This happened in ONE HOUR after I put the pumpkins out on the porch today. I swear, Michigan squirrels might as well carry switchblades and have gang tattoos.

The phone rang in the middle of this morning’s pumpkin-carving, and you know what that means — run to sink and rinse hands, quickly dry them, pick up the phone, and…

Good day. Did you know congressional Democrats have dangerously blah blah blah illegal immigration blah blah blah open the borders blah blah blah–

“Are you a real person?” I asked.

“Yes,” said a young man who seriously seemed to be cursing the day he answered an ad that promised good money working at home.

“So who are you working for?” I asked, as in the middle of the blah blah I hadn’t heard a candidate’s name.

“The National Republican Congressional Committee,” he said.

“My congresswoman is a Democrat, and is so confident of victory she hasn’t bought so much as a billboard in my neighborhood,” I said. “Why don’t you spend your time calling someone in a district where you have a chance?”

No reply.

“Thanks for calling,” I said, and hung up.

This election cannot be over fast enough for me.

OK, then. Halloween! Little Red Riding Hood is bouncing off the walls; we don’t leave for The Most Worthless Day of School for another 20 minutes. No school in the morning, a Halloween parade at noon, followed by a party and God knows what else in the afternoon. Then trick-or-treating tonight. Why don’t I just puree some Snickers and hang an IV drip? Tomorrow the squirrels are free to destroy our jack-o-lanterns and everyone will be full of junk food. Here’s another day I’m happy to see in the rear-view mirror.

Bloggage:

I love Ann Arbor, but sometimes I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. From the Ann Arbor News:

Many families love trick-or-treating, but agonize over what to with all the excess candy. The key is to set limits and stick to them. Decide, as parents or as a family, what your rules will be. Explain your reasons clearly, whether they are dietary, dental or philosophical. Each family has its own comfort level and needs. My family eats three pieces of candy apiece on Halloween, two pieces the next day and one piece the third day. We all brush our teeth promptly and vigorously afterward.

My friend’s family fills a large orange candy bowl communally with everyone’s choicest candies. They can all help themselves whenever they wish, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. A family with food allergies keeps only the dairy-free, dye-free candies. Another family boycotted all Nestle products to protest the company’s infant formula sales tactics in developing countries. We have all made different decisions based on our family values. If your children express a desire to have as much candy as their friends, “different families do things differently” is a fair response. Understanding this concept will help your children cope with peer pressure and cultural differences they encounter in all aspects of their lives.

(HT: AAiO)

Now here’s an evocative photo: Workers at a Georgia Ford plant cheering the approach of unemployment, symbolized by the completion of the last Ford Taurus, seen here. It seems to be a strange emotion, until you think about it a little: We don’t call it “whistling past the graveyard” for nothing. Once more unto the breach. Irish wakes. Who wants to go out like a sad sack? There’s plenty of time for crying later, when you’re standing in the unemployment office. For now, give a cheer to 20 years of Tauruses, and remember where you were when it all ended.

As usual, Micheline Maynard is the go-to source for the explainer.

Friends, I’m making a proactive decision. The weather is mild, the sun is shining, my workload is light (at least at this hour). I think I’m going to take myself outside in it and give you the short end of the shrift, or whatever. Take this opportunity to make the comments your playground. It’s not the end of my particular production line, but there are leaves to rake. TTFN.

I weary of John Mellencamp. Really. For 20 years, I had to live with that poet-laureate-of-the-heartland crap. I lived in the same state as Mr. Laureate, but you’d never know it; a wise man once noted that southern Indiana has more in common with southern Ohio and southern Illinois than northern Indiana, and he’s right. I never saw him once, although the radio stations loyally supported his increasingly dreary, mopey music. After all, he was a Hoosier, and Hoosiers look out for their own.

Based on the evidence of his music, Mr. Mellencamp spent most of the ’90s depressed. I certainly understand how rich and famous people can get depressed — their self-imposed isolation from the regular world takes its toll — but jeez, when they are? I wish they’d just shut up about it. It’s like complaining about how heavy your wallet is. As insufferable as people like David Lee Roth and Jimmy Buffett can be, at least you can say they seem to be enjoying the trip, while Mr. Sourpuss sits down in Brown County fretting over the fate of the family farm and the regular joe.

