In case you haven’t heard: White shirts are in for fall 2009. (Citation, high and low.) On the one hand I am thrilled, as I am a big fan of white shirts and own several, so even though I don’t follow trends, it’s nice to have a trend follow me from time to time.

On the other hand I am disillusioned. Here’s why: A few years ago Alan and I went to New York and saw the Mingus Big Band one night, at a club called Fez. It’s a dense basement space, and all the tables are the same size — six-tops, I think. If you don’t have that many in your party, you share your table with strangers. The woman we sat across from was very nice, also a journalist — what are the odds? As we talked before the show, she said she covered the garment industry for a trade journal so far inside I’d never heard of it, and was based in Los Angeles. She’d come to New York in hopes of finding a job closer to the creative end of the business, as she was tiring of covering the nuts-and-bolts part. What do you write about? I asked.

“Textiles,” she said. Hence the L.A. location — textiles are an industry of the Pacific Rim.

“So,” I asked, “is brown really the new black?” She looked puzzled for a minute, and then said she didn’t really know, as she was so far from the consumer end of the business, she couldn’t even say anymore. The textile industry, she informed us, is two to three years ahead of what you see in stores, and whatever arm of the industry is looking for that sort of thing left the brown/black question behind literally years ago, and had moved on to whether orange was the new pink, or whatever. Industrial looms can’t be changed on a whim, and it takes time to set up raw materials and dyes and supply chains and shipping and whatever else is involved in getting you a new white shirt for fall.

I guess I wasn’t that surprised — the auto industry is the same way, and one of the frustrating things about the discussion of it in recent months has been the public’s ignorance of what exactly it takes to take a car from the imagination stage to the showroom floor. The length of the lead time seemed a bit much — it’s fabric, not a Prius — but who am I to question the mighty Asian textiles industry? I’ll take her word for it.

Like a lot of information, knowing this bit of it both spoiled and deepened my appreciation of fashion. Now, when I see white shirts everywhere, I think that two or three years ago there was a bumper crop of cotton on the world market, not a single simultaneous idea across the entire creative end of the industry. (I don’t know what the return of the ’80s shoulder means, but I’m sure shoulder pads are manufactured and supplied under much the same market conditions.)

The older I get, the more interested I am in commercial and utilitarian art. You could argue that all of it is, but I especially like art that we touch, use, work with or see every day, art that does a job other than entertain or hang on a wall in a museum. It’s interesting to think about the great convergence of market and creative forces battling for the upper hand. Plus I love great design, and the feel of a well-turned handle is a real pleasure. Almost as much as a great white shirt.

And now a pause for Meryl Streep’s great speech in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

You go to your closet and you select, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of …stuff.

Bloggage? Sure, we got some:

I’m not crazy about anthropomorphizing work animals, but this was an interesting story, with a great slideshow — about the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, which every year around this time takes a break from ordinary training and goes to the seashore at Cornwall for few days of galloping on the beach.

The long-awaited sequel to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is here — “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

A great Detroitblog piece, from the Metro Times (but I’m linking to the blog, because of the extra pictures), about the city’s small troop of outdoor sign painters. That’s one thing I noticed immediately after I moved here — how much of the city’s signage is painted. Paint is cheap, even when you use an artist, and many don’t. I love them for their odd punctuation: We do not buy “stolen” tires or rims. Well, I hope not.

Now I have to read a big chunk of “Walden” — the great-books reading club starts today.

God, I hate it when NPR tries to be hip. I also hate it when they show willful obtuseness in the face of pop culture. On this score, I’m impossible to please, and should probably just tune out when they try something like an “appreciation” of Patrick Swayze, which didn’t quite work. Terry Gross could have handled it, but she’s got her own fish to fry, and can’t be popping in to the other shows to give them notes.

