In a dark moment I would describe many of the people in Hank Stuever’s wonderful new book as awful, and maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but certainly they’re my opposite in every way — George Bush-lovin’, Jesus-worshipin’, Red State-occupyin’, exurbia-residin’ Texans. They say tomayta, I say tomahta. And so on. They belong to churches with horrible names like Celebration Covenant, where the sermons come with James Bond themes (“Church Royale 2007″). Their parties for friends require chocolate fountains. Their home decorations make Clark Griswold look Amish. They’ve lost the thread of the Iraq war, and ask what’s going on there now, but lose interest in the answer if it can’t be summed up on a bumper sticker. They’re the sort of people who swallow a radio station’s schmaltzy “Christmas Wish” sermonettes whole, and repay it with happy tears.

And yet Stuever, a Washington Post reporter with whom I likely have a great deal more in common, embedded with these folks for an entire Christmas season (2006), returning for parts of two more, and somehow came to love them. He is a far better person than me, and certainly a more skillful journalist, because the book that came out of this experience — “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present” — pulls off a neat trick, revealing every detail about the way three separate families (and many others) celebrate the holiday, without coming off as jeering or judgmental in any way. Stuever climbed every ladder with Tammie Parnell, an affluent mom with a seasonal business decorating others’ McMansions; he stood in Black Friday queues with Caroll Cavasos, a single mother with too much on her plate but a certain fragile optimism that Jesus is watching over her; and he served as official observer to the assemblage of Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski’s jaw-dropping, computer-controlled, music-synchronized Christmas light display, as well as the birth of Jeff’s consulting business as a holiday lighting engineer.

You didn’t know there was such a niche in the working world? You’ve not been to Frisco, Texas, on the far-flung outer ring of Dallas-Fort Worth exurbia, where everything is new and newer and the discovery of a couple of inconvenient pioneer graves in the route of a new highway can barely slow the work down, let alone stop it. Or maybe you have, because there’s a Frisco everywhere, even in down-and-out states like Ohio or Michigan, spreading like kudzu, high-end malls popping up to serve the residents of all those 6,000-square-foot houses, along with megachurches and fast-casual taco restaurants, big-box stores and the usual accoutrements of affluent-white-folks culture.

They keep Christmas in their hearts in places like this, or at least a version of it, simultaneously over-the-top consumerist and “Christ-centered,” and if you can’t quite reconcile piles and piles of presents under the tree with the story of a humble woman giving birth in a barn, well, then you’ve never stood in the clearinghouse for the Angel Tree effort, which seeks to make Christmas merry for the down-and-out, only even these down-and-out Christmases are oddly upscale, Hefty bags full of gifts bestowed upon people who say, “It’s too much” and mean it literally — one recipient gets enough excess to regift it to the even more impoverished. Tammie Parnell finds Christmas in her heart by decorating the home of a friend dying of cancer. Free of charge, of course, although after she’s finished, she never visits the friend again, and when the woman dies six weeks or so later, she consoles herself by telling a friend who helped, “We totally decorated her house! We brought her so much joy.”

Totally.

Parnell was my least favorite Tinselite, even while it’s clear she and Hank clicked as they decorated all those houses. That’s another paradox of upper-middle-class Christmas, outsourcing the hall-decking, but never mind that. Parnell has the eye and her clients don’t have the time, so let’s let her earn a tidy sum knocking herself out two months out of the year. But I cannot tell a lie: There’s a scene deep into the narrative, where Parnell goes searching for her “total moment” — that more-perfect-than-perfect holiday snapshot that children remember forever — and brings in a $150-an-hour fellow holiday entrepreneur named Cookie the Elf. This moment will leave you either helpless with laughter or sneering in contempt, and maybe both. It’s like this woman watched “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and came away with the idea the Griswold holiday would have been so much better if Cousin Eddie and his family had just stayed home.

But probably you would end up liking her, because Stuever likes her, and Stuever makes her likable. She’s not a bad person, just one who has swallowed Christmas hook, line and tinsel. I think I chose her to channel my displeasure with a culture that never met a moral dilemma or conundrum that couldn’t be explained by an uplifting movie or self-help book (you want to know who buys Mitch Albom’s books? Umm…), that ultimately deals with the uncomfortable or painful by turning away. My heart did soften late in the narrative, when Caroll Cavasos suffers a personal tragedy and keeps her heart open and loving throughout. And it’s hard not to like the Trykoskis, cheerfully childless and still willing to turn their home into an experiment in how much a home electrical grid can bear, mainly for the intellectual challenge of its design.

But it’s very easy to like “Tinsel,” and on behalf of the poor newspaper reporter who could use a fallback for the coming newspocalypse, I beseech you: Buy! You can always give it away for Christmas.

Full disclosure: Hank and I are friends-who-have-never-met, he comments here on occasion, and yours truly is mentioned favorably on page 181. Not that such shameless flattery would ever sway my critical opinion, of course. Oh, and to the FTC: I got an advance reader’s copy free of charge.

Extras:

Buy the book via my Amazon store, making the cycle of kickbacks and corruption complete.

Hank talks a little about the project:

The Trykoski house in (I believe) 2005:

You ask me, everything you need to know about Balloon Boy’s family is that they were on “Wife Swap.” Normal families aren’t on “Wife Swap.” (Or its Fox equivalent, “Trading Spouses,” which went out of production a couple years ago.) The premise — two radically different but equally insane kennels of publicity hounds swap their adult female for two weeks — may have started out as entertainment but is basically a freak show. You tell me this family was on “Wife Swap” and it’s a more powerful signifier than learning dad is a heroin addict. Seriously.

I watched this show maybe three times. Once I think I was trapped in a hotel room. (No, that was “The Swan,” lost to the ages, alas.) I don’t forbid myself trash television, although I justify it with bullshit excuses about being large and containing multitudes, and I try to limit my intake. Some bad reality TV is amusing and some just makes you feel dirty. “Wife Swap”/”Trading Spouses” is in the latter group. (So is “Bridezillas.” That’s for another day.)

The breakout, the week that tipped them over into dirty burlesque, was the “Trading Spouses” episode where the hugely obese insane Christian woman flipped out and started shrieking. (Is it on YouTube? Do you even need to ask?) I saw that one. It wasn’t exactly the equivalent of being at Woodstock, but you got a sense that things weren’t going to be the same afterward. And they weren’t. The next time I watched, one of the families was into both raw food and dirt. They lived in the Iowa outback, and had disturbing theories about germs and medicine and the like. They brushed their teeth with butter and baking soda, ate raw chicken and drank some vile milkshake-y substance every four hours, and the mother woke everyone up in the middle of the night for their shot of sludge.

Everyone has a Scorsesean, camera-pulls-back moment from time to time, where you’re suddenly looking at your disgusting self from a high angle, and I had one then. I said, “Either I turn this shit off or I call Child Protective Services.” I opted for the first. (I did stay tuned long enough to marvel at how equable the other family was, for once. They must have selected from the not-insane file, and drew an attractive family of three from San Francisco, who liked to spend their free time at concerts, restaurants and cozy cafés. Not only did the mother endure Iowa with grace — although she refused to eat raw chicken — the father and son wore the Carhartt coveralls the crazy mom put them in with such style, I half expected them to show up on the runway in Bryant Park the following season.)

I gather the gimmick for balloon-boy’s family was that they’re “storm chasers,” only without the boring college degrees and training. The father, who comes across as an unmedicated manic-depressive permanently stuck on the redline, has many interesting theories about extraterrestrials and what happens inside rotational storms. The wife? Dunno about her, except that she’s 100 percent supportive. Well, good. I hope she’s willing to get a second job to pay the bill that I fervently hope the county emergency responders present them with for this freak show. ABC’s not picking up the tab for this one, pal.

Although what do I know? They probably already have.

And another week lurches to its close. I managed to get a 900-word story turned around on a tight deadline, just in time for Kate to come down with something flu-ish. I don’t know if it’s the pig variety, but she was feverish yesterday and somewhat better today, so fingers crossed. I am washing my hands so often I’m wearing away a layer of skin, but it’s surely coming for one of us. I’m hoping it waits until we can all see “Where the Wild Things Are” this weekend. I remember reading that to Kate when she was little; she would make her hands into terrible claws and make little baby roars. Let the wild rumpus start!

Have a good weekend, all.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the Ralph Lauren Photoshopping story. It all started when Boing Boing called them out for trying to quash criticism of this preposterous ad image by getting the blog post pulled as a copyright violation. Things worsened (for Ralph, anyway) when it was revealed that the digitally squished model in question, Filippa Hamilton, had been fired by the fashion house for reaching a bovine 120 pounds. (Note: She is 5-feet-10.)

Yesterday, however, Photoshop Disasters, a truly amusing site that tracks these things, found yet another example of heinous manipulation by Ralph Lauren, in which a woman was turned into a “human Bratz doll.” (Original post at Photoshop Disasters.)

I’m baffled by this, because it seems that in all the howling about unrealistic body image and the pressure to be thin — arguments that have been growing hair for years — no one is asking the obvious, i.e., can’t Ralph Lauren afford better Photoshop artists? And if not, why? (Dump your stock!) Look at that latter image and ask yourself why whoever put this girl in a digital vise couldn’t be bothered to also manipulate her right hand, which looks like it was transplanted from a nearby cross-dressing linebacker. Photoshop is a skill, and one of the best articles I’ve read in recent years was the New Yorker piece about the world’s most well-paid Photoshop artist (name lost to the ether, sorry), a man who is kept on retainer by celebrities to handle all the pictures they have control over. (Which is to say, all the ones the paps don’t shoot. Yay paps.) He does the Louis Vuitton ads, which is why you don’t recognize their celebrity model (Madonna). If Ralph Lauren’s company can’t afford at least one of his assistants, they’ve got more trouble than some jeering from the internets.

But since Jezebel brought it up, this seems the time to get something off my chest.

I need to say a few words in defense of Bratz.

All conscientious parents hate Bratz, for lo, the Bratz are eminently hate-able. Conservative parents in particular hate Bratz. James Lileks? Hates ‘em. Rod Dreher? Hates ‘em. The latter fell victim to the curse of all overscheduled pundits the other day, and linked them to current events (see the link, but if you’re too busy, it starts with P and ends with olanski). It used to be feminists who wrote bilge like this, but I guess it’s spread:

A culture that markets Bratz to little girls, and that at nearly every turn tries to turn them into erotic objects, is not a culture whose fingers pointing at Polanski are entirely clean.

Sigh. I hated Bratz too, once upon a time, the big-eyed, clubfooted dolls dressed like streetwalkers, named like starlets (Jade, Yasmin, Cloe — yes, spelled that way) and interested in one thing only (collecting bling). I called them the Li’l Ho’s, Skankz, everything I could think of. But I came to change my mind, and even though Bratz are in eclipse now, their cultural impact on nervous parents lives on, and I’m here with one word of advice:

Relax.

I kept my house a Bratz-free zone, but the small temptresses found their way in, just the same. Kate’s friend Sophia would bring them with her when she came to play, and even though this was in Ann Arbor, and every Ann Arbor child eventually becomes familiar with the sort of parent who bans toys on political or philosophical grounds, I decided to hold my fire and just watch them play with Yasmin and Sluté for a while. Guess what Yasmin and Sluté did in their imaginary world? They went to the playground, goofed around, practiced martial-arts kicks (lethal with those giant feet) — in short, they behaved exactly the way the girls holding them did, because that’s what dolls are for children, and always have been, and always will.

I’m glad I did this. I’m glad my neighbor brought Barbie into our house, too, another toy I swore I’d never buy. My experience as a parent with Barbie was exactly the same as with Bratz, and I was forced to admit the truth: A lot of women are walking around with advanced degrees based in part on elaborate theses of the female image in pop culture, theories that turned on the fact Barbie had an impossible waist-to-hip ratio or leg length or something, and these theories were, in a word, bullshit. When you have children you owe it to them to see the world through their eyes, and when they look at Barbie, even when they look at Yasmin, Sluté and the girlz, they don’t see sexy. They see pretty. When we forbid them from having these things, and use loaded, confusing code words like “inappropriate” or “unrealistic,” we’re making them see the world through our eyes, and folks, they shouldn’t have to do that. And when we fear that seeing a doll with plump lips and a short skirt will turn our little girls into prosti-tots, that’s just creepy.

Not long after I made peace with the visiting Bratz, Christmas rolled around. I’ve always believed that Christmas should be a time when you get one thing you didn’t ask for, and one thing you did, and that year, Kate asked for Bratz. I went to Target and considered my choices. Roxxi, Katia, Nevra — there were so many to choose from, each more horrible than the last. I stood there comparing this trashy detail to that trashy detail, until my brain finally short-circuited and I went all in. I chose the trampiest one of the lot, maybe Roxxi, I can’t remember. She wore a micro-mini and a shirt that showed her belly button, but what really sold her was her fun-fur shrug and day-glo hair extensions. She looked exactly like a woman you’d see standing on a street corner near a 24-hour adult bookstore, peering into the windows of passing cars.

Kate was thrilled to find her under the tree on Christmas morning, and she went off to introduce her to Barbie and the rest of the girls. Within three years, all the Bratz, and all the Barbies, lived in a seminude, dismembered tangle in a Rubbermaid box in the basement with all the other outgrown toys. Perhaps they planted the seed of trashy dressing in my darling daughter, but the last time I checked she was so modest she locks the bathroom door to change her clothes and refuses to wear shorts that rise too high above her knee. She’s an anti-Brat, essentially.

(I saw Sophia recently, too. She’s a top student and multi-sport, confident athlete. I don’t think she owns any fishnet hose, and if she did, it would be for a jazz dance class.)

So swallow your distaste, parents. Those handmade, hemp rag dolls you’ve been buying from indigenous artists might make you feel good, but your daughter wants the li’l clubfootz with a passion for fashion. A few years farther down this road, I’m here to tell you it all comes out in the pop-culture wash.

Because I have another ridiculous day ahead, an all-bloggage Wednesday, and we’ll try for something better by tomorrow, eh?

A contributor to the Times of London considers the problem of celebrity culture:

First and foremost, there is the opportunity cost of interminable second-hand gossip; preoccupation with celebrities is an appalling squandering of human consciousness.

The centuries of prattle, of air time and screen time, the miles of column inches are a sickening misuse of the gift of life, of health and adequate nutrition, of freedom from oppression, of the access we now have to the world of knowledge and the arts. They are stolen from thought about, or discussion of, things that are truly important or worthwhile; fighting poverty, disease and the iniquities and injustice of the world; the profound joy afforded by literature and the arts; questions about the meaningful purpose of life.

The celebrity culture is a black hole sucking up light. It is not only a manifestation of the cretinisation or tabloidisation of our culture but further cretinises it.

There’s a certain kind of scold who loves to tell you your dirty little pleasure is something to be ashamed of, that it’s wrong to read People when you could be reading something with a long subtitle. And then there’s the kind who makes a single moment spent contemplating Paris Hilton sound like a crime against the cosmos. Raymond Tallis is the second kind.

What were we just talking about yesterday? Oh, right: Pay cuts. Ahead of the curve, again. Meanwhile, on Wall Street:

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

Whose compensation do you feel better about? The average paycheck at Goldman Sachs, at $743,000, or the airline pilot at $34,000? Come the revolution, let’s carry our torches together.

And now I’m off to Troy, which at the moment feels about as far away as the one they rolled the horse into. Have a great day, all.

Yesterday was a holiday, I discovered when I started my police rounds. Let me see the hands of those who are a) employed in the private sector; b) had yesterday off; and c) don’t live in Columbus, Ohio.

Yes, I thought so. Columbus Day is one of those holidays we give to public-sector employees in lieu of more money. [Pause.] Just looked at that sentence, and reflected for a moment on the traditional deal we make with public-sector employment: Less money, more holidays, better benefits. For a long time, that was the way of the world. The recession may reorder things a bit. I know many, many people in the private sector who have, in the last year, had to swallow pay cuts. Not a no-raise year, not a watch-your-raise-be-eaten-by-health-care-cost-increases year, but an across-the-board decrease, accompanied by a bigger bite from health care, for a grand total of, well, a lot. Ten, 15 percent, in some cases.

Public-sector workers have been insulated from that, somewhat, at least the ones with contracts. A while back I related my jaw-drop moment while reading about the benefits bestowed upon Detroit city employees, including health care for children up to age twenty-damn-FIVE, and more days off than Ronald Reagan enjoyed in his last years in office. The new mayor, Dave Bing, has baldly stated this is unsustainable. In my own little burg, 2010 means contract-negotiation time, and while no one’s said it out loud yet, there are whispers of haircuts all around. Many other states have had public employees on unpaid furloughs already, however; I’m a follower of Amy Welborn’s Twitter feed, and down in Alabama, I gather she’s been trying to get her driver’s license renewed, enduring Soviet-style lines in the few offices that remain open, and still hasn’t been successful.

All this by way of saying that if you got Columbus Day off, and you got paid for it, I hope you did something wonderful, because that feels like a holiday past its sell-by date.

In the newspaper business, we never got the B-level holidays off — Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day, MLK Day and so on. Plus we got the lousy paychecks, too. You see why we’re so surly and wear cheap shoes.

A shabby guy on a crummy bicycle just rode past my house, checking out the recycling bins. Hard times in Michigan.

So. I want to tell you what we did this past weekend, now that I’ve finally exposed the secrets of middle-school dances. After watching “Whip It” the week before, we thought we might check out the local roller derby. And so we did: The Detroit Roller Girls met the Dairyland Dolls of Madison, Wisconsin Saturday at the Masonic Temple. It was a doubleheader, the two travel teams and then the varsity, and it was? Wonderful. Better than “Whip It,” because it wasn’t pretty actresses playing tough, but real tough girls who, you can tell, do not require a security guard to escort them to their cars after the crowd has gone home.

The bout itself was so lopsided — we left at halftime when the score was 151-8, or some such — that I suspect the Dairyland Dolls sent the junior-junior varsity. The Dolls had no D, they had no O, but they did have helmets festooned with Holstein markings. (Where was Wisconsin in its state marketing before cows became kitschy?) But it was still fun, and I think I discovered my roller-derby name, which you may address me by, but don’t tell its owner, who will hunt me down and kill me for theft. Ready? Keyser Suze.

The Detroit Derby Girls field four separate teams. Best name: Detroit Pistoffs.

And now I commence 72 hours of top-speed work, made that way in part by the Columbus Day holiday. Expect thin gruel for a while.

Grosse Pointe is a community that honors tradition. (Sometimes to a fault. That’s for another day.) Lots of people who live here as adults grew up here, went away to college, and came back like homing pigeons, because they like the continuity of the place, its small-town feel, its bedrock of lifers and rotating cast of newcomers, drawn by the beauty, the schools, the lake.

What that means is, when the Grosse Pointe War Memorial (a community center) announces the dates for its middle-school dances, many of the parents you know will remember attending them when they were 12 years old. Or, like my friend Michael, whose son grew up here with his ex-wife, will have a different memory:

“I remember how scantily clad the girls were,” he told me as I prepared to drive Kate to her first one. Michael went to Catholic school, so he has a certain Catholic-schoolboy idea of what constitutes scantily clad. That’s what I thought, anyway.

Five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot, and beheld two girls shivering by the door. On a chilly October evening, they were wearing shorts and tank tops. I immediately wondered if the other thing I heard about the dances, which everyone calls War Dances, was true — that they were cesspools of drinking, smoking and oh-my-god-I-can’t-even-imagine. I hadn’t believed that, because I thought how stupid can the people who run these things be? The procedure for just buying a ticket made in loco parentis sound like dangerous permissiveness. There was a special ID only a parent could buy, after swearing your child was a lawfully enrolled student of the school system, and you couldn’t buy a ticket without the ID. There were strict hours, pickup and dropoff policies. No one would be allowed to leave before 10 p.m.; there were no ins-and-outs. I think you’d have an easier time getting into the White House.

On the other hand, there were those girls, dressed for the Fourth of July in October.

Kate was no help. I insisted she dress appropriately, but she never told me why, month after month, I was picking up the only girl in long pants and sleeves. She said shorts and tanks were just what everyone else wore, and I chalked it up to one of the quirkier sub-traditions, one that, needless to say, I would hold the line against.

Well. This year I finally got to set foot inside the place, when I offered to chaperone. It immediately became clear why summer outfits are the uniform, and I smacked my forehead for stupidity: When you put a couple hundred sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders into a ballroom and crank up the tunes, it takes about eight minutes for the room to reach the temperature of a sauna. The ballroom looks out over the lake, but the million-dollar view is gone by the third song, as condensation covers the floor-to-ceiling windows. At the stroke of 7:30, the doors open and the kids pile up at the check-in tables, where they must display the special ID and have it checked against the computer-generated list of names. No ticket sales at the door. If you haven’t paid for a ticket by noon on dance day, you are turned away — no exceptions. Lady Gaga is already blasting from the ballroom, and they’re eager to get moving. Within 20 minutes, nearly everyone is there, the lights are down, the light outside — what you can see of it through the condensation — has faded into gray, and we’re war-dancing.

What that means is, and this will be familiar to anyone who ever attended a middle-school dance of any sort, clots of three to seven girls dance together in constellations, while boys talk in similar-size knots, or else sit in the chairs that line the walls. And that is pretty much how it goes for the next two and a half hours.

After everyone checks in, we set up the refreshments, which consist of ice water and lemonade. The one parent-volunteer holdover from last year rolled out a cart with what seemed like an excessive number of water pitchers. We refilled them all three or four times through the night, and for a solid hour, all we did was pour, pour, pour. As soon as we could set down a dozen cups, a dozen kids would pile out, red-faced, throw down the ice water like marathoners, discard the cups and head back into the heat. Lady Gaga gave way to Beyoncé, who gave way to Mylie Cyrus, who gave way to half a dozen artists I’ve never heard of. When I got tired of pouring I would circle the perimeter of the floor, careful always to avert my gaze from my own kid, to whom I’m promised I would give no indication of our relationship. Girls dancing, boys watching — check. Then I’d leave, because I was dressed in long pants and long sleeves, and brother, it was hot in there.

I asked the man who, along with his wife, organizes these affairs, how the drugs-and-alcohol rumors got started. He said the only incident he’d known of was about three years ago, when some eighth-grade girls showed up drunk, got past check-in and promptly barfed on the dance floor. Two police officers monitor the doors and occasionally do a perimeter trot-around. The bathroom is a two-stall affair with the door left open to the hallway. The no-entry-without-ID policy eliminates drop-ins, and things have gone smoothly pretty much forever.

At 10 p.m. sharp — you could set your watch — the lights come on, the music stops, and the whole crew piles out like puppies to meet the line of parents lined up for the trip home. I made one last pass through the ballroom, which, though emptying swiftly, still retained its heat.

I wished I were wearing shorts, too.

Bloggage? Some good stuff today:

An interview with Maurice Sendak (HT: Laura Lippman) about his enduring children’s classic, and the upcoming movie adaptation. Some great evidence of why editors aren’t always right:

The entire staff at the publishing house were keen on my changing the word “hot” to “warm” on the last page. Because “hot” meant “burn.”

(For some reason this reminds me of the time on the old Dick Van Dyke show, when Laura wrote a charming children’s book, and Rob, the envious professional writer, wanted to work on it. He changed “sad” to “morose.”)

A long segment from Rachel Maddow, but she just nails the Nobel and is smarter than everything else I read about Friday’s news, and that includes Tom Friedman’s stupid “the speech he should give in Oslo” paint-by-numbers kit. (If there any column-writing trope more stale than “the speech he should give”? Yes: the “open letter.” Now you know.)

Finally, for Stratford fans only: Douglas Campbell died recently. The Scottish-Canadian actor was 87 and a founding member of the greatest Shakespeare company in North America. Robert Fulford explains why he mattered, in the National Post.

As sleepy as I am in the morning, there aren’t many reports coming out of the radio that make me stop what I’m doing and turn up the volume, convinced I’m experiencing audio hallucinations. Today was different.

I gather this was the reaction in Oslo, too, where the assembled reporters were said to “gasp.” I’ll say. Talk about a story that writes itself:

The committee’s choice of Obama from among 205 nominees appears in part to be a continued rebuke to the Bush administration’s go-it-alone approach to world bodies and alliances, including its decision to go to war in Iraq without U.N. approval.

No! Really?

It’s hard to know what to think. You don’t ask for a Nobel for yourself, and the WashPost story points out the deadline for nominations was February 1, not even two weeks after he took office. On the other hand, the Cairo speech was extraordinary, and just as necessary. I won’t say this was the right thing to do, but it’s at least somewhat defensible. Besides, it’s the Nobel committee’s award, not ours. They can give it to anyone they want.

That said, I look forward to February, when Barack Obama will be given an Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

And if Limbaugh, Beck et al stroke out over this, I say we put him on Mount Rushmore.

Let’s look elsewhere for commentary. Ah, Twitter. Trending topic: Noble Peace Prize. Comedy gold: RT: @tienmao: When awoken shortly before 6 a.m. with the news that he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama responded, “What? Shut the fuck up.”

That’s appropriate. The blowback from this could potentially be a bitch.

Is there anything else to discuss? Discuss!

I’m off to do the crossword and make it to my Friday morning meeting. Chilly, dreary rain today, so I won’t be getting there on the bike. Maybe the president will look in my direction and blow a gentle puff from his cheeks, parting the clouds and making the sun shine upon the land.

See you Monday.

The NYT reports on the New Jersey governor’s race, and states pretty baldly that the incumbent, Jon Corzine, is making his opponent’s size a campaign issue:

It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once. …Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.

The story includes a link to the slo-mo FatCam ad, and maybe I’ve been living in the corpulent Midwest too long, but I don’t see it. He’s a big guy for sure, but I don’t see the moving-in-different-directions part, although it could be my monitor. Like many Americans, almost everything I know about New Jersey I learned from watching “The Sopranos,” and let me just say, Christie is no Bobby Bacala. (Neither is Bobby Bacala; he wore prosthetic flab for much of the series.) But the story raises an interesting point: No language is as minutely fly-specked as campaign ad copy, and surely the ad, which says Christie “threw his weight around,” was designed as a poke in the spare tire.

There aren’t many groups of people you can pick on with impunity, but fat people are one of them, because it’s all their fault, you know. If they wanted to be thin, they could, if they’d just get some exercise, scrape half the food off their plates, park in the far reaches of the lot, have different parents, etc. I suppose, if Christie wanted to make an issue out of it, he could mention that Corzine nearly died in a car crash when the gubernatorial SUV crashed on the Garden State Parkway, and that his injuries were surely exacerbated by the fact he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The only reason it’s permissible to criticize fatties is because obesity drives up health-care costs, etc. — you’ve heard this before. So do car crashes with unrestrained human beings bouncing around inside.

Of course, that would be seen as extreme dirty pool. Better to fight back with humor, as former Baywatch baby Nicole Eggert demonstrates. On the other hand, humor is likely in short supply in any political campaign. Especially in New Jersey.

Fun fact to know and tell: New Jersey is one of the leanest states, according to CalorieLab Inc., which ranked it 42nd in obesity last year. So says the NYT. I’d never have imagined.

Living in Michigan resets many of your meters, including the Hard Times gauge. We’re in the midst of a California-style budget fiasco, and some of the nickels and dimes the state is looking to pick up are fascinating. There’s a proposal on the table to allow bars to stay open until 4 a.m., if they’re willing to pay $1,500 for an enhanced license. It’s estimated to raise $13 million and change, not enough to make a huge difference, but what the hell. The restaurant business says, “Great idea, but that’s way too much to charge.” Municipalities say, um, no. Just what a hard-drinking state like Michigan needs: More time to drink.

Fun fact to know and tell: The city commissioner of Royal Oak, a suburb with lots of bars and restaurants, is named Terry Drinkwine. I love reality. It’s so much more amusing than fiction.

But for real drama on the hard-times front, you couldn’t beat the scene at Cobo Center yesterday. The city had announced it would be making emergency grants of federal money to families in danger of losing their homes or utilities. They had the means to help about 3,400 families; 50,000 people showed up. The crowd got restless, then angry, and six people had to be taken away by ambulance.

Apparently the problem was rumors that they’d be handing out cash on the barrelhead. Well, that and the 28 percent unemployment rate.

OK, then. I have just enough time to try to beat Eric Zorn at the crossword before I have to go to the gym, in my vain attempt to stave off looking like Chris Christie. At least I’ll have rock-hard abs under all that flab.

Someone is remaking “Red Dawn.” I know, I know: why? It’s perfect the way it is. What could ever top this mid-’80s Cold War paranoid fantasy? What’s the new story, now that the Evil Empire has been defanged and we still have the memory of those indelible performances — Patrick Swayze, at 32, playing a high-school boy; Ron O’Neal as an alternate-reality Che Guevara; and who can forget Harry Dean Stanton behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp, hollering “Avenge me, son!”

I can’t answer those questions. All I can say is, thank God Michigan is giving out these fat tax incentives, so the “Red Dawn” crew can come to Detroit and blow shit up:

(If you’re impatient, drag the playhead to the 40-second mark.) I don’t know what other American city would let you get away with that. Fortunately, we have a lot of empty buildings to spare.

On the downside, sometimes a post-apocalyptic wasteland behaves like one.

A little Googling tells me the updated story involves a military invasion of the U.S. by the Chinese. There’s a blog, too, with some great deets. A military convoy was photographed rolling down one of the downtown freeway legs on Sunday, something you likely haven’t seen in Fort Wayne lately.

I’d like to see the Chinese try to take this city. Of course, first they’d have to want to. I envision a scene like Tiananmen Square, only in reverse.

OK, enough small talk. Count me among one of the 1 million subscribers who will miss Gourmet magazine. It hurts even more because I’m a latecomer; I only started subscribing it a year ago. Before then, I thought it wasn’t my cup of expensive tea, but I was stupid not to trust that anything Ruth Reichl put her hands on would be worth my time. Far from being a snooty festival of luxury, it’s a well-written tribute to food and food culture, and the recipes are wonderful.

Kim Severson, another food writer I’d follow anywhere, takes a look at the death of Gourmet in the NYT today, and I think she gets to the heart of it right here:

Although it was easy to paint Gourmet as the food magazine for the elite, it was a chronicler of a nation’s food history, from its early fascination with the French culinary canon to its discovery of Mediterranean and Asian flavors to its recent focus on the source of food and the politics surrounding it.

In the decade since Ruth Reichl took over as editor, she underlined everything from the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida to dishes like chicken and dumplings that could be on the stove, simmering, in 15 minutes.

That’s what I’ll miss about it, anyway. It really chaps my ass that Gourmet had to fold so that Vogue and Anna Wintour could live to fight another day.

Finally, I took Kate to see “Whip It” over the weekend, another shot-in-Detroit movie that seemed worth our time, and it was, although I’ve now come to see the PG-13 rating as the enemy of parents everywhere. It’s funny — after we came home and Kate went to bed, Alan and I watched the R-rated “Adventureland” on cable, and the latter, while more explicit in its F-bombs and so on, took much of the same material (young-adult sexuality, in part) and treated it with more respect and less snickering than the PG-13 “Whip It.” It’s not that one was exploitive and the other one not, it’s just that “Whip It” had several scenes and dialogue exchanges that seemed tacked on to avoid a straight PG and make the film edgier, somehow. All I know is, I feel more protected by lead actresses who refuse to take their bras off on camera than the MPAA ratings board.

Other than that, however, it was a pretty good little movie, exploring female empowerment through roller derby. I know Jeff Borden’s a big fan, and I had a twinge, remembering our departed Ashley Morris, whose wife Hana was a New Orleans roller girl. (Ashley chose her stage name, and crowned his wife, a native of the Czech Republic, “Soviet Bloc.”) Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore and Kristen Wiig do most of their own skating, and those girls certainly tear it up. I almost — not quite, but almost — forgave the cheesy product placement Barrymore snuck in there. Did you know a roller girl can never wear too much Lash Blast? Now you know.

After two nights, I think I’m finally caught up on my rest for the next few days. Sorry to be getting here late again, but ah well. Now to the giant pile of copy I’ve been putting off editing. Next time you see me, I’ll be cross-eyed and ink-stained. Have a good rest of the day.

How did I manage to plan my week so everything happens on Monday or Tuesday? Bottom line is, I have work on top of work to do today, and in jettisoning chores, the blog draws the short straw today. Regular readers know I consider this my daily warmup and batting practice, and you watch: I’m gonna pull a writing muscle today, I just know it.

Anyhoo, I’m not going to have time to write anything fun until late afternoon, so let’s just bag it today, eh? Open thread to take wherever you want. I’m participating in a fun thread with one of my Facebook friends over the Sight & Sound best-films lists; did you know there are people in the world who consider “Raging Bull” to be overrated? Bah.

But you can talk about Afghanistan, too. You’ll just have to do it without me.