Look, Madonna’s on the cover of Vanity Fair this month. Doesn’t she look pretty and dewy and unretouched and like the sort of woman who could act so well — once she figures out how to move her eyebrows and mouth again — that she could make you forget you ever heard the name Ingrid Bergman?

Has anyone ever told her the truth? Even her poor husband, who had a bit of promise when they married but whose talent appears to have been drained by his succubus of a wife? Someone should, so Madonna, listen to me: The reason you can’t act isn’t because you haven’t had the right training, or the right script, or the right director. The reason you can’t act is because in order to pretend to be another person, you have to become aware that other people exist, and they have lives and private thoughts and emotions that have nothing to do with whether they think you look fabulous at 49. Only a narcissist could say something like this with a straight face:

Madonna spoke of New York, how it’s changed: “It’s not the exciting place it used to be. It still has great energy; I still put my finger in the socket. But it doesn’t feel alive, cracking with that synergy between the art world and music world and fashion world that was happening in the 80s. A lot of people died.”

Because of course you’d know. You get out so much these days.

Another thing a non-narcissist wouldn’t say:

madonna: Do you have a daughter?
me: No, three sons.
[Madonna looks at me accusingly.]
me: I didn’t choose it—it just happened.
madonna: Do you believe that? You think things just happen?
me: I think that just happened.
madonna: Mm-hmm.
me: So who’s making the decision?
madonna: You are, you and your missus.
me: About what kind of kids we want?
madonna: You chose it. Your soul chose it.
me: No. Do you believe that? That my insides wanted boys?
madonna: Unconsciously. Yes.

Now that you’re pushing 50, you’re going to learn something unpleasant: One by one, your friends are going to start getting sick. Just you wait. One day you’ll get a phone call, and it’ll be someone you’ve known for years, and she’ll say she found a lump in her breast, and she’s going to be starting chemo soon, and she just thought you’d want to know. When this happens, be sure to tell her her soul chose cancer. Unconsciously, of course.

Also, because I am still feeling very, very mean, ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States:

I believe I just unconsciously chose this headache I’ve had all day.

Well this was a Monday morning fit for the weekend it followed. I was in a bad mood for about 48 hours, entirely media-induced. I wish there was a way to check one’s hormone levels from day to day — gauges installed in the forehead, perhaps — so I’d know when to stay away from the papers.

It started Saturday with “This American Life” on Saturday, a particularly pungent episode called “The Audacity of Government.” (From the promo: “We’ve decided to spend an hour admitting and talking about the fact that everyone knows is true: America’s become a jerk.”) Part I was about the Bush administration’s attempt to buffalo an independent treaty commissioner, in order to enforce the “property rights” of a couple who built an illegal wall in their back yard, which backs up to the Canadian border. Part II was about the government’s relentless efforts to deport the immigrant widows of American citizens who died before their spouses’ permanent residency could be established — a group that numbers barely over 100.

It continued when I got home and read the story about this poor schmo, a former kindergarten teacher in his second trial for sexually assaulting two boys. It’s his second trial because his first conviction was overturned. The boys claim he grabbed them out of a lunch line and into an empty classroom and raped them both. Unfortunately, the classroom was never empty in the course of the day, and the kids showed all the signs of having been coached, and their stories changed with the wind. What happened? No one knows, but it’s highly likely the teacher on trial, practically the definition of a pencil-neck geek, didn’t do what he’s accused of. The jury has been deadlocked for a week, 11-1 for acquittal, but the holdout seems determined to hold out forever.

The funk lifted when he had our long-delayed dinner with friends Saturday. Main course: lamb chops. Mmm, lamb chops in the spring. Yum. But the next day, more outrages in the daily papers:

Remember when “vulgar” was a word everyone understood, and a description no one wanted to attract? Ah, those were the days:

Like so many of the over-the-top birthday parties that typically appear on “My Super Sweet 16” on MTV, Ariel’s celebration took the fairy-tale-princess theme to new heights.

Horse-drawn carriages delivered teenage guests to a faux-castle tent where they were met with dancing jesters and disco lights. The birthday girl, wearing a white dress and tiara, flew in via helicopter. And the evening ended with fireworks and the arrival of Ariel’s gift from her father: a brand new BMW 325i.