It’s hard to say what was wrong with the Swayze piece; maybe it was done by someone too young to really grasp the dual wonder and disappointment of the guy — he was always the best thing in a bad movie, but couldn’t really make the leap to good ones. He belonged in a different era, when his Gene Kelly combination of physical grace and unquestioned masculinity could have been packaged in his own “Singin’ in the Rain.” Either that, or he needed to live a little longer, until Quentin Tarantino could have built a script around him, like he did for John Travolta and Robert Forster. As it is, he’ll be remembered for doing his best work in individual scenes where he could shine — the last few minutes of “Dirty Dancing,” the Chippendale’s sketch from “Saturday Night Live” — rather than one single movie.

If you’re a fan of “Point Break,” I don’t want to hear about it.

And while I hate it when bloggers link to their own past work like it’s some sort of scholarship, I reread what I wrote about Swayze at the time of his diagnosis last year, and I’ll stand by it. You can read it here.

I just watched the “Dirty Dancing” clip again. Great dancing, of course, but why did the rest of the movie have to suck so bad? Why is Jerry Orbach glowering when everyone around him is happy? Why is the orchestra leader conducting, when we’ve already clearly seen they’re dancing to a record? And when the old people join in I have to pull the covers over my head and die a little bit.

(You know a movie I’d pay to see? One about Jennifer Grey’s nose job. I know it’s been discussed on TV, but a smart movie that drills down into plastic surgery and all its implications, using Baby’s rhinoplasty as a through line? That would be worth doing.)

Oh, and my all-time fave Excruciating NPR Pop-Cult Moment is when Noah Adams tried to lead a segment explicating the career of the late Big Pun, the rapper. Yeah, that guy. Yeah, Noah Adams. It’s still one of the funniest things I ever heard.

Friends, it appears that casting a couple worms in the job pool this morning has eaten up my blogging time. What are we thinking of “Mad Men” so far this season? I’m thinking it’s simultaneously wonderful and awful, which is, I hasten to add, a very good thing for me. I love entertainments where everyone involved points at the highest rows in the house and says, “That’s what we’re aiming for” and then maybe falls short, but dies trying. The mood so far this season seems to be “the thing that’s coming? It’s getting very close…” It’s not quite there yet, so we’re seeing a lot of Peggy slowly getting the message about what women are worth, really, and Betty ditto, and we really need more Joan, but so far it’s hard to see how it’s all coming together. The last scene this week was wonderful, all of Betty’s hopes deserting her at the time hope likes to do so — in the middle of the night — while the primordial ball-and-chain of all womankind wails from its crib. (Yes, it’s a joy, too. It’s both. That’s the point.) She’s going to have the worst post-partum depression ever.

I’m getting a little tired of the hollaback lines and scenes we’re all supposed to titter over. From the un-seat-belted children playing with dry cleaner bags in the first season, we’re now expected to gasp over the OB nurse telling Betty to get ready for her shave and enema. standard for childbirth back in the day. This feels forced.

What say you? I’m off to the gym to think about it.

I’m wondering if I need to stop paying attention to politics for a while. It was a beautiful weekend, and while checking e-mail Saturday I surfed over to Memeorandum to see what was going on with the teabaggers. Michelle Malkin’s blog proclaimed the march at 2 million strong. I rolled my eyes, shut down my browser and went back downstairs to think about what to do with the pattypan squash I bought at the farmer’s market.

I’m one of the worst crowd-estimators in journalism, in keeping with the long tradition of people who are good with words being stupid with numbers. I always avoided making crowd estimates in stories I wrote, and when I was pressed to do so, fudged with time-tested phrases like “a packed hearing room” or “scores,” or else found a less numerically challenged source to give me a number. But even I know 2 million is plain and simple balderdash. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com explains how the whopper came to be — the very short answer: Someone lied to Malkin — and adds:

Malkin herself did not lie; she merely repeated a lie. It does not particularly call into question her character. It does, however, call into question her judgment. The reason is that if there had in fact been 2 million protesters in Washington yesterday, there would have been no need to lie about it — the magnitude of the protests would have been self-evident. I was in Washington for the inauguration, an event at which there really were almost 2 million people present — and let me tell you, it was a Holy Mess. Hotels, charging double or treble their usual rates, were booked weeks in advance. Major stations on the Metro system were shut down for hours at a time. The National Guard was brought in. At least 3,000 people got stuck in a tunnel. Essentially the entirety of the National Mall, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, was dotted with onlookers. Heaps of trash were left behind. The entire city was basically a warzone for a period of about 20 hours, from midnight through mid-evening.

