I’ll say this for durable goods: There’s nothing like a brand-new major appliance to take your mind off your troubles, especially when it’s linked to the one activity that can always make me feel competent and in control — banishing dirt and clutter. Sears delivered our new washer today, a Bosch high-efficiency model. It uses about a tablespoon of water per load, and no more electricity than can be generated by a single stroke of a butterfly’s wings. The clothes are spun so thoroughly they come out practically dry. If I could, I’d move it into the living room and watch the clothes go ’round, which is more entertaining than the HGTV show I watched on the elliptical at the gym yesterday morning.

It reminded me of when we bought our first house, and got a brand-new washer and dryer. It was the first time I’d ever lived in a place where I didn’t have to shlep my laundry somewhere else, and along with the dishwasher, nothing before or since made me feel so rich, virtually overnight. All those nights spent in the Solar Sudser on Broadway in Fort Wayne left a mark — the dirty kids who would walk up to you and cough in your face, or the attendant with trichotillomania who would talk on the phone for hours, narrating events in her life, which lurched from crisis to crisis as she yanked her bald spot bigger and bigger. I’d sit there with my book and try to let the white noise of the swish swish swish do its job, but it could never compete with the cigarette smoke and the yelling and everything else. To do one’s own laundry, in one’s own basement, while you got something else done, too? Sheer luxury.

The delivery man was Croatian. Someday I’ll be able to hear an intriguing accent and refrain from doing an impromptu interview with its owner, but that day hasn’t arrived. Besides, when someone says they’re from “the good part” of Croatia, don’t you want to know which part that is? (It’s the part where the war wasn’t.) So what brings you to Detroit? The fact your homeland is entirely run by thugs? And how is that different from Detroit? Ha ha ha ha ha. Enjoy your new washer, you parody of a bored housewife, you.

Well, that may all change sooner than we think. Today’s the day we find out if the household can continue to afford detergent, and if so, for how long. I intend to be in my weightlifting class at the time. Good wishes appreciated, but our fate is already sealed. We just don’t know what it is yet.

Bloggage to take your mind off it all:

Those Brits really know how to write a headline, or at least a subhed: The worst christmas party injuries I see in my surgery / The comedy stuff, such as plucking shards of photocopier glass from revellers backsides, happens when the surgery is closed. Now that’s something to read.

Gay penguin soap operas. A good story, actually.

The Iraqi who graciously offered his shoes to our president? Is a folk hero.

My admiration for Roger Ebert’s blog grows with every entry. Today, one for you parents out there, likely to be the only ones who’ve seen a Tru3D movie (unless you really are a Hannah Montana fan, in which case I will back away slowly).

Off to wash away my worries. I’m doing darks.

From the Department of Whaddaya Mean We, White Man?, Detroit’s very own Mitch Albom has found a new vein of cheap sentiment to mine, and it is rich indeed, i.e., the so-called “open letter” trope:

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Huh? You do? Grease? Where did that come from, passing a tip to the masseuse? This piece is headlined, Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing. I suppose we should be grateful the editor didn’t try to channel the driving spirit behind the piece, and call it “t’anks for nuttin’!” But it’s bad enough as it is, a millionaire claiming solidarity with The People — worse, claiming to be a voice of the people. (One would hope that The People, if allowed to speak for themselves, could come up with a better turn of phrase than “the last gurgle of economic air,” etc. I do, anyway.)

The prose gets worse, too. You all know Mitch’s favorite rhetorical device: The single-sentence paragraph set off by lots of dramatic white space. Note the next passage; this may be a record:

And now you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?

They cut their salaries.

Or they resign in shame.

When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over a failed policy?

Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?

Who are you people?

I like that last one — Who are you people? It’s the latest way to say How dare you?, a phrase that always packs a punch. Why I never is another goodie, the verbal equivalent of a clutched strand of pearls. Albom is a short little guy, a fact that doesn’t come across on ESPN, which perhaps explain his effortless belligerence in print. If he actually walked onto a shop floor, they’d pull the old no-really-we-need-you-to-be-the-crash-test-dummy joke. And he’d believe it.

Last check: The story had been recommended 825 times by readers. Probably a record. Most popular? Yup. Most e-mailed? Yup. I smell…book contract!

Well, he’s going to need one. I assume you all heard the news that leaked over the weekend, which hasn’t been formally announced yet. As it stands, you all know as much as I do, including how it might affect our household. I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst, and if I can get something in between, I’ll be happy.

Of course, there are other ways to make money in this crazy world.

I’m posting this Sunday and spending Monday a) waiting for Sears to deliver our new washing machine, because of course no economic crisis can be complete without a major appliance throwing in the towel; b) studying Russian sentence structure; and c) writing and writing and writing and writing, in the hopes that someone might throw me a few coins for it, someday. I suppose Dwight has a lecture he’s about to deliver in 5,4,3…

You all have a good week.

UPDATE: For a lesson in how to say all the same things Mitch Albom said, only in less eye-rolling fashion, see the great Gretchen Morgenson in the NYT.

A novel I read once — can’t remember which one — described a woman in a blouse with one too many buttons undone over abundant cleavage. The wording is lost to me, but it said something about the picture she made, somewhere between maternal and sexy, a suggestion of warmth and generosity. That’s always stuck with me, and not as an excuse to leave an extra button open. One of the advantages of having a bosom, after all, is its invitation, not to grope but to comfort. Children, friends, amusing pervs — women have been holding them to their chests throughout history. It’s just fun to say: “Come. Let me clasp you to my bosom.” Try it on a friend today. (This works for men, too.) Share the warmth.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about generosity of late, as the bad news piles up like an avalanche. There’s a meeting scheduled for early next week that could settle a few things in our household, in the sense that when a roof falls in, it eventually settles somewhere. Every time I hear another story, I find a Salvation Army bell-ringer, a help-the-homeless collection jar or someone to tip. And I stuff another bill in. It’s disgusting.

Disgusting because it’s so nakedly craven, so plainly rooted in self-interest. On the other hand, I know others who go to church, light candles and send up prayers when they find themselves under siege. After the L.A. riots in the ’90s, rich west siders poured into South Central to sweep up broken glass and do good works. Is this so different? It’s hope for a little good karma, mixed with a realization that there are others who have it far, far worse, and gratitude is called for. The stock market falls 700 points, and I know I’m about to be $5 poorer. A 700-point drop calls for a fiver in the bucket. Two hundred points and I can get away with a buck. Now that the Senate has killed the bridge-loan package for the Big Three, I might as well sign over title to my house. It won’t be worth much soon, anyway.

And generosity, even generosity meant to deflect the Evil Eye, is better than the other impulse that fights with it at the moment — incandescent anger. Apparently the Senate finally called it quits when they couldn’t agree on when American auto workers would accept the same wages paid by foreign car makers doing business here. These men and women have never accepted a pay cut in their lives, never saw a deal they couldn’t sweeten for themselves, think organized labor should be taken down a peg and start accepting shitty health care and salaries under $40,000 a year, not that any of them would consider such a thing.

I really don’t know what’s going to happen now. No one does. But the next time a hurricane comes ashore in Alabama, they can figure it out themselves. I’m feeling all out of generosity at the moment.

So what else is happening here? The New York Times liked “Gran Torino” pretty well. That’s the movie that was shot in and around Detroit and the Pointes last summer. Oh, wait:

Despite all the jokes — the scenes of Walt lighting up at female flattery and scrambling for Hmong delicacies — the film has the feel of a requiem. Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.

Well, OK. Seems like a good note to knock off on. I’m off to prepare for yet another job that promises little other than a heapin’ helpin’ of not cash, but personal satisfaction, i.e., citizen journalism. FTW.

Seventeen degrees as I write this. It seems it’s been 17 degrees forever, except for earlier this week when it was 38 degrees and raining. Did I mention I bought some cool-weather cycling gear, and tried it out when it was briefly not 17 degrees? I discovered my personal threshold of misery was 40 degrees — anything above, and I could handle it. It hasn’t been that warm since Halloween.

Because I know that my readers come here for a weather report, that’s why.

You know the worst part of being chronically sleep-deprived? The constant failure. You make a to-do list of, say, five items, and you’re lucky if one gets done. You just don’t have the energy. Today, for instance, mine has three: Take dog to groomer, work out, write three script pages. Just watch me fail to do at least one, and maybe two. The first only requires me to stumble to the corner, but who knows? It’s 17 degrees outside! I may not make it. Besides, there’s all sorts of stuff to read on the internet today, like hot details on the “Twilight” sequel. I did my parental duty on that score last weekend, and took Kate to an afternoon matinee that still cost $9.50 for an adult ticket. It was…well, it was competent, assuming the director’s intent was to produce 100 minutes of teen entertainment that looked great and contained many smoldering glances.

When I go to these things, I think of my friend Adrianne, aka Lance Mannion’s Blonde, whose father dutifully took his children to every “Planet of the Apes” movie when they were growing up. He would buy everyone some popcorn, escort them to a row, take up the end seat and promptly fall asleep. In the great tradition of children everywhere, Adrianne and her siblings had no idea how agonizing these films were to their father, until years later he let loose with his mockery of the final installment. “Ape has killed ape!” he intoned, capturing the moment when the arc finally came back down to earth, when the apes realized they had become the humans they’d spent all that screen time conquering. (This would be “Battle for the,” etc. title in the series, for you cineastes.) In the tradition of Adrianne’s father, I kept my snide remarks to one, whispered in Kate’s ear in the early moments of the film, “Whoever has the teeth-whitening contract for this high school is doing a great job.” The rest of my petty observations — if she’s so in love, why does Bella always look constipated? why do the vampire teens go to high school if they don’t have to? why doesn’t the same school change its name to Diversity High and get it over with? wait, her mother has a 17-year-old daughter and she’s married to a minor-league baseball player? let’s see more of this cougar! — I kept to myself. This movie wasn’t made for me, it was made for Kate’s demographic, and she liked it well enough, although even she said, aftereward, “Bella doesn’t smile very much.” That’s my girl.

If Alan had come along, I might have slipped out and gone down the hall to see “Milk.” A friend of mine used to do that — get his kids settled, then say, “Daddy’s going to see ‘First Blood’ now. You wait for me outside when the movie’s over.” A simpler time.

So, we have a few odds and ends to get out of the way, then? We do:

My local papers get on my nerves plenty, but at least they have a few good writers. It’s hard not to read the rest of a story that starts like this…

On third thought, Wayne County Probate Judge David Szymanski has concluded maybe it wasn’t a great idea to jail a woman for writing about her court case on a Web site.

…and continues with this…

Szymanski jailed Anderson, 59, twice Monday after she refused to shutter the site, which she has used as a pulpit in her tangled battle with her brother over the care of their elderly mother. The battle has extended to the mother’s ailing, 17-year-old cat, Toupee (who has his own, first-person column on the Web site).

Judges hate gadflies. Not to mention cats with columns, evidently.

It’s that time of year again: “A Christmas Story” cast, 25 years later. Ralphie in particular has aged well, and Scut Farkas continues to terrify. Thanks, Dexter.

Finally, in the last, desperate days of my time at The News-and-Sentinel, the staff was showed some market research that said, basically, that our readers were dumbasses who thought local television — yes, those even dumber dumbasses — did more in-depth and follow-up reporting. This is preposterous on its face, and it’s probably good that I wasn’t doing the questioning, as I might have been tempted to ask the respondents a further question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, just how stupid would you say you are?” The only reason we could see for this is that TV marketing people said so, constantly: Now with more in-depth reporting to serve YOU, etc. This led to us adopting a bunch of standing column sigs that read FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS and IN-DEPTH REPORTING. I only wish I were kidding. But since this next item involves my N-S ex-colleague Dorsey Price, let’s dust off the sigs and call this…

FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS

You remember Dorsey’s son Derek, who made the incredibly cornball video, in pursuit of a pile of college cash? And who asked us to vote for him, because the cash went to the video that got the most popular support? He won! We can’t say what the NN.C bump may have had to do with it, but $20,000 is $20,000, so who cares? The money, by the way, came from iCorn. Which is? Ahem: At iCORN we’ve created a new way to select and purchase seed corn and soybean seed….your way and on your schedule. iCORN is now starting their 9th year of business providing high-yield potential corn and soybean genetics with the latest traits.

Now you know.

Time to leash the dog and check one item off the list. Have a good one.

As we are boat people, I know what a bailout is, literally. A wave swamps the boat and all hands grab buckets. I don’t have to explain what bailing is, do I? If no more waves come and your captain knows what he’s doing, eventually the vessel finds an even keel again and all is well. If not, well…I hope you’re wearing your life jacket.

I thought of this when I recalled some of my earliest conversations with my friends here in Detroit, when I expressed wonder or frustration at the business practices of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler et al. The company was inevitably described as a battleship, an aircraft carrier, or some other very large seagoing vessel. And then they would add, “It can’t change direction quickly. But it can take a few hits and go through rough seas without too many problems.” I suppose that makes the credit crisis a Japanese torpedo hitting broadside. I hope $15 billion will buy enough buckets.

I mention this because Freep columnist Brian Dickerson makes a few good points regarding Detroit topic No. 1 today:

The primary reason to be skeptical is that the congressional enforcers tasked with holding Detroit’s feet to the fire have done a glaringly atrocious job reforming their own, ahem, industry. The same lawmakers lambasting the auto industry for promising its retirees more benefits than it can afford continue to promise their own constituents more benefits than the U.S. Government can afford. The same Congress that wants to crucify the Detroit Three for their preoccupation with short-term profits is notorious for strategic visions that extend only to the next election.

Um, yeah. But let’s not think about that now. You all want to talk about the Illinois governor, right? Rod Blago-unspellable. I’d like to talk about him too, but my mouth is so agape after hearing all the ugly details that I fear my only contribution would be buh-buh-buh. Even by the standards of the Illinois governorship, this resets the scale. Whoever said, yesterday, that the guv is stupid? I think that’s right.

Anyway, I have a doctor’s appointment early today, so I must away. Talk, instead, about Hank Stuever’s simple thesis:

We live comfortably, if strangely, in a pseudo-Sapphic era in which seemingly every college woman with a MySpace page has kissed another girl for the camera; but for men who kiss men, it’s still the final frontier.

So, James Franco, what was it like to kiss Sean Penn in “Milk?” (And no one seemed to ask him the question I want to know: What’s it like to kiss a heavy smoker these days? It’s been so long since I did that, I totally forget.)

I’m off to get prodded. Into the shower.

For years, I’ve thought of Caroline Kennedy as my doppelganger, if you stretch the term a bit. On most counts we have nothing in common — she’s rich, skinny and has excellent bone structure, while I’m none of those things. But we are almost exactly the same age; I was born two days before she was, on the date that would become her baby brother’s birthday three years later. (More proof that there’s nothing else to do in February.) So I’ve always taken a certain interest in Caroline, the way a changeling might watch the one having the life that was obviously stolen. Caroline summered on the Cape; I, at the city pool. Caroline went to Harvard; I enrolled at Ohio University. Caroline got a mega-rich stepdaddy with a yacht and the sort of inheritance that provides one with a comfortable life of wealth on Park Avenue, spent raising children and doing Good Works; I got…well, I got what I got. I’m not complainin’. I’m just sayin’.

By the way, an aside: My Caroline scholarship foundation text is this, a cookbook that came to the newsroom a few years back, and which I immediately nicked for myself. It’s part memoir, part recipe collection, written by Marta Sgubin, the woman who was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ cook and later, nanny to Caroline’s family. The recipes are better than you think, but the anecdotes will make you want to chew your leg off. Thanksgiving, for instance, spent at Jackie’s Virginia hunt-country house, where everyone arises early for the Thanksgiving Day foxhunt, then home for a light lunch of minestrone soup before the banquet later in the day. Changeling! Changeling! This was supposed to be my life, dammit. (Thanksgiving is also when Caroline and John Jr.’s birthdays are celebrated; Caroline always wanted chocolate roll, a recipe I never tried.)

Anyhoo.

So of course I’ve been following the discussion of whether Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg — which she’s never called, by the way; did she stop using her married name? — should inherit Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat. And while I’ve never begrudged my doppelganger anything, from the summer vacations on Skorpios to cinnamon toast made under the broiler, by a goddamn servant, after sledding in Central Park, I’m putting my foot down on this. And it’s not class envy, but simple justice: No Senate seat for the martyred president’s daughter. Got that, Gov. David Paterson?

Others have made the case against her with clarity and bullet points. Jane Hamsher:

Her leadership could have been really helpful when we were trying to keep the progressive lights on and getting the stuffing beaten out of us by a very well-financed right wing for the past eight years. But when things were tough, she was nowhere to be found.

Now that the Democras are in power, she’d like to come in at the top. We have absolutely no idea if she’s qualified, or whether she can take the media blast furnace of being a Kennedy in public life. She’s certainly shown no appetite for it in the past. She’ll have a target on her back and if she can’t take it, if she crumbles, she will become a rallying point that the right will easily organize around.

The woman has never run for office in her life. We have no idea how she’d fare on the campaign trail, or how well she could stand up to the electoral process. She simply picks up the phone and lets it be known that she just might be up for having one of the highest offices in the land handed to her because — well, because why? Because her uncle once held the seat? Because she’s a Kennedy? Because she took part as a child in the public’s romantic dreams of Camelot? I’m not quite sure.

Richard Bradley, who mixes in a little personal score-settling:

Kennedy would become senator simply by doing something at which she has long excelled: working the phones with powerful people who take her calls because of her last name. And though such talents aren’t irrelevant to a senator’s job—and though Kennedy has long experience fulfilling ceremonial obligations, another senatorial duty—they are far from sufficient. Sometimes a senator has to get her hands dirty.

Disclosure: My view of Kennedy is shaped by personal experience. Before my book “American Son,” about working with John Kennedy Jr. at George magazine, was published in 2002, surrogates of Caroline tried to prevent its publication. They failed, but it was ugly stuff. If Caroline Kennedy didn’t know the specifics of their efforts—which ranged from threatening my original publisher to planting negative stories about me in the media—she certainly knew of their existence. How do I know? Because I told her, in letters to which she never responded.

Michael Wolff sees it as a fait accompli, and shrugs:

The fact that she has never had a job, other than as a retailer of sentimental poetry, and keeper of the flame, and occasional figure-head on commissions and committees, is beside the point. What she has is glamour—true, old-fashioned, gives-you-a-little-buzz glamour—which is quite remarkable, given the oddness, ungainliness, and general lack of sociability of the latter-generation Kennedys.

…Assiduously courted by benefit committees and PR types, she’s a china doll. A kitschy presence. In real life, she is said to be rather droll and, even, quite captivating on the subject of her bizarre family (come on, they are bizarre) and unimaginable life. So much so that it is a kind of perk of power and status to get near to her at a dinner party or benefit gala and receive a small tidbit, an insight or witty view, about what it is really like to be a Kennedy.

Whereas Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post merely embarrasses herself, and ho ho, she’s got a doppelganger, too:

On the question of Caroline Kennedy for Senate, my head says no, on balance. My heart says yes! Yes! Right now, as you might guess from the hedging on the former and the exclamation points on the latter, my heart is winning.

…What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age — I’m a few months younger than she — Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother’s hand at her father’s funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eyes.

In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess. She is not locked away in a tower but chooses, for the most part, to closet herself there. Her mother dies, too young. Her impossibly handsome brother crashes his plane, killing himself, his wife and his sister-in-law. She is the last survivor of her immediate family; she reveals herself only in the measured doses of a person who has always been, will always be, in the public eye.

Oh, shut UP. Of all these, I think Bradley gets closest to the truth: She shouldn’t be a senator — a representative of the people, after all — because she doesn’t particularly like people. If she did, she might get out and about among them once in a while. Of course, we all know she’s been dealt a different hand, and for a daughter of Jack Kennedy, getting out among them means paparazzi, blind items in Page Six and other pains in the neck. On the other hand, her brother had all the same burdens, and carried them with evident grace. Both siblings got law degrees, but only John actually practiced law. Caroline got a big apartment on the upper east side, wrote a couple of unreadable books and, in the cliché phrase, “zealously guards her privacy.” Again, under the circumstances, these are entirely defensible decisions for a woman to make. But there have to be consequences, even for a Kennedy. And sorry, you don’t get to simply waltz in and claim a prize like this, because why, exactly? Your uncle is dying and the United States Senate has a Kennedy affirmative-action spot?

This is still America. In your world, you can become one of the incoming president’s “dearest friends” simply by picking up a phone. But to be a member of the Senate, you still should have to shake a few unwashed hands. Sorry, you don’t qualify.

So, a little bloggage before I go out in the chill freezing rain for the one thing that can get me out in the chill freezing rain: We’re out of coffee.

I can’t find it now, so no link, but I was surprised by some of the blog reaction to the SUV prayer services in Detroit stories yesterday. Commenters in particular seemed appalled that cars were brought into the church itself, on “the altar.” You’d think even if you haven’t been in a church lately, you’d know that when you read this phrase — “the 8,000-member Greater Grace Temple” — we’re not talking altars as they’re commonly understood. These folks are Pentacostals, anyway, and don’t do altars per se; it’s the One True and related outfits that make a big fuss over altars and chalices and genuflection. The SUVs were on a stage. Get over it. (Which reminds me: Apply for credentials for the auto show in January. Should be interesting.)

Mother of the Year, Detroit-style.

Coozledad got his mules. My money’s on Jane putting a hoofprint on his ass before they reach an understanding.

A break in the rain! I’m off.

Some version of this story was on Page One of all three of our household’s daily newspapers this morning, and why not? The photo is irresistible — a sharply dressed gospel choir belting it out while arrayed around three heavenly white SUVs. (And yes, the opening number was a no-brainer: “I’m Looking for a Miracle.”) The name of the sermon at Greater Grace Temple? “A Hybrid Hope.” This is what Detroit’s been reduced to, America: Praying for money.

Although, honestly, who can blame anyone? You see what happens when you put your faith in representative democracy.

Among others who may be driven to their knees by current events: Employees at the Tribune Co., the recycling industry and, of course, everyone else:

This recession, which officially began in December 2007, now appears virtually certain to be the longest downturn — and possibly most severe — since the end of World War II, as evidenced last week by a demoralizing rat-a-tat of grim reports on jobs, sales and public confidence.

The reports signaled that even after 11 months, more than the entire length of the last two downturns, this recession has only now entered its fiercest phase, and economists say the pain will not end soon.

“For the average American it’s going to be devastating for the next 6 to 12 months,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a research and forecasting firm. He added, “I have not seen anything particularly hopeful right now, which tells me we have a ways to go.”

Well, thanks for that cheerful news, folks. Nothing like awakening on a dreary Monday to find that as bad as it was last week, this week it’s worse.

Actually, the church story interested me. One of the saddest things about the funerals we went to this year was seeing what remains of Alan’s family’s church, which we’re told is in a perilous state. It’s your standard Methodist congregation, as spicy as Wonder Bread, and I gather that’s part of the problem — Alan’s sister reports a large segment of the flock was lured away by “a holy-roller church” a few years back. I can scarcely believe Methodists would go holy-roller justlikethat, but on further questioning it seems the new joint was simply cast in the new mold of churches. That is, it had a band instead of an organist, video screens in lieu of felt banners, and a preacher who behaved as though he had an audience to please, rather than preach to. Not a megachurch per se, but leaning that way.

On the one hand, I don’t really have a problem with this. One of the things that most disappointed me during my brief attempt at reconciliation with the church of my birth — that would be the One True — was how lifeless it was, how rote, how dusty and oxygen-deprived. When the priest stepped away from the script in homilies, it was to complain that people wouldn’t put grocery carts in the cart corrals in the parking lot, or that birth control was like taking a drug to stop your heart. I would have welcomed an SUV rolling past the altar at that point, if only to maybe run him down and shut him up.

On the other hand, there’s just something wrong about going to church and expecting to be entertained. Sinners in the hand of a joke-telling God, etc.

But is there any doubt why these churches are in their ascendancy? If you want people to come back week after week, give them something to come to. Being prodded there at the point of an imaginary pitchfork isn’t a strategy for ongoing success.

I’d go to Greater Grace, but it would require a lot of new clothes and prayer with my hands in the air, a practice so divorced from my own tradition it would make me break out in hives. Plus, it would be totally obvious I was only there for the choir. I covered the funeral of a black civil-rights leader in Fort Wayne. By the end of the opening hymns, I was ready to make an altar call myself. That’s the power of a great gospel choir.

Running a little late this morning, and I still have Russian verb conjugations to drill myself on. Besides, I know this thread will belong to Jeff TMMO, so let’s let him take it away, and we’ll try for more later, eh? Eh.

An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today, about the tough decisions communities are making with their paltry share of the $4 billion Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a congressional grant to help mitigate the disastrous fallout of the foreclosure crisis. “Help” and “mitigate” are pretty ridiculous words, when you consider the extent of the damage and the fact $4 billion doesn’t go very far these days, not when it’s spread across the entire country.

The story focused on Avondale, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, where workers and activists are trying to determine which buildings are worth saving and which are bulldozer bait. One passage jumped out at me:

One house the officials would love to tear down is located in an area of the city that housed migrant farm hands. It’s a blue, wooden, 576-square-foot shack on a bare dirt lot. The owner, according to the city officials, was an unemployed woman with a history of drug abuse. In February 2007, at a time when the house was assessed at $50,100, a finance company gave her a $103,000 second mortgage on the house.

If someone with a keener business sense than mine — that would be, roughly, all of you — can explain why everyone connected with this transaction shouldn’t go to jail, please do so. There’s a picture of the place in the accompanying slide show, although the description does it pretty well — roughly a 20-by-30 shack sitting on bare dirt. This is why the top of my head threatens to pop off when I hear someone say the fix we’re in is the result of irresponsible borrowers getting in over their heads. Irresponsible lenders milking fees out of housing stock that ran dry a generation ago? Healthy profit-seekers getting their piece of the American dream!

In Detroit these guys went house-to-house, ringing doorbells, stuffing brochures in mailboxes, buying billboards, advertising endlessly on local radio and TV. Today there are entire neighborhoods that were hanging in there just a few years ago, poor but stable, now dotted with boarded-up homes and flapping tarps, scrappers circling like jackals. People say there should be consequences. Well, there they are — the consequences. Meanwhile, Angelo Mozilo still has his tanning bed. It’s things like this that make me consider becoming an anarchist.

Elsewhere, Editor & Publisher reports the speculation of a credit-rating firm that says, “several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.” Among the media firms in trouble are McClatchy and Tribune Co. McClatchy bought Knight Ridder, the chain we used to work for. I sold all my KR stock to buy our house, and Alan sold a little not long after we moved in to buy his boat. What remains is so worthless now that the last time we talked about it, Alan said, “At least I have my boat.”

My sister had a friend who went bust in the dot-com crash in 2001. He told her, “When the stock was high, I sold some and bought a BMW. People told me I was crazy, that I should have hung on and not spent it on such a frivolous purchase. Well, at least I have a BMW now!”

We’ll probably be living on that boat by the end of things. Look for the Mad Max couple with the sulky daughter and elderly dog, washing their clothes on the rocks.

Welcome to Surly Friday! Tapping the deep vein of rage in us all, since roughly an hour ago.

So let’s! Get! Surrrrrrly!

If your kid came to you and said, “Mom, when I grow up I want to be a makeup artist,” what would you say? “No, no, kitten — go to college so you’ll have some real earning power. There’s no money in makeup.” Well, you would be wrong, at least if the makeup artist in question works for Sarah Palin.

Hey, lawyers in the house: What was Clarence Thomas thinking when he cleared the way for the Obama-citizenship dispute to go to a conference of the entire SCOTUS? I’m aware there could be a back story that explains it better than, “because he’s jealous, bitter and crazy, duh,” so let’s hear it. Before we get any surlier.

Unemployment at 6.7 percent! Buy krugerrands! Dump your stock! Get surly!

Or just take to your bed with a sick headache, once you read about the guy who took his fiance out to the romantic Pacific promontory to pop the question, only to watch her get hit by a wave and swept out to sea. Presumably drowned. No kidding.

Actually, I remember reading once about a similar case. There’s a famous news photo of a man being carried into a hospital ER, impaled on a sizable length of wood. We’re talking landscaping-timber size, and it hit him a bullseye, right through the sternum. Only in the picture he’s awake and conscious, seemingly unsurprised that he has a huge chunk of wood sticking out of his chest. The story is, the impalement was a one-in-a-million shot, the timber effectively shoving his vital organs to the side. The stake was removed in a lengthy surgery, and the guy spent most of a year in the hospital recovering. Not long after his release, he was walking along a jetty on Long Island when a wave hit him and took him out to sea, never to be seen again. One is reminded of Faust. While it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the guy in Oregon is lying and he really dumped his girlfriend off a cliff somewhere — that’s just the mood I’m in today — let’s take him at his word and reach the inevitable conclusion: THE WORLD HATES US, AND WE ARE BUT PLAYTHINGS FOR THE GODS. Although I have a dirty house at the moment, and bright sunshine outside, so I’m going to take advantage of actually being able to see the dust bunnies, and go clean them up.

Have a nice day!

Can we take credit for this?

That’s GM CEO Rick Wagoner (in the passenger seat, or “at left,” as they teach us on the copy desk), en route to Washington in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Original story here. Original suggestion, by our own J.C. Burns, here, although the idea makes so much sense it may well be one of those cases of simultaneous light bulbs. As I reread J.C.’s comment, though, his is much better than a simple driving stunt:

Yeah, if I were doing PR for GM/Ford/Chrysler, I’d turn it into an event…put all three of them in a hybrid SUV and let them roll down the Ohio and Pennsylvania Turnpikes to DC, doing press avails by cell phone, stopping for mini news conferences at truckstops, and rolling triumphantly (with live shots) into the Capitol area. In the back seat: a UAW employee from each.

“These are the people you’re affecting. We’re just their drivers.”

I still think that’s a great idea. Put Wagoner behind the wheel, and hell yes, live shots. That’s what they do at the auto show every year. Have the Chrysler guy drive his Jeep up the Capitol steps, like they did at the Pontchartrain Hotel a few years back. Do something dramatic, anyway. It wasn’t so long ago that Detroit designs had mojo — do you see rappers customizing Hondas with hydraulics and rims? Do 45-year-old men wake up one day with an all-consuming lust for a vintage Datsun 210? Confidence, gents — get a little of it back. Honk the horn when you roll into D.C.! Turn on the four-ways! Have some fun! Stand up and tell ‘em you’re from Detroit!

Fat chance. But here’s hopin’.

While we’re on the subject of J.C. luv, I found this in the comments of his wife Sammy’s blog — you following? It’s a recollection by the former editor of The Country Journal, a small weekly J.C. worked for in the 1970s, way up in Plainfield, Vermont:

My favorite J.C. memory involves sending him to Cabot to get a story — any story, so long as Cabot people were in the paper, because if they weren’t, no one in Cabot would buy a copy. All J.C. could find was adult night at the school gym, where basketball was in progress. He wrote a story that consisted almost entirely of the sounds of the game (THA-DUMP,THA-DUMP, THUNK! CLUNK-CLUNK … “Hey!” “Here!” “One More!” “All right, Harv!” “Hwup!” “Oh!” “Ow!” “I’m sorry!”). Classic.

David Mamet lives there now. I hear he was attracted by the quality of the local media.

OK, then. Thursday is the end of my week, more or less. Lately I have a standing Friday work-related thing, but mostly Thursday feels like Friday, and since the sun’s out today — for the first time in days — it feels a little special. No bad news allowed, today. Thanks to Brian for pointing out the overlooked story of the week, about a soured co-operative effort between the Cincinnati Zoo and the nearby Creation Museum:

The Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum launched a joint promotional deal last week to draw attention to their holiday attractions.

It worked, but not the way zoo and museum officials had hoped.

The zoo pulled out of the deal Monday after receiving dozens of angry calls and e-mails about the partnership, which offered reduced prices to anyone who bought tickets to the zoo’s Festival of Lights and the museum’s Christmas celebration, Bethlehem’s Blessing.

I mean, speaking of tone-deaf. How could an institution with at least one or two actual scientists reporting for work on a daily basis dream up something this dumb?

Others said a scientific institution shouldn’t link itself to a place that argues man once lived side by side with dinosaurs. “They seem like diametrically opposed institutions,” said Dr. James Leach, a Cincinnati radiologist who e-mailed zoo officials about his concerns. “The Cincinnati Zoo is one of this city’s treasures. The Creation Museum is an international laughingstock.”

Yeah, that’s one way to describe it. John Scalzi’s account of his 2007 visit remains the foundational text, however. The LOL Creashun thread is just for grins.

Someone asked me last night, “What’s the difference between the stuff you write and then this thing you call ‘bloggage’?” I said, well, I tend to write a little column-y piece with few or no links, followed by a few linky/comment sorts of things, but he didn’t see it that way, and maybe I’m just fooling myself, maybe that’s not the structure these daily entries take anymore. Maybe we’ve become an all-bloggage blog without even noticing. Whatever. It’s time to go to the gym. My thighs are a much bigger problem.

UPDATE: Nearly forgot: Happy birthday, Kirk!

Add to the lengthening list of the many business I would not want to be in at the moment this: Funeral homes. Their profit margin — fancy caskets, spare-no-expense funerals — is swirling down the drain with everything else.

It’s the damn boomers, of course, who ruin everything they touch. At Thanksgiving, we had a brief discussion of what we wanted for our last tribute on earth, and neither Alan nor I want a fancy funeral. Frugal Midwesterners we are (soon to be broke Midwesterners), we ask for nothing more than immediate cremation followed by some sort of meaningful dispersal of ashes. (The church of my birth would strenuously object to the scattering part, but I left that building a while back. The thought of my corpse being pumped full of chemicals and laid out for public display grosses me out far more, so that’s that.)

Of course, others have more ambitious plans:

The Royal Shakespeare Company will no longer use the real skull of Polish pianist Andre Tchaikovsky in its performance of Hamlet when it transfers to West End as it is “too distracting for the audience.”

The use of the skull had been kept a carefully guarded secret throughout the play’s four month run in Stratford until leading man David Tennant disclosed that the skull belonged to the late pianist Andre Tchaikovsky – who bequeathed his skull to the RSC for this very purpose.

Andre Tchaikovsky left his skull to the RSC in 1982 after he died of cancer to be used on stage in Hamlet. It took a quarter of a century to happen – and he posthumously appeared as Yorick in the recent production of Hamlet at Stratford.

Tchaikovsky — no word on relation to Pyotr Ilyich — always hated productions where they used a prop for the Yorick scene, his agent said:

“He hated the way it was done. When he saw (Hamlet) with the RSC, he (Andre) said, ‘I am going to leave my skull to the RSC, they really should have a proper skull. It doesn’t work with the plastic thing they have.’ And then we looked at his will, and there it was.”

Back into the prop warehouse for the late pianist; maybe in another 25 years they can bring him out again. If the bigmouth actors can keep their yaps shut, that is.

And so we begin all-bloggage Wednesday here at NN.C. But it’s beefy bloggage:

Remember how I told you you should be reading Roger Ebert’s blog? If you were listening, you already read today’s riposte to critics who accused him of not reviewing “Expelled,” the anti-evolution “documentary.” If not, baste in its sweet, sweet revenge here:

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, depending on their complexions, they will look sunburned, red-splotched, oily, pale as a fish belly, orange, mottled, ashen, or too dark to be lighted in the same shot with a lighter skin. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

It weighs in at about a million words, each one as sweet as candy. Bon appetit.

How often have you sat through a meeting at your workplace — Six Sigma blah blah blah pursuit of excellence blah blah blah best practices blah blah to the blah — and yearned for something…more? Thought, “the writer’s life for me!” and considered jumping out the window, or maybe walking out the door? If so, let me introduce you to the closest equivalent to a copy desk staff meeting, “The Right Word” blog at the NYT:

Careful readers, including some in the cement industry, are quick to point it out when we confuse cement and concrete.

What’s the difference, you say? Go back to kindergarten, bonehead. From the NYT stylebook:

cement. Use concrete instead to mean the material that forms blocks, walls and roads. One ingredient is cement, the binding agent that is mixed with water, sand and gravel.

You can almost hear the voice of Ben Stein, can’t you? Click through for more exciting hair-splitting over “podium” and “lectern.”

(All snark aside, I do think these distinctions are important, and I recognize the importance, and thanklessness, of the job of maintaining language standards. I only question whether the public gives enough of a fig to make it part of the NYT’s website.)

From the WashPost, a sobering story on how technology makes a better terrorist:

The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.

This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of information about the attacks — on TV, cellphones, the Internet — seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.

Fascinating story.

If you prefer gunplay more relaxed, less deadly and a whole lot funnier, try this piece on Detroit’s last surviving inside-the-city-limits gun store, written by the Metro Times’ own Detroitblogger John. (I’m reliably told the pseudonym protects an actual reporter for the more smugly self-satisfied of the city’s dailies, and why these excellent little sketches of city life aren’t running there is anybody’s guess, but I’d guess it comes down to the suicidal standards of corporate journalism.)

Anyhoo, some great detail about the dangers of ricochet on the indoor range:

He unconsciously shields his groin with his hand as he talks. “A woman was shooting, and I got hit right on the head of my dick!” he says. “But it didn’t hurt. It just come and fell. So about two, three months later a lady’s down here shooting, the damn bullet ricocheted, hit my damn dick. I said ‘What the hell’s going on here!’”

And finally, what the hell is going on here? General Motors needs $4 billion in cash just to get through the end of the month. Anyone want to buy a nice house in Grosse Pointe? I could probably make you a deal.

Off to whistle past the graveyard. Happy Wednesday.