my right hip.

You know the punchline, don’t you? Cell phone.

I swear, I’m going to start packing a sawed-off shotgun, loaded with a peppery birdshot, maybe rock salt. Nothing lethal, just something to get their attention.

Well, I always suspected exercise would kill me someday.

OK, then.

Our old pal Adrianne called yesterday, who may be the last newspaper editor in America who’s having a good time at her job. Why? She works for a tabloid, in upstate New York. Tabs still know how to have fun. Big news up in her neck of the Hudson Valley these days — the death of Moses Teitelbaum, the rebbe of the Satmar Hassidim, a branch of which lives in Kiryas Joel, a little village in their circulation area.

“You have your unusual locals in the Amish,” she often tells me. “We have the Hassidim.”

Anyway, the death of an orthodox Jewish leader with devoted followers in two places creates its own news — there were services in New York, then a sprint up to KJ for a second funeral, at 3:30 a.m., so that he could be buried before sunrise in keeping with Jewish tradition. And there was traffic and charter buses and lawsuits, and, of course, the politicians. Gov. Pataki showed up to pay his respects.

“You should see our front page,” she said. “A picture of these kids in sidelocks lined up, and a headline: GUESS WHO’S COMING TO SHIVA?”

Tabs have all the fun.

I once saw some research, very cutting-edge for the time, that wired up a bunch of volunteers with these devices that would track, with some precision, where and how their eyes moved as they read the paper. The idea was to discover, without relying on personal reporting, exactly what things people read as they looked at their hometown daily. When the research was presented, each element on the page — from the 2D page number at the top to the credit lines on photos — had a number next to it, indicating the percentage of people whose eyes stopped long enough to indicate they might have actually read it.

One page had a left-rail digest of short items, marching all the way down the page. Each item had a number somewhere between 17 and 19 percent, except for two, which were up in the 40 percent range. The headline on one was something like “Sex charges filed against parolee” and the other, “Nude body found in field.” I think this indicates, with some authority, that if you want someone to read your work, slap a headline on it featuring the words “sex” or “nude.”

Note that I haven’t done it for this item, as all good webmasters know that doing so is like sending an engraved invitation asking for spam-bots to stop by. Some readers you don’t want.

But my point — and I do have one — is that headlines matter, whether it’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO SHIVA or NUDE SEX AT COUNCIL MEETING. And yet, when I was writing them, the question we most often asked one another was, “Is this offensive? Should we tone this down?”

OK, I’ll stop. Off for another bike ride. If I’m killed by a distracted, cell phone-yakking, minivan driver, I’d like this headline, please: CYCLIST STRANGLES DRIVER BEFORE DYING OF INJURIES.

Just one “American Idol” pop-culture note before we get to the meaty stuff: Kellie Pickler has passed her sell-by date, and in fact did so several weeks ago. She is starting to stink up the room. Also, as though I needed even more evidence that I am 12,000 years old, Elliott Yamin referred to “A Song for You” as a Donny Hathaway song, and no one corrected him. That’s because only six graybeards in the audience watching at home could say, with authority, that it’s a Leon Russell song.

Reader, I have the album. Recorded in 1969, when I was just starting to pay attention to such things. (I bought it for “Roll Away the Stone,” which I distinctly recall hearing first on prog-rock radio, more proof that I’m older than Lazarus. Radio playing obscure Leon Russell? That’s crazy talk!)

I wonder if Leon watches “American Idol.” I wonder what he thought when he heard one of his best songs assigned to a performer, not a songwriter. And what’s Leon up to these days? Of course Professor Google knows. Speaking of graybeards…

Oh, but I have to stop talking about the music of my youth. It’s just a straight shot from here to the iTunes Music Store, to spend away Kate’s college fund. I’m way too suggestible about these things. Do you know that after a Sopranos episode wrapped up with a Pink Floyd song a few weeks ago, I immediately ran over there and downloaded it? I did — “One of These Days.” Which isn’t a terrible song, but I sort of have a wall up between myself and Pink Floyd, which has been there since I gave away my copy of “Dark Side of the Moon” and vowed that if I never heard it again for all eternity, I still would have heard it once too often. “One of These Days” is from “Meddle,” but still. I was never much of a Pink Floyd fan; the band always seemed to be solid evidence that marijuana really was a dangerous drug. A gateway drug, in fact — it led to Pink Floyd records.

