George Clinton is not the hardest-working man in showbiz. He just has the best time. Now 67, touring House of Blues-size venues and no longer landing on stage in a spaceship, he doesn’t really need to anymore. Last night in Detroit, he ambled onto stage about an hour into the show, after “Funkentelechy” and “Bop Gun” and still tore the roof off the sucker.

After all, he invented this music — the long, freeform, improvisational funk/rock/blues/whatEVuh party jam that never quite stops. P-Funk went for three hours last night, and that was taking it easy; the Boston show last week went for four. At one point I counted four guitarists, two drummers, two bassists, two keyboards, about six chick singers (although they kept changing), four or five soloists of various genres — rappers, R&B, a Tina Turner clone — along with a horn section and the dancing-pimp guy, Carlos McMurray, and some people from the audience. Clinton doesn’t really sing, and doesn’t play any instruments; he just ambles around the stage like a psychedelic Santa Claus, directing the band and asking for applause and being his funktastic self. The show concluded with a bassist’s father, a skinny old white guy from Flint, singing a hillbilly a capella version of “A Change is Gonna Come.” And it felt entirely in keeping with the spirit of the evening.

The crowd was just as amusing. The woman standing next to me for much of the evening was either a stripper, or just looked like one — D-cup implants, rhinestone grillz, just your average Detroit girl. A woman in front looked like a grandmother, gray hair in a comfy tracksuit. The guys behind us were smoking dope with a vengeance (“Does this offend you in any way?” one politely asked Alan) through much of the “I Got a Thang” singalong.

(The stripper is writing on her blog right now: “Since when did they start letting all these soccer moms in?”)

The rest of the night? Magic. For a while the bouncers had the outside doors open, to cool the place off, I guess. I can only imagine what the neighbors in Royal Oak must have thought

Anyway, this is why I’m late getting started today. I was supercalifunkitastic last night, and my ears are still ringing.

I’m so mellow today I don’t even care who the new attorney general is. Someone do some research and tell me what I need to know.

More links coming later. After I rehydrate with coffee.

OK, one link: They tore down Slumpy on Saturday. Another Detroit tragedy.

OK, one more: George Clinton, interviewed by UBM.

Big big news in Michigan today: The pets are having an uprising.

I don’t mean to be flip. Three people are dead in two separate dog-maulings. I mentioned one yesterday — a four-month-old baby killed by a Rottweiler. Worse was one that followed, in which two adults were killed by the same pack of roaming curs in an adjacent rural county rapidly going exurban.

Here’s the story; note the photo. I wonder what that sign means, the “if you don’t like it, go away” part. Clashes between long-established rural concerns and newly arrived suburbanites have been going on for years, but it usually involves issues like hog-farm smells or slow-moving combines on rural section roads. Even country people would consider the maintenance of a free-roaming pack of killer dogs to be a bit un-neighborly, but you never know. There’s a strong streak of antisocial libertarianism that runs through rural Michigan, of the fuck-you-it’s-a-free-country variety. Remember, Tim McVeigh spent a spell here, along with his close pal, Thumb native Terry Nichols.

That said, I know nothing gets a posse of farmers to take their rifles from the wall faster than a wild dog pack. Freedom’s one thing, but livestock-killin’s taking money out of pockets. I guess the question to raise is whether two people constitute livestock.

Man, I’m under-caffeinated today. The thing about sleep deprivation is, it builds up. I once heard Bob Edwards interview an expert in these things, who studied people who had jobs that put them out of sync with normal circadian rhythms. It was really more of a conversation, as Edwards was one of those people whose alarm is set for 1 a.m. By Thursday, he said, he was snapping at people for the crime of having squeaky shoes. Dr. Frank once observed that he’d gotten three voice mails overnight from a cardiologist friend doing the all-night on-call shift, an action-packed one in artery-clogged Indiana. The 1 a.m. call was merely terse and grouchy, the 3 a.m. message clouded with increasing shittiness, and by 5 a.m. the voice was screechy and enraged — and these two were fast friends.

I get bitchy, too, but more often I just get tired. If I were that cardiologist, I’d be trying to insert an angio balloon into the patient’s appendix.

