I’ve been scanning the usual sources, and it’s gratifying to see that condemnation of Roman Polanski among people who have never been offered entrance to a luxury lounge is pretty close to universal. Among the ahem artistic community — pinkies up! — not so much. I admire Martin Scorsese, and you’d hope a man with five daughters wouldn’t be afraid to take a contrarian position, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We separate the art from the artist, amen.

I agree with Paul Campos at LGM, who said the petition in support of Polanski “reads like a wingnut parody of degenerate France and degenerate Hollywood engaging in an orgy of amoral pomposity.” Let’s take a look at it, shall we?

Pétition pour Roman Polanski

Nous avons appris avec stupéfaction l’arrestation par la police suisse de Roman Polanski à son arrivée samedi 26 septembre 2009 à Zürich (Suisse), alors que celui-ci se rendait à un Festival de cinéma qui devait lui décerner un prix pour l’ensemble de sa carrière.

Cette arrestation fait suite à un mandat d’arrêt américain prononcé contre le cinéaste en 1978, dans une affaire de mœurs.

Oops, that’s the French. It sounds so…sexy, doesn’t it? The plodding, Puritan, Amur’can version:

Petition for Roman Polanski

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

It is astonishing to learn that arrest warrants are sometimes carried out. What is astonishing to me is to learn that someone actually believes the following:

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

Sundance as de facto embassy space? How charming. Imagine the possibilities for the diplomatic pouches.

I bring this all up not because this case is so interesting; ultimately — and it’s important to keep this in mind — this is about a grubby little crime, not artistic freedom and puritanical American…what’s le mot juste? Une affaire de mœurs, yes. I bring it up because you watch, it won’t be long before someone tries to hang this on “the left,” or the Democrats, or Obama’s secret teenage-girl rape teams, or whatever, and I just want it on the record now that I ain’t havin’ it. I don’t know what Scorsese was thinking, but I suspect it’s more along the lines of, “if I ever want to do business with Harvey Weinstein again, I’d better get on board with this” than “sure, she was asking for it.” Not that the former is any better than the latter, but at least we can all understand filthy lucre as a motivator, whereas the other is just gross.

OK. As you can see, I’m late getting started today. I took an extra-long sleep last night, didn’t rise until 9:30, and friends? It felt good. I see the previous comment thread has taken a left turn into discussion of “Valley of the Dolls,” one of my favorite novels of all time. I read it as a teenager, and learned so much from it, I hardly know where to start, from New Haven openings to El Morocco, where everyone waits for the early editions to see what the reviews are like. I’ve been looking for one of those “frownie” plasters Jennifer North wears in an early scene; it’s sort of a glue-on thing that pokes you in the face if you dare to furrow your brow and invite wrinkling, Botox-before-Botox. Also, I’m all about the Nembutals. I think I took one last night.

So no bloggage today; I’m still barely ambulatory. At least I’ll be well-rested for work tonight. I did try, as an experiment, doing the L.A. Times crossword puzzle within 30 minutes of rising, pre-coffee. I finished in 7:18. Anyone care to take me on?

Roman Polanski will, as they say, “face justice” in a child-rape case so old the victim is perimenopausal. Good. There shouldn’t be a statute of limitations on that sort of thing, and no matter what the victim says today, there needs to be a reckoning, 76 years old or not, great artist or not, friend of Jack Nicholson or not.

I saw the documentary about the case. I have read opinions from both sides, those who call it “brilliant” and those who argue it was a cleverly constructed propaganda job (which, in documentaries, is a little like accusing water of being wet). No question that the case was seriously flawed, the judge a fool, etc. No question that the victim wants the case to be dropped and Polanski officially forgiven, as she says she has done. Admirable of her, but has anyone asked if the forgiveness was accompanied by a cash payment? I can’t recall. No question that Polanski, at 76, is likely no menace to society, or even to young girls, anymore. (Although you never know. I remember reading a story pegged to one of the big anniversaries of “Chinatown,” in which screenwriter Robert Towne described doing a rewrite with Polanski at the latter’s house, and how easily distracted Polanski was by the scene out the window, where several young girls frolicked poolside. He liked having girls of that vintage around. If only so many didn’t have mothers who thought that was just swell.)