As viewers learned, Ariel’s dad was a successful oilman. “I love oil. Oil means shoes and cars and purses,” Ariel exclaimed to the camera as she and her father stomped around oil drilling sites in the muddy hills near her home in Campbellsville, Ky. When her father pointed to one of the sites and told viewers that it produced 120 barrels a day, Ariel asked, “How many Louis Vuittons is that?” Her father’s answer was “a bunch.”

Now there’s a lede that’ll keep you reading, even though you know what comes next: Ariel’s daddy is a swindler and thief, not to mention a man whose sense of restraint and decorum makes Tony Montana look like Prince Charles. Say what you want about WASPs, with their buttoned-down nerdiness and toothpaste tube squeezers and 25-cent tips for the yard man, but at least they don’t go around hiring choppers for their kid’s birthday party.

When the Obama administration sweeps into office, I look foward to seeing Ariel’s father face a firing squad. Ariel herself will be sent to a forced-labor camp for youthful offenders. ¡Viva la revolucion!.

Grumble, grumble. On to the Free Press and there was Mitch Albom, ever the edgy opinionator, going waaaay out on a limb to stake his claim that religious fanatics who shun doctors and sit idly by praying while their kids die of treatable diseases are — hold on to your hats — bad parents. But where is the qualifier? Ah yes, here it is:

Now I know there are many of us who believe “God has a plan.” And I hope and pray that’s true.

But I’m betting His plan doesn’t include us sitting around doing nothing.

Well-said, brave boy! My brother thinks picking on Mitch Albom is a waste of time. I heartily agree. And yet, I cannot stop.

Finally, in despair, I thought a little celebrity gossip might do me some good. Uh, no:

Madonna wants to remake “Casablanca,” set it in Iraq, and play the Ingrid Bergman role. Dr. Kevorkian on speed-dial for that one, baby.

So how was your weekend?

Oh, I shouldn’t complain. It wasn’t that bad. We got our drain cleared, the dog got his annual shots and an “excellent” from the vet, and as they say, who has anything to complain about, really? Not me. But I do still have some work to do, so that’s it for now.

Floor drains in the basement backing up? Check.

Dog needs to go to the vet? Check.

Deadline stretched to breaking point, necessitating concentrated period of morning work? Check.

You get the idea. See you sometime this afternoon.

Well, goddamn it all to hell:

Bite me. Guess what Monday is in Detroit? Opening day.

I should take the day off, but instead, I’ll take it easy. Yesterday I ran across something called The Documentary Blog, and found the inevitable Top 25 list. Can I see the hands of all who despise “Grey Gardens?” Of course it was on the list (No. 8); it’s on all the lists. Everybody loves it. Hidden masterpiece, etc., blah blah blah. I finally found it in the library stacks a few months ago and couldn’t finish it. It strikes me as precisely the sort of thing I would have loved at 19, which isn’t saying much — I loved “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” when I was 19. (Still do, at least a little bit. Tim Curry’s the first man in a corset I ever found remotely attractive. The last one, too.)

“Grey Gardens” is the story of two of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ crazy relatives, who live in a crazy house and do crazy things and feed the crazy raccoons who hang around their crazy Hamptons estate, and if you like watching that sort of thing, well, you should come to Detroit. We have no shortage of crazy people here. You could follow one or two home and see how they live. I suspect the end result would be much the same, except it would happen in a cardboard box, not the Hamptons. Toe-tally crazy! The film was shot in the mid-70s, perhaps the last era in which crazy could read as “wise in a different way.” By 1980, when the nation suddenly developed a homeless problem, “Grey Gardens” would have been a harder sell. It’s easy to romanticize mental illness when it’s not taking a crap on the sidewalk in front of you.

Some things can only be thought worthwhile in their own era. Originality counts for a lot. I try to keep this in mind when experiencing art of an earlier time. It still got on my nerves.

The rest of the list was OK, although I would have made a place somewhere for Michael Moore. I suspect documentarians secretly hate him (because he’s successful), but he got the genre back into the multiplexes, and that has to count for something.