Well, now Mr. Sourpuss has a new record out, and rather than cut through the clutter of modern radio formats, he’s elected to do it the new-fashioned way — selling the first single as an extended jingle for Chevy trucks. If you’re watching the baseball postseason, and everyone in Detroit is, you cannot escape that “This is Our Country” spot, in which we are asked to connect Silverado trucks with Mellencamp’s jangly guitar, stillborn lyrics (”I can stand beside/Things I think are right/And I can stand beside/The idea of stand and fight”) and an arresting visual montage that links ’50s super-8 home movies, the war in Vietnam, Rosa Parks and images of flooded, destroyed New Orleans neighborhoods. Because, you know, this is our country.

For the reaction in New Orleans, let’s go to our correspondent on the ground, Prof. Ashley Morris:

Does that new Chevrolet commercial piss anyone else off as much as it does me? WTF are they doing showing flooded New Orleans to try to sell a fucking Chevy truck? And Johnny Cougar now gets to keep his name Johnny Cougar. Mellencamp is a name for people with a modicum of scruples. Fuckmook.

Feh.

Others are no kinder:

It’s not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks. It’s wrong. These images demand a little reverence and quiet contemplation. They are not meant to be backed with a crappy music track and then mushed together in a glib swirl of emotion tied to a product launch. Please, Chevy, have a modicum of shame next time.

Yes, please, Chevy. You too, Johnny Cougar. I’m taking Ash’s suggestion and calling you Johnny Cougar from now on. The jury is still out on “fuckmook,” but you’ve been warned. This is my country, too.

The Tigers are on deck to lose it all, so how about some angry, bitter bloggage:

The only people who can make ignorant-ass statements about Parkinson’s Disease are the ones who’ve never seen it up close and personal. TPM Cafe blogger Joseph Hughes states the obvious.

Because I’m an overbooked physical wreck today, it’s All-Bloggage Thursday:

For all my well-documented dislike of Mitch Albom’s “one-man sap factory,” (clever turn of phrase: Amy Alkon) there is one part of his multimedia, the-man-the-myth empire that fails to get on my last nerve: His radio show. I’m not a religious listener, but I’ll tune in every so often, and I hereby give him his props: In a radio world populated by shrieking right-wing lunatics, Albom brings a certain regular-guy decency to the airwaves.

Which is not to say I like him, only that he sounds good in comparison. (Talk radio: Where the Likability Bar is So Low, It’s Underground.) He does, however, do one thing that will get my fingers on the dial in a trice. He name-drops. As I was saying to Tony Bennett the other day.. I was talking to Jeff Daniels, and.. My good friend Warren Zevon… Etc. So I wasn’t surprised to read this in the NYT yesterday, about the Kenny Rogers was-it-pine-tar-or-wasn’t-it question:

In his radio broadcast Monday on the Detroit station WJR, the Detroit Free Press sports columnist Mitch Albom made light of suggestions that Tigers pitcher Kenny Rogers had a strange, dark substance on his hand early in Game 2 of the World Series.

He did not mention that the standard practice is to shake with the right hand.

Many other sportswriters talked to Kenny Rogers after the game, but Mitch? Mitch shook his hand, and found it unsullied. Then he raced back to his laptop to file a column, the first act for his next play, two more chapters in a novel about an angel who helps a blind girl run a marathon and notes for the cover letter for his Pulitzer entry. Mitch’s hand never has too much time on it. Mitch’s hand offers the Shake of Truth.

OK, I’ll stop. Although I bet if you asked him, he’d stand by his story and say he knows Rogers’ hand was clean because of course the pitcher took the writer’s hard-working paw in both of his hands, and the left one wasn’t sticky, no sir.

As long as we’ve hopped right to the bloggage today, another delayed entry from yesterday, this one on the ex-White House chef and his new book He’s the ex-chef because he couldn’t get along with the Bush team’s social secretary, who sniffed at his “country-club food” and wanted the food to look “just like the pictures” she sent him, clipped from Martha Stewart Living. Most unsurprising news of the week: President and Mrs. Bush are “not adventurous eaters.” You don’t say.

And if you’re a fan of Roz Chast, and who isn’t, you’ll like this NYT feature on Halloween at Chez Roz, where her husband, Bill Franzen, turns the place into a tourist attraction:

He has a calendar inked with important dates: when to sort the extension cords, when to lay out the electricals, move the skeletons, dummies, headstones, mummies, etc. (there are a lot of props) from a storage area in town to a tent set up in the backyard, when to make repairs, tweak past ideas.

When he’s finished, there might be 15 or 20 tableaux — they have titles, like Alien Crash or Death in the Desert or Lunatic Asylum — each marked by an impish, deadpan humor. It’s the Mad Magazine version of Halloween, said Mr. Franzen, who writes fiction the rest of the year and who was spending the day in his tent behind the house, sorting through his props with quiet urgency.