The older I get, the more comfortable I am with situations that are muddy, complicated, filled with icky people on both sides but still have a clear right/wrong distinction, and this is one of them. Polanski needs to answer for, if nothing else, his flight to Europe. And that’s all I have to say about that, other than this: Like David Edelstein, I’m dreading the resolution of this case; he notes in a brief blog post, “Now, there will be a lot of grandstanding by idiots.” Yep.

If the Achilles heel of the right wing is their seemingly endless supply of family values-bleating, boy- and/or mistress-buggering Republican hypocrites, Hollywood plays the same role on the left, providing their private jets, their money and their glittery stardust and then getting that what? look when someone catches them being a little too artistic in the morality department. I haven’t said anything about Mackenzie Phillips yet, mainly because I couldn’t wrap my head around the nearly overlooked detail of that sordid story: Phillips asks us “not to judge” her father. It takes a very specific sort of showbiz birdbrain to say something like that, to tell us something vile and stomach-turning and them demand our stomachs not turn.

No real practical purpose will be served by locking up Polanski at this point, but (shrug). And if Mackenzie Phillips’ sordid overshare serves any practical purpose at all, let’s hope that it sets the bar so high for celebrity memoirs that fewer get published. The way I look at it, if the next starlet can’t top this with, oh, cannibalism, then the next starlet doesn’t get a book contract. Win-win.

Which brings us to Mitch Albom, who has a new book out this fall, another slim, small, wide-margined, born-to-be-a-bestseller volume called “Have a Little Faith.” The Free Press assigned a freelancer — that’s what “special writer” in the byline indicates — to do their Q-and-A, a wise move even if it produced the usual bootlicky crapfest, accompanied by two photos of the elfin Albom looking dark and broody. If I read the story correctly, the book examines Mitch’s return to Judaism? No, he doesn’t do that. He just has “faith,” preferring to play the piano at an inner-city black church and meet weekly with his old rabbi, who inexplicably has asked Albom to give his eulogy, even though he’s still hale and hearty. So much for rabbis being wise and learned. (I think it was Judaism, or at least Philip Roth, who gave “learned” its two-syllable pronunciation, in fact.)

It may be a sign of my boredom with Albom that I can’t even get pissy about this book, although we’ll see how the publicity tour goes. He has the usual kickoff planned — a star-studded “and friends” weepfest at the Fox Theatre tomorrow night that sounds excruciating. Ernie Harwell will be there; nothing like the presence of a beloved public figure with a terminal cancer diagnosis to get a crowd leaking like a sieve. Maybe Dave Barry can lighten things up, but my guess is, Mitch will settle for nothing less than a two-hanky soaker.

Boy, you can tell I’m working until 2 a.m. all this week, can’t you? I’m a hangin’ judge, and I’m coming for you. Just as soon as I have a little more coffee.

Off to the gym, instead. The only thing that keeps me sane in a week of five-hour sleep is clean living. And naps.

So many interesting things in the meeee-dya — every so often I like to say it like the pests who brayed it in my ear all these years — this weekend. I hardly know where to start. As many of you know, Detroit is having a moment in the national spotlight; Time magazine bought a house in town to be home base for its yearlong look at the city. Their first cover story is either this week or last, but I haven’t read it yet (although I bookmarked the blog). I’m catching up with everything else this weekend:

“On the Media” looks at poverty porn with the unnamed but unmistakable presence of Jim Griffioen, aka Sweet Juniper. (The piece slams Time magazine for its drive-by tactics, amusingly.)

The New York Times covers Mayor Dave Bing, the ol’ crepehanger.

Best of all was this WSJ feature, looking at the decline through the lens of a single house, which was once in the swankiest neighborhood in town and today is vacant and recently sold for a four-figure price. This was the part that caught my eye:

In 2005, (a previous owner, the Andrews) found a buyer, Kimberly Carpenter, willing to pay their $189,000 asking price. They were too relieved to question why Ms. Carpenter’s closing documents recorded the sales price as $250,000.

County records show Ms. Carpenter took out simultaneous loans of $200,000 and $50,000 from First NLC Financial Services, a unit of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, an Arlington, Va., investment bank. First NLC specialized in subprime mortgages — loans for borrowers with damaged credit.

At the time, Detroit was swept up in the subprime-lending frenzy that hit much of the country and eventually sparked the financial crisis and deep recession. Lenders became quick to loan to high-risk borrowers.

Ms. Carpenter, 37, says she was buying the house on behalf of her father, Lewis Maxwell, whose own credit record was too blemished. “My father handled all of that,” she says of the financial details. Her father, who worked on the Chrysler assembly line, died of cancer in 2007.