So let’s call this a draw and skip right to the bloggage. New chick-blog for bookmarking: I Am Bossy, which I only discovered this week, after Weingarten linked to her ever-so-helpful tampon test (note: safe for fainthearted males; all fluids are a color other than red). Just earlier that day I had been admiring the Simply Vera by Vera Wang ad insert in my morning newspaper, thinking maybe I’d mosey over to Kohl’s and see if anything caught my eye, and then Bossy just…destroyed it. In a highly amusing fashion. I wonder how I’d look in that Liberty Bell cozy.

Fidel Castro writes a newspaper column, and fellow columnist Eric Zorn has a few questions. No. 4: Is he able to take one of life’s minor indignities or insults — a crooked crease the dry cleaner left in the pants of his camouflage suit, say — and spin it into a 700-word tirade on the overall decline of society? I can!

Finally, if you missed it in the comments of the previous post, our own Brian Stouder vexes the help in Logansport, Ind., via that community’s splendidly named Pharos-Tribune.

I’m awake now. Just in time for lunch.

Remember Fred Goldman, Ron’s dad? He certainly won’t let O.J. Simpson forget about him. A great WashPost story about the case that won’t go away. Fascinating forensic-accounting detail:

Lawyers (Goldman has) hired simply cannot find Simpson’s money — though tax returns they obtained in 2002 and 2003 show he was making nearly $400,000 per year. His pro football and acting pensions are protected from seizure. He lives on a nice street in Miami, he takes his children on vacations to the Bahamas, in large part, Goldman’s attorneys say, by a complicated scheme of refinancing loans on his home, using that money for living expenses, while having the payments back to the mortgage company protected by law.

Worth your time.

Lately I’ve been keeping a headline file. Duh headlines:

Texting while driving is reckless

Indictment is cloud over Kelty campaign (Non-Fort Wayner explainer: The indicted one is Kelty.)

You-gotta-read-this headlines:

Marquess of Blandford jailed for road rage

Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion

3 Ohioans convicted of trying to sell catfish bait as heroin

Can’t forget Misc Stupid:

Pigskin breeds thought

And then there are the headlines that can’t quite capture the full scope of an event of tragic stupidity, like this: Baby killed in dog attack. You have to read the story to imagine the scene — a Warren party full of teenagers, one with her new baby, one with his recently rescued Rottweiler with a history of aggressive tendencies toward children. The mother goes to mix formula, someone puts the carseat on the floor, the dog “comes out of nowhere,” and justlikethat, a four-month-old life is snuffed out. Some people shouldn’t own dogs, some people shouldn’t be parents, and sometimes a little baby is the one who has to tell them.

The dog’s name was “Chopper,” by the way. Always get the dog’s name — first rule of reporting.

Alan wrote a story once about some people who bred miniature horses. They thought they were cute. They had been breeding shih tzus, but once they saw the little horses they got out of the little-dog game. A copy editor changed “shih tzus” to “dogs.” I can’t recall why; probably he or she thought “shih tzu” might make people think “shit zoo” in their heads, and that would be wrong. Alan told his boss, “If I have to tell them why ‘shih tzu’ is funnier than ‘dogs,’ I just give up.” The mini-horse people provided one of the mascots for the Indianapolis Colts, a stallion that had been fine until they started breeding it, and it began nipping the cheerleaders. Testosterone — cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

I’m meandering here, aren’t I? Whimsy, dead babies, shih tzus — I should pick a topic and stick with it. OK. How about my love for Detroitblog? Of all the ones in my RSS bookmarks, this is one I look forward to most. It’s entirely anonymous, although my spidey sense told me early on it was written by a journalist, and a few months ago this was confirmed by One Who Knows, but one who steadfastly refused to spill the final beans. He doesn’t write often, but when he does I’m always charmed — the top-of-the-pile post about the Bali Barber Shop is a perfect example, taking note of the humblest of businesses in a grungy of the city that somehow hangs on. This isn’t a very pretty town, but it’s full of places like this, a little pocket of cheer tended by an 80-year-old man who refuses to give up and by soldiering on, gives Detroit a flavor all its own.