“Hoop Dreams” made the list, too. It was nominated for an Oscar, but should have won the Pulitzer Prize. I remember it mainly for the portrait of the coach at Arthur Agee’s private school, a man who was such a vile p.o.s. you could almost smell him in the theater. Also, that “Hoop Dreams” was one of the films that played during Northwood Cinema’s brief attempt to be an art house, always a dicey proposition in the Fort. I did my part as a customer.

So that’s my frame of mind this snowy morning — nasty, brutish and short. How’s yours?

I slept in — as much as it’s possible to “sleep in” when one’s head is full of crusted snot — and pledged I wouldn’t miss the weight-training class at the gym this morning, so you folks only get 20 minutes of my time today. My Quickfire all-bloggage challenge starts…now!

Our fame spreads. I knew one day all that time I spent reading Ann Landers could pay off. Also, it’s interesting to note the credulousness of the American media was ever thus.

Just a warning: If tomorrow you see a photo posted with a long string of obscenities, I will be taking Friday off to gnash my teeth. Because guess what we’re promised overnight: Snow, and perhaps enough to photograph.

The idea of putting my house up as collateral for a new bathroom never appealed much to me. My parents were Depression babies, and never went in for the sorts of high-wire financial shenanigans so popular in recent years. (They were, however, the Trumps compared to Alan’s parents. One story I recalled at FuneralFest 2008 was the reaction of Alan’s grandparents when their daughter and her new husband took out a mortgage to buy a tiny house in Defiance, Ohio — “You will be paying on that for the rest of your life,” delivered in an accusatory, thou-shalt-be-damned tone. Amount of the loan: $8,000.) I really really really would like a new kitchen, but I really really really really don’t want a home-equity loan to worry about at 3 a.m. Finally, vindication! Ahem:

Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans — and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.

To get it, many lenders are taking the extraordinary step of preventing some people from selling their homes or refinancing their mortgages unless they pay off all or part of their home equity loans first. In the past, when home prices were not falling, lenders did not resort to these measures.

I remember in the ’90s, I’d see ads touting home-equity lines of credit as a good way to finance a vacation. Whenever I am tempted to spend too much in a restaurant, I remind myself that no matter how good it tastes, it’s going to be headed to the waste-treatment plant in 24 hours one way or another. Imagine being kicked out of your home and staying warm with your memories of the beach in Bermuda. Nope, doesn’t do it for me, either.

Related: A total financial moron explains it all for you. Clip and save. Useful!

Twenty minutes is up. Tell me how my affinity for drug-culture trivia can be monetized in the future. I’m off to the gymnasium to swing some of those newfangled Indian clubs.

Somehow I thought I’d reach this age and not be watching so much television. Of course, at the time I’d have made an observation like that, most TV sucked. It’s hard for me to watch any network television anymore. On the way out of town yesterday we passed a filthy Chevy Trailblazer, emblazoned Wayne County Medical Examiner. The driver was a fiftysomething doughball who bore no resemblance at all to David Caruso, William L. Petersen or Gary Sinise. Where’s your Hummer? Where’s your supermodel partner? In real life, sometimes a meat wagon is just a meat wagon.

I don’t know how many of you are watching “Breaking Bad,” on AMC, but you might want to give it a try. It’s imperfect, not as sure-footed as “Mad Men,” but part of the fun of discovering something pretty good is watching it become very good, and I have high hopes for “Breaking Bad.” (Just noticed something: This is the second made-for-AMC series; do they all have to have two-word, alliterative names? Maybe I can interest them in an autobiographical series based on me.)

B2 is about Walter White (MORE ALLITERATION! And the lead in “Mad Men” is DON DRAPER! I have found the key!)… OK, about Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who’s just turned 50 and discovered he has late-stage lung cancer, the kind where the choices are die now or suffer now and die just a little later. He has a pregnant wife, a son with cerebral palsy and no money at all; in the pilot episode he’s moonlighting at a car wash, scrubbing the tires of his own students. He wants to die without telling anyone what he’s dying of, and he wants to leave his family enough of a grubstake that they have at least a fighting chance without him. The first desire is unrealistic, and once he lets his wife in on the secret, you see why he didn’t want to tell her: She becomes almost unbearably “supportive,” and she’s already the sort of Goodwife who looks good on paper, but doesn’t work so well in real life. (On his 50th birthday, she serves him bacon and eggs arranged into a 50 on his plate, but the bacon is the vegetarian kind.)