David and Ruth Andrews say Ms. Carpenter paid them $189,000. They say they don’t know what happened to the other $61,000 entered into sales records.

“I have no idea about any of that,” says Ms. Carpenter. “It’s over. It’s out of my head.”

OK, so clearly Carpenter is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor does she come from a long line of sharp knives. When I hear the Tea Party people complain that they’re being asked to bail out people who got in over their heads, foolishly signed papers they shouldn’t have signed, I’m sympathetic. But Carpenter at least lost the house and is in a world of financial hurt. Why are the NLC bankers not in jail? That’s what I want to know:

Ms. Carpenter quickly fell behind on her payments. In August, 2006, First NLC Financial bundled Ms. Carpenter’s first loan with a pool of other troubled mortgages and sold them to American Residential Equities, or ARE, a Miami company that specialized in buying bad loans.

First NLC Financial went into liquidation last January, dragged down by mortgage losses. Its parent company, FBR Group, became Arlington Asset Investment Corp. A spokesman for Arlington said the company can’t locate the original files on the Carpenter loans or comment on the lending decision.

By November 2006, ARE’s collection agents were after Ms. Carpenter for $218,348.53 on the $200,000 mortgage, according to county documents.

Good luck with that, ARE. I wonder where the folks are who pimped a quarter-million dollars to a woman who can’t even say, today, what happened to her. There’s enough blame in this disaster to slice it up like a big fat mortgage tranche. But I’ll be saying this until the end: When you open a store giving away free crack if you sign here and here and initial there, and if anyone expresses reservations you say, “Don’t worry, this is the special non-addictive crack we’re giving away” — when that happens, you really can’t complain that the neighborhood is suddenly full of crackheads.

Oh, well. Onward to the more uplifting things:

I’m not an opera fan by a long shot, but I enjoyed this piece about Peter Gelb, the new director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It was worth reading just to pluck this marvelous bit of jargon from the word-sluice: “park and bark,” used to describe singers who can’t act. In usage:

…He has commissioned new productions, some of works seldom seen in New York; signed up new singers, who don’t just “park and bark,” as he puts it, but actually act; and recruited directors from Broadway…

There was also a great piece, by an opera aficionado, looking at Barbra Streisand and her miraculous voice, which was bestowed upon a woman who only saw singing as a way to get to what she really wanted to do — acting. She doesn’t warm up, she doesn’t read music, she processes everything from her gut and ear:

“I hear these melodies,” she said. “I hear horn lines and string lines. That’s what’s fun about recording with an orchestra.” She can sing things, and composer-arrangers like Bill Ross or Jeremy Lubbock have the skill to write them down, she said.

She talked about recording with Marvin Hamlisch. “I can go, ‘That’s not the right chord, no, it has to be an 11th or a 9th or something,’ ” she said. “I just know that the chord has to be in contrast, it can’t just be this.” She sang a sustained husky pitch. “I’ll say: ‘It has to rub. I want that slight rub there.’ ”

It’s funny how, when Streisand was given the chance to just act and not sing, the results were pretty uniformly crapola — “Nuts,” “The Prince of Tides,” and so on — but all agree that what makes her singing special is how very emotional it is, i.e. how much acting she does while singing.

Finally, in the On Language column, a piece on “phantonyms” — words that sound like they should mean something, but don’t. They don’t discuss my personal pet peeve (infamous does not mean “really famous”), but it scratched a very specific itch.

On Language, of course, was William Safire’ column. Who is no longer with us.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day. (If I may be excused a little John Phillips lyric.) Have a good one.

I found a notebook yesterday. Nothing like a full software reinstall to send what should stay buried tumbling from the shelves. Keeping notebooks is one of those things all writers are supposed to do, and I sort of do, but not enough. There’s the how-to-carry thing, for one. There’s the atrophied writing muscles thing, for another. And notebooks are dangerous items, not unlike your seventh-grade journals. Scribbling one’s innermost thoughts, or even amusing words, phrases, juxtapositions and church signs contemporaneously inevitably leads to a 99-to-1 chaff/wheat ratio.

(Lance Mannion is an exception. See his Mining the Notebooks tag.)

