The view from the front window this morning. I regret I couldn’t quite capture the fat-fluffy-flakes sense of how hard it’s snowing, but you get the idea. Spring, nearly, in the Mitten.

Rented “Babel” this weekend, an event remarkable only in that it whittles the unseen-Oscar-best-picture-nominees down to two (“The Queen,” “Letters from Iwo Jima”), which is pretty good for post-parenthood Nance. I liked it a lot, but I’ve liked Alejandro González Iñárritu ever since “Amores Perros,” which blew my doors off. “The Mexican Quentin Tarantino,” he’s called, but he’s much better than that. More serious, anyway.

The theme of “Babel” and “Amores Perros” is one that I’m always a sucker for — the way our lives all connect, stranger to stranger, even across continents. The Butterfly Theory in human form, maybe. But here’s what I have to ask someone who saw it in the theater:

Were there subtitles?

Because there were none for the DVD, a pretty cheeky directorial decision for a film where characters speak in seven-count-’em-seven languages, according to IMDB: Japanese Sign Language, French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Berber and Arabic. When I realized none were forthcoming, I decided to just settle in and groove with it — dialogue is just words, and acting is a lot more — and found that I understood it pretty much perfectly, with the exception of the Japanese girl’s backstory, which was superfluous anyway. I know her backstory because I looked it up online; helpful souls at Wikipedia, who apparently speak all these tongues, figured it out and posted a complete synopsis. The movie is called “Babel,” after all. And making people do supplemental reading is totally, whoa, postmodern.

Before I took the DVD back to Blockbuster, I went through the menu until I found a setup screen. I selected “English subtitles” and hit “play.” No subtitles. So who the hell knows? I enjoyed the movie. Brad Pitt may be a handsome devil, but now he’s a handsome devil with serious eye-crinkle. Like his friend George Clooney, he’s striving to age in an interesting manner. I heard Alec Baldwin talk in an interview about the morning-afterness of being last year’s hunk, how it’s not as difficult for men as it is for women, but it is difficult, breaking through into something resembling serious work, especially when women fan themselves at the thought of your butt. (Or at least how it looked in “Thelma and Louise.”)

Through the magic of the Google, I looked up my old Prof. Terry’s take on “Babel.” He frequently surprises me, and this was one of them: Two lousy stars, and a flip of the hand:

Though “Babel” would seem to be a plea for more cross-cultural empathy and understanding … it fails to provide dramatic evidence that any of the bad things that happen to the generally good people here could have been avoided if we all spoke the same language.

Hmm, I didn’t get that that was its aim, but then, I watch a movie in my living room very differently than I do in a theater. At home, I’m a much easier lay. The other day I found myself whiling away an early Friday evening with “Imagine Me & You,” which I objectively recognized as a total piece of crap but still failed to turn off. I think it was because all the characters dressed so well. I just wanted to see what the next scene’s sweater would look like. (There were also a lot of knit hats in that one. I have never been able to wear a knit hat without looking like a person who sells newspapers out of a van on a busy corner.)

“300″ — there’s another one I won’t be catching until it hits cable, even if it shaping up to be the “Billy Jack” of the Bush-boosters. Even if it is, like, the gayest movie since “Top Gun” and maybe gayer. Even the previews make that obvious, but this blogger puts the cherry on it:

Any movie that features this many half naked, really good looking guys running around thrusting long shafts into each other over and over and over again, in which so many men spend so much time demanding that other men kneel before them, and in which so many truly butch guys dressed only in panties and leather straps manage to get so constantly and thoroughly spattered with the body fluids of other men… I don’t know. I’m thinking that pointing out that the Greek culture which the Spartans were part of and which they were fighting, killing, and dying to defend was homosexual by choice is, well, appropriate, and merited.

Yeah, me too.

(By the way, those who have seen “300″ — does Leonidas have any scene where he’s not yelling at the top of his lungs? The whole trailer, he’s bellowing. “This…is…SPAH-TA! Then we will fight…IN THE SHADE!!!” That would get old fast.)