Did I say meaty stuff was following? Well, I lied. Bloggage is following:

Who has the best corrections in the newspaper business? I’d nominate The Guardian: We said that the vertical drop of the Stealth ride at Thorpe Park was the fourth steepest in the world (Crowds force closure of theme park, page 11, April 17). Nothing can be steeper than vertical. What was meant was that the launch acceleration - 0-80mph in 2.3 seconds - was the fourth fastest.

What do firefighters do when they’re not fighting fires? Sometimes they pull naked guys out of chimneys. Jon Carroll explains.

Some weeks back, after Rosa Parks was laid to rest, there was some disapproving talk about how the niches nearby in her Detroit mausoleum were suddenly carrying much larger price tags; apparently the rule of “location, location, location” applies after death, too. Well, time has wielded its scythe and Mrs. Parks has a new neighbor. And as they say, there goes the neighborhood.

More later. Discuss.

Off to Ann Arbor yesterday to do some work. On a book, no less. Not my book, someone else’s book. But still — a book. On the way home, I got a phone call, which offered more work. When I got home, another phone call. Which offered still more work. Hoo-boy, I actually felt like a person with a job yesterday, even if it is one that allows me to watch “The Sopranos” on Monday morning in sweatpants.

Nay, requires me to watch it on Monday morning. Because on Sunday nights? I’m working.

Being a freelancer is all about multiple income streams, don’t you know.

As I did my taxes this year, I estimated that, good-lord-willin’-and-the-creek-don’t-rise, I’m on track to match or exceed my last year’s salary as a columnist. The work I’m doing now is harder but more interesting, riskier but less predictable. There’s more juggling, more cold-sweat financial anxiety, but 97 percent less b.s. That’s gotta be worth something.

I expect I’ll be back to work in an office before too much longer — opportunities are starting to present themselves, and honestly, in this economy, in this business, having one member of a co-prosperity sphere working without a net, from home, doesn’t seem wise. I fully expect spousal health care benefits to either go away or become ruinously expensive within the next few years. But if and when I do go back to an office coffeepot and the rest of it, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I made it work the other way, at least for a while.

Yes, yes — I feel a song coming on — I did it myyyyy waaaaayyyyy.

OK, then.

What are you paying for gas these days? Filled up yesterday in Ann Arbor, at the chest-clutching price of 2.96 a gallon. And it’s only April — I suppose $3.50 in inevitable by midsummer, maybe even as much as $4. I love Detroit’s reaction to these events, which seems to consist mainly of adding to the greenhouse effect by vigorous complaining. Not that there isn’t comic relief:

“It’s not easy, but as soon as gas hit $2.80, I stopped driving my Lincoln Continental,” said Antoine Coleman of New Haven, a hi-lo operator in Detroit.

Now there’s an idea. (And I have no idea what a hi-lo operator is. Do you?)

As for me, warm weather calls for instituting the No-Drive Zone, roughly from Alter to Vernier and Mack to the lake, where I do most of my shopping and errand-running. From now until further notice, if the shopping and errand can be accomplished on a bike, it will. My cargo bags, last year’s Mother’s Day gift, were the best I’ve gotten in a good long time. I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.

The 100 Unsexiest Men in the World. Relax, you’re not on the list. But it’s a stupid list (Osama bin Laden? Richard Simmons?). Of course, it was written by TWO MEN. And it’s not a gay list (it includes Brad Pitt!). The irony is staggering.

Every time I consider getting a BlackBerry, I sit down, take a deep breath and consider: a) I don’t need one; and b) the idea of typing with one’s thumbs is stupid. Jon Carroll asks whether humanity is evolving smaller hands.

This guy says every newspaper editor-in-chief in the country should be writing a weekly column. I guess because newspapers need more columns written by uptight, frightened people who use “impact” as a verb (and “impactful” as an adjective). It’s a rule — the editor’s column is the best-read, and worst-written, column in the paper. No one fixes it because everyone’s afraid to tell the boss he or she can’t write. Once I told our editor he’d used the word “brackish” incorrectly. (He wasn’t writing about the paper, but his backyard fish pond. That’s another thing about editor’s columns: They should be about how we get the paper out, but sooner or later they all fall victim to Columnist’s Complaint and start writing about their backyard fish ponds. Or, worse, they try to make their backyard fish ponds a metaphor for something that happened at the paper that week.) He didn’t say, “Is there time to fix it? Let’s get it correct, then.” He said, “Really? Huh.”