Anyway, the notebook I found yesterday was from my Ann Arbor year. Danger, Will Robinson. That was the last year I felt boundless optimism and infinite possibilities, before it ended and all the crabs reached up and dragged me back into the bucket. (Yes, I am joking about the crabs. Poor me.) It wasn’t as excruciating to read as I’d feared:

2/10/04: Norwalk virus in a dorm — lines outside the stalls in communal bathrooms, signs on doors reading “sick.”

I have no idea where I got that, as I stayed out of dorms. Probably overheard someone talking about it in class, and just liked the image. I don’t recall my own dorm years as happy, fun ones, although they were instructive. You discover how people really live, and hope you don’t draw a roommate with a vastly different threshold of Gross than yours. Once I walked into a shower and found an empty bottle of disposable douche lying on the floor. Strawberry. Having to line up to barf is all part of the same hell of other people.

Here’s another:

1/28/04: Snow day casualties — Cindy, pale and tired, color bleached from even her lips. Smokers, banished to the outdoors, huddled together like dull sparrows in the cold.

Whoa, poetry. An unattributed quote:

1/20/04: “The golfer plays to save the land from builders.”

Someone should answer for that.

2/18/04: The psychology of oppression: Make members of the oppressed group overseers of the group as a whole. Thus, women initiate others into prostitution, Jews guard others in concentration camps, Hebrews oversee work on the pyramids.

Again, no cite. Notes on watching an onstage interview with Arthur Miller, 4/1/04:

AM on UM: “A testing-ground for all my prejudices.” …30′s theater in NYC: “radical outcry” against the Depression (Welles, Odets) …Never trust an interviewer who uses the word “perspicacious” …”[We] weaned the [Michigan] Daily away from the fraternities.”

But what I remember most without the aid of my notebook, I didn’t even write down: When Miller said that within five years, climate change would change the route of the Gulf Stream and plunge the British Isles into a Siberian ice age. I thought, Hmm, he’s senile. He died not quite a year later.

I suppose my notebook has done what notebooks are supposed to do — prodded memory and data-mined a unique year in my life. Every year is unique, and we forget so much of it. That’s why I started this blog — so I could remember more of it. Ruby just hopped up and nibbled a crescent out of the Arthur Miller page. Another memory.

The last page has a single line: “food and wine.” I have no idea.

OK, then. Another early exit, more scant bloggage:

Hank Stuever has a book coming out this fall. You’d think writing a book would be the hardest part, but it isn’t. He explains.

Finally, I was going to wait for Moe to bring this up herself, but I see the comments in the previous thread have uncovered her recent news, so here goes: Moe, our frequent commenter here, recently got some very bad news about what started as a raspy throat. It’s the kind that includes language like “biopsy” and “stage 3 or 4.” Moe, courage to you on what must be a terrifying journey. Details on her blog.

And now off to my meeting.

For a brief shining moment in 2005 or so, Kate and I had a shared TV ritual — “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy,” 7 to 8 p.m. in my market and probably yours, too. It was fun, and it was educational. Then she discovered “America’s Funniest Home Videos” was on opposite, and that was the end of winning $400 on Civil War trivia. Although I’ve tried to make the best of it.

“You know whenever you see a kid, a father and a baseball bat, something’s going to happen, and it’s going to be a shot to the junk,” I say, figuring it’s best to introduce film-analysis skills early. (You can say the same about trampolines positioned near basketball hoops.) Some parents teach their children what Chekhov said about guns and first acts. We work with the material we have.

It’s amusing, isn’t it, how AFV, as it’s called, predicted YouTube? (And how YouTube predicted “Ow! My Balls!”) Did you know there are more than 19,000 YouTube videos tagged “treadmill?” The treadmill, any fan of viral video can tell you, is even more predictive of wacky hijinks than baseball bats and fathers. Sometimes video makers don’t play fair. This one, for instance. There’s no reason for that treadmill to be on. This is like Chekhov writing a character who says, “May I leave my loaded gun here on this table? Make sure no one touches it. It’s loaded. And it’s a gun.”

Lately, it’s babies. Babies and Beyoncé.

I blame YouTube for ruining my attention span. It boggles my mind when I see people posting webcam videos of themselves talking about one thing or another, specimens that regularly clock in at eight or nine minutes. If I know one thing in this world, it’s that no one wants to watch you yak for eight minutes. Even “leave Britney alone” came in at under three.

Of course, when it comes to viral video, this is the only one you need to watch today:

HT: Sweet Juniper.