I’m retooling my blog bookmarks again. My rule: The drop-down menu must not extend beyond the depth of the screen. Every few weeks I add and drop to make it fit. I added Bats left, throws right for the sheer novelty of a Hoosier liberal. Found Kim Morgan, who writes better about movies than I do, via Wolcott. Kept the increasingly disappointing DetNews politics blog because they provide my health insurance. Laura Lippman’s blogging her book tour, but she’s so nice she can’t say anything mean about anybody; her life is an exercise in gratitude. Also, discretion:

Just this morning, I tried on some outfits in anticipation of an engagement later this week. The outfit I ended up choosing is, according to the one outside opinion I sought, “classy and becoming.” It also is a) twelve years old and b) from Banana Republic. But no one will know that unless I wear it inside out. My hunch is that the context of the engagement — not to mention the killer shoes — will lead people to think the outfit is nicer than it is. Unless you read this blog, in which case, if you catch this particular gig, you’ll probably be thinking: “I can’t believe that Laura is such a dork that she’s wearing a 12-year-old Banana Republic outfit.”

From further analysis, I suspect the engagement was an appearance on CBS’ morning show, whatever they’re calling it these days. I missed it, and too bad, because I would have liked to fire off an e-mail to the producer chastising her guest for wearing a 12-year-old Banana Republic outfit.

And then there’s Ken Levine, whose St. Patrick’s Day post I didn’t see until after I’d done St. Patrick’s Day. It’s from a “Cheers” episode that he wrote, so he’s allowed to quote it:

AN IRISH BAND ENTERS. THEY’RE ALL WEARING CABLE-KNIT SWEATERS. ONE OF THEM IS NAMED SEAN.

…

THE BAND BEGINS TO SING AND PLAY A SLOW IRISH BALLAD:

SEAN
(singing) “They broke into our Dublin home, the dirty English dogs. They took away my sister and they beat my dad with logs.”

THEY BREAK INTO A QUICK UP BEAT IRISH JIG FOR A BEAT, THEN RESUME THE LYRICS:

SEAN
(singing) “Along the ring of Kerry you can hear the bleat of gulls, I’ll sip the blood of the English from their bleached and hollowed skulls.” (TO THE BAR) Everybody!!

Everybody! Happy week to all.

Five false starts later, I’m making this an all-linkage Friday.

This link is fascinating, but not safe for work, in the sense that giant plaster vaginas are not safe for work. It’s not porn, it’s medicine. Also, art. (My favorite is the one where the kid’s arm is reaching through the door, so to speak. If I were an 18th-century midwife, that would freak me right the hell out.

I love horse races, at least when the horses don’t shatter their legs in the process. This is one of the best:

God, this was a hard movie to watch. It doesn’t get any easier in small pieces, or over time. Language warning (Jack Nicholson at his nastiest), but also Ann Margret in a black bra:

If you covered the juvenile-justice beat in Detroit, I don’t know how you’d avoid jumping out of high windows. Fourteen-year-old kills 13-year-old in graffiti dispute: Just another day in the D.

Erin go bragh. I’m done.

Eric Zorn’s RSS reader must be the best one in the world, because it somehow snagged the Lost Post in the 120 seconds or so that it existed. So here it is, and we love us some Eric:

Among the pleasures of the internet age, from sub-sub-sub-niche pornography (brunettes in pure-white Keds, anyone?) to the London dailies a click away, I have a new nominee for Top 25 status: The online package tracker.

I do a certain amount of catalog ordering, and have fallen in love with the small joy of watching my box, on this trip holding New Balance running shoes and two sports bras — please, draw no conclusions about my fitness plans — make its way to me. Origin scan, March 9: Commerce City, Colo., after which it was scanned for departure, arrival and departure again, all at the same facility. (I’m assuming it’s a hub.) On to Omaha, then Davenport, Iowa — how are you enjoying the humidity of the east, shoes and bras? much different from Colorado, no? — then Hodgkins, Ill., wherever that is. From Hodgkins to Livonia, Mich., where it stayed only a few hours. Its final departure scan took it to Detroit. In at 6:45 a.m., out at 7:40, delivered at 1:49 p.m., to the back door.

The dog didn’t bark. He’s likely to sleep through these things, these days.

Why can’t they put this technology on the cable guy? “We’ll be there sometime between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. Can’t be more specific than that, sorry.”

(Of course, one day they will. And I’ll complain that it’s wrong to micromanage human beings to this extent, and predict that the cable guy with a bar code on his forehead is the next disgruntled postal worker, and who will be able to blame them? People are not packages. Consistency, thy name is…not mine.)

But until then, it’s nice to dream.