All the fun people are a little crazy. Around here, the peak of Halloween decoration is a few of those giant inflatables, some orange twinkie lights and a fake pumpkin.

I’m not going to say anything about Rush Limbaugh and Michael J. Fox, except to note that judging from the physical evidence, the fat man is back — he was a thinner man for a while, but no more. Which means, I suppose, that he’s giving free rein to at least one of his impulses. Lock up your oxycontin, because it won’t be long now.

I know what I’m doing this weekend: Making Kate Lawson’s Chocolate-Pumpkin Brownies with Apricot Surprise. Why? Because any dish with “surprise” in the name, I’m all for. (Fave National Lampoon cartoon: A waiter pulling the dome off a smoking dish in front of a solitary diner, saying, “It’s a fried telephone book! We gave it a fancy French name, and you ordered it!”)

That’s it. Y’all play in the comments, but I’m off to work. Er, “work.”

My mother had a Christmas cactus. As a houseplant, it was pretty much as advertised — easy to care for, impervious to all but the most heinous abuse. And it bloomed like clockwork every year, only not at Christmas. My mom ignored it other than regular watering, and it rewarded her by blooming at Halloween. Fortunately, its blossoms were a sort of salmon/orange color, so it went with the general Halloween theme.

I bought a Christmas cactus last year, at Christmas. It bloomed through the holidays and then threatened to die, but I repotted it and it found a new reason to live. Encouraged, I hit the internet and downloaded a multi-page document detailing exactly how I should care for it to ensure another bloom at Christmas 2006. I can’t say I followed it religiously — there was something about both lowering the temperature and reducing the light by sticking it in a cool closet. All my closets are more or less room temperature, so I opted to just leave it outside until right before first frost. The night I brought it in, it had tiny blossoms forming.

Huh. I checked the multi-page document, which said the plant should be “developing buds” in October for a holiday bloom. It went into the front window, where the development hit the gas.

And now we’re right on track to be in full flower at… Halloween:

Oh, well. It’s still very pretty. I bought pink for a reason. One gets tired of all that red and green at the holidays.

If it isn’t quite Christmas on the calendar, it felt like it was closer than it is, today. Of course this was the day Alan elected to take the boat out of the water, because nothing says “winter’s coming” like taking waves from a stiff northwest wind over your starboard bow, eh? Fortunately I wasn’t there; I was on car duty. But we got Lush Life de-masted and hoisted from the water and her bottom power-washed. Soon she’ll be on her winter cradle and buttoned up for the duration. Fun fact: If you don’t wash off the bottom slime with a hose immediately upon removal from the water — that is, before it dries — you’ll be removing it with a chisel a day later. All the books tell you this, and it must be true, because that is, quite literally, the first thing the guys at the marina do, once the hull is clear of the surface. Why can’t this miraculous substance be harnessed for good?

Pardon me if I sound rather empty-headed today. I sat for an hour this morning trying to think of something to say about the upcoming elections and realized I was as empty as a cup. What else is there to say? Bush is really really really really really really bad? The Michigan governor’s race is really really really really really depressing? Everything else feels like piling on. I know who I’m voting for, and if the election were held tomorrow, I’d be really really really really really happy to get it over with.

Here in Michigan, and everywhere else I expect, the campaigns (and hence, the ads) have entered the “desperate” state. It’s the Week of the Undecided Woman, and both campaigns are pulling out the stops. Jennifer Granholm has an ad about abortion, and Dick DeVos has one featuring his very pretty daughters and their very pearly white smiles, saying “Vote for my dad.” Both are fairly lame, but DeVos’ is lamer, as I don’t care a whit what the third generation of Amway wealth thinks of anything. But. These are desperate times. DeVos is behind, facing a candidate who has little going for her other than telegenic good looks. I guess he figures: Fire with fire. We’ll see how it works.

Still empty. I guess it’s houseplant bloggin’ until the well refills, eh?

Update: Just went through the comment spam file. It’s the usual — comments loaded with links for pharma products, porn and the like. I don’t usually go through the comment spam, except that lately it’s been catching our own Mary, and sure enough, there she was. Again. I de-spammed her, reread the part on the page where it says de-spammed comments will be resubmitted to the filters, “so that it will learn,” and wondered when this learning might take place. Ah, well. I also like to take note of the different tacks spammers are using to penetrate the filter. This is a recent hit parader:

Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes.

Man, that says “my native language isn’t English” as well as anything, don’t you think? There’s also a naked-celebrities site that uses come-ons like this:

Remember Bacon in Footloose and Quicksilver? Now those were some classics.