For purposes of space, I’ll spare you my rant on why I can’t read stuff like this in the daily newspaper. I know why the blogger keeps it on the DL.

Today is a morning for maintenance — my car’s due for its 50K service, and in celebration, I’m going to the dealer’s waiting room without my laptop, only one of the three books I checked out of the library yesterday. Whichever captures my fancy will replace the months-old “Stalin’s Ghost” on the nightstand later today. I know, I know — try to contain your excitement.

I was right to sit out 9/11. No one gives a shit where anyone was, how they felt, what was running through their minds. Do they? I certainly don’t, although for those of you who collect such things, I’ll keep it brief: Getting ready for work; shocked; and pissed that it took NPR so long to get their act together. There’s nothing like driving to work, knowing the country is under attack in at least two cities, and hearing Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” on your preferred news source.

To be sure, though, there was little enough of that. More common, today, was the rueful conservative, like, ohhhhh, Jonah Goldberg:

“Remember 9/11!” once looked like it was going to be a battle cry for the ages up there with “Remember the Alamo!” Now, the only aspect of 9/11 that is acceptable on a bipartisan basis is sadness. Obviously, with that much carnage and suffering there’s a place for the sadness. But why only sadness?

If I had said in late 2001, with bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, anthrax flying through the mail, pandemonium reigning at the airports, and bombs falling on Kabul, that by ‘07 leading Democrats would be ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker, I’d have been thought mad. If I’d predicted that a third of Democrats would be telling pollsters that Bush knew in advance about 9/11, and that the eleventh of September would become an innocuous date for parental get-togethers to talk about potty-training strategies and phonics for preschoolers, people would have thought I was crazy.

For the record, I know a lot of Democrats, and to my knowledge, none of them think Bush knew in advance about 9/11, although the whole country knows he got a fairly specific memo on the subject a month ahead of time, if that’s what you mean. And I apologize for getting a haircut on the Date That Changed Everything, but my roots were getting embarrassing. By the way, how many people do you know can even tell you the date the Alamo was attacked?

Then there’s James Lileks:

It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years – Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran. The idea that it would have stalled and ended up in diffuse oblique arguments about political timetables would have been immensely depressing. There was a model for this sort of thing, a template. Advance. But that requires cultural confidence, a loose agreement on the goals, the rationale, the nature of the enemy and the endgame. We don’t have those things. Imagine telling someone six years ago Iran would be allowed, by default, to make nuclear weapons. They would wonder what the hell we’d done with half a decade, plus change. What part of 25 years of Death to America didn’t we get, exactly?

Wha-? I missed this memo. I thought the idea was to invade Afghanistan and get Osama bin Hidin’ dead or alive. “Then Iraq, then Iran?” I must have been reading different newspapers. “The idea that it would have stalled and ended up in diffuse oblique arguments about political timetables would have been immensely depressing.” Well, hell yes, but you skipped another immensely depressing part — that before the arguments were about “political timetables,” they were about the massive botching of the job and the refusal of anyone in the administration to take any responsibility for it. And now we’re stuck with a chattering class of neocons stateside who act like a pissy girlfriend who says, “I shouldn’t have to tell you what you did. You should know.”

Ned Flanders manque Rod Dreher:

God, it’s hard to remember how scared we all were then. And that’s nothing to apologize for. Nothing like that had ever happened to our country, at least not the mainland. None of us had any idea what was coming next. …

It was a magnificent feeling we all shared, that national unity in the days and weeks after America was attacked. We all knew it couldn’t last, I guess, but didn’t you think, or at least hope, that something had changed forever, and for the better? As long as America was a victim, we were united domestically, and the world was on our side. When we decided to fight back, that ended that. We fought back foolishly, to be sure, and as Jonah notes, President Bush handled the politics of this thing badly. Big mistakes have been made. We all know that. We all live with that.