I like my shoes and bras, by the way. They’re all closeouts, for obvious reasons which I won’t get into, except to say: Bra designers, don’t put seams right down the middle of the boob, OK? Most women prefer a nice smooth line there. But it’ll do for something to sweat in this summer.

One deadline passes, another approaches — they’re like telephone poles on the highway. In the meantime, though, I have to see my doctor this morning, to find out why my knee hurts. No, I know why (slipped on the ice); I need to know why so long. Also, I’m hoping to score some powerful narcotics. I wonder if that would work, not pussyfooting around with the so-called drug-seeking behavior, but just asking outright: “How about a little Vicodin/Oxycontin mixed grill, doc?” It worked with my old doctor, who appreciated directness, as well as the fact I never asked for anything stronger than Tylenol 3. (On a scale of 1-10, there’s a reason that one has a 3 in its name.) A few weeks back, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on off-label prescribing. The opening anecdote was about a woman who was licking those narco-lollipops for relief of pregnancy-related migraines*. She was up to five (!!!!) a day by the time labor started, and surprise surprise, her baby’s first words were, “(Sniff.) How much for an eightball, doc? Can I get it on credit? I seem to have left my wallet in my other diaper.”

Of course, if he says I have arthritis I’ll just ask for a bullet. To shoot myself.

In the meantime, festive bloggage:

I’m not the biggest fan of the Freep’s pop-music critic, but I thought he did a pretty good piece on Why Cobo Matters, even if that wasn’t the headline (but should have been).

Jacob Weisberg went to the American Enterprise Institute’s gala the other night, and wrote a nice piece for Slate. They should change their name to Home of the Unrepentant Neocon:

In his address, the 90-year-old (Bernard) Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq would provide the jolt needed to modernize the Middle East. Instead, he spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their “cosmic struggle for world domination.” This is a familiar framework from the original author of the phrase “the clash of civilizations”—made more famous by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington. What did surprise me was Lewis’ denunciation of Pope John Paul II’s 2000 apology for the Crusades as political correctness run amok. This drew applause. Lewis’ view is that the Muslims started it by invading Europe in the eighth century. The Crusades were merely a failed imitation of Muslim jihad in an endless see-saw of conquest and re-conquest.

Were you to start counting the ironies here, where would you stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticizing the pope for apologizing to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the Crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge them wrong. And here was the clubhouse of the neocons throwing itself a lavish ‘do, when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they’ve dug. Reality seemed to have taken up residence elsewhere for the evening.

Mark Steyn can turn a clever phrase, but reading this piece o’ crap (only the first two grafs available online, sorry) last night made me want to cancel my subscription to The Atlantic. Please, editors of the world, don’t let idealogues write arts criticism, OK? Styled as a tribute to the talent-free Denny Doherty (“the other Papa”), it comes off as one long snark about the excesses of the ’60s, which is a record played so often by this crowd you can’t even hear the music anymore. Not that they ever heard the music in the first place. Michelle Phillips, he says, is “seriously hot, in a way few rock chicks are in the cold light of day when the drugs have worn off.” Oh, please. How would you know? There’s more snarkage about Cass Elliot, who could only get laid because she had drugs, and pokes at John Phillips’ “vacuous” lyrics, proving Steyn may be the only person alive who could listen to the Mamas and the Papas and think their appeal was about the lyrics.

Put it this way: Reading this, I was reminded of the time Alexander Cockburn, hard-core leftist, described the scene in “The Untouchables,” where Elliot Ness throws Frank Nitti off the roof after the latter taunted Ness about how his recently departed colleague (Sean Connery, sigh), “squealed like a stuck Irish pig” before he died. This person, Nitti, Cockburn describes as “an unarmed murder suspect.” So there.

Off to tend the knee.

Late-breaking update: Knee diagnosis unclear, but he suspects arthritis. (Muffled gunshot. Thump.)

* I originally wrote “nausea.” My memory was faulty.

I just wrote a nice long post about, well, a bunch of things. It started out with a hymn to online package tracking, dallied at sports-bra design, moved on to narco-lollipops and ended with the American Enterprise Institute, just the sort of eclecticism that pleases my eclectic readership. The first comment that came in was a spam trackback. I was trying to do something else — pet the dog — while I deleted it, and guess what? Deleted the post.