“It does, however, call into question her judgment.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the problem with journalism as practiced by mere mortals, but it’s especially the problem with mortals who are proudly partisan, who scoff at “objectivity” as a fiction, etc. I’m not one of those journalists — and lately, I should add, I don’t consider myself much of one; I feel like I’m on a floe that has broken away from the main icecap and is steadily drifting away — who worries what will happen to Journalism when all the newspapers have been hollowed out or killed. That’s because I already know (and excuse me if I’ve said this before; I think I’ll be saying it for a long time). We’re headed into an age when we will flock to the media source that flatters our own prejudices with a unique set of facts. We had that for a long time, in fact; although nearly everybody here is too young to remember when even middling cities had multiple dailies to reflect every reading niche, from labor to plutocrats. You could even make the argument that the vaunted value of Fairness and Objectivity, which in J-school you learn was handed down from Mt. Olympus, is really just a cold-eyed business tactic, that once the Workers Daily and the Plutocracy Times folded, the net needed to be cast a lot wider and the masthead slogan changed from Screwing the Proles since 1851 to Shining the Light of Truth.

Most reputable crowd estimates put it in the “tens of thousands,” perhaps as many as 100,000. The Daily Mail in London, relying on “Mail Foreign Service,” went with “up to two million.” Damn liberal media.

This isn’t really about politics, anyway; it’s about numeric shenanigans. I love Silver’s blog because he’s that rarity, a genius with numbers and more than competent with words. I love stories that make a splash because someone challenged numeric conventional wisdom. One of the Denver papers won a Pulitzer in the ’80s for pointing out that the numbers of missing and abducted children were wildly inflated, that if every face on the milk carton belonged to a kid who’d been snatched by a stranger, virtually everyone in the country would know someone whose child had suffered such a fate. And yet, we repeat these whoppers over and over.

Oh, well. It was a lovely weekend. Spent a chunk of it at a local block party, which featured a DJ. I took a moment to marvel how it only took a cute dance to turn “Y.M.C.A.” from a tune about anonymous gay sex in a public gymnasium (as Garry Trudeau amusingly put it), to a song adorable toddlers tumble to while their parents look on and snap pictures. Which Village Person are you? I think I’m the construction worker.

If a woman this size shook her tennis racquet at me, I don’t know if I’d feel in fear for my life, but I might tremble a little. What a whiny baby; she deserved to lose that one. And what is it about tennis that seems to breed these uniquely awful tantrum-tossers?

And speaking of rude…

So another Monday begins? The Magic 8 ball says yes.

It’s Michiganapalooza, plus a pumpkin with Elephant Man’s Disease.

I suppose we can all say what we were doing when it happened. I’ll spare you my recollections; they’re unremarkable and who really cares? What I think about at this distance isn’t just what happened that day, it’s what happened after. A mental data dump in no particular order, with a media-centric focus:

It was the beginning of the end of John Bob Edwards on “Morning Edition.” (Yes, yes — trivial.) I remember driving to work, wondering why the hell NPR wasn’t live with this, when I had just heard a phoner with their correspondent in the Pentagon, who’d said, “I just heard something. I think I have to go now.” It was the plane hitting, somewhere on the other side of the building. (That’s the amazing attack, to me. It’s one thing for a half-trained pilot to fly into a building standing 110 stories high. But to essentially bellyflop into one with only five floors? Damn that guy’s luck, for sure.) But here it was, after 9 a.m., and “Morning Edition” had segued into Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and if there’s a voice you really don’t want to hear when your adrenaline is racing and you want information, dammit, it’s that one. I think Keillor would agree. NPR had no structure in place to go live for national breaking news. That would change pretty soon, and Mr. Sleepy Morning Avuncularity was shoved aside.