Just so you know: “Brackish” means “slightly salty,” as in the water at the mouth of a river that drain into the ocean. It doesn’t mean “yucky.” And a disclaimer: The editor mentioned above wasn’t a terrible editor. He just wrote a pretty lame column; it’s, like, a rule.

And finally, NN.C’s comments are being spam-bombed. The filter’s catching it all, but so much is coming in that I’m going to the moderation panel and hitting “mark all as spam” and deleting them with a click. If you left a comment and it isn’t showing up, it may well have gotten mass-deleted. E-mail me privately or try again. UPDATE: J.C. installed a plug-in; if you have any problems commenting, let me know.

We have a Pomeranian living a few doors down. Looks like a fox crossed with a powder puff, but a very cool dog. Spriggy doesn’t meet many dogs that make him feel like a big one, so occasionally they touch noses and tangle leashes and play.

Maybe I should keep them separated, eh?

OK, then.

It occurs to me these days that I have very little to say. Others, they would let their blog lie fallow in these times. Others would fill the space with enervating accounts of trips to Target. Me, I aim for something in between. Truth to tell, the world is calling me outdoors, and the wifi doesn’t reach past the back door.

So let’s take the coward’s way out — another Sopranos thread. Personally, I think this season is off-the-charts great, but the restless crowd at TVWoP begs to differ. Last night’s episode revolved around comic relief Artie Bucco, but I didn’t even care. Christopher’s gift-basket grab was hysterical. What do people want? Non-stop whackage? The only thing that makes these awful folks tolerable is seeing their little moments of humanity. Yes, even when Artie killed the rabbit.

Back after oxygenation.

A nice moment today, as I was finishing a piece I’d promised to an editor by noon. Looked at the clock: 11:57 a.m. Looked at my buddy list; was he online, with his chat program open? He was. Was he at his desk? Sent him a shout-out. He was. Dragged my Word file over to his name on the buddy list, which sent him an automatic message saying a file was coming his way, and would he accept? He did. The file transferred in a few seconds. Glanced at the clock: 11:58. I beat deadline by two minutes. I rule.

All the world’s a newsroom when everybody has a Mac.

Magazine deadlines are more elastic than newspaper ones, but deadline is a drug, and freelancers don’t get enough of it. Oh, we have deadlines, but we don’t get the deadline energy that comes from a newsroom, when everyone’s clattering away, focused on beating the clock. It helps you work. When you’re alone in your home office trying to meet a deadline, it’s just you and your flop sweat.

So, then.

Another deadline slain, and a little time to breathe. Detroit buried Proof today. (The other guy shot in this incident died earlier this week.) I recommend the photo gallery, which revealed the details of the $48,000, 24-karat gold-plated casket, the wide range of outfits and, of course, the funeral “family” credential. And what funeral would be complete without bomb-sniffing dogs? The world is a remarkable place sometimes.

If half the city was at Proof’s funeral yesterday, the other half was at the zoo, which is where we were. The crowd was so dense we were directed to park on the sidewalk. Since we are, I have been informed daily this week, the only family in the whole school that didn’t go out of town for spring break, I was surprised to find so much company; I figured we’d have the place to ourselves. (When pressed, Kate will acknowledge that one or two of her classmates are not vacationing in Florida this week, and surprise, we saw them both at the zoo.) My favorite feature this visit: The Japanese snow monkeys, who were sitting in the sunshine on this fine day, grooming one another. The body language is so close to that used by my hairdresser when she touches up my roots that I couldn’t help but smile.

And back to the bloggage: John Scalzi mentioned the “Purity Ball” earlier this week, the strange ritual in some evangelical cultures in which fathers escort their daughters to a dance and then publicly sign this pledge:

I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.

It’s all about virginity, obviously. (And just to ratchet up the creep factor for those fo you who haven’t spent much time in livestock breeding, “cover” is the verb that describes what the stallion does to the mare. What it means here? Up to you.) The very thought of any father taking this much interest in his daughter’s sexuality, and at such a young age — here’s a Focus on the Family story that says some of the girls escorted to this shindig were as young as 4 — would send me running for the hills, but then, I’m not of this world. Show me a culture where female virginity is prized to this extent and I’ll show you one that has a real problem with women.