Screw this blogging. Screw it, I say! Find someone else to for your sports-bra fix. I’m off to find some narco-lollipops.

One of my Fort Wayne neighbors was a police officer, and worked overnight. I’m a part-time editor for a company whose senior staff works overnight, too. I have an easy shift; I knock off at 1 a.m., while they’re up until dawn and beyond crafting custom newspapers for corporate America to read on their BlackBerries on the pre-dawn treadmill. The woman who relieves me should be leaving work (i.e., turning off her computer) right about now, in fact.

I really hope there’s not a wood chipper outside her house at the moment, as there is at mine.

The world just isn’t set up for night-shift workers. After a year of this, I think I’ve finally settled upon the right mixture of coffee and naps that allows me to function on five hours of sleep a night (at best). Basically, it’s this: I write in the morning, I edit at night. Sometime after lunch, when the afternoon sleepies strike, I don’t fight them. I turn off the phone and go to bed. If I’m fortunate and there are no wood chippers about, I get one hour of decent sleep, which I pad out with some recreational reading in a prone position. I’m up and about by 3, feeling like aces.

I’m always looking for tips on how to make this work better. When Detroit hosted the Super Bowl, there were lots of stories in the media about Roger Penske, who was the main mover/shaker behind the event. Penske works pretty much all the time, and has the ability to turn himself on and off at will; he’ll say, “OK, time for a 20-minute power nap,” tilt his head to the side and drift off in seconds, then wake up precisely 20 minutes later. This is why he’s a billionaire and I’m not. Also, he probably doesn’t get bothered by wood chippers.

The business press is full of stories of high-functioning insomniacs and others who claim to be totally refreshed by absurdly little sleep. This is always reported in an admiring tone — such superhumans! — and for the life of me, I don’t understand why. Martha Stewart gets by on four or five hours, or so she says. Madonna, ditto. Half the corner offices, it seems, are occupied by people whose e-mail is time-stamped 3:20 a.m. Meanwhile, all the people I work with at my night job are on my buddy list (we communicate almost entirely by e-chat), and one has this as her Away message: “I’d BETTER be sleeping now.”

I used to be a night owl, and transitioned through my 30s into lark-hood. My natural body rhythms — banished now — would send me to bed between 10 and 11 and get me up around 6, and screw all these naps and cappuccinos. But who can live that way? Not this home-office worker. The price for all our flexibility, for being able to run errands during the day and start stews braising at 2 p.m. and beating the rush at the dry cleaner and grocery store, is paid 12 hours earlier, when I shut the laptop, stretch, turn out the lights, check the locks and look up and down the street at all the dark windows. I think: Lucky bastards. And then I join them.

The wood chipper has moved to the next block. Time to get some work done. For now, the bloggage:

“American Idol” is shaping up to be more talent-free that usual — can we fast-forward to the inevitable showdown between LaKisha and Melinda now? — but entertaining in many other ways. The sadism of the baby-boom producers continues to amuse, as we watch these young’uns forget the words to “Love Hangover,” a song I’d happily pay money to have excised from my brain. And young Sanjaya, cocking his head like a puppy when Simon uses a fancy-schmancy 10th-grade word like “wail.” (Sanjaya thought he was talking about the marine mammals.) This sort of entertaining brinksmanship is why we tune in. The assignment seems so simple — find a song you can sing from the back pages of Diana Ross, a woman who wasn’t much of a singer in the first place — and yet, hardly anyone can find one. I was astonished at how many of the old Motown finger-poppers were spurned in favor of Diana’s disco catalog, or the apres-disco craptastic stuff. (“I’ve chosen a song from ‘The Land Before Time,’ Ryan.”) Melinda should have sung “Touch Me in the Morning” if she wanted something downtempo and emotional. Why didn’t anyone tackle “Reflections”? Leave it to LaKisha to play the “Lady Sings the Blues” card and sidestep the whole oeuvre by snagging a Billie Holiday song. That was smart. If you can sing better than the supposed master-class teacher, don’t sing one of her songs.

Ken Levine is funnier than I am, however: Could they pad the show any more? Christ! It was so long Paula’s drugs were wearing off.

Today is Pi Day. Happy 3.14, etc. to presumed infinity, to you.

Greetings from west Michigan. Here’s how you know where you are:

1) This is what passes for workplace benefits in the less-unionized part of the state, and
2) the snow stick.