He’s big on this, telling others how “we all” feel or felt about whatever. I’m reminded of Tonto — what do you mean “we,” white man? And what’s this “magnificent” stuff? All this revisionist history! I recall a world that stood with us pretty much up until we started rattling sabers at Iraq. I guess that falls under the umbrella of “the politics of this thing,” the stuff that was “handled badly.” Well, when you put it that way…

Enough. Fortunately, we have Britney Spears to distract us. Something we can all enjoy together, as a nation. It’s a magnificent feeling:

Hoping to solve the mystery of how Britney Spears, a seasoned performer with many memorable faux-lesbian and python-related VMAs performances to her credit, came to prance across that Las Vegas stage as listlessly a past-her-prime, breakfast-shift stripper who’d just been shot in a fishnetted haunch with an elephant-grade tranquilizer dart…

“Breakfast-shift stripper” — if that doesn’t make milk squirt out your nose, nothing will.

Wandering back to 9/11…I give a lot of people a lot of slack for almost everything that was said between 9/11 and, say, New Year’s. It was a crazy time for everyone. There was a certain LarryCurlyMoe-ness in the air, only not funny. In one of Alan’s late father’s expressions, no one knew whether to shit their pants or wind their watch. I recall horrible things being said right out loud, and slightly less-horrible things being published in the newspaper. There was a Friday morning, probably the first Friday afterward, when I was sitting in the newsroom near the police scanner, and about every five minutes a call came in to check out some swarthy person seen walking down someone’s street — and this in Fort Wayne, Indiana. If anyone knew what the hell was happening, they weren’t telling. Emotions were high. My BFF Deb and I had a trip to Florida planned for that December, a four-day spa getaway at The Breakers in Palm Beach she’d won in a contest, and she said she thought maybe we should donate it to a firefighter’s widow, because would we even be able to enjoy ourselves? (Reader: We didn’t give it away, and we did enjoy ourselves.)

I wasn’t feeling too good myself. But I got over it. A lot of people got over it. If, six years later, we haven’t made 9/11 a national day of remembrance, all I can say is: The president told us to go shopping when the wound was raw.

Ech. Enough. How about some fun bloggage?

The new Thin Thighs in Two Days: A Clean House in 19 Minutes. Sure.

For once in my life, I’m out in front of a trend, although it would be stretching reality to call me a Spokes-Model:

Meet the beautiful bicycle girls of New York, a breed that bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, Spandex-short-wearing species of 20 years ago. Those women were athletes, pumping the pedals, fighting to win. Getting somewhere. Today’s girls—and one always thinks of them as girls, even if they’re well into their 40’s—are more meandering, their long legs flashing along the pot-holed alleys of SoHo and the boutique-lined bike lanes of the West Village. Eco-conscious and ethereal, they wear flowing frocks and gigantic sunglasses but never helmets. Their hair flutters in the breeze as they leave a trail of swooning male pedestrians in their perfumed wake. They’ve been known to weave up the Brooklyn Bridge, holding up traffic as they absent-mindedly chomp on almonds, steering through a stop sign while texting on their BlackBerries.

Local celebrities like the actresses Naomi Watts and Chloë Sevigny and the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen have all championed living the green life in this most public and only incidentally calorie-burning way. “I go every day to work on my bike,” Ms. Bundchen told the Daily News a couple of years ago. “It’s faster than a car, and cheaper.”

So I’m not in New York, lack flowing hair, almost always wear a helmet, never bike in a dress and don’t text while riding. And I’m not a celebrity, actress or Brazilian supermodel. Otherwise, this fits me to a T. (I do have big sunglasses. Ray-Bans.)

So if you see me, wave.

I have a busy morning today, followed by an exhausted afternoon, and so you may have to take a little less today. This is an anniversary, of course, but I decline to participate in the national introspection. If you’re looking for bloggage to discuss, here’s a good start: The formerly friendly Canadian border, gone, gone, gone.

Dick Law of Gibraltar can remember boating across the Detroit River to Crystal Bay in Canada as a young man and seeing the customs officials go by and simply wave.

But beefed-up border security from customs officials, the Coast Guard, county sheriffs and local police have complicated what once was a simple trip to Ontario waters across from Grosse Ile.