The second desire is more achievable, considering Walter has excellent chemistry skills and the down-and-outers around Albuquerque have a deep thirst for methamphetamine. He hooks up with a former student in the trade (nickname: Captain Cook) and the two commence on a comedy of errors designed to produce glass-grade crystal meth for the masses.

The comedy-of-errors stuff is what’s imperfect about the show. Hiding and disposing of dead bodies, deception of families, squeezing chemotherapy in around work and cook sessions — this we’ve seen before. But I watch the show for the stuff I haven’t seen before, or am seeing in a new way. It’s in the way Walter chafes under his unrewarding life, in his ugly house, with his idiot students and his pillow-plumping spouse. And in the depiction of Albuquerque thug life, with its Mexican gangbangers, laundromat-haunting tweakers and absurd, hip-hop patois (did you know that New Mexico city is known as “the ABQ”?). Walter’s partner, Jesse, dresses in the oversize pants and knit watch caps sported by rappers and other bad-boy style leaders, but he looks like a toddler playing dress-up in them. But Walter’s own wardrobe of Dockers and short-sleeve shirts hardly looks like something to aspire to. When the two fall out, split up and separately decide to go straight, the only job Jesse can find is dressed as a smiling dollar bill, passing out fliers on the sidewalk outside a bank. (This show has a way of demonstrating that for some people, daily life is so banal and stupid that staying stoned all day on crystal just…makes…sense.)

Walter comes clean about his cancer, submits to chemo, and in his physical misery finds himself attending the 50th birthday party of a college classmate who got a little luckier in the business world and lives like a pasha. No soy bacon for him — his birthday presents include one of Eric Clapton’s old guitars, personally signed by God. Later, the former classmate tries to give Walter a do-nothing job, as a cover to pay for his cancer treatment. There’s something about the moment when Walter seeks out Jesse after all this and greets him with a terse, “Wanna cook?” that encapsulates the whole show — the way people get left behind in life, the way being left behind means you can’t get the good cancer drugs, the way lawbreaking can make a man feel alive in a whole new way.

I hope it gets renewed. It’s taken me years to discover Bryan Cranston, who plays Walter. I don’t want to lose him just yet.

Do we have bloggage? No, we don’t. I was at a funeral all day! But feel free to post your own. It’s work work work today for me.

We’ll be out of touch today, attending the funeral of Alan’s Aunt Dorothy. (Everyone had an Aunt Dorothy once upon a time, didn’t they? And now hardly anyone does. In 70 years, will we all be burying our Aunt Britnee?) She died two days before her 91st birthday. I met her on the same day I met Alan’s parents. They had recently been to Fostoria to check out the biggest news in years — Jesus on a soybean-oil tank.

“They say the image was made by vapors, but maybe a divine hand guided the vapors,” she said.

“Oh, bullshit,” said Alan’s dad.

This anecdote pretty much encapsulates both departed souls.

Anyway, now she can ask the man himself.

I’ll be back tomorrow. Discuss whatever you like, but I won’t be participating.

How do I get on the Talking Points of the Day mailing list? Because I’m obviously missing something.

Memeorandum notes that the indictment of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is national news. I was puzzled to notice all the blog reaction came from the right wing, and what do they rise as one to say?

HOW COME THE MEDIA ISN’T MENTIONING KILPATRICK’S PARTY AFFILIATION? BECAUSE HE’S A DEMOCRAT, YOU KNOW.

My guess would be this: Because it’s so obvious the black mayor of a black city would be a Democrat, it isn’t even worth noting? Because Republicans don’t even put candidates on the mayoral ballot in Detroit? (Help me out here, Del, JohnC — was there a Republican on the November ballot in 2005? I can’t remember, mainly because the primary is the final battle for that office.) Because anyone who knows anything about Detroit other than “it’s where the Supremes came from” and “they make cars there” would know this? Because if there was some distant, outside, ghost of a chance that a black Republican might be running this city, he would be a regular commenter on Fox News by now? Take your pick.