Ha, that first one’s a joke. I just thought the sign was funny, as the business was deep in one of those light-industrial parks — low-slung buildings with indeterminate names (“FlexCo”) arrayed along a winding road, thundering with truck traffic, dotted with storm-water retention ponds and about as pastoral as a parking lot. Who would want to fish there, you wonder? I’d say the occasional employee looking to spin out his lunch hour with a little fly-casting practice would be a rarity, but evidently they get enough interlopers that they needed to put up a sign.

The snow stick — that little marker on the edge of the driveway — is there to remind plow operators where the curb is. In the world of Lake Effect, you need those sticks.

That’s where I was Monday, working on an assignment, which I have to spend most of Tuesday writing. I’d like to tell you more about it, but it’s a magazine piece, which means standard non-disclosure applies until publication, which is weeks away. Alas.

But hey, it was nice to get out of the house, even for a there-and-back across the Mitten. It was strange to see signs in yards reading, WE SUPPORT PRESIDENT BUSH AND OUR TROOPS IN EVERYTHING THEY DO. (Yes, a real sign. Elsewhere in the same yard: WE LOVE AND SUPPORT AMERICA. Glad to get that cleared up.) Western Michigan is pretty red, but the traffic’s thinner over there, so they’re frequently outvoted by the blue southeast. Movie writer/director Paul Schrader’s from Grand Rapids. I once attended a columnists’ convention — yes, they have them — with a guy who wrote for the paper there. He claimed Schrader put a small, subtle f-you to Grand Rapids in every movie he wrote or directed. I’ve seen most of them, and never noticed a single one, except maybe for the hometown in “Hardcore.” Even Iris, the lost soul girl prostitute in “Taxi Driver,” hails from somewhere in Pennsylvania.

But I can see why he — Schrader — might be tempted. I’m sure he fled as soon as he could.

OK. Because I was out in the actual world yesterday, I didn’t get out in the ‘net world, so I have no tasty bloggage, and my overwhelming impression of what went on yesterday is filtered through the radio — both the NPR affiliates I was able to find, and the rokkin-the-lakeshore stations I turned to when I tired of the plight of indigenous Guatemalans. And so, to bookend this entry with another list of two, here’s all I know today:

1) Alberto Gonzalez deserves to be smeared with peanut butter and set upon by pit bulls; and
2) Bob Seger’s wrapping up his tour with two dates at Cobo, and they’ll be RECORDING. Is “Live Bullet 2″ in our future?

We can only hope. Discuss anything and everything in the comments.

OK, so it doesn’t look springlike, but trust me — this is spring in Michigan. And this ice is unusual; the Free Press says so. People were driving down Lake Shore Road all weekend, snapping pictures of the pileup of floes. Some of the lakefront mansions are losing their seawalls. (Not that this constitutes a tragedy; I’m just reporting.)

This is not the most dramatic of the pileups, but it is my favorite picture.

Mmm, a nice weekend. We had a small dinner party Saturday night. I learned two things: If you start with a soup course, the rest of your timing better be great. (Mine was acceptable.) Also, nothing gets things off on the right foot better than a bottle of champagne. Forget serving it with dessert, by which point your guests will already be half-sloshed on the red and the white and the cocktails. Just pop open that sucker and get the little bubbles tickling noses early.

Today is the week’s busiest, and the rest of the week is front-loaded with deadlines. So in lieu of the usual, accept another picture. Oooh, look, a pretty flower:

Back later today or tomorrow.

I’ve started taking a writing workshop, down at Wayne State. It isn’t precisely what the doctor ordered, oriented more to freeing the writer within than I’d like. (My inner writer has been free for some time, running around the pasture kicking up her heels; what she needs is some work under saddle.) But it’ll do. It’s two hours a week when I have to concentrate on something other than the things I’ve been concentrating on, and the course description contains my favorite words in the world: free and open to the public.

The teacher and I have some differences of opinion, primarily regarding the value of longhand. For years now, I’ve been doing all my writing at a keyboard, to the point that my handwriting muscles have atrophied. I pick up a pen to write checks and grocery lists; even my sympathy notes are done on the laptop. (As a consolation prize, I try to make them long and meaty, letters rather than notes. There’s something about the lines “Dear Bob, so sorry for your loss. You have my condolences” that, when written on a computer and printed out, really says “You shouldn’t have.”)

However, this teacher believes we get in touch with a different part of our creative selves when we compose by hand. I can agree with that — it’s the part that says “ouch.” He gives us short assignments we’re supposed to write in class, in our notebooks. Last week my hand felt like a claw by dismissal time, so this week I switched to a No. 2 pencil, figuring less pressure would help. It didn’t, at least not much. I pared my scratchings down to my journalist’s combination of shorthand, abbreviations and the sort of incomprehensible scribblings we hope will protect us in court if our notes are ever subpoenaed. And so I have a legal pad that contains a two-page reverie on Ohio State football fans that I could only reproduce at gunpoint.

This is the thing about writing, though, the really cool thing — you start out thinking you’re writing about one thing, and then you start writing about something else. Your brain gets out the way of the mystical bond between your fingers and your subconscious. (Some call this “losing the plot.” I prefer to tart it up with b.s. about the creative process.) So I wrote the sentence, “Columbus is the sort of place where a man named Gray can name his daughter Scarlet Ann and nobody considers this child abuse.” It made me think of when I first heard this story — when I was just starting my career in Columbus. Mr. Gray was a lawyer, I believe, and baby Scarlet Ann would be an adult by now. Whatever happened to her, I wonder? Did she grow up to become S. Ann Gray or did she fully embrace her dad’s egomania in making an infant a reflection of his sports-team loyalties? If I were a betting man, I’d take the latter option. Every little girl wants to make her daddy proud.

(Why should no one be surprised Mr. Gray was a lawyer? Discuss.)

Parenthood and sports made me think of the earlier comments this week about the new basketball uniforms, which made me think of a funny line from the Poor Man, from years ago, in an entry called “Fashion Victims of the ’80s.” No. 9, Larry Bird:

Super-short green shorts split up to the waist are a notoriously hard look to rock, and Larry Bird was uniquely unqualified to pull it off. Unafraid to show all twelve feet of his milky-white thighs on the basketball court, Bird topped the ensemble off with knee socks, Chia-hair, and a permanent milk mustache.

Of course, Larry would have looked even worse in those baggy shorts. Most white guys from French Lick, Indiana would, I expect.

You see how this works, you amateurs? You start out talking about Columbus, and end up at Larry Bird. And you make your readers suffer along with you! This is why blogging is such a runaway success.

Speaking of which, I was checking my incoming links the other day, and found a blog I was unfamiliar with, Englishgirl in Indiana. Whaddaya know, it’s run by the folks who bought our house in Fort Wayne. She links to photo albums of family events, and I ignored the people in the pictures to concentrate on what I’m really interested in — what they’ve done to our house. They refinished the floors! They look fabulous. They painted the dining room yellow! It looks fabulous. I’m wondering why I didn’t paint the dining room yellow. I’m so pleased our old house fell into the hands of someone who loves it as much as we did. I’m still forging my relationship with my new one, and while I like it more every day, I say with real regret that I miss my Fort Wayne eaves. I used to leave my upstairs windows open all summer long and now I have to run around like a commando every time a drop of rain falls. The Committee to Bring Back Eaves — this is my new cause.

Have we meandered enough? Does this entry make as little sense as possible? Good. On to the bloggage:

In re Fox’s attempt to make “conservative” humor, Roy Edroso points out the difference between art and propaganda.

Henry Allen, one of my writing idols, makes a point about the Walter Reed fiasco that hasn’t been made yet: It has something to do with the difference between enlisted soldiers and officers.

I am shocked, shocked to hear Newt Gingrich has a wandering pecker and the soul of a hypocrite.

Gotta go bust some scum. Guests for dinner tomorrow.

New York Times photo. Shamelessly stolen.

Everybody in New York is from someplace else, right? It’s just so, so amusing, when I see Zach Klein making yet another cultural splash — this time on the Thursday Styles cover of the freakin’ New York Times — to remember the first time I met him face-to-face, in a Chili’s on Coliseum Boulevard in Fort Wayne. We had appetizers and grown-up drinks, and Zach showed his fake ID. We were just about the only bloggers in the city.

And now look at him, being pawed by a crowd of omnisexual pretty people, participating in the focus-group research for the new version of CK1. The story notes he’s “no relation” to the original Calvin Klein. And he speaks his mind, and calls the new name — CKin2u — “lame.” Love those plain-spoken Hoosiers.