Here’s a line I’ve been waiting my whole life to use: Sorry I’m late today. I was polishing my screenplay.

Which is the truth. It appears “The Cemetery Precincts” is a go, and if we all lived in the same town, I’d invite you all to be zombie extras, but at the moment, finding locations is a more pressing concern. It’s true that everyone wants to be in showbiz, but with the real, paying showbiz all over Michigan at the moment, the no-budget hobbyist has to go to the end of the line. With the state currently offering filmmakers the highest rebate on money spent in production in the country, you can’t swing a cat without hitting Drew Barrymore smack in the face. Alan came across a sizable shoot on a bike ride the other day; they’d taken over a mansion on Windmill Point Drive down in the Park. I suspect this is “The Prince of Motor City,” a retelling of “Hamlet” set in the auto industry.

Anyway, they had streets blocked off. We’re just looking for a few places we can shoot guerrilla-style.

It was just as well that I was thinking of low-budget zombies and how to explain an uprising of the undead this weekend, because every time I thought of events in the real world, I felt like clawing someone’s throat out. At one point Saturday, as I waited at the gate for my flight home from St. Louis, watching CNN Headline News, we all watched a story about the federal bailout. A clip from our president featured him looking even more the dumb Irish setter than usual, and when he said, “It turns out the markets are interlocking,” lacing his fingers together for emphasis, I thought, How proud Harvard Business School must be of its most successful graduate. And I said, louder maybe than I’d intended to, “BullSHIT.” Up and down the row at the gate: Titters. Granted, maybe they were laughing at the crazy lady talking to the TV, but I like to think that if I’d risen from my seat, climbed up on it and said, “To the nearest federal building! Who’s with me?!” I’d have gotten a few followers. I don’t think Washington is quite aware of how incandescent the fury is out here in Deep Pockets-ville, and what will likely happen as a result, especially if stories like this…

The financial crisis that began in the United States spread to many corners of the globe. Now, the American bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensify scrutiny by Congress and critics. Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic American mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as United States banks.

…and this…

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it. Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

…become widely known and discussed. I’m also thinking that indemnify-the-CEOs stuff is a non-starter, too. But then, I’m an extremist; I advocate stripping them of their assets, and then their clothing, and sending them on a national tour of, say, Springsteen-size arenas, there to be chased through the rows and struck by audience members who will, further, jeer at their shriveled weenies. That sounds like justice to me. Or at least a good start.

You’ve probably seen this, which was going around this weekend, but if not, read and feed on the sweet, pure anger.

St. Louis was fine, if anyone wondered. After spending Friday night talking, I went over to my friends’ house to meet their new dog, who had moved in only hours before. She’s a skinny, undersized golden rescued from a puppy mill who nevertheless seems to be adjusting well. At eight months she’s unlikely to get too much bigger, but she’s got the blonde silky coat thing going on, and that’s all you can ask from a golden. Name’s Frankie. She came from an all-female litter, and they all were given men’s names. I called her Francesca, Francine, Francie, etc., which is what I do with my loved ones. My own pooch has more diminutives than a Russian novel, enough that it’s a wonder he answers to his own name at all. (Of course, he doesn’t anymore, but that’s because he’s deaf.) Saturday was spent touring the city — such a prosperous-looking place. I can’t figure if that’s because the local economy is strong or my eye’s been Detroit-ified; I suspect the latter. But the inner-ring neighborhoods are blossoming with money, and it was heartening to see. Not everyone wants to live in a subdivision. It’s nice to see a few reaching critical mass.

Not much bloggage today, but a question: Who let America’s aging sweetheart, a star beloved by all who know her, one possessed of the rare talent of sincerity and the ability to laugh at herself, wear this horrible dress to the Emmys? It doesn’t matter how skinny you are — past 70, a woman should wear a sleeve.

Happy Monday to all of you.

