The Obamas have some competition in the T-shirt aisle.

One of the more interesting ideas to come out of the twin celebrity deaths of late last week, Blondie and Jacko, was that they represented the end of an era, and not that of easy access to hospice-strength pharmaceuticals, either. The passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson is the end of consensus.

Paul Farhi wrote about this last week in the WashPost:

To say they don’t make sex symbols like Farrah Fawcett anymore isn’t so much a comment on Fawcett as a comment on “they.” Because they — Hollywood, the media, whoever it is that makes “sex symbols” — can no longer manufacture consensus.

The explosion of choice for your leisure hours, first on cable and then the internet, democratized and splintered the market. We no longer had three TV channels, we had 300. In 300 channels, and 300 million more websites, everyone gets a pinup that pushes their very specific buttons. And now for a transition I’ve been waiting my whole life to write:

Nowhere do we see this more than in pornography.

The other day I surfed past “The House Bunny,” a slight little movie that came out last year. The scene I watched featured the animated corpse of Hugh Hefner telling Anna Faris to come back to the Playboy Mansion and get ready for her Miss November photo shoot, after which they’d send her on a multi-city publicity tour, blah blah blah, and I actually laughed. It was such a joke, the idea that a barely breathing skin magazine could even interest a basement-dwelling blogger, much less an editor, in their Miss November. No one has cared about a Playmate of the Month since Farrah Fawcett was still selling posters.

The other day Roy linked, playfully, to a magazine called Black Tail, and yes, that link is probably NSFW, although it’s not that bad. What interested me was the scroll-down material, the other exciting titles under the Jiffy Fulfillment umbrella — Big Butt, Big Black Butt (for those who find Black Tail too scrawny, perhaps), Juggs, Panty Play, Over 40, Over 50 (!!!) and we’re not even getting into the gay titles, Inches, Black Inches, Latin Inches, Torso, and so on.

Of course, Leg Show is among them. Dian Hanson edits Leg Show, or did. She’s the thinking man’s dirty-magazine editor — note the Leg Show poster in the back room at the Bada Bing on “The Sopranos,” a nice little shout-out to one’s life’s work — and once dated Robert Crumb, who called her the Albert Schweitzer to pathetic foot-suckers. I know I’ve linked to this profile of her in the past, but here it is again, fascinating stuff:

Fetishes are narrow, even brittle, phenomena. There are men who need to see women’s toes but not heels, or heels but not toes; men who need to see women in leg casts; men who need to see a specific kind of woman’s shoe pushing a specific kind of car’s accelerator. “That’s not at all an isolated fetish,” says Dian Hanson, the most cerebral pornographer in America. “There’s an entire club called Pedal Pumpers. The first man who called me about it could only be satisfied with a 1959 Corvette and white pumps. It had to be white pumps. He’d bring hookers home and take them to the garage.”

I don’t want to dwell on porno, but you see my point. We’ve all become fetishists of a sort, or at least specialists. Once, heavy metal was heavy metal. Now it’s Death, Slash, Industrial and 15 other modifiers of Metal. (Sometimes I think the sole qualification for being a pop-music writer is how confidently you can sling those modifiers around.) Country — alt, mainstream or traditional? Even pop — short for “popular,” the very definition of wide appeal — has fractured. There’s power pop, ballad pop, teen pop, soccer-mom pop. For all of Simon Cowell’s attempts to carnival-barker a national consensus on “American Idol,” he must surely know that much of his audience wouldn’t be caught dead actually buying a record by any of those sad-sack tools, and only watch to monitor their over/under bets on when Paula will cry.

It’s staggering, today, to imagine a world where a single artist could sell 120 million records, or 12 million posters. Who could tear us away from YouTube that long? (Speaking of which, how’s that Susan Boyle phenom holding up? Yeah.) Who, or what, could unite the multitudes even long enough to dig $12 out of their pocket for something everyone else has?

The thing about fragmentation is, it satisfies only part of the audience experience. Yes, it is exactly what you want, but it can be lonely. (Of course, the other great thing about the internet is, it connects you with your other fanboys and girls. I still recall the thrill of finding my fellow Warren Zevon fans on AOL.) Maybe “American Idol” works in part because it satisfies our need for at least one bit of shared experience to discuss with our co-workers.

Or maybe this is just the pendulum’s furthest distance from the center, that something else is coming that we will all freak for. And then we can have the strange collective experience of building it up and tearing it down together. Destruction of humanity! Now that’s entertainment.

Have a good holiday, all. Grill many meats and vegetables. The wondrous taste of charred things — that’s something we can all agree on, eh?

There are times I truly miss being a G.A. — that’s old-fart-journo-speak for “general assignment reporter.” You never know what’s going to turn up. I had plans to spend yesterday relaxing with my kid, maybe cleaning the house. The phone rang at 8 a.m. with news the Detroit Police dive team was going to spend the next two days fishing cars out of the river. Plans changed.

A little background: In May, this same team was doing a training dive at the point where Lake St. Clair joins the Detroit River, preparing to recover a car, when the team leader discovered what seemed to be a hand, reaching up from the bottom. It turned out to be a bronze sculpture that had been stolen several years earlier from a local institution, part of a rash of outdoor-art thefts in the area. At the time, we told the team leader to call us the next time they went looking for a car, thinking a tick-tock on how they work would be a nice feature for my journalism students.

Of course they had to call only hours ahead, too little time to scramble a team of overscheduled college students. But I was able to go, and I don’t know about you, but to me, the great thing about journalism is the permission you get to watch other people work at interesting jobs. I could have watched these guys all day, and in fact, that’s pretty much what I did. The 60-ton heavy-duty tow truck alone was a marvel; it looked like you needed a master’s in engineering just to run the thing.

The divers were trying to clear at least 14 and as many as 16 (sonar was unclear) drowned cars from what must have been a popular dumping spot, once upon a time. A patch of riverfront land that had been the site of your standard-issue 20th-century poison factory — metal plating with casual environmental standards, shudder — stood empty for years, and if you took the time to drive or push a car through the weeds to the riverbank, you found a nice open area with no seawall and 15-20 feet of water ready to swallow the evidence of your insurance fraud, no questions asked.

The divers went down in teams and strapped up the axles or frames, and the truck operator ran the winch. The wrecks came up groaning and dropping vast cauldrons of mud and crawfish. As soon as they cleared the water, the gearheads started calling out models and years. Several fell to pieces as they came free; a Ford EXP, second cousin to a Mercury Capri I once owned, lost its roof and necessitated a second dive to retrieve the rest.

And once they were on dry land, photo ops galore:

What interested me the most: Even in that stew of heavy-metal waste and pollution, nature is always trying:

Those are salamander eggs — mudpuppies. Ah, well — based on what crawled out of those wrecks, there’s no shortage down there.

Note the zebra mussels, an invasive species that first entered the Great Lakes in the ballast water of oceangoing freighters. They have played havoc on treatment-plant intakes and other underwater structures, but have had an undeniably positive effect on water clarity; I’ve heard many long-time Great Lakes anglers say the water’s never been cleaner.

So that was yesterday. Today I’m giving blood. In consideration, I’ve gone off all my over-the-counter analgesics for the last 72 hours. Man, do I feel old.

Bloggage:

My TV now has to stay off for two reasons: The still-unplanted corpse of Michael Jackson, and the governor of South Carolina, who has now raised humiliation of his wife to a high art. I’m with Josh Marshall — just go be with her, already.

As for Miguel Jacko, the NYT lead says it all:

Nearly a week after he died, Michael Jackson still has not been buried, new complications have arisen over settling his vast estate, and his will has given up tantalizing details, including his choice of Diana Ross as a guardian of his children if his mother were unable to care for them.

I think his family is dragging their feet because they like the publicity. I fully expect him to be stuffed and mounted by the time this is over.

To the gym and to the exsanguination table after that. Back in a bit.

My sentence at the car dealer’s yesterday ran through lunchtime, but without wheels the options were a) vending machines; or b) walk two dealerships down to Fuddrucker’s. I chose B. One thing I’ll say about Grosse Pointe — it’s generally free of these sorts of places, the chain food-stravaganza. We’ve got bagel joints, Panera and a number of utterly mediocre locally owned restaurants, but hardly anything with a drive-through window and even fewer of these big-box grease pits.

The idea of Fuddrucker’s — and yes, every time I see it, I think of “Idiocracy,” in which one of the visual jokes is the evolution of the name into its logical obscenity — is to build your own burger. Giant burgers, all the condiments you could think of. I chose a 1/3-pound burger, the “small” size. Remember when McDonald’s introduced the quarter-pounder? My God, man, now that’s a hungry man’s meal! A quarter-pound burger? That’ll fill a tummy, ain’a?

That was a long time ago.

OK, so a 1/3-pound burger. What the hell, I’ll get what I usually put on it at home — grilled onions and crumbled blue cheese.

“We don’t have that kind of blue cheese.”

That kind? What kind do you have?

“Blue cheese dressing.”

Oh. OK, then. Grilled onions, blue cheese dressing on the side, and let’s try to get out of here at under a million calories. Fries? Sure. Something from the fountain to drink. Nine bucks and change.

The burger came piled high with grilled onions. Now there’s a menu phrase — “piled high.” When you’re cooking at home, how often do you pile anything high? I could have stuck my finger into this onion pile down to the second knuckle. Onions are a low-cost item, so it pays to stack ‘em deep. It gives the customer the sense of getting a bargain for his food dollar. Judging from the other customers in the place, these are folks who drive a hard bargain. Only in the Midwest, witty Jim Harrison once wrote, is overeating seen as heroic.

I picked off seven-eights of the onions and added an experimental dab of blue-cheese dressing, wondering if it would sub for my beloved crumbled Stilton. It did not. The fries were thick-cut slabs of potatoes, no doubt sliced, seasoned and prepped at a processing factory far, far away. They were speckled with a seasoning blend that is probably “secret.” Fries like this frequently disappoint me, and so did these. I ate a few, left the rest.

I once asked a short-order cook why I couldn’t make a hamburger as good as his. “Because you wouldn’t fucking believe how much salt I put in it,” he said. (He’d been drinking.) “Almost a tablespoon. And then I add butter to the grill.”

I can’t speak for the butter, but they surely didn’t skimp on the salt in my lunch. If salt was the bass note, it was blasting out the windows of the car. I sat and did the L.A. Times crossword — too easy — waiting for the clamor in my mouth to subside. It didn’t. I grabbed a cookie on my way out for the relief of sugar. Mission accomplished, Fuddrucker’s! Customer carpet-bombed with sodium chloride and grease, upsold dessert upon exit. Well-done.

Maybe this is a good sign. There was a time in my life when I would have happily cleaned my plate, but lately I’m working toward, what’s the word? Mindfulness. Nothing prohibited, just carefully considered. Maybe I should have fallen happily into the Fuddrucker embrace and gone whole-hog with the cheese, which would have been the yang to the yin of salt. Or maybe I should have had another glass of water and some yogic breathing, and just put off lunch another 90 minutes.

Lately I’ve been reading about David Kessler’s new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” in which the former FDA chief takes a look at so-called food engineering, in which chemists seek to find just the right layers of salt, fat and sugar to find the “bliss point” that gets us cleaning our plates and ordering more:

Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies “design food for irresistibility,” Dr. Kessler noted. “It’s been part of their business plans.”

But this book is less an exposé about the food industry and more an exploration of us. “My real goal is, How do you explain to people what’s going on with them?” Dr. Kessler said. “Nobody has ever explained to people how their brains have been captured.”

My brain has been captured. Lately, I’ve been trying to take it back.

You know what I had for lunch the other day? A kale smoothie. I’m not kidding. Alan has this pasta dish he likes, with Italian sausage and peppers and kale, and it always leaves me with a lot of leftover kale. I found this recipe online: Put two cups of chopped kale in a blender with a frozen ripe banana, half a cup of orange juice and a quarter-cup of skim milk. Blend and serve. It looks like grass clippings, but it’s actually quite tasty. Those of you who make smoothies a lot know the ingredients are utterly malleable — one person said to try it with pineapple juice instead, and I’ll probably substitute a dollop of vanilla yogurt for the skim milk next time. And when you’ve drained your glass, you’ve eaten kale instead of chocolate ice cream, and you’re not so very deprived at all.

Maybe I’ll open a kale smoothie shack in retirement. Call it Buttpuckers. “So good, it’ll make you clench your cheeks.”

OK, maybe not.

Some bloggage:

Life is strange in Oklahoma. A state legislator blames the economic crisis on divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Well, that’s one way to look at it.

One thing I did yesterday while I waited on $600 worth of repairs on a car that was running fine: Read the Sarah Palin piece in Vanity Fair. Nothing really new, except the obligatory Olbermann dog-whistle item about writing in the voice of God, but it was nice to see it all in one place.

I swore I’d have nothing more to say on it, and I really don’t, but here’s something that bugs me about the blacks-take-pride-in-Michael-Jackson stories popping up here and there: How much racial pride can you project upon a man who, when he had the choice, chose to have WHITE CHILDREN?

I ask you. And now I head to the shower, and another day too full of obligation, but hey — work’s work.