Not much for you today. Fortunately, Roger Ebert’s on the job, presenting his long-awaited recollection of O’Rourke’s, his old Chicago watering hole:

O’Rourke’s was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago’s Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out in back. From the day it opened on Dec, 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

Our place in Columbus wasn’t so colorful, but it was pretty fun — the Galleria. It was on the ground floor of an office building, and you entered through an indoor, well, galleria. I won’t try to match Ebert, but when I sift through my misty watercolored memories of the place, I remember Tim May, one of the sportswriters, looking through the window to see a homeless man shuffling by to use the bathroom. This was in the very early ’80s, when the public mental hospitals all closed justlikethat, and suddenly we were seeing homeless people everywhere.

“Someday I’m gonna write a book about those guys,” he said in his Texas drawl. “I’m gonna call it ‘Wrong Turn,’ ’cause somewhere along the line, those guys took a wrong turn.” He never wrote the book, but I still think that’s a tremendous title, and if I ever have occasion to use it myself, I’m going to credit Tim.

Off to the gym. I did Pilates yesterday, and am still waiting for the ab soreness to settle in. Sit-ups aren’t called sit-ups in Pilates, they’re called roll-ups. That’s because you do them very slowly, one vertebra at a time, and if you think that’s easy, try it sometime. Ouch.

One thing you have to admit about the American pop-culture barrel: It really has no bottom. You think the Jackass/Bruno/Borat oeuvre was the last word in vulgarity? You have yet to meet Tucker Max. You think the long, sordid story of Michael Jackson’s corpse ended when his moldering bones were finally planted in Forest Lawn? You would be wrong.

I watched the trailer for “This Is It,” which is apparently a Michael Jackson concert movie, only there was no concert, so it’s been repackaged as a “rare, behind-the-scenes look” at the rehearsals, at least whatever sort of rehearsals could be held while Jackson was medicated into temporary uprightness. (I just Googled the phrase “rare, behind-the-scenes look.” Results: 133,000. Not so rare, I guess.) You have to marvel, really, at the unmitigated gall of the Jackson family and the cast of human cattle egrets who follow their herd, eating the blood-engorged ticks on LaToya’s back. The film will be in theaters for two weeks only; tickets will go on sale a month in advance. I suppose this will build buzz among the people included in the opening phrases that appear onscreen — the “billions reached” by his music (an uncomfortable echo of McDonald’s there, eh?), the “world inspired” by his “dreams,” etc.

Let me just pause for a moment and consider the brief flash shots of people driven to near-hysteria by the presence of their idol. A few years back, one of my colleagues won one of those Rotary Club scholarships to spend a few months overseas, being a Rotary ambassador. He went to Chile, where he distinguished himself as an ambassador of pop music; his first duty upon returning was to make mix tapes from his vast record collection and send them to South America, where his new friends were absolutely starved to hear anything other than whatever crap was carried on local radio. ABBA had played a series of shows in Santiago while he was there, and it was an event that nearly brought the city to a standstill. When I hear people talk about Michael Jackson and what his music meant to them, all I can figure is, they must have recently moved here from Chile.

As a cynic, I’ve been cheered to see the reaction to the mountain of evidence in the case, which is pretty much exactly as I predicted when the corpse was still warm: Jackson died of a drug overdose, and was an abuser at a level you could only call baroque; the most ossified Detroit junkie must stand mute in the shade of a man who had a private physician turn his bedroom into an operating theater every night, literally anesthetizing him into unconsciousness. And was I right about the other thing I predicted? Ahem:

“He was just careful about what he ate; he just tried to be healthy,” said Kevin McLin, a friend of the family and Jackson’s former publicist. “He ate turkey burgers, Chinese food, a lot of vegetables. He always tried to eat healthy stuff. … He tried to stay away from red meat.”

So what is the official reaction to this news? Charging Jackson’s doctor with homicide. He killed our hero, that bad man! All the patient wanted was a good night’s sleep, even if it had to be aided by the drug they use to keep you quiet while a surgeon is sawing your sternum in two, and what did the quack doctor do? Gave him too much, depriving the world of his music and inspiring dreams! And we know he was a wonderful, wonderful person, on the brink of a comeback, because his daughter said so at the funeral, right after Auntie Janet made sure she was speaking directly into the microphone.

During the crack wars, when the homicide rate in places like Fort Wayne was climbing through the roof, the editors at my newspaper would send a reporter to chat with the family of the murder victim, even when it was clear the victim was a sleazebag banger with a target on his back. The grieving mother always provided the same narrative: Sure, her boy had been bad, but he was turning his life around. The recent birth of his latest child had changed his heart, and he was planning to get his G.E.D., enroll in college and perhaps found a software empire, or maybe enter the ministry and help others. How tragic he was taken from us when his potential was so, so great.

It’s good to see the narrative hasn’t changed. It’s also good to see there were enough fragments of rehearsal footage, and millions of suckers, for the Jackson family. They have a lot of egrets to feed.

OK, then. I’m working extra hours this week, extra late hours, which have left me sleep-deprived and even crankier than normal. Not so much bloggage, but what I have is pretty good:

The Detroit City Council is rattling its saber about a strip-club crackdown. In a normal city, this would bring out the church people to say, hear hear. In Detroit, it brings out the strippers to say back the fuck off of my livelihood. (And, to be sure, a few church people.) Click through to note the fine booty on the woman speaking at the podium, and for this quote:

“I take care of my family,” said Omni Jenkins, 21, a dancer at a local club. “By cutting us off and making up all these rules, it’s going to cause crime rates to go up. It affects not only the entertainment community, but Detroit as a whole.”

Even lame-duck Martha Reeves gets off a good one. You can find it on your own. I gotta hit the shower. And the coffee pot.

Yes, Jeff, I did see “Mad Men.” I’m gonna be doing some spoilin’ here, so take a minute and leave the room if you must and OH MY GOD THEY RAN A LAWNMOWER OVER THE ENGLISH GUY’S FOOT. I’m not sure what this show is trying to tell me this season, but for now I’ll settle for Joan’s deadpan summation: “One minute you’re on top of the world, the next some secretary is running over your foot with a lawn mower.”

At first I saw the sale of Sterling Cooper to Putnam Powell and Lowe (aka, the Brits) as the sort of thing dramatic series television has to do to stay fresh — that is, import some villains. Conflict = drama is Screenwriting 101, and when you’ve created a fairly vast cast and made them all “interesting,” the big risk is that the audience is going to start liking them, too, and then you end up with shows like “M*A*S*H,” where everyone wears a halo by the time the Very Special episodes roll around, and after that — meh. So you bring in some antagonists. “The Sopranos” paroled a new one every season: Richie Aprile, Ralph Cifaretto, Feech La Manna, Tony Blundetto et al. The crime-family story structure made it perfectly acceptable to bump each one off when their dramatic possibilities had been fully explored. Tony even said it out loud, before making his move on Feech: “Did I learn nothing from Richie Aprile?” Your writers sure did, Ton’. Other shows have to make do with more ridiculous farewells; remember when “L.A. Law” threw Rosalind Shays down the elevator shaft? That was awesome.

So the Brits, with their terrible swift sword of cost-cutting and bean-counting, are this season’s bad guys. I’m not so sure where they’re going with it, other than wacky symbolism — how amusing that the mower in question is an all-American John Deere. The show has too much respect for reality to have SC sold again at season’s end (at least I hope so). But once you’ve severed the foot of your parent company’s rising young star, you have to go somewhere with it, and I hope they have some ideas. If nothing else, it did wake up the season with a roar at close to its midpoint. I watched the scenes where Stumpy MacKendrick is being shown around the office, and was impressed by how…comtemporary he seemed, with his empty platitudes and English-accented bullshit. “You…are a very impressive young woman,” for instance. I can’t believe I used to swallow crap like that. I can’t believe people still dish it out.

(One of my old bosses was fond of writing mash notes to her favorites, little missives I came to call Wowsers, because they all started the same way: WOW. The remainder was full of empty superlatives that by their very volume and pitch were transparent crapola: WOW. I have never read a story as moving and funny as yours. I feel so grateful and proud to work with such a magnificently talented staff...and so on. She would have felt right at home at Putnam Powell and Lowe.)

And how amusing that the cost-cutting of this season — 30 percent of the staff, we’re told — somehow spared dumb Lois, promoted from the switchboard but barely capable of basic secretarial work, and certainly not able to navigate a riding lawn mower around an office full of tipsy partiers without maiming one.

My other favorite detail: The Brit-speak, shedjools and curriculum vitae and enjoy the delicatessen.

Someone — can’t remember who — mentioned that Joan’s gory dress in her final scenes foreshadows a certain blood-smeared pink Chanel suit coming by year’s end. Hadn’t thought of that. It’s even the same nubby wool.

