Against the good counsel of our better judgment, a few of us signed up to do another 48-hour film challenge. Not the one we did last year — this one, the original-recipe contest. So I’ve been thinking about stories. This means wasting time with the Apple trailers site, where I’m always left with the overwhelming feeling that I’m just not cut out for showbiz. A movie about a guinea pig strike force in 3D? See, I never would have thought of that.

The next step is wondering if we can assemble a team without turning to Craigslist, which last year gave us a mixed bag, including a guy who presented himself with great enthusiasm. He called me to tell me his idea for a sci-fi short: A man possesses a pack of cigarettes, and… well, I’m trying not to describe them as “magical” cigarettes, but it’s hard not to, because every time he smokes one, he sees a vision of his future. The last one in the pack tells him how he will die.

Now that I write it down, I see it isn’t really a terrible idea, if you did it right. You could make the brand of smokes something like Oracles. He’d have to buy them in a creepy shop; the clerk could be a nice little part. Twenty smokes would give him time to figure out what’s happening. The visions could increase in significance and jeopardy as the pack diminished. The last one would bring the action to a nice climax. You could pepper the dialogue with snarky lines about giving up this filthy habit and “these things are gonna kill me.” Title: “Bob Quits Smoking.”

Unfortunately, when I talked to the guy about it, I must have failed to express my enthusiasm. I believe I told him that under the rules of the contest, sci-fi was only one of the seven or eight possible genres we might be assigned, and did he have any ideas for a chick flick? Because a day or two later he sent me an e-mail withdrawing from the team and complaining that he didn’t feel his ideas were being respected. He didn’t even make it to a single meeting. So I also get a Fail on dealing with sensitive artistic temperaments.

Nevertheless, I think we should do it. The true challenge will be to play it sincere; too many teams treat the assignment as a lark, and end up doing spoofs on whatever they draw — “Snakes in a Minivan,” etc. I think you could stay on the table* just by not cocking your eyebrow.

* Obscure Pulitzer-judging reference for journalists only.

Whatever we end up doing, I hope it includes a follow shot. This link is recommended, especially the video clip. See how many you get. (I was a Fail here, too.)

A quick skip to the bloggage today, because I have ten tons of work today, and ten more tonight. I’m listening to highlights from Barry’s speech in Cairo today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I’m sure others won’t be. After all, you can’t say something like this…

“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

…without being called a wussy little quisling by someone, probably starting with whoever is on Fox at this very moment. But don’t let that hold you back. Discuss.

Something I didn’t know and find sort of sad: What happens to a man married (and divorced) four times? You end up buried next to your mother. What would John DeLorean say about GM? a Freep columnist wonders. My boycott of Mitch Albom’s employer didn’t last long, but I did avert my eyes from Mitch.

I can say uno mas mojito, por favor therefore I speak Spanish. At least, according to Michael Goldfarb, via Steve Benen.

Remember the “terrorist fist jab?” Gawker does:

Here are ten photos from the past year, proving that fist jabs have overcome their scary, black-person-centric origins and flowered into a glorious tableau of diversity.

And with that, I’m out of here. Sharing week continues with today’s Decorum Share: Tell us something that would have been scandalous in a prior century. I’ll start: Some days, I don’t wear a corset.

Publishing success frequently lies in a niche that goes something like this: X Tells You What the Experts Won’t. Vicki Iovine, a clever writer who married a rich recording executive and could have retired to a life of indolence and manicures, hit a succession of books out of the park, all with the title, “The Girlfriend’s Guide to…” etc. I read the pregnancy volume cover-to-cover and skimmed the rest, but they all had the same idea at their root: Screw doctors and nurses, they lie. I will tell you the truth.

There’s something to this. Not all doctors lie, but I do wish more would use plain language, which would help a lot. Say “pain” rather than “discomfort,” for instance. “You will probably” beats “you may experience.” And so on.

Lately I’ve been thinking I should write a girlfriend’s guide to aging, although it would have to be more like The Old Crone’s Guide. I could spend an entire chapter on eyebrows alone. It would be called “When You Look in the Mirror and Andy Rooney Looks Back,” or just “Eyebrows: WTF?!?” Of all the mysterious, horrible, humiliating changes connected to aging, I’ve never read about eyebrows, at least not in women. No one told me about these long eyebrow hairs that appear out of nowhere (I call them “Andys”) and must be banished. No one said I would turn into a schnauzer. I’ve taken to screeching, “Goddamn Andy Rooney eyebrows!” in the mirror as I do battle with tweezers, which prompts Alan to reply, “What the hell are you talking about?”

I should add: For men, this is the only permissible response. That is to say: blindness. The wife of a friend of mine had three babies in five years and idly asked while she was getting dressed one morning, “Do you think we could afford a little work on these?” Indicating her breasts, of course. “Nothing drastic, just a lift.” He said, “Well, I suppose we could figure something out,” and was instantly rewarded with a metaphorical shoe to the head. He didn’t realize the question being asked wasn’t about cosmetic surgery but about their enduring attractiveness, and his scripted answer was, “What are you talking about? They’re perfect the way they are.”

The Old Crone’s Guide to Marital Chit-Chat While Dressing. There’s my title.

So, how’s your week going so far? I’m sitting here knitting my Andys together, scowling out the window. The closed window. The temperature will not reach 70 degrees today. It didn’t reach 70 yesterday. It briefly reached 74 the day before, when the wind changed rather abruptly and imported some air from Arkansas or something. But then it changed back and, well, it’s June and I expect the windows to be open by now, but we’re still walking around in sweatshirts, being grumpy.

Speaking of eyebrows, let’s kick off the bloggage with this short piece, “The Tragedy of Susan Boyle,” by John Wright. (HT: Wolcott.) A taste:

The world which celebrity promises those who embrace its life affirming narrative is a world absent of pain, poverty, boredom, and sadness. It is a fairytale lived in three dimensional splendour, replete with the adulation of millions, more money than you could ever spend, along with untold glamour and excitement. More importantly it offers the only freedom worthy of the name – the freedom to be the person you always dreamed of being, rather than the person you are.

Susan Boyle was one of the anointed few to be allowed entry to this fairytale. This unfashionable, unglamorous, poor woman from an unfashionable, unglamorous, and poor town in Scotland was plucked from obscurity, stuck centre stage, and celebrated by millions of adoring fans around the world. Dubbed the ‘hairy angel’, here was the archetypal ugly duckling with the voice of a swan.

But then something happened, something unscripted and completely out of kilter with the expectations of a world weaned on the promise and the dream of everlasting happiness through fame and fortune. Susan Boyle let the world down. Instead of playing the part of the ‘hairy angel’ with the sonorous voice and thus fulfilling the myth by which we escape the drudgery of our daily lives, to be sure a prime time TV version of the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ or ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, she committed the crime of pulling back the curtain on the myth to reveal its ugly truth – human despair.

Ah. Sigh. I haven’t really been following this story, but it doesn’t surprise me.

Some comic relief from Gawker: Watch the Fox & Friends Bunch Try to Process the Bruno-Eminem Stunt. This may require more pop-culture awareness than many of you have, so a thumbnail of the story so far: Sacha Baron Cohen stuck his bare butt in Eminem’s face at some MTV event. There was a flying harness involved and two people with hot product to sell in the entertainment marketplace, and that’s really all you need to know, but it’s still funny to watch these three clueless souls try to figure it out. I had a boss once who was gay but only sorta out about it, and even though everyone knew he was gay, there was one staff member who simply wouldn’t believe it, because he had once been married, and so that meant he couldn’t be gay, didn’t it? Didn’t it? The Foxies remind me of him.

Off to pluck something. Also, edit. Wish me luck.

I read both Detroit dailies every day, not every word but a lot of them, usually returning to the websites several times. I think the Freep may have lost me for good today. I don’t know what the print edition looks like, but you know what the lead story is on the website? (Underneath the Red Wings package, of course; I mean, the bankruptcy of the cornerstone of the underlying industry that supports a whole region might be news, but hey — priorities, people!)

A Mitch Albom column.

A really stupid one.

One with lots of one-sentence paragraphs and padding creative white space.

Oh, and a repetitive catch phrase, like a refrain, because you know Mitch is a songwriter, too.

It is: All fall down.

It’s hard for a newspaper to insult me, these days. I’ve gotten used to the degradation. I told my boss the other day, the one I farm news for, that the hardest thing about this job has been watching the steady decline of newspapers over the last three years. There was an oncology conference in Florida this week, a big one, that we were tracking for our clients. Monday’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times had several stories on the news coming out of it, about new cancer drugs and therapies. So I made sure to visit the website of the local paper, once one of the finest papers in the south, in search of stories. They had punted it to the AP.

But Mitch Albom writing about General Motors? That might just do it for me. I can’t even stand to take it apart for laughs, it’s so depressing and stupid. OK, one line:

We have each other.

What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

Nothing like starting the first day of the rest of Michigan’s life on a high note, I always say.

I’m starting to like these one-sentence paragraphs. I think that extra white space really gives flaccid prose that extra oomph, don’t you think?

It’s sort of like the very short sentences in children’s books:

Look, Sally, look. Mitch is writing a column. See Mitch write. Write, Mitch, write. See Mitch write while he’s doing his radio show. Multi-task, Mitch, multi-task. Mitch is quoting the governor: Gov. Jennifer Granholm told me Monday on WJR. Synergy, Mitch, synergy.

OK, that’s not funny. Here’s what is: I’d be willing to bet a mortgage payment that Mitch makes at least $200K from his Free Press revenue stream, perhaps more. They could get Sweet Juniper for half that, the columns would be better, he’s shoot his own photos and show up in the office more. I know I’ve made this suggestion before, but it bears repeating.

Well. It’s a bad day in Michigan, innit? We are officially in free fall. I’m now working under the assumption we are capital-F you-know-what. For a while now, I’ve been asking old-timers, “Is this the worst recession you’ve seen in Michigan?” and they all say, “No, early ’80s were worse.” That was the “Roger & Me” downturn, the tent cities in Houston, the “Continental Drift” migration of the blue-collar working class to the south. They don’t say that anymore.

Fortunately, we still have the solace of television. Dexter posted this excellent interview with Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad,” which just finished its second season. I was a little worried as the season began; whereas last year’s had a fairly constant undertone of comedy, year two dawned under dark, dark clouds. Gilligan faced the same problem David Chase did with “The Sopranos,” i.e., how do you make a show with an evil character at its heart and still make viewers want to tune in? I remember Chase saying at the time how frustrating he found it to hear viewers describe Tony as a nice guy, when he clearly wasn’t. I think the turning point for viewers came in that show’s second season, too, with the Scatino bust-out and subsequent whacking of Big Pussy. You really couldn’t hold on to your illusions after that.

Walt had more sympathy going for him; the guy had cancer, and his turn to meth cooking was initially because he felt he had to leave a grubstake behind for his family. So Gilligan had to rub our faces in the fact even a noble end doesn’t justify the evil means, and the first few episodes were so, so bleak. But Chase figured it out — when you need relief, turn to the other characters. And so we got buffoons like Paulie Walnuts and sweet, clueless Adriana to leaven Tony’s march into hell. Gilligan did, too, and found depth in the characters of Skyler and Jesse and even Hank the DEA agent. Jesse, Walt’s toddler-dressed accomplice, turns out to be the one who most regrets his actions, and his suicidal depression at the end of this season will be interesting to watch in the next.

And in the meantime, we have “True Blood” to look forward to, and then “Mad Men,” coming back in August. If we still have cable then, that is. You never know.

Not much bloggage on this depressing day, but what I have is amusing: my left armpit smells while my right one doesn’t. this isn’t even a shower issue, it smells right after a shower — Oversharers on Twitter. HT: Brother Jim.

Off to the gym. Because if only the strong survive, I want to at least be able to carry one of their suitcases.

Look, it’s like a United Nations of hockey:

Saturday night in Detroit, before the game. (The Wings won. You knew that.) Walking around this particular neighborhood with friends — our zombie flick was part of a short-films festival in the same block — I marveled at how often you still hear the ghost-town claim about downtown, always from people who don’t live anywhere nearby and haven’t visited since 1974. You should have been there. It’s not Chicago, but it’s a hell of a lot more than you might think.

I cannot deny it: I look forward to P.J. O’Rourke’s byline. Mostly I am disappointed by what I find under it these days, but he still can find the mark once in a while, and he’s always good for a guffaw here and there. But I smelled something when I read his Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal pegged to the GM bankruptcy, The End of the Affair: Old-man smell. And it started so promisingly:

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

This touches on something I’ve been thinking for a while: I’m worried about a government-imposed plan for the domestic auto industry, because I think cars are one of those things like newspapers, magazines and anything else with even a soupçon of creativity at its heart — they just can’t be made by a focus group. And the public is fickle. They wanted fuel economy last summer, when gas was $4 a gallon, but a few months later it was down to $1.50 and Priuses were sitting unsold in California lots near where they’d been unloaded from the freighters. The Obama administration is absolutely justified in imposing some harsh restrictions on a company so badly managed it’s taking on staggering cash infusions and bleeding them out nearly as fast, but…still. O’Rourke is right. The automobile is a powerful tool of personal freedom, and all the bike trails in the world won’t change that.

He loses me, however, when he lapses into his you-kids-get-off-my-lawn act. “In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible,” he writes, and in an underhanded way “to make me hate my car.” He adds:

How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

Oh, for God’s sake. Let me see the hands of all those who want to return to the golden era of bare-metal dashboards, leaded gasoline and seats free of safety belts. Thought so. There’s a great deal to be said for automotive design of a bygone era, but complaining that cars pollute less seems like a spectacular case of missing the point. To me, what makes cars dull and boring today is their slow transition from conveyance to living room, a sea change driven entirely by what a good libertarian like O’Rourke would recognize as the holy of holys, the Market. At least once a week, I pull up in the carpool lane at Kate’s school behind an SUV or minivan with a backseat entertainment system, and even though the kids are just going to school, it’s on and playing Sponge Bob for the backseat occupants. Modern cars are big and comfortable and climate-controlled and some of them make me yearn to stretch out on the third seat and take a little nap. That’s sort of the opposite of sex appeal.

My six-year-old VW has pollution control and 5 mph bumpers and cupholders and air bags, and it’s a blast to drive, a little Audi wearing dress-down clothes. It’s even a station wagon. The modern driver appreciates tight handling in the corners as much as an early XY-chromosome boomer like O’Rourke appreciates speed off the line. I’ve driven John and Sam’s Prius, and it’s a blast, too. Al Gore’s kid was clocked doing 100 in his. So the modern “shade-tree mechanic” can’t work on them anymore — so what? The best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne, a guy whose customer base was so devoted they followed him from a Mercedes dealership to his own driveway after he got forced out, told me once he couldn’t work on modern cars anymore, they were so technically advanced beyond his tool chest, but he didn’t care. They’re better now, foreign and domestic. Keep the oil changed and even a cheap one should last 100,000 miles at the very least, a milestone that used to be remarkable. One of Alan’s colleagues drove an Acura with 260,000 miles on it, until it got stolen. (In Detroit. Only in Detroit.)

My proudest moment with a car came on M-129, a road as straight as a plumb line, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Four of us had borrowed my friend’s bad-ass ’69 Camaro, and decided to see how bad-ass it could be off the line. I forget who was driving. He dumped the clutch, laid rubber in first gear, chirped the tires again going into second, and then, blurp — it wouldn’t go into third gear. We pulled over and for the first and maybe only time in my life I said, “I can fix it. Got a wrench?”

This had happened before, the first week Mark had the car, and I was riding with him. It had happened in Columbus, back when every gas station was a service station, and Mark had limped it into one, where they put it on the lift. I watched the mechanic find the problem — jammed transmission linkage — and fix it with a smart whack of a rubber mallet. So I took a hefty wrench, wiggled under, found the linkage, gave it a similar whack and lo, it was healed.

While I think it’s fine that the problem could be so simple that a dumb ol’ girl could fix it with a blunt object, honestly, can you imagine that happening to a modern car today? I’ve had my transmission problems, but you could speed-shift my Passat every day of its life and not have the linkage jam. And my car is about as old now as the Camaro was then.

(On the other hand, that Camaro was promptly christened the Coolmobile. I can’t imagine anyone bestowing such a name on my car.)

It’s sad to grow old and have more of your life behind you than ahead. But yearning for your lost virility shouldn’t get you the cover of the Weekend Journal. Just sayin’.

OK, then. I suppose everyone will want to talk today about Dr. Tiller. I don’t have much fresh to add except to note that I’ve only known one woman who had a second-trimester abortion, and I don’t know where she got it, but she had her reasons: She needed chemotherapy for a devastating cancer diagnosis that came at the worst possible time. I don’t judge people who sometimes need an unpleasant and unpopular medical procedure. I’m just glad there are at least a few doctors willing to provide it. One less, today. Sigh.

Busy week ahead. Enjoy yours.