The ancestral home of NN.C, before there was a .C. South side of the Lou, in a neighborhood turning Bosnian around the edges.

How do you get to Busch Stadium? Practice, practice, practice. Also, it’s a Metrolink stop.

The last few days have been interesting on the parental-duties front. Kate got in the car after school a few days ago and announced the world was supposed to end tomorrow. (To my relief, she didn’t use this as an excuse to not do homework that night.) This was the first I’d heard of the Large Hadron Collider, actually, but I covered my ignorance with a “Don’t be silly” and opted to flip it into a discussion on the importance of skepticism. I remember junior high pretty well, how rumors swept through the student body like crabs in a bathhouse, and thought the best thing she could learn from this was, as stated so eloquently by Detroit philosopher Marvin Gaye, to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

That night, reading the British dailies, I learned about the supercollider and the fears of British schoolchildren that baby black holes would band together and suck us all into the abyss. I flagged the stories for her to read the next day, and she made it her weekly current affairs assignment, and that was that.

We haven’t been talking about Wall Street this week. She’s a worrier by nature, and the last thing I need is Mini-Me. I’ve mentioned before that I still carry the scars of the 1970s on my psyche, the cold and dark years when it seemed things were only going to get colder and darker. (And look, it’s like that “Twilight Zone” where the girl wakes up and discovers it’s not that at all, it’s the opposite — global warming, not a new ice age. Life imitates Rod Serling.) We are going to whistle through this one, we are. More cake for the table! More champagne! But make it the cheap Spanish stuff, please.

Oh, and read the Freakonomics guy (his colleagues, actually), and their readable explanation, here.

Friends, I have to skedaddle today. I’m catching a flight for St. Louis in 3.5 hours, and have yet to shower, so I’d best get that out of the way. I’m speaking at another conference — thanks, Tim Goeglein! — and will post from the road. Have a good weekend, all, and if the plane crashes, remember these final instructions: Someone stand up at my memorial service and say, “She always loved ’70s funk.”

Yesterday’s bike ride took me down Mack Avenue, past the Dodge dealership. Hey, gang! The 2009 Challengers are here. Try to contain your excitement:

My taste is famously out of step with the mainstream, so we’ll see whether it moves metal, as they say in Detroit. Fun fact: Guess how much those fancy wheels and low-profile tires add to the bottom line. Any brave souls? No? OK, I’ll tell you: $4,000. My first car didn’t cost much more than that.

In my entire stupid life, I have never been impressed by the tires and wheels of another’s car, although admittedly, I’m not in the target demographic. We caught most of “Tales of the Rat Fink” on Sundance the other evening, a fun documentary about Ed Roth, the original car customizer. I was interested in it mostly as a doc that breaks all the way free of the Ken Burns Bigfoot style — the story is moved along by several talking cars, their words indicated by flashing headlights, and no, I’m not kidding — but it left me thinking about Detroit, too.

The auto industry and Big Daddy Roth were yin and yang to one another, especially as Roth grew older and crazier in his designs. Roth imagined a world where everyone’s car would be unique in the truest sense of the word, thanks to customizing and easily moldable fiberglas. In this sense he was like a couture fashion designer, who imagines the entire world wants to express itself through clothing, when in truth most people just want their bodies appropriately shielded from eyes and weather. But the extremes feed the middle, and when it works we live in a world where a car is more than a rolling transpo-box and a jacket is a statement. My favorite part of “Tales of the Rat Fink” was the end, where the filmmakers draw literal lines between Roth’s innovations and things we take for granted today. (Did you know Roth was the first to paint designs on plain T-shirts? Now you do.)

I still think wheels like that are a waste of $4,000, however.

Quick bloggage, as I’ve got a full plate today:

Kwame Kilpatrick left office and the official mayoral residence today. Detroit is one of only a handful of cities to have a designated mayoral mansion, and today Freep.com ran a photo gallery of the Manoogian Mansion through the years. This was my favorite; how often do you see a one-lane bowling alley? Even Daniel Plainview had three or four.

You’ve all seen the Sarah Palin e-mail hack by now, no doubt. The most important takeaway lesson? If you’re running for vice-president, the whole world will know the answer to all your security questions. So tie up that loose end beforehand, ‘kthanksbai.

Sentences that do not inspire confidence: The financial crisis that began 13 months ago entered a new, far more serious phase as hopes that the damage could be contained have evaporated. Thanks, Wall Street Journal! Suggestion for comments discussion: In a collapsed world economy based on barter, what do you have to trade? I’m figuring a 10-second peek at my tits in a nice bra ought to be worth a few slices of bread to someone, but maybe not. What’ve you got?

Back later.

Part of the problem with the Wall Street mess is, hardly anyone understands it. I was discussing this — in the sense that “exchanging instant messages” = “discussing” — with my boss last night, two reasonably smart people whose job it is to read the papers, and we both admitted we could just barely get our heads around it. It’s kind of like understanding precisely how large the universe is; just when you think you’ve got it, someone throws another intensifier at you. “Now multiply that by infinity, and that’s the answer.”

And yet, I still regularly come across the Grandpa Simpson explanation of the mortgage meltdown, from people who should know better: “Some dirtbags got in over their heads and didn’t make their house payments.” What a neat trick, shifting blame for a global financial disaster engineered at the very pinnacle of world finance onto the most powerless parties, the ultimate “you wouldn’t have gotten raped if you hadn’t dressed that way” hand-washer. Funny how that absolves a person of all those uncomfortable thoughts the current crisis arouses, the ones that whisper it’s even worse than you think and the people who are supposed to be overseeing this don’t have a clue, either. As long as you can blame some poor person in Cleveland, one’s hands and moral conscience remain clean.

If that’s true, if all the money extracted in second mortgages went for manicures and two-week cruises and cars, we ought to have some very rich manicurists and cruise lines and carmakers in the world, and I don’t see that’s the case.

Here’s a story I heard this weekend, and I can’t vouch for its veracity: On Labor Day, a few of us toured a grand old house in Palmer Woods in Detroit. It belongs to a friend of one of our little moviemaking crew, and he offered it to us as a spooky-mansion set, before restoration work really gets going on it. At one point I looked out a window in back and saw the real spooky mansion, another big house, not as magnificent as the one we were in, but a big solid house that once doubtless housed a well-to-do family. Unlike the one we were in, however, it was beyond salvation. It seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of a complicated renovation project. Tattered blue tarps and Visqueen flapped in the breeze. Particleboard walls had been exposed to the elements for several seasons and were bleached the color of bones. It’s a teardown now, and barely worth that. “Very sad,” said our host, and added that the house was at the center of vigorous fraud — that it had changed hands several times in recent years, each time delivering a tidy sum into the hands of someone, each time never welcoming a single soul who intended to live there. A lot of people had joined hands — buyers, lenders, appraisers — winked at one another, flashed their cufflinks and extracted cash from the house like an ATM.

I didn’t learn the punchline until this weekend, however: “Oh, that’s the old Romney house,” one of my dinner guests said. “When Mitt was campaigning in Michigan, they wanted to hold a fundraiser there, in the house where he grew up. And then they saw it.”

Certainly, that would have been very awkward, holding a GOP fundraiser in a house that stands at a living, tangible monument to what can happen when you turn greedheads loose in the world with no rules, and expect the invisible hand of the market to keep the playing field level, i.e., a very GOP, laissez-faire sort of economic policy.

So while, yes, it’s possible at this point to say the current crisis came from dirtbags not paying their mortgages and have it be technically correct, it’s equally possible to say that isn’t the whole story. Once again, for the best single explanation of the underpinnings of the current crisis, see “The Giant Pool of Money,” which you can download or stream free. (When you get to the part about 23 dead people in Ohio receiving mortgages, it should start to dawn that it’s a bit more complicated.)

And that’s only the beginning. What’s happening this week — the failure of Lehman Brothers, et al, and the bailout of AIG — is several steps beyond that, and sorry, but I can’t explain it, either. If you can, you know where to leave it.

Such excellent bloggage today. This is going around, but it’s too good not to share. Where I come from, this sort of thing is called poetic justice:

He met her in the bar of the swank hotel and invited her to his room. Once there, the woman fixed the drinks and told him to get undressed.

And that, the delegate to the Republican National Convention told police, was the last thing he remembered.

When he awoke, the woman was gone, as was more than $120,000 in money, jewelry and other belongings.

Actually, at this point it’s just called “getting rolled.” This — in which the victim is interviewed several hours before the fateful tumble into the honey trap — is what makes it poetic justice:

Live by the pork sword, die by it, feeb.

Now if we could only arrange the same treatment for the mortgage thieves, we might have ourselves some justice going on.

Have a swell day, all. Remember: Economic education in the comments. We all need it.

I keep meaning to call up my old screenwriting prof and ask what he thinks of “Mad Men.” Watching Joan sadly rub the bra strap mark on her shoulder this week was a revelation of great writing — exactly the sort of detail that reveals everything about a character without a word being spoken, with the added bonus of being something I’ve never seen before. God, I love this show. I hope you do, too.

It’s hard to do even one good season of television like this, but the mark of greatness is how it flowers in its second, and I haven’t seen a second season like this since “The Wire,” and before that, “The Sopranos,” so take that however you will. The gorgeous thing about this show, set in the world of Madison Avenue ad firms in the early ’60s, is how we know what the characters don’t — that their world is about to be upended by the cultural storm of the ’60s. It’s like a disaster movie, when we can see the killer sneaking up behind the clueless sap about to be hit with an ax, only in slow motion and with all the carnage emotional. But the early breezes of the coming storm are already starting to blow. This season is focusing on the women, who have a mighty load of resentment to tote around from week to week. This week, a marriage shattered and a woman who’s been successful in the one feminine strategy that transcends eras — knowing how to work a bodacious bod — finally realized the limits of her power, and both of these events were conveyed the way they are in real life, with strained conversations, a flicker of expression across the eyes, a change in a tone of voice.

I once read some advice on playwrighting: No character needs to walk onstage and say, “I’m tired.” All he needs to say is, “Has anyone seen my magazine?” In “Mad Men,” characters love and compete, support and betray, sometimes at the same time. A few weeks ago, a woman named Peggy seemed to be having a flirtation with a young priest. He pushed her away with a gesture and comment aimed directly at the most vulnerable spot in her psyche. This week he was back, trying to coax her into confession, and his plea was 50 percent wheedle and 50 percent genuine concern. Neither acknowledged the elephant in the room, a very early-’60s thing to do. The final scene showed several characters at the end of the day — Peggy in the bathtub, Joan the bombshell rubbing her strap mark, and the priest stripping off his collar and picking up his guitar. He strums a couple of tight chords, then belts out “Early in the Morning,” which you might not know was Side 1, Track 1 of Peter, Paul & Mary’s very first album.

The song takes the form of a prayer, and the prayer says what most prayers say: Help me find the way. It’s the perfect prayer for that character at that moment in time, and it serves as distant thunder for the coming storm and — as this show is justly famed for its maniacal attention to perfect detail — the album it’s on was released in 1962, and guess what year it is in “Mad Men” this season?

You just can’t watch this show and fail to be impressed. Not if you’re paying attention.

Bloggage later. I have a busy morning tomorrow and I think I won’t be back until afternoon. Talk amongst yourselves.

Dear Mr. Nugent:

Please come back to Michigan and help clean up the mess you are partially responsible for making.

Then go home to Texas.

Thanks.

N.

We had some fairly apocalyptic weather this weekend — apocalyptic for around here, at least. OK, maybe just “bad” would be less hysterical. What it did was rain buckets and buckets all day Saturday. Then we had a little bit of a break, and then the remnants of the hurricane arrived and it rained more buckets Sunday. In between, we had a little dinner party.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon cooking, and it was nice, with the windows open enough for a breeze and the rain pitter-pattering outside. And then everyone arrived and the kitchen seemed to burst into flames, it was so hot, and I wondered, is this some change-of-life thing? but everyone else seemed hot as hell too, and of course if you turn on the A/C it takes two hours, minimum, to cool everything down, so basically we just suffered. You can’t control everything, I guess, especially hot air masses pushed by monster storms. But there was something about the heat and the shortening days and the buckets of rain and the dinner conversation and “This American Life” on Saturday that made me think, man, we are all screwed. The second chapter of TAL was about the do-nothing Securities and Exchange Commission, and how they’ve sat around on their confused asses for the last couple of years, while Wall Street has waltzed the economy to the edge of a cliff, and I reflected that the campaign has become whether a mean photographer made John McCain look like a monster or if Barack Obama wants to teach your kindergartener how to put on a condom. I said a while back that if Obama could put the Wall Street message in simple language in a 10-minute stump speech with lots of pullout quotes, he might could maybe win this thing.

Of course, at this rate, it might be too late for that.

The dinner party was nice, in case you were wondering. Beef tenderloin, fresh green beans and corn, new potatoes, a little gazpacho to start. Blueberry-peach pie. Very WASPy, very basic. Oh, and since I walk past it in our container garden all summer and daily say, “You know, I need to do more with that tarragon,” a sauce bearnaise for the beef.

Beef tenderloin and bearnaise sauce during a financial meltdown is known as whistling past the graveyard.

This seems a good point to segue into the bloggage, since it falls under the classification A Few More People I Don’t Feel Sorry For: Remember all those people in Galveston who, when told to evacuate, yelled, “Hell no, we won’t go!” while all their friends lifted a glass and gave them a rousing hell yeah? Do you have some sympathy to spare now? Ahem:

With no water or power, no working toilets, no food or phones, people faced growing public health concerns here on Sunday. More than 2,000 residents who had defied an evacuation order were taken off the island, and state officials tried to ensure that no one could return.

“The storm was easy,” said Brenda Shinette, 51, who rode out the hurricane in her home but went to a shelter Sunday hoping to be taken to the mainland. “It’s what came after that was terrible.”

“We have no showers, and the food is spoiled,” Ms. Shinette added. “I feel like I want to pass out, but I can’t tell if it is from too much heat or too little food.”

She said the lack of toilets had become so bad in her neighborhood that she had been avoiding eating so she would not have to use the bathroom.

No? I didn’t think so.

Eminem has a new album coming this fall, and with any luck, an end to his Graceland period. It’s not doing anyone any good.

I should get to work. Just got a Facebook friend request from a guy I knew in Fort Wayne, since moved on. He was just laid off when his paper folded unexpectedly. And here I am making a no-budget zombie flick. Talk about fiddling, etc.

Enjoy financial Armageddon!

Oh, and a quick update, in keeping with our Armageddon theme today: The News’ sports page screams AS BAD AS IT GETS in Armageddon-size type, and they’re not talking about Wall Street, but rather the Lions, and once again Wojo speaks for us all:

DETROIT — This can’t keep happening. It’s cruel and unusual and flat-out absurd. And yet, for the Lions and Jon Kitna, it happens again and again, until fans scream to keep from crying. Every time there’s a glimmer, it’s gone. Almost every time there’s a game to be won, it’s lost.

The Lions are wandering in a bizarre world of their own making, with no clue how to get out. They tossed away another one Sunday, rallying from a 21-0 deficit to take the lead, then collapsing and losing to Green Bay 48-25.

The not-just-motor city, Eastern Market.