Anyway, here are some Purity Ball photos from the 2005 affair Van Wert — presumably Ohio. Draw your own conclusions. Me, I’m grossed out.

Busy today, so I’m declaring this an open “Sopranos” thread. What’s going to happen with Vito? Poor, homicidal, confused, yearning-to-breathe-free homosexual Vito? I’m almost afraid to think about it, and whenever I think the show has underlined this particular plotline a little too heavily — the end-credit music of “Fourth of July” was a bit much for a man trying to both break free of mob life and find a new identity as an obese queer in rural New Hampshire, especially when he seems to have wandered into, as one TVWoP poster put it, “the magical town of Gay.” Still, I think, a network show would have made him more attractive. We all know his biggest sin was dancing, because men who weigh more than 300 pounds are not permitted to dance. So give them credit.

So what about Vito? What happens to Vito? And why did Vito bother with a goomar? And who’s taking bets on how long Finn stays in the picture?

Yeah, remember those guys? I do. I remember someone quoting a line from…I think it was Jonathan Kozol: “The cure for homelessness is housing.”

Well. We know it’s a bit more complicated than that now. But the homeless are still out there, and I recommend this post from Detroitblog, an anonymous site run by a local journalist and urban explorer. He walks the reader through his experience with finding homeless squats in local buildings, complete with pictures.

I wonder if this guy works for one of the local dailies (I strongly suspect he does). And I wonder, again, why I can’t read stuff like this there.

A Free Press columnist makes reference today to one of Islam’s most puzzling details — the 70 dark-eyed virgins who await the jihad martyr in paradise. Never mind the essential weirdness of the idea (heaven is an orgy in a high-end brothel, something I believe other Muslims dispute), let’s address the practical end of the question: As the virgins are used up, are they replaced by other virgins? Or are the virgins magically re-virginized? What if you get attached to one of them, and the sex gets better on subsequent go-rounds (which usually happens; ask any recently de-virginized woman how it was for her), and you want to keep her around — does she get a pass? And what about woman martyrs? I can scarcely think of a worse deal for her than 70 male virgins.

It’s times like this I wish George Carlin were here. I still think his stump-the-nun “Easter duty on the international date line” question was one that could keep religious sages at work for decades.

I see Pastor Jeff just left a comment below indicating he’s tied up today on a panel discussion of “intelligent design and the media.” So I guess he can’t take this on. Or maybe he’s just … in hell.

A fine Easter weekend. Alan fixed the bathroom sink, which I broke by trying to clean out a clogged drain. The drain gets seriously clogged about twice a year, because drains were not meant to carry the main sink detritus of half the population — hair. I tried to be a strong housewife and handle it myself, and ended up screwing it up but good, and due to lack of plumbing supplies, it was out of commission for a week. This bathroom is an after-market addition to the house, and was done on the cheap, I believe. It’s the size of the head on a 737, and I’m the only one who uses it. The size also makes working on the pipes a job for either a dwarf or a very skinny person, neither of which Alan is. So last week the air rung with peevish calls of goddamnit until the job was given up for a while.

(A five-goddamnit job — is that a southern expression? I first read it in a Florence King column.)

But now it’s all fixed, and I’m happy once again that I have a husband who can do stuff like this, swearing or no. And the drain runs again. (For now.) When Alan went to Lowe’s to find the right size pipe, he asked the clerk, “Don’t you have anything sturdier? I could crush this in my hand.”

The clerk looked at him, looked at the pipe in his hand. “You bad,” he said.

When the Fellowship was winding up, and I had my job tryout in Minnesota, a small part of me was secretly pleased when I didn’t get it. That was the part that didn’t want to take on an even more horrible winter, along with the part that knew the Minnesota-nice thing would drive me up a wall in about a minute. I’m sure plumbing clerks would never say such a thing there. Temperamentally, I’m far better suited to Detroit.

The week awaits. My taxes are done. I recommend that, whatever you do, you should never, ever move, especially if you have to liquidate securities to buy your house. I’m filing three returns this year, and the Schedule D could cripple a Sherpa.

NN.C Byline Watch: Ten Things Your Local TV News Won’t Tell You, from SmartMoney.com.

Remember last month’s mailing from the company that offered to sell me natural gas at the low, low, locked-in rate of $1.098 per ccf?

Got another mailing this month. Same company. New low, low, locked-in rate: $.889 per ccf.

I give up.