Sooner or later, the earth reclaims everything.

The z-movie is more than half-shot, but next week will be the Pyrenees stage — the bloodiest blood gags, the grossest gross-outs. It’ll be latexapalooza fer shure. Depending on our extra needs, I may even take my 90-minute turn in the chair and become a bloodthirsty walking corpse, although I suppose we could just skip the makeup and shoot early in the morning before the coffee, since there’s not much difference in how I look and one of our ghouls, masterfully rendered by our evil genius, Dan Phillips:

We did a blood-gush effect yesterday, which was totally creepy and made a huge mess. We were prepared for it — plastic drop cloths all around, splashguards deployed, a small mountain of paper towels — and immediately afterward wrapped everything up into a bloody ball and carried it directly to the dumpster. I wonder what the garbage collectors will think.

And now it’s time for paying work, and folks, I’m so tired they need a new word for it. So on to the bloggage:

Salon, in a story headlined, Blood in the water in North Carolina, asks, “Republican Sen. Liddy Dole may be a goner, and John McCain is in trouble in a state the GOP hasn’t lost since 1976. What happened?” Coozledad happened, bitches!!!!!11!!

The NYT investigates the source of the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim rumors. Among the findings:

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

…and…

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

…and yet…

(An) appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

Oh, well.

Actually, at this point I would happily give up three weeks of my life if we could reset the calendar to November 5, 2008, and have all this shit done with, but I know I’m in the minority. So carry on, y’all, and I’ll be in and out here throughout the day.

But what’s my motivation?

A zombie consults with his director, October 2008.

Hey, look! I got a postcard from Sarah Palin:

Governed from the center, eh? Let’s see what the other side of the card says:

Whu-? Stem-cell research? Climate change? Bill Ayers for the proles, stem-cell research for the college-educated suburbs? Whatever works, I guess. My zip code is telling the world too much about me.

I turned off “Marketplace” last night when they got to the news of GM and Ford’s stock price ($4.76 and $2.08, respectively). There’s a downside to living in a company town, and this is it. I’m thinking I’m going to restrict myself to the digest items for a while, lest I fall down hyperventilating. I took the dog for a meander — “walk” doesn’t really describe our excursions these days — and thought about other scary times in history. I was Kate’s age in 1968, a year that must have seemed at least as perilous as this one, and I don’t recall my parents doing anything more than discussing current events calmly. I was driving with my mother one night in May 1970 when the radio broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin directing all off-duty Columbus police officers to report to their local station house immediately. The student riots that followed the invasion of Cambodia had begun, and while Ohio saw blood spilled and lives lost by the end of it, all my mother said about the muster of police was, “It must be something on campus.”

So that’s the role model, right there: Calm acknowledgment, sans freak-out. I made a mental list of everything I could do to get through this, and came up with:

1) Make soup.
2) Exercise.
3) Drink lots of water.
4) Keep the house looking nice.
5) Take good notes.

So we had a curried butternut squash/apple soup — recipe in the Junior League cookbook, which gives the lie to the old myth about WASPs not appreciating non-salt-and-pepper flavors — and got our vitamin A.

It’s probably just as well I’m concentrating on soup, because I no longer understand the world of finance (if I ever did). Ford and GM have plants all over the world, production lines, product that’s still selling (badly, but still selling). I don’t understand how the market could value them at a fraction of what you could get even if you pulled the plug on the whole business and parted out each and every factory.

This is what a lack of liquidity does, I guess. Can’t get a loan, can’t get a car. Even Toyota sales are down by a third. How this shakes out remains to be seen — that’s a phrase they teach you on the first day of j-school — but I don’t imagine it’ll be pretty.

It’s hard to believe I’m going to spend the next two weekends making a no-budget zombie movie. On the other hand, why not make a zombie movie? What else should I do? Start cutting firewood for supplemental heating?

Speaking of which, my co-executive producer sent out the all-hands e-mail yesterday. Because we’re no-budget, we require the cast to wear their own clothes for costumes. With some caveats, of course:

Julie, business casual as well, but please wear clothes that you don’t have to wear again. A wooden stake is going into the front of your blouse and coming out the back.

As our makeup guy said, “Let the good times roll.” Have a good weekend.

We have a minor moose story unfolding in the U.P.: Authorities shot and killed a female of the species Monday. It had wandered into the bustling metropolis of Ishpeming, and after failing to drive it safely out of town, the DNR and local police said they had no choice. They also said their efforts were thwarted by gawkers who surrounded the animal, taking pictures and confusing it. The crowd was also, shall we say, highly critical of the execution. To get a sense of the mood in Ishpeming:

“People are yelling that we should be fired,” (DNR moose biologist Brian) Roell said, “but we had to make a tough, unfortunate decision.”

Police Chief Jim Bjorne said: “We would not have had to kill that cow moose if the public did not act like the paparazzi, chasing it around like it was some type of Hollywood movie star.”

Plenty of residents say the officials made an unconscionable decision. And their anger appears to be spreading.

Take Richard Tyynismaa, 64, a longtime resident. “The police are taking a lot of heat,” he said. “We would like them to explain the hows and whys of what happened. I find this totally offensive. There is absolutely no reason for putting that cow down. If she was acting erratic, it’s probably only because she was just trying to protect her calves.”

Yes, calves, plural. The cow had two spring calves at her side, which disappeared into the woods after the shooting. Moose customarily stay with their weaned young until the following spring, so their chances of surviving winter just went down a bit.

As you can imagine, this incident has spread ripples throughout the state, although, to be sure, it’s also generated some totally awesome headlines, like, ohhhh, “Chief Bjorne speaks out about moose” and Does one moose’s death undermine Michigan’s reintroduction initiative? (DNR says no. The public, however, is furious.) The Free Press outdoors writer knows where to point the finger: Gawkers to blame for U.P. moose debacle, he thunders. Ahem:

A lot of the criticism of the police and DNR was based on sheer ignorance. One writer couldn’t understand why the cops didn’t just lasso the moose and lead it away. I wish I could give that person a lasso, get him to within throwing range of a 1,000-pound, panicked moose and stand back to watch the fun.

People have been killed by moose cows that were protecting calves from what the moose viewed as potential predators. A moose’s hooves are big and sharp, and being kicked by one would be like being hit by a baseball bat swung by the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera.

As for me, I think it’s pretty amazing when a town in the U.P. — a land where rifles surely outnumber people — can generate a) 100-200 mooseparazzi; b) enough people defying direct police order to reach critical mass; and c) animal lovers willing to speak up against the death of a large ungulate. Towns like Ishpeming are kept alive in large part by hunting, after all; one of the best stories I ever read in the Free Press was 20-some years ago, a magazine piece that sketched the weirdness of deer season Up North. (The party stores lay in extra supplies of Juggs and Hustler; entrepreneurs sell freshly killed bucks from pickup beds at bar-closing time, for hunters too loaded to be trusted with a weapon.) In three minutes or so, you can get the same sense from Da Yoopers:

But moose aren’t deer, and are a fairly recent phenomenon in the U.P. The stories mention the DNR’s reintroduction efforts with the species, importing them from Canada. I guess it has been going pretty well; twin calves are usually a sign of good health in the mother and a supportive environment. I guess the Case of the Executed Moose Cow can be chalked up to collateral damage.

A couple years ago, during the annual Brownie camping trip, one of our number was a military wife, who recalled giving birth in a remote Alaska clinic where her husband was stationed. A moose cow took up residence outside her window and proceeded to lick the window glass for hours on end, and no, I don’t know why, either, but she said this was very common in Alaska, that everyone’s windows were smeared with moose saliva. Huh. She also said moose delays were a fact of life, when one or two would wander into your yard and decide to stay a while, and if one was between you and your car, it was a perfectly acceptable reason to call in late to work, as it wasn’t safe to come too close to them.

I saw my first moose up close and personal on Isle Royale. Alan was off fishing and I was taking a little nature walk around our campsite when I came around a bend in the trail and there she was — about as close as my driveway to my neighbor’s, chewing her cud. We looked at one another for a long moment. I looked around for a calf and didn’t see one, and relaxed a bit. We looked at one another a little longer. She went back to ruminating. I turned around and went back. Later that week we passed one standing just off the trail, having a pee. It sounded like a bucket being poured out onto dead leaves. There was another one in Yellowstone Park when I was camping alone, and when I looked out the tent flap without my glasses and saw a large brown thing at the edge of the lake, I nearly had an unscheduled pee myself, but I got my specs on before I let loose and relaxed.

And that’s all the moose I have been privileged to know. There were many spotted from the car in Yellowstone, some of which had calves. There is nothing cuter than a baby moose, and here I am including puppies, kittens and bunnies. They have brown eyes the size of grapefruit and cute floppy ears and comical Bullwinkle noses. The idea of leaving not one but two without their mother is a crime against cuteness, and that can never be tolerated, not in this country.

Where am I going with this? To the bloggage, I hope:

Why even professional-journalist bloggers need editors, so they don’t write ignorant-ass shit like this.

Watching “Red Dawn” and laughing uncontrollably at it is one of my peak memories of the ’80s. David Plotz looks anew at John Milius’ paranoid fantasy and finds it less funny today.

Be the first one on your block to get a ThatOne’08 T-shirt.

I’m off to the gym to get myself in tip-top shape for the coming depression. I should just take up smoking and hope for an early death instead.

Three eggs, six yolks.

God, I love the farmers’ market.

Prosciutto and roasted pepper frittata, if you were wondering.

Of course Obama won the debate. Here’s the part you won’t believe: I’d say that even if I were still an independent voter, because it was so obvious. McCain looked angry, tired, angry, achy, angry and old. Olbermann mentioned the “get off my lawn” demographic he seemed to be speaking to, and that was it. He’s the grumpy guy in the neighborhood who came back from the Army with a plate in his head. All Obama had to do was stay cool — which he always does; the man has apparently replaced his blood with that blue stuff you put in picnic coolers — walk around a little to show off his knife-slim, erect, athletic posture, and wait for Grandpa Simpson to get angrier. Which he did. It’s presidential-by-comparison.

It’s over, folks. I’m already starting to feel sorry for the Mav’rick. (Sooner or later, I feel sorry for everyone who loses. I’m not the world’s biggest empath, but as a mother, I feel obligated to assume the sorrows and mistakes of all around me.) Maureen Dowd, of all people, seems to put her finger on the roots of his misery:

John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.

It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock). Sulfurous Atwater-style rumor-mongering by Bush supporters — that McCain had come home from a Hanoi tiger cage with snakes in his head — aimed to stop him during that primary after he had zoomed in New Hampshire.

(To be sure, this is more or less conventional wisdom about McCain, and not original to Dowd. But she’s the most recent person to say so, so.)

Sarah Palin — now that’s another story. Discussion of her political future was a little side chitchat in the comments here yesterday, and I agree with whoever said she’s having a very good year, win or lose. It’s no accident she inspires rock-star swooning, while her running mate nets a little polite applause. She’ll go back to Alaska and muck around for a while, but her sights are set on Washington, and that’s where she’s going, if not to Blair House, than certainly to some nearby address. (I hope the First Dude can handle the humidity.) She’ll start doing her roadwork for 2012, while the propaganda wing of the party starts its whispering campaign about President Obama. It’s Clinton II! Oh, I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, carve out a big chunk of time and read George Packer’s dispatch from my native land of Ohio in this week’s New Yorker. God, is it depressing:

A man in Brown County, along the Ohio River, in the southwestern part of the state, said that a year ago there was one foreclosure notice in the local paper each week; now the number is six or eight, and the listings for the week of September 12th announced fifty-three foreclosure sales in a county with only fifteen thousand households. In the town of Wilmington, outside Dayton, a D.H.L. facility with eight thousand workers—a third of the area’s population—is likely to close. On September 9th, the day I flew into Cincinnati, a woman named Marla Bell, attending an Obama rally near Dayton, told National Public Radio, “It almost feels like it’s a dying state.”

The next day, Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat who remains popular in Ohio, announced a budget shortfall that would require painful spending cuts across the board. The state’s budget director, Pari Sabety, told me, “There are a lot more part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, jobs that require a broader social safety net than we currently have. We are not creating high-value jobs at a rate that can absorb people who are losing high-value jobs of the old economy.” The economic crisis, she went on, is so grave that it has created room for a renewed discussion about the role of government in people’s lives. “Here’s the opportunity before us. What’s happening is a slow-motion Katrina to economies like ours. I feel like we are where F.D.R. was.”

(Yes, Deb, John — you’re going to see lots of place names you recognize here. Brown County, Athens, Glouster, Cincinnati, Columbus. So read.)

Several people have sent me a nine-minute YouTube video (!!! Like I have nine minutes! For YouTube! !!!) purporting to pin the entire economic meltdown on the Democrats and, specifically, the Community Reinvestment Act. Because, you know, Republicans couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. Anyway, they’re wrong, as Daniel Gross explains in Slate. It’s a shorter, lighter version of “The Giant Pool of Money,” touted here about seven million times. Worth your time.

Oh, and speaking of which, in a piece on Poynter.org about “The Giant Pool of Money,” reporter Alex Blumberg mentions a blog he relied on in his research — Calculated Risk. I just bookmarked it and based on two days of reading, I’d say it’s also worth your time. Not a lot of analysis (in two days, anyway), but a wide range of sources collected under one roof.

NPR’s Planet Money blog is helpful, too.

And because I now have three freelance assignments and a zombie-movie shot list to produce by day’s end, I turn the rest of it over to you folks.

I was unfamiliar with the phrase “my 9/11 movie” until my screenwriting teacher used it in reference to “Amelie,” and I learned the definition was “the movie that brought you out of your 9/11 funk.” We were all that way, weren’t we? Dazed and frightened and confused and angry and depressed, convinced we’d just stepped off the cliff and were plummeting toward a pile of rocks and shit at the bottom, just waiting for the landing. And then, at some point, we were rescued by art. Maybe your 9/11 movie was a painting or a symphony or a two-and-a-half-minute single, but for me it was a movie: “Citizen Ruth.” This ferocious satire of the culture wars slapped me across the face and gave me hope. If we can make movies like this, I thought, we’re better than they are, because they can’t.

Turns out A.O. Scott loves it too, and tells us why in this fine video appreciation.

I had to call my investment guy yesterday on an unrelated matter — unrelated to the current crisis, that is — and couldn’t find his number. So I logged on to my account to see if it was displayed anywhere on my welcome screen.

Note to self: Don’t do that. Like, ever again.

Oh, well. Middle age has a few rewards. Cons: Harder to lose weight, something always hurts, gray hair. Pros: Generally calmer in crises. I ask, what can I do? and if the answer is not much, I change the brain channel. Answering the question is difficult, however. I figure it’s my duty to learn as much as possible, and then think creatively about what I’ve learned. This sounds easy, and isn’t. What if Alan lost his job? What if I did? How would we manage? I end these trains of thought with, I guess we’d make it up as we go along, and while that’s not much of a caboose, it certainly beats checking in with the various end-times lunatics who’ve secretly been praying for this with every turn of the compost pile. Rod Dreher in particular seems to go looking for them, and is always turning up another dropout who left (insert high-paying job in large city here) for (insert details of modest acreage in low-value state here), etc. His latest crush is one Sharon Astyk, filing from an internet connection somewhere in upstate New York, who writes:

We’re all going to need reliable sources of food. We’re all going to need some transportation. We’re going to need health care, and emergency services. We’re all going to need good work – even if it is only for food. We’re going to need ways to keep people housed, to connect folks who need homes with those who can’t keep them unless they rent some space. A lot of people are going to need warm clothes and blankets. A lot of people are going to need a meal, a helping hand, help with disabled family members and elders. And folks, when the formal economy falls away, when we cannot trust our government to act in our interests, all of us have to get acting to compensate, to keep the wolf from the door.

“When the formal economy falls away” — that’s a telling phrase, there. Not if, but when. I don’t single it out to somehow underline the scary stuff; I think this woman is full of about 12 percent common sense and 88 percent shit. But it’s hard not to read her, and Dreher, and James Howard Kunstler, and all the other Cassandras out there — many of whom, oddly enough, have a book to sell — without thinking, they’re happy about this. I stumbled upon Dreher via two paths, Amy Welborn (who’s sorta-friends with him) and Roy Edroso (who mocks his pants-wetting anxieties better than anyone). Obviously I’m more in tune with Roy, who in a thrice, with his typical laser vision, identified what bugs me — and should bug you — about the guy and his confederates:

When brother Rod denounces the West, as he is increasingly prone to do, my defensive reaction troubles me less. Because while I would agree with him, and his sources, that there are many things wrong with this country, his judgment of general rottenness on our way of life so offends me that I turn into a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy. When he says “[Patrick] Deneen raises the possibility that events — economic, especially — will do more to enhance traditionalist conservatism’s prospects with the public than anything else,” and I realize he is praying for catastrophe to befall us so that we will all come running to Jesus and the Old Ways for protection, I feel the sort of things that liberals of old must have felt when student radicals threatened to burn the motherfucker down: this is still my country, and if we are ridiculous about a number of things, I will certainly side with it against the likes of you.

Roy coined the phrase “godly paupers” to describe what Dreher and others hope will rise from this rubble, and that, friends, is worth fighting against. I know Jeff the mild-mannered in particular thinks Wendell Berry can do no wrong, and to be sure the man is an elegant essayist and speaker, but when I read shit like this I just want to scream:

What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?

Mr. Berry, take note: I would not consider it. Not everyone wants to be a humble craftsman of honest wood, or whatever. I want to rock ‘n’ roll in a big city full of other cursed rock ‘n’ rollers, and honestly? The idea of living next door to the Drehers, or the Astyks, or some other band of pious back-to-the-landers? Makes me barf. (Unless, of course, the neighbors are the Coozledads. In which case we’d spend our days cultivating our pot plants and our evenings putting the speakers on the porch and baying at the moon. That wouldn’t be so bad. So Mr. Berry, correction: I would consider being the village idiot.)

Come the apocalypse, you all are welcome to stop by my house. Where we will be keeping the flame of urban living alive.

That said, I’m thinking maybe next year we’re going to take an ailing flowering tree out of our back green patch (it’s too small to be a yard) and plant a victory garden. Not because we’ll need the food, but because I like homegrown tomatoes.

Bloggage:

The GOP plays the Quayle card:

Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Actually, I should call that the Shine card, as it was Steve Shine, now GOP chairman of Allen County, Indiana, who incited a similar mob in Huntington 20 years ago, when he left live mics on the swarming of Quayle by a clutch of national media. This was DQ’s first availability since his nomination, and everyone wanted to ask him about his National Guard service. Quayle did what he was supposed to do — repeat “I’m proud of my service” endlessly, no matter what the question — but as he continued to evade, the questions got tougher and the crowd got meaner. I pulled off my credential, stuffed my notebook down my pants and slipped into the crowd as a civilian. If someone had thrown a bottle, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I’ll give Huntington this, however: I never heard anyone called “boy.”

Have you listened to TAL’s “Another Frightening Show About the Economy” yet? Well, why not? (The first chapter is about the commercial paper market, which the Fed is shoring up as we speak. If you don’t know what that is, you need to. So go listen.)

Me, I’m off to the gym, surely the first luxury to go when HELL RAINS DOWN ON US ALL. Back later.

You can keep the wraps on a straight man’s gay gene, but only for so long. Alan bought a chair this weekend, and spent most of Sunday rearranging furniture and rehanging pictures. (Maybe I need to rethink the significance of that leather jacket.) I’m hoping it’s not one of those things our biographer will take note of in hindsight — the chair-buying, that is:

“Tell me again why we’re buying furniture in the midst of an economic crisis.”

“Because that’s when it goes on sale.”

Can’t argue with that. And now, for the first time in my life, I have a recliner under my roof. When Alan and I bought our first house, his mother said, “I’d like to buy you two a chair.” I said, “Wow, great, thanks. No recliners, though.” Well. I might as well have slapped her face. There was the evidence, if she was looking for it, that her son had fallen in with one of those latte-sipping elitists. Recliners are as common in Defiance as televisions. Whereas I’m the daughter of a furniture salesman who wouldn’t have allowed one across the threshold at gunpoint.

I held firm, though. We ended up getting a very nice chair from Ethan Allen that didn’t recline but continues to serve us well and looks as good as the day it arrived. And now, almost 20 years later, designers have perfected the stealth recliner — no hideous overstuffed tuck-and-roll upholstery, no handle, nothing that screams La-Z-Boy. Just a little push and you’re reclining.

It’s a placeholder until my ship comes in and delivers an Eames lounge and ottoman. Or the sheriff’s deputy comes to evict us. Life is a coin toss; at least we’ll have a nice chair to sit on.

Now I have to go around vacuuming up little piles of plaster dust under the drill holes and wait for the coffee to sink in. In the meantime, a little light bloggage for a Monday:

David Pogue’s Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User, 90 percent of which you probably already know, but you’ll appreciate the 10 percent you don’t. I learned something, anyway.

Mark Bittman revisits the Easiest Bread in the World (which didn’t work for me, btw). Hope springs eternal; I’ll try it again.

For a good cry, call Gene, writing about old dogs:

I believe I know exactly when Harry became an old dog. He was about 9 years old. It happened at 10:15 on the evening of June 21, 2001, the day my family moved from the suburbs to the city. The move took longer than we’d anticipated. Inexcusably, Harry had been left alone in the vacated house — eerie, echoing, empty of furniture and of all belongings except Harry and his bed– for eight hours. When I arrived to pick him up, he was beyond frantic.

He met me at the door and embraced me around the waist in a way that is not immediately reconcilable with the musculature and skeleton of a dog’s front legs. I could not extricate myself from his grasp. We walked out of that house like a slow-dancing couple, and Harry did not let go until I opened the car door.

He wasn’t barking at me in reprimand, as he once might have done. He hadn’t fouled the house in spite. That night, Harry was simply scared and vulnerable, impossibly sweet and needy and grateful. He had lost something of himself, but he had gained something more touching and more valuable. He had entered old age.

And thanks to either Jolene or Moe, who found this story from the WashPost, which explains life in Michigan at this moment very well:

To understand why — and to understand Obama’s widening lead over McCain in a crucial state — is to see an American worker pushed to desperation. A Wall Street bailout for $700 billion dollars? After six years at Dollar General, Fleck earns $10.35 an hour and receives an annual raise of 25 cents. She gave up Fantastic Sams and now cuts her hair over the sink in the bathroom.

Michigan is in its eighth year of a ransacked economy that has lost 322,000 manufacturing jobs in this time. The state’s unemployment rate is 8.9 percent, the highest in the nation. The Pew Charitable Trust is predicting that one of every 36 homes in Michigan will fall under foreclosure by next year. The evidence is everywhere. Fleck’s son tells her that poachers are stripping metal and copper from abandoned houses. The family living next to her sister lost their home, leaving behind a deep freezer full of meat that began to rot and gas the neighborhood.

Finally, please don’t express another opinion about the Wall Street crisis until you’ve listened to “This American Life” this week. Podcast, stream, etc. here. This is Pulitzer-worthy journalism, only they don’t give Pulitzers for radio, so it’s Peabody-worthy, instead. This is a companion piece to “The Giant Pool of Money,” which explained the roots of the subprime meltdown better than anyone. Seriously: This is a required text.

Back later.

I didn’t see most of the debate last night, although I heard a fair amount. I took the French journalists to a GOP grassroots fundraiser/debate party, but we left 15 minutes after the green flag, and after that I had to rely on NPR for most of it. My impression was of someone who had competently deployed the me-so-dumb advance strategy, enough so that any performance short of pants-wetting would be seen as a resounding victory, but otherwise: Meh.

Admittedly, I wasn’t predisposed to like her. But in the company of journalists, I tried to watch it with a journalist’s eye, and still it was pretty meh. I know soccer moms with similar resumes and qualifications — they are thick on the ground in the GP — who would have blown her doors off.

But as usually happens, it left me thinking about something else, i.e., ways to be a public woman. The old Hollywood joke about the three ages of women — babe, district attorney and “Driving Miss Daisy” — still seems to apply. I wasn’t the biggest Hillary fan, but my heart went out to her for the fight she put up, to be taken seriously amidst a barrage of abuse about everything from the size of her ass to the sound of her voice. How easy it is to step into a niche that comes with pre-arranged stereotypes and expectations, and all you have to do is put it on like a uniform.

Which is to say, about 20 percent of my problem with Palin comes from my general dislike of folksiness. Fifteen percent more is about how folksiness is supposed to substitute for preparedness, as though al-Qaeda can be slain single-handedly by Marge Gunderson.

Sixty percent is about her lack of qualification. The rest is unease over her apparent religious weirdness, but notice we’re down to five percent here. Living in Indiana taught me there are many paths to God; I’m just suspicious of the Assemblies of God version. That’s all.

And right now I’m going to cash in a few markers, picked up when various sexist shitheels were trashing “Shrillary” and her voice, and say, Palin’s gets on my last nerve. On the other hand, if somehow the Republicans pull it off, I doubt I’ll hear it much. She’ll be redecorating Cheney’s dark lair.

Enough of her. A little goes a very long way.

I’m sick of the routine, anyway, so let’s shake things up a bit. I need a ruling from the group on something I found in the hall closet the other day:

It’s Alan’s old motorcycle jacket. Relax, it’s no misplaced Italian or English gem, just an incredibly sturdy old no-name leather jacket built to take the punishment meant for your skin should you need to lay your bike down in a pinch. It’s very heavy — the scale says it weighs five pounds, and I believe that’s fairly accurate. And it’s a size 38, a ship that sailed for Alan many years ago, but it fits me pretty well. So my question for the group is: Is it acceptable for a 50-year-old woman to wear her husband’s old motorcycle jacket? I tend to dress in a rotating wardrobe of blue jeans and neutral tops, and I freely acknowledge I didn’t inherit my mother’s fashion sense. (You should see her in pictures from her teen years — the height of the Depression, and she was a total babe, in clothes she made herself, right down to the hats.) It’s possible I’m looking in the mirror and seeing Carla Bruni, when the rest of the world sees a lesbian without a mirror.

And if the answer is yes, would adding an Hermes scarf just be impossibly cliché?

Whatever the answer, I’m not getting rid of this jacket. Kate will look smashing in it, someday.

Squiring the French around town this week, I didn’t have time for collecting all the week’s tasty bloggage, but assuming Jolene and some of our fleet-fingered number are still on the job, you’ll have plenty to read. Well, maybe you have a moment for this, yet another of Coozledad’s charming little recollections of people from his past. You don’t have to be a writer to be a good writer. You just have to write.

Have a swell weekend, all.