I know they read different newspapers out there in the rest of the country, but come on, people — some knowledge truly is general. And that black cities in the rust belt have Democratic mayors, usually black Democrats, is right down at the duh level.

Did everyone have a good Easter? I caught a cold, which really frosts an Easter cake served with three inches of snow. So if you came here to be entertained, all I can offer is this: I’ll try not to sneeze on you.

This story is going to get a lot of buzz today, so prepare to weigh in. Dan Barry’s portrait of the virtual runt of a high-school litter is pretty wrenching. Billy Wolfe is the kid whose ass everyone loves to kick, and as bad as his story is, the portrait it paints of a typical American high school is worse. The new technology is galling — the beatdowns of Billy are recorded on cell-phone cameras and then passed around the school — but at the end of this depressing tale, what it really calls to mind is prison. The code of any large population overseen by a much smaller power class will eventually evolve like this, where the most thuggish thugs of the lower class are the real people to fear.

Note how it started:

It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up.

What do we tell kids when they’re in over their heads? “Tell an adult.” And look what happens when they do:

Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School.

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Clueless school administrators can’t stop it? Contemptuous student body reinforces it? Color me astonished. Billy, Billy’s parents, if you know what’s good for you you’ll get out of this hellhole before it turns your boy into a monster. I suggest private tutoring or, at the very least, a very pricey private school, paid for by the public-school administrators who allowed this situation to grow and flourish. Maybe that’ll get ‘em fired, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

OK, let’s turn 180 degrees, as befits a head clouded with decongestants.

More proof of my husband’s gay gene: Some years back we upgraded our sleeping platform. Our bedroom furniture was inherited from my grandmother, and the bed was starting to be a problem. It was so noisy you couldn’t roll over from your left side to your right without awakening your partner, and never mind the other thing. Plus, we were ready to make the jump to queen-size. So Alan went in search of something that would please his eye but not require replacement of the two dressers, which are still doing their work just fine. (Plus, I hate matchy-matchy in all things.) He found us something from following an ad in the New Yorker, and it fit the bill just fine.

That was in…? Nineteen and something, so at least eight, nine years ago.

So the “Sex and the City” trailers are out now, and oh my, it looks like Charlotte York finally caught up with the trendsetters:

That’s our bed. (Satin pillows, actresses and child not included.)

“Sex and the City” comes in for a lot of well-deserved abuse, and someday when I’m on a long bike ride I’ll have to decide why it fails to irritate me as much other shows loaded with shameless product placement and unrealistic New York housing options. The writers could be so ham-fisted with it; I still cringe to recall the AOL-plug episode, and the one where Carrie mentions “my new favorite website, Google-dot-com.” Because “Google-dot-com” is what everyone calls Google, right? The many Hermes plugs were totally grating — they squeezed their orange boxes into “The Devil Wears Prada,” too — but I still wear my Hermes scarves. It’s a crime against beauty to leave a Hermes scarf in its box for too long.

I think the thing about “Sex and the City” is, it distracts you with the ridiculous outfits. Once you’ve seen Kim Cattrall in gym clothes with her thong riding six inches above the yoga pants (because there’s nothing that feels good during yoga like a thong), or Cynthia Nixon in her…well, she played a lawyer, so she usually looked OK. And Charlotte was the epitome of good taste, which is why she bought our bed. But Carrie made up for all of them, especially when she ran down the street in a corset, net skirt, seventeen thousand ropes of pearls, stilettos and an Hermes scarf wrapped around her head so that the logo rode over her eyes, and the rest of America gaped and said, “What the fucking fuck?” So you were distracted from the next scene, which was set in the Magnolia bakery. The only Carrie outfit that didn’t make my head spin was the Vivienne Westwood suit she wore for her first day at Vogue. (Says Vogue: “a suit that nobody at Vogue would wear to work (too theatrically chic.)” Well, whatever.

I’m going back to bed. Or to couch. Or somewhere. Be nice to one another.

Go ahead, I can take it: