Sometimes by Thursday I am all current-evented out. Which is to say, I can’t take any more. As you might expect, this is happening more of late. Fortunately, the New York Times is thinking of people like me, and so on Thursday it is possible to open your paper, discard the bad-news sections unread, and turn directly to Thursday Styles, where daffiness abides.

Today’s enormous cover art was the left-hand photo in this series, which I will describe for those too impatient to click: A model strides scowling down the Milan catwalk, wearing a red cardigan sweater of the sort preferred by your grandmother, accompanied by mud-brown wool short-shorts and “strapped-on leather waders.” Yes, boots that rise to mid-thigh, which must be secured with garters and a belt, like stockings. This outfit was by Miuccia Prada, and reporter Cathy Horyn observes:

What Ms. Prada’s remarkable collection offered was something that has been lost to other values — and that is intimacy, real contact with people’s lives.

Yes! Yes! This is precisely what has been missing from the Italian fashion houses of late — real contact with people’s lives, who are clamoring for some leather waders worn with grandma sweaters.

When I tell people this, they never believe me, but Kirk can back me up: I was once a fashion reporter. A terrible one, granted, but for a couple years in the 1980s I attended New York runway shows and filed reports from Halston’s aerie. (It was always called that — an aerie — and fashion writers are nothing if not followers.) Somewhere in my album is a surreptitious snapshot of Liza Minnelli sitting ringside. I found that despite the twice-a-year trips to New York, and the shoulder-rubbing with Liza, I just couldn’t get into it. The clothes were ridiculous (with some exceptions, like Halston), and it struck me that I simply couldn’t sustain the level of bullshit necessary to do it well, or even correctly. I respect the art and the artists, but when it came time to describe the collections as intimate or overdone or whatever, I was just pulling adjectives out of my ass.

Writing about fashion is a lot like writing about wine. You read these descriptions of chardonnay — “lustful, with strong top notes of apple and ligonberry, and a bang-up finish of nearly astringent balsam and juniper” — and it’s the emperor’s new clothes, it really is.

Something else I noticed: Every single fashion designer, and I mean every single one, dressed in Levi’s and black turtlenecks, or Levi’s and white buttondowns, or Levi’s and T-shirts. Mostly Levi’s 501s. And everyone in New York just dressed in black.

But I still like to read the reports from the runway shows. Because you never know when you’re going to need some leather waders.

Elsewhere in Styles was a mournful account of a vanishing life at the Apthorp, a place whose existence I learned of from Nora Ephron, who wrote a New Yorker essay about her time there. The Apthorp is a sprawling apartment building known for its enormous apartments, most of which have been rent-controlled or rent-stabilized. As I recall, Ephron’s apartment was five bedrooms and more square footage than my house, and she paid something like $2,000 a month, which even then was a tiny fraction of its market price. Lately the building has been snarled in financial problems, but pause for a moment to appreciate “a lone outpost of the kind of bohemian family life that renters could once have there.” How bohemian? The family at the center of the story pays $2,850 for “a 3,300-square-foot four-bedroom with black and green marble fireplaces and several crystal chandeliers, is freshly painted in a shade of white that makes it seem even bigger, reflecting the light that pours in through oversize windows.”

Welcome to reality, folks.

Thus heartened with scorn and schadenfreude, I feel ready to start my day. But first, some quick bloggage:

Thanks to Dexter for reminding me that “Breaking Bad,” yet another of the AMC series, starts its second season Sunday. I wrote about the show last year, just as the first season was wrapping up, just in case you want to, you know, make a few notes.

I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but it’s a great read so far: Michael Lewis reports on the financial crisis in Iceland, where speculation has, basically, collapsed the entire economy.

And with that, I run off to the gymnasium to grapple with the medicine ball and Indian clubs. Have a good day.

The other day I saw a movie trailer online — “The Education of Charlie Banks.” It features Eva Amurri. Because my memory for celebrity trivia is stickier than it is for, say, math, I know Eva Amurri is Susan Sarandon’s daughter. I thought I’d watch the trailer, see how much of the old block chipped off on Eva. And I learned something else:

Eva Amurri pronounces her name EH-va. I think it’s fair to say most of the other Evas in this country go with the more conventional EVE-a. I think it’s fair to say young Ms. Amurri has spent a large chunk of her life saying, “No, it’s EH-va” to people who mispronounce her name. Using current actuarial tables, if you totaled up all these moments at the end of Ms. Amurri’s life, they’d come to four days.

Now that I’ve driven most of you away…

One of my alma maters (almas mater?) had a layoff earlier in the week. The Columbus Dispatch severed 20 percent of its staff — 45 people. For those of you who are my age, saying, “Oh, well, I’ve been here 20 years, the Grim Reaper isn’t coming for me,” kindly note that Columbus’ reaper came for a great many people my age or older. From the list of “people you may know” passed along to me, I see a couple people who were there when I was there (and I left in 1984), and a few others with much snow on the mountain. Some of these folks will undoubtedly land on their feet — unemployment in Franklin County is fairly low — but it’s safe to assume others won’t, or they’ll land and twist an ankle, or whatever metaphor you prefer.

This is why I chuckle at the current craze among our friends on the right, which they call “going John Galt,” a shout-out to one of the worst-written novels in the English language. The idea is to protest the current legislative proposals by voluntarily reducing their work output. Withdrawing from the workforce. Some call it “depriving the world of my talents,” which is particularly amusing, as it’s usually the most untalented who are calling it that.

I encourage them to do so, even in this dicey labor market, nay, especially in this dicey labor market. A lot of talented people are on the park bench, and would be happy to take your place. Your bluff is called. Go John Galt.

Much work to do, nothing much to write about here. So let’s skip instead to the bloggage:

Another outstanding interactive map from the NYT, showing unemployment by county throughout the U.S. I learned the jobless rate in Mackinac County, Michigan, where a friend of mine lives, is an astonishing 24.2 percent. That’s the December figure, and in that Upper Peninsula county the work is distinctly seasonal. Still, that’s 6.2 higher than the same time last year. My old Hoosier neck of the woods is equally eye-popping — 15.1 percent in LaGrange County, 11.2 in Steuben? Yikes.

When you die, your heirs have no legal obligation to pay your bills. Most people don’t know this, so a debt-collection industry has grown up to take advantage of this. Ah, America.

WDET is rejiggering their programming again, trying to brand themselves with a capital D, and brought back Ann Delisi, a DJ with a legendary local reputation, for a weekend show called “Essential Music.” I’ve written before about never hearing new music anymore, how you have to be a dedicated detective to find anything interesting, unless you have satellite radio, a fondness for certain podcasts, or just more time than I have at any given moment. All this by way of saying I discovered JJ Grey and MOFRO over the weekend, and have been downloading ever since. I’d like to know how long you people have been hiding them from me, and who’s to blame.

I started this season of “Big Love” the way I do most HBO series runs in the post-”Wire,” post-”Sopranos” age — hopeful but prepared to be disappointed. And, to be sure, this chronicle of polygamy-on-the-DL-in-the-suburbs hasn’t been all that. The ratio of soap opera-like plot developments to the less flashy, more interesting glimpses of the human heart has been a bit lopsided, but OK, it’s television. And there’s a reason soap operas run for years and years — it’s always fun to check in on others’ action-packed lives.

But beyond the soapy stuff (writers, I saw Sarah’s miscarriage coming like a brass band), the show is still finding the sorts of stories that make HBO’s native series so much better than Showtime’s. Things are building to a climax in the world of Bill Henrickson and his extended family, and it’s fun to watch.

At this point I should probably note some spoilers are coming. You’ve been warned.

One theme, this season, has been how Bill’s choice to take additional wives has affected and compromised those women, as well as others who come in contact with them. His life is a wreck. All three of his wives are miserable and coping in their own ways. A fourth entered and left the family in a matter of hours. His business partner, also multiply wed, saw two of his brides run off together, a payoff we’ve been waiting for since season one, when a single shot of them playing footsie under a card table suggested they had their own special bond. And the poison is seeping into his children — a pregnant teenage daughter, a son in love with wife No. 3, a tween girl up to various nefarious activities. The more recent children, those of wives two and three, are too young to raise much hell, but their day is surely coming.

The early season questions were mainly about how the sex stuff works. This season, Bill lost a whole bottle of Viagra down the bathroom sink drain, which left him suggesting an evening of cuddling to wife No. 2, but she’s already got his number — what really makes Bill’s dick hard are his various business interests, all of which seem to involve high-wire negotiations, slamming doors and blood oaths.

But this week was an emotional payoff of sorts. Bill, who has been groping toward an understanding that polygamy has a truly evil side (don’t expect him to grasp that he’s part of the problem, not for a few more seasons, anyway), will have to confront it directly, now that his sister-in-law-to-be has had her neck broken, fleeing a forced marriage to a truly insane FLDS “prophet” and his transgendered first wife, and…

I told you it got a little soapy from time to time.

Anyway, this episode was the best of the season, as each wife digs into her personal hell and shores up the bunker walls. First wife Barb is even more the bullying boss lady. Second wife Nikki finds, for the first time in her life, a man she actually wants to have sex with. Third wife Margene, the current baby factory, is overwhelmed by the cacophony of children’s voices she endures all day and dreams of trips to the grocery store. Meanwhile, back at the Juniper Creek compound, Hollis Green stirs his creepy stew, and caught in the middle is poor FLDS pawn Kathy, the bride-to-be, with her signature braid delivering the death blow after a brief flight to freedom. Will it dawn on Bill, the part he plays in all this female misery? Of course not. But that’s why it’s fun to watch.

Discuss, if you like.

Or, we can continue to talk about Rush Limbaugh. I wonder how much those Dominican prostitutes charged him. I figure he had to hide C-notes in his flab rolls and let them go exploring. Some things just cannot be expected at market prices.

I leave you with a joke I heard the other day: One of these things is not like the others: Herpes, AIDS, gonorrhea, a house in Detroit. Can you tell which one? The answer is: Gonorrhea, because you can get rid of that.

It’s important to keep a sense of humor in dark times. Remember that.

I have a very busy day that hits the ground running before 9 a.m. and won’t quit for about 48 to 72 additional hours, and may actually stretch beyond that. (Coffee, be my Rock.) A few things you can discuss today, without my benign moderating presence:

1) Paul Harvey. Couldn’t stand the guy. Everybody says, “Yeah, but he was a great broadcaster.” Woo. OK, then. Still couldn’t stand the guy.

2) “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” about to leave the nightstand and return to the library. I finished it over the weekend, and had that strange experience of a book I really, really despise that is still, nevertheless, a page-turner. You keep turning pages because you can’t believe how awful it is, what fresh assaults on logic and language will be found in the next chapter. The language problems are forgivable; the novel was translated from Swedish, and it has a strange history — the author died “shortly after delivering the manuscript,” the jacket copy says. Perhaps, in Sweden, when the author is dead, it’s considered bad form to actually edit his manuscript, because that’s where the outrage is, in the amount of prose in this hefty volume that’s simply screaming for the red pencil. For example. Here’s a journalist sitting down to research a sprawling family history:

The family consisted of about a hundred individuals, counting all the children of cousins and second cousins. The family was so extensive that he was forced to create a database in his iBook. He used the NotePad programme (www.ibrium.se), one of those full-value products that two men at the Royal Technical College had created and distributed as shareware for a pittance on the Internet. Few programmes were as useful for an investigative journalist. Each family member was given his or her own document in the database.

What the hell? Is that logorrhea, or a product placement?

Warning: The book is called the first volume of a trilogy. Given that, in 465 pages, we encounter serial murder, sexual sadism, torture, rape, Nazis, muckraking journalism, international crimes of high finance and other pulpy shenanigans, I can scarcely imagine what volumes II and III might reveal. Shudder.

3) Go immediately to the “This American Life” website and download the podcast of last week’s show, “Bad Bank.” It’s a companion piece to two others I’ve touted here before, “The Giant Pool of Money,” (about the mortgage meltdown) and “Another Frightening Show About the Economy” (about the credit freeze), and nowhere will you get a better glimpse at why we’re in the fix we’re in, and how it might be repaired. (Bad news: It isn’t. Yet.) Radio doesn’t compete for Pulitzers and TAL already has a Peabody, but they, and Public Radio International, should win some sort of major award for these reports, which are truly heroic explanatory journalism. Maybe a lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg.

A friend, a fellow newspaper journalist, wrote me the other day, “Sometimes I panic. Sometimes I think: What an amazing time to be alive.” Me, too.

4) Another hazard of houses standing empty.

5) Via Playboy, of all places, a credible analysis of yet another “grassroots” movement, in this case Rick Santelli’s tea party movement. Speaking of which: Scenes you couldn’t make up if you tried.

6) Finally, a link I’ve been meaning to post for ages. Sometime last year the New York Times began including a daily recipe on their Health section web page, called, duh, Recipes for Health. After several months, there’s now quite an archive, and it’s sortable by main ingredient, which really comes in handy when you’ve got a lot of something and no particular ideas about what to do with it. I’ve made several dishes, and have only been disappointed by one — the beet risotto did not come out a cute Pepto-Bismol pink, but a disappointing muddy color. This is a pretty good percentage with me, and these last few weeks of trying to eat better, I’m turning to it more often. Bookmark and explore.

And that’s it for me. For now.