Or:

I am pretty surprised that Julia Roberts is getting all politcal! I read she is supporting raising taxes on oil. That’s gotta be a pretty unpopular opinion these days.

Thanks, jerk. Into the ether with you.

According to John Ritter, occasional commenter here and designated Nall Family Genealogist, Loretta Nall and I are only related by marriage, and not closely. However, we have exchanged e-mail from time to time, and any Nall who introduces herself by saying, “I don’t like your congressman, Mark Souder,” well, we might as well be sisters.

Loretta is running for governor of Alabama as a Libertarian, on a drug-reform platform.

Although, as you can see from her T-shirt, she has other planks in her platform, ba dum bum. I’m telling you: The next family reunion, I want to be seated at Loretta’s table. Maybe our other cousin, Doug Nalle, will bring the wine.

(Thanks to Mitch Harper for forwarding the T-shirt pic.)

Sports aren’t my thing, but hey — it’s fun to live in a World Series town, especially when the first game hasn’t started yet and you haven’t lost.

Kate and I went down to the ballpark on a mission. We weren’t there to soak in the atmosphere, but to buy a birthday gift for Nikki, whose stomach virus flew in and out the window within 24 hours. The birthday sleepover party was back on for Saturday and, for once, I didn’t need to think about what to buy for a present. Nikki’s a big Tigers fan, plays Little League herself.

“I want to get her a T-shirt and a big foam paw,” Kate said. And so we did. We probably could have found both in the Pointes, but we couldn’t have seen the park on the day of Game One, and we probably couldn’t have gotten the bonus free XL T-shirt being given away on the street by the Ball Park Franks people. It declares BP as the official hot dog of the Detroit Tigers.

(I wonder if Hebrew National has the Yankees account sewn up. If so, that’s a good reason to go to a game there. Love those Hebrew Nationals. I distrust a frankfurter that, like Ball Park, “plumps” when you cook ‘em. Never mind the adolescent humor of watching a tubesteak grow tumescent on the grill. I want to know what, precisely, does the plumping? Cellulose foam? Oh, well. It’s not like I have tickets anyway.)

On the way home, Kate asked many questions about baseball, and I answered them to the best of my ability, which should be understood to mean: Not very well. She asked about the Fort Wayne Wizards and I explained the minor leagues. Then she asked about the Columbus Clippers and I explained about the difference between single-A and triple-A minor-league ball. Then she got off on a tangent about the Clippers, thinking the team was named for a manicure accessory, and I tried to explain about fast-moving ships and the Yankee affiliation. We discussed the World Series, and why the teams play two games in one city, then three in the next, and two more in the first city. Then I ran out of information, and tried to remember as much of the stupid Clippers song as I could — something about hometown heroes and ringing your bell. Thank God for the internet, so we can all sing along.

With the birthday sleepover back on, we were free to see “The Departed” after all. We chose to see it at the RenCen, the better to bask in the Saturday-night World Series glory. Alas, however, the projectionist was doing that thing I’ve read about — showing the picture with a dimmer bulb than is called for, resulting in a muddy stew of murk. It was really annoying, and how ironic that this was a Scorsese picture; Marty Himself is said to travel with a light meter and calls projectionists on this bit of miserly penny-pinching. (The low-light projection is believed by some theater managers to save wear and tear on the expensive bulbs.)

It was distracting, and almost, but not quite, enough to affect my enjoyment of the movie. I had to make a conscious decision, 15 minutes in, to will my pupils to open just a tetch wider and try to forget about the murk. It helped that this scene was in progress:

(Leonardo DiCaprio sits down at the bar in a tough Southie dive and orders a cranberry juice.)

BARTENDER: Cranberry juice?!

GUY ON THE NEXT STOOL: Cranberry juice is a natural diuretic. My girlfriend drinks it when she’s havin’ her period. How about you? You havin’ your period?

(DiCaprio smashes a glass on the guy’s head.)

Every woman who’s ever been asked, by anyone other than a medical professional, if she’s havin’ her period can relate to that.

It was a great movie.

I look forward to seeing it again on DVD, when I can control the brightness. If the theater industry is losing money, it’s their own damn fault.

Almost as good was the stroll, afterward, over the Greektown, where Tiger fans thronged the sidewalk. From the cheers I thought we were winning, then checked the score through a bar window: 5-1. Ouch. The cheers were for such heroics as base hits; no one was letting a little lopsided runaway get anyone down, and good for them. How depressed can you get when waiters are lighting cheese on fire in restaurants up and down the street? I ask you.

Bloggage:

If you read one really long story today, I recommend this one: Doonesbury’s War, maybe the first profile of Garry Trudeau done with his cooperation in, like, ever. It’s by our beloved Gene Weingarten, so you know it’s worth your time.

Last week’s mention of “Meerkat Manor” revealed the little critters have fans, and then they have Fans. Here’s one, liveblogging MM every week.

Nikki’s mother called a while ago with bad news: The sleepover birthday party set for tonight is cancelled. Which means two things.

1) I will probably have to wait for “The Departed” to appear on DVD, like all the other parents in the world, and

2) I can find out what happened to the Whiskers as soon as everyone else does.

Yes, we’re watching “Meerkat Manor.” If you’re not watching this Friday-night Animal Planet serial, you don’t know what you’re missing. One 30-minute episode tracking the antics of extended meerkat clans in the Kalahari Desert routinely features family, fellowship, squabbling, grooming, sex and fleas. “Desperate Housewives” does not have fleas. Added value.

I’ve loved meerkats since I saw a mob of them at the Toledo Zoo, and they seemed to be the only animals there that didn’t know they were in captivity and didn’t care anyway. They live in extended families in complex relationships with one another, which is why their lives make such interesting television. The narration comes close to, but does not cross, the line of anthropomorphism, which makes it feel like science. But it’s as gripping as any old soap opera.

The Whiskers are the central family group. They’re led by a tough female, Flower, who reserves all breeding privileges for herself and doesn’t hesitate to kick the crap out of any female who defies her, including her own daughters. The Lazuli are their close-by rivals, and a third group appeared this season — the Commandos. Their leader is Hannibal, a male who appears to be missing an eye. Every week we are reminded that meerkats are adorable little weasels of menace, no matter how much time they spend grooming one another and looking out for the clan’s babies. Last week a Commando war party found a lightly protected Lazuli den holding two pups, Bubble and Squeak. The Commandos streamed down the hole and killed Bubble. On camera! It was tough to watch.

Last week, the episode ended with Flower and a small band of adults desperately trying to hold off another Commando raiding party. The Whiskers were outnumbered by the Commandos, and had pups with them, too. I know enough about television to know the chances of the producers allowing the central band to be taken apart midseason are pretty slim, but you never know. I keep thinking of Flower, whom I have loved and hated throughout the summer — yes, I willingly allow myself to be manipulated by producers and editors — trying to do her duty, and I just…I just…

Well, I just would have happily DVR’d it if I’d been able to see “The Departed” tonight, but now I’m sort of glad I don’t have to.

And if you hear me making references to war dancing and scent-marking, this is where they come from.

Bloggage:

There’s shameless, and then there’s shameless. Vote GOP or share responsibility for the next terror attack. I spit on these people.

I’m pretty plugged in to the daily news cycle, but missed the Great Stadium Threat yesterday. Dirty bombs in trucks? Huh. A few years ago, in a private conversation, a police official sketched out a scenario for attacking stadiums that was far easier, more plausible and likely deadlier than the hoax under investigation yesterday. I have a friend, a sportswriter, who believes that if al-Qaeda knew us better, they would have attacked us not on September 11 but on September 9, flying their planes into four NFL football stadiums scattered around the country. The casualties would have been higher, the shock more profound, the blow to the economy graver, he believes. “If you want to rattle Americans, get them at play,” he said. So it’s not a stupid idea. But I wish dumbass armchair warriors conducting “writing duels” would do it in private e-mails, not on websites.

My local weekly wins the headline of the month award. No link (paid subscribers only), but it’s short, and so:

Arrested with meat in pants

Oh, baby. Have a great weekend.

Busy blog morning. You just never know what you’re going to find when you launch Google News, do you? Today I discover that the guy in Florida who was stabbed in the heart by the stingray? Was a local. Floridians must think that everyone in the world comes from Ohio or Michigan.

And now it’s pushing 11 and I haven’t done my 30 minutes of erg torture. So I’ll leave you with a quick photo and an invitation to make merry in the comments.

A little background: A few days ago, one of my favorite lemon-sucking conservative crones, Mona Charen, made a remark on the National Review’s Corner site that “childhood now ends at 8,” and girls older than that are only interested in being “vamps” for Halloween.

Please note: Charen has no daughters of her own. And you know what? She’s not only a lemon-sucking crone, she’s wrong:

Please do not look too closely at the craftsmanship on Little Red Riding Hood’s signature item. I am but mortal.