So, Jeff, what’s your take? Where are we going with this?

Me, I got web work to do. Do I have any bloggage? Maybe.

John D. and Catherine T. finally give some dough to a working-stiff journalist, and it’s not me. But it is money well-spent. Here’s hoping his bosses don’t lay him off.

Roger Ebert came home from Toronto with bad news: Indie film is effectively comatose. There goes my second career. (Can you people tell I’m kidding when I say stuff like that? I hope so.)

Web work. Russian drills. Later.

My search for the ideal stimulant continues. I’m trying to find that elusive pick-me-up that I can down sometime around 10 p.m. that will keep me alert until 1 a.m., but still let me sleep afterward. Two cups of coffee handle the stay-awake part, but sour my stomach for sleeping. Energy drinks make me feel like a 51-year-old in baggy shorts, tryin’ to hang with the kids. Today I got a brainstorm — a memory, actually. Morning Thunder.

My friend Paul hated coffee but needed serious stimulation to get going in the morning, and used to drink a gigantic tankard of Celestial Seasonings’ Morning Thunder tea, with four or five bags steeping in there. It was a pretty vile drink, but it did the trick. I tried it for a while (one bag at a time), but dropped it when I got tired of people making poop jokes about my beverage. (What brings on the famous 10 a.m. session with the morning paper, anyway? Is it the alimentary canal making room for breakfast, the hot liquid or the caffeine? And why does it mostly affect men? I’ve never known one who didn’t need a little me-time at midmorning.) After a while, it made me associate Morning Thunder with boom-booms, and by then I had developed the obligatory journalist’s taste for rancid newsroom coffee, which was free.

But with this unusual need for a specific eye-opener, maybe it’s time to check out the M.T. again. So I stopped where I never do — the tea section at the supermarket.

It’s kind of depressing. Tea runs in cycles like everything else, and now we’re deep into the relaxation thing. With eye-opening delegated to Starbucks and dark-roast arabica beans, tea has to take the opposite tack, and the most common word is decaffeinated, along with calming and serenity. No Morning Thunder in evidence. Ah, well.

Last night a triple-e from Starbucks at 8:45 did the trick magnificently. Drowsiness arrived at 12:55 a.m. If I try it tonight, it’ll either be too much or too little.

Do the guys at Starbucks try to speak Italian to you, too? “Here’s your tripplio,” or whatever; I wasn’t taking notes. Sometimes, when I feel like making my triple a dessert, I’ll order it with whipped cream. Tripplio con panna, the baristas say. They’re probably the same wiseasses who refer to Detroit as day-twah. Blech.

What a pleasant weekend, made for long bike rides, a little weightlifting and a pass through the Nordstrom’s shoe sale. The Steve Madden boots I’ve been eyeing keep falling in price, but they’re still not a justifiable purchase. I don’t have the legs, or the youth, to stuff jeans into boots anymore. And Kate will give up her Ed Hardy sneakers when they pry them off her cold, dead feet. Best would be a cool pair of ankle boots, but the only ones like that they’re making these days have towering heels. My knees hurt just looking at them. Where is a woman somewhere between stilettos and Hush Puppies to find her footwear? Not at Nordstrom’s shoe sale, evidently.

As you can see, friends, I have very little today. I stayed away from my computer for a couple of days and strongly recommend it, except for the pile of e-mail that accumulates under the slot. And I didn’t get too much bloggage, but a little:

New York magazine looks at the birther/wacker far right. What a bunch of maroons.

And now off to begin manic Monday. Kate woke up with a sore throat and informs me it’s sweepin’ the schoolyard. Oh, joy.

Ruby the rabbit is turning out to be less pet by far than a dog or cat, but still amusing. I keep her close by, to monitor her chewing and miscellaneous destruction, but also to observe her wacky antics. She likes to climb to the tops of things, then jump up and down for the fun of it. Yesterday she interrupted a nap by placing a single paw on my back three or four times — hey, you awake? Lately she’s fond of long grooms, followed by mini-naps in fluffy-ball position, and then an extended paper-shred project. She prefers the paper be nice and crackly. I knew maintaining all these newspaper subscriptions would pay off one day.