As of Jan. 31, Americans will be required to carry a passport or similar document to return from Canada, a requirement formerly reserved for overseas travelers. Customs officials plan to phase in the requirement until the public becomes more aware, but it’s expected to increase the time it takes to cross the borders.

The new rules will be backed up with more spot checks. Law said boaters near Gibraltar face a gauntlet of law enforcement from U.S. or Canadian customs agents, the Coast Guard, the Wayne County sheriff and local police from Gibraltar and Grosse Ile.

It isn’t just boaters, either. They’ve started putting portable toilets along the approaches to the crossing at Port Huron. Live near a border? What’s it like where you are?

Back later today, in one form or another.

The subprime meltdown is at its hottest in southeast Michigan. Pigass stupid borrowing/criminally fraudulent lending was robust here even before the auto industry began its downsizing over the last 18 months. Tens of thousands have taken the money and many of them are trying to run, but find themselves tethered to their house in an area where for-sale signs sprout like dandelions on every block.

This isn’t news. I’m just trying to give you some background.

(Obligatory it’s-all-about-me note: As of last week I thought that if circumstances forced us to sell tomorrow, we’d take a $30K bath on what we paid two and a half years ago. Then I walked the dog past a lovely comparable house a block away that’s been on the market a while. “New pricing!” the sign said. I glanced at the sales flyer in the box, and revised our potential loss upward to $50K. It’s only a loss when you sell, I know. Still. Unnerving.)

Me ol’ pal Ron had a story in Saturday’s paper that should have surprised no one, but set in stone a grim truth: We’re number one! No. 1 in subprime lending in 2006, and No. 1 in foreclosures:

About 55 percent of mortgage loans made in 2006 in Metro Detroit were subprime loans, carrying interest rates at least three percentage points higher than that of prime loans—double the national average. Laredo, Texas, had the second-worst rate, at 52 percent. The news is even worse in Wayne County, where nearly two of three home loans were risky, high-cost loans.

One local-jargon note: “Metro Detroit” is the local-media term for “everybody in the area,” and includes the affluent suburbs. “Wayne County” is mostly occupied by Detroit, with a handful of better-off communities — Dearborn and the Pointes, to name but two. Two-thirds in Wayne County isn’t surprising; 55 percent in the metro area is.

So what you have is the regular subprime meltdown that the whole country is experiencing, along with the market losses you’d expect in an area losing thousands of jobs. If you live in the Sunbelt, go ahead and kiss that giant electric bill you got last month. It’s probably a lot less than $50K.

But as you go further into the story, interesting details emerge. There’s a quote from a mortgage executive:

The foreclosures caused by questionable loan practices are likely to continue for another year, as adjustable rate mortgages spike, Glanz said. “Were there abuses? Yes. Could they have gotten financing someplace else (at better rates)? Maybe. (But) people did sign up for those loans.”

In other words: Tough luck, but you asked for it. But note the next passage:

One such family is Jerome and Alice Wilder, who live in a tidy home on Waltham Street in Detroit. The couple and their 4-year-old son, Jahari, had a fixed-rate mortgage on the home they’ve lived in since 1999. A mortgage officer repeatedly called their home in 2004, saying he could lower their house payments and get them thousands of dollars in cash if they refinanced.

“He kept calling and calling,” Jerome Wilder said. “He said, ‘I know you can use the money—Christmas is coming up.’ “According to the truth-in-lending statement prepared by the mortgage officer, the Wilders’ home payment would be $504 a month at initiation, and would rise no higher than $569. Despite the broker’s reassurances, the family’s house payments reached $900 a month by 2006.”It’s the most elaborate con game you’ve ever seen,” Jerome Wilder said. “I feel like I was taken for a ride.”

The Wilders’ home was sold at a sheriff’s auction in March, and the family is scheduled to be evicted later this month.

Obviously, the Wilders were defrauded. It’s a truth-in-lending statement, after all, not lies-in-lending. Where is the eager prosecutor bird-dogging the scoundrels who led them into this? Second-to-last graf:

ACORN officials have asked the Michigan Attorney General’s Office to investigate mortgage fraud in Metro Detroit, and several bills have been introduced in the Legislature to clamp down on predatory lending.

Note: ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I first became acquainted with this group as a young reporter, when they came to Columbus to agitate for the homeless (I think). You could call them the quintessential so-called outside agitators, sending reps from the national organization to town to set up a local chapter with local leaders, and then call the whole thing “grass-roots.” At the time they were easy for the power structure to ignore, and I don’t know if that’s changed at all. I’d feel a lot better if that sentence said, “The mayors and city councils of 23 separate communities have asked the Michigan Attorney General…” But I’ll take action wherever it comes from, even ACORN.

I know what some of you are thinking: The Wilders had it coming, somehow. They didn’t read their closing papers, or something. Well, I didn’t read my closing papers either; if I had, my real-estate closing would have taken three days instead of 45 minutes. I looked over what I could beforehand, and took the word of the people who handed us the papers and explained what each one was. I was vastly reassured that I was dealing with reputable people, and that I was agreeing to a boring old 30-year, fixed-rate loan, given to people with excellent credit scores, and not something we bought after a phone pitch. I had faith in good faith. Maybe I should dig them up and reread them.

I remember ads that ran on TV during the subprime boom. One featured a jolly black couple whose nice lender helped them get out from under all those credit-card bills, lowered their payments, and freed up enough cash to buy an above-ground pool. I wonder what apartment they’re living in now.

OK, Monday bummer over. On to the bloggage:

Here’s one for Ashley, who played to be heard when he was in a marching band:

The joke about black-college football games in the South is that the crowd patterns are the reverse of the norm. The fans talk, flirt and eat during the first two quarters, then return to their seats to scrutinize the marching bands through their eight-minute shows at halftime. …

In 1989 the Prairie View drumline introduced a new drums-only feature sequence, which usually includes a kind of circus gymnastics: throwing drums around, drummers carrying one another upside-down by the calves, walking and playing in pairs like a push-me-pull-you. And in 1994 the Box began rotating sections of its drumline during the routine, so that snare drummers weren’t always up in the front.

Amid the rampant trash-talking between supporters of different black college bands, Prairie View’s pioneering of this modern drumline feature seems to have become accepted history.

“If any other band tells you that they started that,” said Skip Wilson, an alumnus of the Box who now helps direct it, “I’ll eat a bug. And I’ll let you choose the bug.”

You mean they’re not in your ass? Your politics are all in your head:

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment being reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

All I see are…shades of gray!

Well, it’s Monday. It’s fittin’.

I’ve been blessed — as an agnostic, I don’t use that word lightly — with good health all my life. I come from a sturdy line of people who generally live into their ninth decade, with no chronic diseases other than those time carries in its reeking baggage. My medical-history interviews are a chorus of no, no, no. Lucky me.

Lately it has occurred to me I won’t live forever, and may in fact see my lucky streak end with the usual degradations of cancer or heart disease or stroke or multiple blunt-force trauma in a bicycle accident. I’ve always had health insurance through my/our employers, but lately those employers aren’t looking so healthy themselves, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about more. So you might say I was ready for “Sicko,” and when someone offered me a screener copy, of course I said yes.Everything you’ve already read about the movie is true, so we don’t need to go into greater depth here: Yes, it’s entertaining propaganda. Yes, the Cuba sequences were ridiculous. Yes, Michael Moore is still fat. But hey, guess what else: It’s also a pretty excellent movie. Moore is at his most self-effacing and crafty, deliberately dialing down the childishness in favor of sincerity.

By concentrating not on the uninsured, but the badly insured, he makes it hard to distance yourself from the problem. If 46 million Americans don’t have health insurance, that means 250 million have at least something standing between them and a $250,000 hospital bill, and “Sicko” only confirms what many of us long suspected: There but for the grace of God, etc.There’s the woman whose ambulance ride after a car accident was denied, because it wasn’t pre-approved.  The woman whose husband was denied a bone-marrow transplant, and died. (And she worked at a hospital!) And there’s the woman who was denied cervical-cancer treatment, because she was too young to get cervical cancer, in her insurer’s opinion.

You can’t help but wonder how long before something like this happens to you. This isn’t journalism; it’s not even-handed. When he goes to France, and England, and Canada, and looks at the happy people there, we know there are others who aren’t. Mention universal health care in this country, and within seconds someone will bring up the eight-month waiting list for a hernia repair in the UK, or whatever. No one does this in “Sicko,” granted.But here’s something I don’t notice happening in Canada, either: People saying, “Let’s dump our system and adopt that of the United States, because that’s one that works like a Swiss watch.”

No one’s saying the National Health Service is a bowl of cherries, but at least after waiting your eight months or whatever, you can walk out of the hospital with the shirt on your back. Nothing is really free, and when Moore keeps calling government-subsidized care by that name you want to correct him — they’re all paying one way or another. But maybe this is what you can afford when you’re not flushing billions down the Pentagon’s toilets, too.

I know I quote Roy too often here, but I think he got to the heart of it with his post on the film, a few weeks ago:

 But there aren’t a lot of “gotcha” ambush moments. Instead, halfway through the film Moore seems to abandon the litany of despair to go to other countries where we meet people who are well-served by their systems, because their governments acknowledge that health care is a human right. And hearing their stories, and especially observing their lives outside the hospitals and clinics, we come to realize that health care is only part of the difference. What’s remarkable (and sometimes infuriating) about these subjects’ attitudes is that they take their superior care for granted. They expect more from their governments than we do — and, the film implies, that’s why they have it and we don’t.  Even hostile reviewers seem to pick up on this. The claim by National Review’s Rich Lowry that Moore is “the Riefenstahl of socialism” is hysterical but telling. Lowry is acknowledging the power of SiCKO’s real story — the story of a civilized world that, in some important ways, has left America behind, not by dint of socialism but by a different understanding of what the old Labourite Tony Benn calls by its right name: democracy.     

We look, after Moore’s propaganda film, like people who can’t quite let go of the other propaganda we’ve had sowed in our brains since birth: That the government can’t do anything right, and the market does everything better. Ask yourself if that’s true the next time you find your COBRA running out.

Before I started this blog, I thought I was the only Nancy Nall in the known universe. It’s such an oddball name, after all — who other than my parents would choose it for an innocent girl baby? It turns out that I’m not, of course; since the Google came around I have virtually “met” at least a dozen relatives (all Nalls in the U.S. go back to a single ancestor, so we’re all at least distantly related), including a couple of Nancys. But this e-mail may be the best ever:

are you by any chance THE talented, nancy nall who starred on the Riley High School stage in Firefly, among many other memorable performances?  if so, though you may not remember, I played opposite you in that one. 

 No. But if I were, I would certainly remember my co-star. 

Happy 16th birthday (80 in Jack Russell years) today to the other man of the house:

Now I have to take him to the BMV to get his license. Among the things I will not be doing today, however, is baking a bacon chicken layer cake, although I’m happy to share the recipe. What did we do before Google? I ask you:

Bacon Chicken Layer Cake

This recipe makes a real layer cake! Chicken, bacon and yogurt provide aromas that drive dogs crazy for this cake.

3 cups flour

1 T. baking powder

1/2 cup margarine, softened

6 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup corn oil

2 jars strained chicken baby food

2 cups finely shredded carrots

plain or vanilla yogurt

2 or 3 strips of bacon, fried crisp, then crumbled, or use bacon-flavored jerky strips, cut into bits.

Generously grease and flour two 8″ round cake pans; set aside. Combine flour and baking powder; set aside. In a mixing bowl, beat softened margarine until smooth. Add eggs and corn oil; mix well. Add strained chicken, and shredded carrots and mix until smooth. Add flour mixture and mix thoroughly. Pour batter into the 2 prepared 8″ cake pans. Bake at 325° for 60 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before removing from pans. Cool completely on wire racks.

Place one layer on a serving plate and spread yogurt over top. Place second layer on top, then spread yogurt on top and sides of entire cake. Sprinkle crumbled bacon or bits of jerky strips over top. Use “Pupperoni” sticks for candles.

More later. I got some bidness to take care of.