Flying went from bad to worse. I remember racing onto a flight in the ’80s, a remarkable flight that didn’t last long — Fort Wayne to Toledo on Delta. Fourteen minutes in the air, $14 one-way. That doesn’t seem possible, that price, but that’s my recollection. J.C. was in Toledo for a night, working on a station there, and I left work early to meet him. I was running late and blasted through the terminal with my carry-on, a newsboy’s delivery bag. Threw it on the machine’s belt and zipped through the metal detector, and was the last one aboard, while the stewardess tap-tapped her foot impatiently at the jetway. Total time from parking lot to fasten-seat-belts, about five minutes. Now when I have to fly, I rise hours early, remember to keep my ID handy and always wear slip-on shoes. I remember flying maybe a year afterward, watching a TSA agent wanding a septuagenarian in Newark, the wand beeping at his belt line, the old man plaintively barking, “It’s my artificial hip!” Well, at least we didn’t profile.

It was a dark, dark night for my section of the newspaper — features. Jesus Christ, but my brain nearly exploded, seeing what the features editors of the world came up with to help us process the pain. They made Sports look profound. I distinctly recall one around Christmastime on “the new comfort,” which quoted a Land’s End representative saying yes, they were selling more cashmere throws and other soft things this season than last, and yes, it seemed to indicate the nation planned to spend its first post-9/11 winter on the couch with the covers pulled up tight. Imagine if the Slanky or Bleeves or, what’s it called? Right, the Snuggie — imagine if we’d had Snuggies then. The mind reels.

But the worst was the Wall Street Journal features section, which ran a story saying more people were eating in as part of the new comfort and new austerity, but it turns out that’s not much of a savings over restaurants, because have you priced a set of All-Clad lately? Nine hundred dollars! And here’s some girl who invited some friends over for a dinner party, and was shocked at how much truffles cost, and don’t even get her started on lemongrass. One magazine had a short item on how the Carrie Bradshaws of Gotham were changing their fitness routines as a result of the attacks. One had started swimming laps, so she could make her escape from Manhattan by water, if necessary. I only wish I were making it up.

This marked the rise of the blogosphere, too. Everyone wanted a blog, so they could tell their story and share their feelings. I recall being amazed at how many people took the attacks personally, and by that I mean really personally, people in places like the Midwest who were convinced Muhammed Atta went to his death screaming, “You’re next, Bob Smith of Kansas City, you and your twins Jason and Jordan, and also your filthy dog Bingo!” If nothing else, 9/11 made me glad I lived in a Hoosier backwater no one would bother bombing. Alan had a job interview with a non-profit the following spring that would have taken us to Traverse City, Michigan, and that would have been even more suitable, being too far north to be downwind of Chicago, surely next on al-Qaeda’s list.

(I often wonder how many police agencies in places like East Methane, Tenn., went to the county commissioners with a wish list in those immediately-after months, in case terrorism came to town. I mean, they have an armored police vehicle in Defiance, Ohio, these days. Why?)

Oh, but that didn’t stop people in Fort Wayne from feeling very, very threatened. I sat next to the police scanner, and listened to it the Friday after the attacks. Call after call after call to investigate a swarthy individual seen walking on a downtown street. I really couldn’t blame them, though — we all went a little crazy. To this day, I forgive anyone who wrote or said something insane between 9/11/2001 and 12/31/2001. Crazy times provoke crazy responses. Four crashed airliners followed by anthrax via mail? Maureen Dowd was reduced to jibbering. (That’s a straight line for anyone who wants it, btw.) So were a lot of other people. Ego te absolvo.

Needless to say, irony didn’t end.

My favorite post-9/11 cartoon.

My second-favorite.

What came after for you?

Wow. The people calling this the “most astonishingly tasteless thing I’ve ever read in a newspaper,” are somehow …selling it short. For those of you too time-starved to click through, here’s the lead on Mark Whicker’s column yesterday in the Orange County Register:

It doesn’t sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.

Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.

She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn’t high-fived in a while.

She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.

Now, that’s deprivation.

The rest goes on to lay out the last 18 years in sports for this newly freed captive, who as you recall spent that time not in some wacky Rip Van Winkle state of suspended animation, but as a literal sex slave to a monster. Of course, now that she’s been out for a few days, she might want to, you know, catch up on the sports pages and have a few laffs:

Mike Tyson now makes fun of himself in movies. …For the most part, fans have stopped doing The Wave. …USC is one of college football’s elite programs, three coaches later.

And so on, until he winds up with this extended fart:

Congratulations, Jaycee. You left the yard.

I showed it to Alan. He said, “He probably turned it in six minutes before deadline. His editor was too busy to deal with it and punted it to the desk, where they ran spellcheck, slapped a hed on it and pushed the button.” I might add: And everyone who had a problem with it figured it had likely been approved from on high. And there were three copy editors handling a work load that was previously handled by 12. And anyway, we just had a meeting where we were urged to be “edgy,” and here goes nothin’.

There’s always the strong possibility he’s a dumb jock-sniffer who really thinks the worst part about such an ordeal would be missing the early career of Tiger Woods. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and credit him instead with profound cluelessness. Code of the Columnist and all.

OK, then. I’m not going to talk about the guy from South Carolina, but you all are welcome to. What’s to say, anyway? That he violated some code of conduct? Of course he did, but this is the same chamber that saw the caning of Charles Sumner, after all. (Technically, it was the Senate, also where Dick Cheney told Sen. Leahy to go fuck himself, but I don’t think bad behavior is confined to one chamber.) Again, though, it’s the strong b.s. factor, the fact that these very people were the ones wringing their hands over the death of civility and Bush Derangement Syndrome just a few short years ago. Obama can take a little trash-talk, although I find it amusing that it was Rahm Emanuel who put the word out that he wanted an apology on his desk, soonest. (I can’t find the cite for that, but I read it last night.) I wish he’d added, “and the motherfucker’s finger, I want that too,” and who knows, maybe he did, and that exchange is merely lost to the mists of time:

Politics aren’t for the weak of stomach. The Brits survive Question Time, and they’re famously polite.

Anyway, the first lady wore sleeves last night, so I hope we can all be happy about that.

Boy, I’m mellow and forgiving this morning, aren’t I?

Mellow bloggage: Bookmark 5 Second Films, and hit “random” a few times the next time you’re on hold. Today’s home-page film contains mild profanity. HT: Mr. Felsing, down Charlotte way, via FB.

Kudos to yesterday’s comments, which slaughtered, filleted, consumed and excreted California Assemblyman Michael Duvall so I didn’t have to, as well as whoever pointed out that the lobbyist who hauled his old-man ashes probably shouldn’t lose her job over this, as she’s pretty much just sticking to the job description. May I just add, however? Ewwww.

(A slight tangent: I was trying to decide if Kate could handle “The Hurt Locker” and watched a clip online of the first seven minutes. The soldiers are using one of those remote-control bomb-investigation ‘bots, and bantering over it: “Just stick it in.” “You stick it in.” “Pretend it’s your dick.” And so on. I asked a friend if men talk about anything else, and he pointed out, correctly, that he hardly ever talks that way with his friends. And yet, here’s Assemblyman Duvall chatting up bodily fluids with a colleague. Again: Ewwww.)

They can’t win, so they’re playing the dog card: The Detroit Lions produce a pet calendar for charity. Aw, what nice young men.

Now we’ve seen everything: Hef files for divorce, cites infidelity. Hers.

And now I’m off to write a short essay in Russian, using lots of past tense. I still can’t find the bathroom in Moscow, however.

You all know about my fear of heights. Look what I found today — BASE jumping from the RenCen here in Detroit:

This makes my head whirl. Someone on the local forum where I found this pointed out it’s at least a few years old; it predates the riverfront improvements. Still. A friend told me once about his roommate, who did this crackbrain pursuit. (Does everyone know what BASE jumping refers to? Building, Antenna, Span, Earth.) He landed badly after jumping from a tall building in Los Angeles, perhaps because he didn’t have time to prepare, perhaps because security guards were chasing him and his buddies up the stairs to the top. In keeping with the agreement they all made ahead of time, the same buddies abandoned him at the bottom, so they wouldn’t be arrested. He screwed up his legs but good, and spent months in a rehab hospital learning to walk again. Good times!

This is the sort of activity that leads to terms like “testosterone poisoning.”

When I rode horses, I became acquainted with the idea there are certain equine personalities that are suited for certain jobs, and no amount of cross-training will ever overcome it. Fortunately, there are disciplines suited for nearly all of them, and thank God for that, because if there weren’t steeplechases left in the world, a lot of hard-charging jumpers would wither on the vine. Which is to say, I guess guys like this do stuff like this because there are no machine-gun nests to charge.

In my webby perambulations of late, I’ve found a bit of bloggage but no grand unifying theories, so let’s just cut to the chase, eh?

For you Chicagoans: Eric Zorn blogged Blago’s book so you don’t have to. Table of contents post here. Sample:

Blagojevich portrays himself as a great and noble and selfless man who fought for the people over the entrenched political interests. I believe this. What I mean by that is that I believe he sees himself this way — that he is nearly blind to his own personal failings.

Which suggests this book is going to be every bit as tedious and repetitive and uninsightful as the series of media interviews he gave in early January of this year. No self awareness. Just self justification.

Last September, here:

Quick tech question for some one who knows: There was a guy at the Dirtbombs concert Friday night with some thing I’ve never seen before. It looked like a horizontal mount for seven count ‘em seven identical digital cameras — Canon PowerShots, I b’lieve. He’d hold it up, they’d all twinkle their autofocus lights and fire as one. What the heck was it? And please don’t say “a horizontal mount for seven cameras.”

UPDATE: J.C. Burns and kind commenter DanG appear to have the answer: It’s how you get the ‘bullet-time’ effect…dollying dimensionally around a frozen or slo-mo image. The rig was similar to this, only wider and with an antenna-like thing above it that could have been a microphone. Think of an old-timey photographer’s flash bar; it was like that, only with cameras instead of flash powder. But I think they’re right — it’s for capturing that Matrix-y effect.

Not quite. Mystery solved:

Get yer old-skool 3-D glasses out … now! Most astute observers have no doubt seen local artist Chris Dean’s work somewhere around the city, whether it’s on those 1800 Tequila billboards or on the walls of the now-defunct CPOP Gallery. And if you’re a regular clubgoer, you’ve probably seen Dean himself at rock shows. He’s the guy lugging that unmistakable rig that includes seven digital cameras, which he uses to create three-dimensional “lenticular” images (you know, like those old Cracker Jack prizes). The artist recently switched from digital art to photography for a show — titled “D3D” — that debuts this Saturday.

A few of you asked when our 48 hour challenge film, “A Little Knowledge,” would be available for viewing. Here it is, on the imperfect 48.tv site, but there you go. You’ll need Flash, a fast connection and forgiveness in your heart.

Why birtherism will flourish forevermore.

Britney Spears was in town last night. The Freep critic was unimpressed; the News’, about the same. I’m wondering what the tickets cost. So far I’ve been pleased my own kid’s musical tastes ran toward the more alternative, i.e., less expensive acts like Paramore. Until I bought tickets for a show next month and paid a surcharge of about 40 percent. And I have to print them on my own computer! Now I see what Eddie Vedder was so pissed about.

Is mental illness afoot in the land? If you say, “Spiders are crawling up the wall! Can’t you see them?” And I say no I can’t but here, let’s take a picture of them; if there are none in the picture will you believe they’re imaginary? And you say, well, OK, and I take the picture and there are no spiders, and you say you cast a spell and made the spiders invisible! Does that suggest disordered thinking to you?

It does to me. Which is only my way of saying the people who are today saying, “Sure, Obama’s school speech is innocuous now. What do you think it looked like before brave patriots stood up and objected, huh?” Those people? Sound insane.

But I’m keeping my mouth shut. I sent an e-mail to my local school board about the administration’s decision on the speech. (They’re delaying it for later use — defensible under the circumstances — but allowing for parental opt-out, which… isn’t.) I hope I struck the right note of arch douchiness; I described myself as disappointed and disillusioned, which I think is just perfect for notes like these, a little bit of parallel redundancy to underline one offense with another. There’s something about writing a j’accuse letter that makes me want to use phrases like “I think not.” You just can never de-smug them entirely.

OK, then. Summer’s mostly over, and the past week — the last week of Kate’s vacation — was lovely. We went to the pool Sunday, and I made an appropriate end-of-summer gesture: I went without sunscreen. Ask me how much I regret my sun wrinkles. Yeah. About that much.

Meanwhile, I spent a chunk of a relaxed weekend catching up with a bit of neglected culture. First, “In the Loop,” one of those movies so small it barely exists, but god, funny as hell. Set in the U.K., Washington and New York in the drumbeat before the Iraq war, it’s sort of a meaner, blacker, harder-to-understand “West Wing,” with Aaron Sorkin’s politics sucked out and extra funny pumped in. I only caught about a third of it, cloaked as it was in thick Scottish burrs and English slang, delivered at a blistering pace. I think I’d need about two more watchings to absorb it all.

The action begins when a somewhat dim British politician tells the BBC that war is “unforseeable,” a word that puts the prime minister’s office into a tizzy and incurs the wrath of Malcolm Tucker, the p.m.’s chief of communication, so gloriously profane his rants edge into poetry. (When the minister steps further into the goo by saying, that sometimes a country must “climb the mountain of conflict,” Tucker accuses him of being a “Nazi Julie Andrews.” It’s the flat-A sound in “Nazi” that kills.) Soon said politician is off to Washington and then to the U.N., trailing aides far smarter than he is, if only at the fine art of ass-kissing and jockeying for favor.

If you have a decent on-demand cable service, you’ll find it on one of the IFC channels for about six or seven bucks. Definitely worth it.

And I got a good way into “Closing Time,” Joe Queenan’s memoir of growing up with a father so drunk and brutal he could only have fathered, well, Joe Queenan, the celebrated master of mean. Reviews tell me this story ends without the customary weepy reconciliation between father and son standard in alcoholism memoirs, and that’s what intrigues me — the bleakness that lies at the heart of a man who can honestly say his father beat him so hard, so often and so unjustly that he finally thrashed every last shred of love out of his own child. The NYT critic notes:

There will be truces near the end, but when the family attends the old man at his deathbed, there is precious little warmth or nostalgia. Two of his daughters consider their father “beyond redemption,” and their mother refuses, for herself and those daughters, to be listed in the obituary. The son feels neither love nor respect; he is there only because “having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son.” Three years later, the anniversary of Joe Sr.’s death passes unnoticed. “My father was dead,” Queenan writes, “and I did not miss him.”

As grim as that sounds, it’s still a vastly entertaining read.

And now it begins. Fall. Still weeks of warm weather ahead, but for all intents and purposes, we must put away our white shoes and put our noses back to the grindstone. I’m packing the sunblock and thinking of projects. How about you?

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Some of you might not have those advantages….

And so on. Some people should be ashamed of themselves.

An embarrassment of riches…

…and the distant thunder of frost. Ack! Mums!