The only bedroom I let her in is the guest room/office, which has a white bedspread (camouflage). I keep a couple of cheap blankets up there, and she likes to burrow and dig in them. She photographs better against the darker colors of the downstairs:

Why do we keep pets, anyway? Because we like carrying on conversations with them in squeaky voices? That’s my theory today, anyway.

You should hear the conversations Ruby and I can have over a bundle of carrot greens. You’d be …horrified.

Ugh. Another short night of sleep, another early meeting. I don’t feel capable of anything approaching serious discussion yet, so your loss, toots — sometimes you get what you pay for. How about a cavalcade of idiocy?

Everybody’s seen this by now, but the classics stay fresh forever: Ernie Anastos, anchorMAN! Stay classy, New York City.

A friend of mine works for the Palm Beach Post, and once told me the paper’s older, conservative readership dictates that they be downright prudish in their discussions of any story with a sex angle. You could read the entirety of the Bill and Monica clip file, for instance, and never know what, precisely, the two did together, as it was always referred to as simply “sex.” Well. Looks like they changed their policy. At least on the racy internets, anyway.

Look, free crack! And it’s not addictive at all; you can quit anytime you want. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

You get in every morning, naked, and it makes you feel warm and good. So of course it’s out to kill you.

Meeting. Bicycle. Back later.

The first great-books club meeting of the year was yesterday, although maybe that’s pushing it. We don’t read any great books in toto, we read selections from them, in a master text called “Great Conversations,” which the library, the sponsor of this shindig, provides. There was dark talk of budget cuts affecting this year’s schedule, but so far — fingers crossed — we’re hanging in there. Members of the group may have to lead a session or two, should we lose our librarian, but we’re ready for that. I signed on for “The Chilean Earthquake” by Heinrich von Kleist, a work and a writer I had never even heard of before, and so much for that English minor, eh?

Anyway, when I joined the group I was hoping for a raucous bunch of table-pounders. I got five retirees. Ah, well. It’s also where I found my Russian teacher, after we read a selection from the “War and Peace” and she revealed she’d just finished her second read of the entire novel — in the original language. And the retirees are always interesting, especially when they make small talk. One recently tuned in to WJR and heard Mark Levin, who is apparently a talk-show host who makes Rush Limbaugh sound like Walter Cronkite. I have to take someone else’s word for this, because I can’t listen to commercial radio anymore. I force myself to take in a little on the weekends, because if it weren’t for the XM they play at the gym, car commercials and these few brief hours of weekend exposure, I wouldn’t hear new music anywhere.

I draw the line at talk, however, no matter when it’s on. Just can’t do it, and when I hear Rush or Sean or someone else drifting from an open window or the UPS truck, my default setting is the same one I employ when I pass a homeless person muttering about motherfuckers. I assume: Crazy. Avoid eye contact. Do not engage.

My book-club friend, a nice lady who was most engaged by the tangent we took on left brain/right brain issues, was horrified by Levin. WJR is a community institution here much the way WOWO is in Fort Wayne, but like lots of AM stations, it’s had to stake out its position in right-wing talk. They generally go for the A-team national shows with lots of local-local hosts, and I notice they sneak Levin on in the evenings, when the rational part of the nation is watching TV and only the insane ones are down in their basements, radio on, cleaning their guns or building birdhouse after birdhouse under a bare light bulb. (And hey, check it out — Dr. Laura now has the coveted 11 p.m.-1 a.m. slot. How the mighty have fallen.)

It’s good to see someone else is horrified. Although less comforting to know more people are seeking this stuff out.

I’m short on time today, and want to say a little about Mary Travers, the latest in this year’s long, long line of obituaries. I can’t exactly mourn her passing — what has Peter, Paul and Mary been since 1970 or so? — but I’d like to at least take note of what she was a part of. “A Mighty Wind” had a mighty fine time mocking the early-’60s folkie era, but I was a young child then, and these were some of the earliest records I can recall choosing myself out of the pile and putting on the turntable. The world won’t mourn the last New Christy Minstrel who leaves the earth, but for all the fun you can poke at it, this was some great music. It was also maybe the last time that overtly religious traditional music was heard in the public square. (I’m not counting “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and you can’t make me.) The first PP&M record is a little work of art in a time capsule, and today, while we’re marking the passage of the blonde, lots of people will call your attention to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Meh. This is the only PPM record you need, and this is its best single song (side one, track one, I believe). Yes, it’s the one that was used on that “Mad Men” episode last season. Enjoy, and RIP Mary Travers: