Challenge filmmaking is perverse. Take something that has to be done slowly and painstakingly, and add the element of speed and deadlines and kitchen-sink required elements to it, and you’re virtually assured of a substandard final product. Add creative people to the mix, who never met a job they were 100 percent satisfied with, because if only they’d made this tiny change and tweaked this and rewrote that and how much time do we have left? Nine minutes? This’ll only take about eight, eight’n a half. Piece of cake… Well, you see how things can go.

That said, we have a great team this time. Fingers crossed. Gun’s at 7 p.m. Some tweeting/photoblogging will likely ensue, barring total disaster. Check back.

I warned you of a potential rant on the Asian carp issue. Another skirmish in this strange battle is taking place now in Illinois, where state and federal officials dumped more than 2,000 gallons of rotenone, a fish poison, into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (there’s a waterway with a romantic name, eh?) in a last-ditch effort to keep the bastards out of the Great Lakes. The kill has already netted 200,000 pounds of piscine collateral damage and a single Asian carp, although more way well turn up as the decomposition process continues.

I’ve been reading about this invasive species for a while now, never with anything other than dread. Like the three-eyed fish of the Springfield Reservoir — “Blinky,” and thanks, Wikipedia — they portend nothing good, even while an army of Mr. Burnses facilitated their journey up the Mississippi River system.

Here’s where the rant comes in. Eric Sharp, outdoors writer for the Detroit Free Press, raised the roof pretty well last month, explaining how the species was originally introduced to eat algae in Arkansas sewage lagoons, with this priceless, stomach-souring detail from a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report, that the original plan stipulated “carp raised in the sewage lagoons could be sold as food to people to defray some of the costs of treating the sewage.” Mmm, pass the drawn butter. The carp were also used by Southern fish farmers to clean their own facilities.

Of course there were escapes. Of course something could have been done when the problem was still containable. Of course nothing was done. Of course an unholy government-business alliance was responsible. Sharp writes:

I found a story I wrote nearly 10 years ago about Jerry Rasmussen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who by 1990 was trying desperately to warn people about the potential threat from the carp.

But he was called on the carpet by his bosses and told to shut up after the fish farmers complained to their friends in Congress, the “Arkansas mafia” of politicians allied with the Clinton administration. When Rasmussen refused to be muzzled, the USFWS tried to eliminate his job.

What’s the problem with Asian carp, besides the fact they’re imports? They grow to the size of monsters. They jump from the water at the sound of boat motors (this video is pretty amazing) and have actually broken boaters’ noses and caused other injuries. But their biggest threat is how they displace native species. It’s safe to say that once these behemoths reach the Great Lakes, it’s only a matter of time before they do serious damage to the trout, steelhead and salmon species that support much of our tourism. I’m trying to imagine these fuckers in the Au Sable or Manistee River, some of the greatest trout waters in the world, accessible to any visitor who can buy a fishing license. Actually, I’m trying not to. Because that would be the end of it, for sure.

In the 19th century, the Au Sable was populated by grayling, graceful native species with a fanciful, sail-like dorsal fin. Easy to catch and delicious to eat, they were wiped out by overfishing — they say the tourists piled them, literally piled them, on the riverbank, just because they could — and, of course, logging, Michigan’s original environmental sin. The clear-cutting of virtually the entire state in the 1800s provided the seed money for the industrial revolution that followed, but the use of the fast-running rivers of the north as logging chutes to the lakes were disastrous to grayling, scouring the bottom and destroying their hatcheries. Grayling only live in Alaska now, for the most part.

Nature keeps teaching us these lessons, and we keep refusing to learn them. The Burmese python is establishing a beachhead in Florida. Now carp in the north. Maybe someday they’ll all mutate, grow legs and lungs, and add us to their breakfast menu. It would serve us right.

Rant over. Now I have to put on my screenwriting head. I’m thinking sci-fi — giant, walking fish that glow in the dark and eat poodles. Whatever, I’ll be in and out over the weekend, and you are encouraged to check back. Action!

Warning: Major language nerdosity ahead.

There are a bunch of billboards around town right now. Advertising a new smartphone, they proclaim it “a bare-knuckled bucket of does.” Every time I pass, I think of deer. Every time. The ads suggest a certain dystopian menace, and does — as in a deer, a female deer — are not menacing creatures, for the most part. I’m not alone. Language consultant and blogger Nancy Friedman writes:

Only the tagline, buried at the bottom of the ad, solves the riddle: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.”

What we have here, folks, is anthimeria gone bad: a verb (third-person, present-tense to do) treated as a noun. And because said verb ends in an S and is spelled exactly the same as a real noun, we end up in a bucketful of don’t go there.

Anthimeria, I learn from further research, is the use of any word that’s normally one part of speech as another. For years I’ve been railing against impact — a NOUN, people, a NOUN — used as a verb: The cuts impacted the teacher’s union, or, if you really want to pile on the 21st century usage, The cuts negatively impacted the teacher’s union.

As frequently happens when the forces of good battle the forces of evil, however, we’re losing. A drugstore display I saw the other day:

Yikes.

In the case of the bucket of does, this might be one case where I’d advocate hip-hop spelling. At least it would make sense that way: bare-nuckled bucket o’ duz, yo.

OK, then. About once a week I feel the need to sleep in, and today was one of them. I’m getting a late start on a busy day, so we’re going to make today a grab bag of this ‘n’ that and links ‘n’ stuff. Ready? Let’s begin with that other always-evolving institution, marriage:

I’m wondering what it would do to the atmosphere at our breakfast table if I marched in one morning and said, I’m telling my lawyer I’d like a hefty seven-figure sum to stay with you. Probably it would crack everyone up, but that’s what you get when you don’t look like Mrs. Tiger Woods in a bikini — comedy.

Jim at Sweet Juniper had an eventful Thanksgiving. Read all about it. May I just pause here and thank the bloggers of the world who write about parenthood and family life as well as Jim does? Say what you will, but very few newspapers ever presented anything as wonderful as that brief essay. Parenthood — or, almost always, motherhood — was either presented Bombeck-style or Albom-style and very rarely like this.

I have a whole rant cued up for the Asian carp issue, probably not one that’s of interest to you people who live outside the Great Lakes, but I’ll spare you today. Just know that once again, we’re learning about the hazards of non-native species introduced into complex ecosystems. The hard way.

Gym, shower, crossword, shopping. I’ve got a whole bucket of does on line today. Have a good one.

I was reading the New York Times special “winter drinks” issue when it occurred to me that my subset of the baby boom might go down in history as the Lost Generation of Cocktails. Just the first three paragraphs left me feeling I’d been parachuted into a very strange land, or maybe suffered a stroke and woke up with a type of reader’s aphasia. See what it does for you:

For a drink with a ball gag in its mouth, the Night Marcher has a lot to say about where cocktail culture may be heading.

Some major themes in fashionable bars lately: small, elegant, stemmed glassware; arm garters; house-made bitters; a seriousness that is hard to distinguish from humorlessness; gin.

Some major themes in the Night Marcher, a drink that one owner of the Tar Pit, a bar that will open in Los Angeles later this month, calls “our ambassador”: a large, grimacing tiki mug; bondage gear; store-bought Cholula hot sauce; a sense of humor that is hard to distinguish from weirdness; rum.

A drink has a mouth? Into which one can insert a ball gag? And themes? Bondage gear?

Of all the jobs I never held, I may miss bartending the most. One of my secret social fears is that I’ll have some people over for dinner one night, handle the front door and the coat-hanging with ease, and be struck dumb by a request for a Manhattan or, worse, a Rob Roy. With a few exceptions, mixing drinks — and especially cocktails with ball gags — leaves me feeling like those dreams where you’re giving a speech naked.

I don’t know where I went wrong. My dad had bar ware and could make anything. There was a citrus squeezer that captured the seeds, a wooden mallet for cracking ice, jiggers and shot glasses in all sizes, an elegant bottle opener, swizzle sticks in glass/stainless/plastic, and shakers of various types. He didn’t have a bar, but he could stand at the kitchen counter and mix up anything from a Tom Collins to a pitcher of martinis and serve it to you in the correct glass. (Mostly; he didn’t go much for the stemmed stuff, but I always thought martini glasses were a bit too James Bond for people in our demographic.)

My mother could do all this, too, but left it to him, because that was his job at the end of the day — making and serving the drinks. They had one, maybe two, and proceeded to dinner. It was what adults did.

When I started drinking, I started with beer, the classic choice of teens everywhere. Beer was easier to get and easier to steal from your parents, at least if they kept a second refrigerator in the basement stocked with Stroh’s or Budweiser. Beer is an acquired taste, and for a good long time this was the best thing about it, in that it was hard to drink quickly and virtually required nursing, preventing overindulging.

But the big alcohol trend of my youth were the so-called pop wines, Boone’s Farm and Annie Green Springs among them, sweet and sticky and perfect for getting your 16-year-old girlfriend loaded, in hopes of getting some before the inevitable vomiting on the front lawn (if you were lucky). No one really drank them much beyond high school, but I think they set the template for my generation’s lack of cocktail literacy. Because pop wines were followed by wine coolers, premixed sangrias, Zima and other crimes against humanity. Not everybody likes beer, even after you’ve developed the ability to drink like a grownup. But in that interregnum between legal drinking age and true adulthood (when wine with actual corks entered the picture), they were what served for cocktails for people my age, and with the exception of an occasional summer treat of frozen daiquiris or Slurpee-machine margaritas from a Mexican restaurant, they were what people my age drank.

My friend Becky tended bar (under the tutelage of our own MarkH), and what I learned from her was the following: If you want to keep a bartender happy, don’t order strawberry daiquiris or sloe gin fizzes. We used to go to her place, a restaurant/cocktail lounge connected to a hotel adjacent to the OSU campus, to watch her work (and drink her occasional “mistakes”). I once observed her nearly blow a gasket when the Ohio Women’s Republican Club descended on the joint and tied her up with blenderful after blenderful of fruity concoctions. She taught me that “and water” is music to a barkeep’s ears, advice I took to heart. In a mellow mood and during slow periods she would experiment with new formulations, but I don’t think the Brown Robe or Pink Bunny — both conceived during a beautiful Easter Sunday when “The Robe” was playing on the bar TV — ever caught on.

A brief pop-cult interlude: The radio ads for Annie Green Springs went like this:

Sold my suits and pawned my watches,
bought some Annie Green Springs wine.
Now I’m going up to the country,
gonna find my peace of mind.

Movin’ up with Annie Green Springs,
city’s not the place for me.
Movin’ up with Annie Green Springs,
to a place I’d rather be.

Let’s set aside, for now, the rather disturbing picture that such a ditty conjures, of a man happily embracing drunkenness and unemployment. My brother pointed it out to me one day when I was in junior high, chuckling over the idea of selling wine with a wino’s ballad. It was a funny, singable 15 seconds of song, anyway. Some years ago I was reading a profile of Warren Zevon, which described a dark time of underemployment in his past, when he was so hard up he was forced to write jingles for an undrinkable wine called Annie Green Springs. Sometime after that, I met the man himself, sang him that jingle and asked if it was his. He looked at me like I was insane and said, and I quote, “No.”

But you know who did write it? Professor Google says? BOZ SCAGGS. How would I know this stuff otherwise? Maybe wrecking the newspaper business will turn out to be worth it. You know what else? I remember reading a story in Time magazine around that time, about the trend in pop wine. And guess what? Google found that, too. You marvel, you.

Cocktails came back into vogue a while back, in the ’90s. Martini shakers suddenly started appearing on wedding registries, but by then I felt set in my ways. Inexpensive wine was everywhere by then, and when I came home from work, that’s what we drank, unless it was summer, when I’d have a cold beer on the back steps, like the proletarian slob I always suspected I am. But cocktails continue to haunt me. There’s a passage in an Elmore Leonard book, “52 Pick-up,” where a blackmailer is taunting his mark, the latter a man who started life in a blue collar and traded up to white:

Here comes sport, now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift. Right?

Until I read that it never occurred to me that the Budweiser in my hand was a social marker, but of course it is. The ’90s were also the time when designer beer came along, when someone was always pressing a bottle of some raspberry lager into your hand. This trend seems to have moved on, and thank God for that, because some of that was nasty-ass beer. Last I heard, hipsters in their 20s had rediscovered Pabst Blue Ribbon. Ha ha.

We’ve gone on at some length, now, and we still haven’t solved my cocktail problem. I’m making some progress on my own. There’s a container of simple syrup on my refrigerator door, mixed up last summer when Alan and I went through a mojito phase with mint from our container garden. I can make margaritas in the blender. But the drinks my parents made like it was second nature, gin rickeys and whiskey sours and various collinses, are beyond me. I guess I could look up the recipes online, but I don’t have the right mixers and I certainly don’t keep maraschino cherries on hand.

And so I sit, today, confronting this picture of the Night Marcher in the Times, of a drink in a black tiki mug with a ball gag in its mouth. An artfully scored lime with several picks emerging from it crowns the rim. Some sort of steamy, dry icy-looking condensation swirls off to one side. I feel utterly defeated. I guess I can always stop by and let someone else make one. I’m sure it costs only about $20 or so.

Maybe you get to keep the tiki mug.

If this blogging gig paid anything, I’d hire Jolene as my research assistant. Not only does she read the entire internet every day, she actually remembers what she read, searches like a ninja and is always able to provide a helpful link to something that ran six months ago. She was the one who suggested, a few days ago, that we start a discussion this month with recommendations of gift books for the holidays. So I’ll kick off December with her excellent idea.

Federal Trade Commission full disclosure: All links in today’s entry will take would-be purchasers through my Amazon Associates store, aka the Kickback Lounge, where yours truly will receive a tiny percentage of the purchase price. (Commenters’ links most likely won’t.) And a word to any fellow bloggers out there: Amazon’s payments, compared to Google’s AdSense, are the difference between your paychecks at a rural weekly newspaper and those of, say, Katie Couric. Which is to say I made about $17 last month, and sometimes I’d go months before making that much from the don’t-be-evil people. Who are.

OK, then: You’ve already read my thoughts on “Tinsel: A Search of America’s Christmas Present,” but I’m here to recommend it again. Hank Stuever has been getting some very respectable reviews for his look at how the holidays are celebrated in Exurbia, but for my money you can’t beat this one, from Amazon:

This is a nasty book written by a bitter, self-described homosexual with an anti-God, leftist agenda. That being said, it’s an “absolutely phenomenal” read.

Ha. Well. Actually, what comes through in the book (for me, anyway, and I’m not the only one to note it), is how much Hank actually likes all the people he writes about, even as he does not shrink from describing them in situ with the sort of all-seeing eye an anthropologist would envy. Recommended for the overdecorator, or under-spirited, on your gift list.

While we’re pimping our friends-who-just-happen-to-be-celebrated-authors, two for the mystery/crime fiction readers on your list — Laura Lippman’s fine standalone, “Life Sentences,” and her collection of short stories, “Hardly Knew Her,” the latter of which reveals more of Laura’s impish sense of humor than her long-form fiction. (Not that she’s a slug or anything, but many of these stories are just plain funny.) Also, the stories are available in paperback, so you can buy both and make a gift bundle, while tossing a few shekels at Laura for her bundle. I should probably mention that “Hardly Knew Her,” like much of her fiction, takes as its theme what a PhD might call the perfidy of women. Perfidy, but with humor. Win-win-entertain.

“Closing Time,” on the nightstand in the right rail for the longest time, isn’t new — it was published last year — but it’s worth your time even if you have to look a little harder for it. Joe Queenan’s memoir of being the abused son of a charming Irish drunk stayed with me for weeks after I finished it, and stays with me still. Rich with detail of growing up poor at a time when anyone with a work ethic could become comfortably middle class (if they didn’t have a drunk for a parent, that is), and not only poor but white and poor, and not just anywhere but in one of the most interesting cities in the country (Philadelphia), it’s a banquet throughout. It’s not a front-to-back bummer, either, but at its heart a story of how a person can overcome just about anything if he has the right kind of help and just a little bit of luck. I’ve been a fan of Queenan’s for years, and this book adds a new layer to my appreciation of a fine, funny writer.

Because we all know a lot of non-reading readers, and because America needs its share of books that don’t cause even casual readers to break a sweat, as well as something funny for your guests to page through while they watch you cook Christmas dinner, a recommendation from Mindy, who found the website that led to “Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong.” Revel in the simple yuks provided by cakes with names misspelled on them, or emblazoned: BABY SHOWER FOR BOY. Mindy recommends bookmarking Cake Wrecks as your daily amusement stop, now that the Lolcats seem to have run their course. Yes, what she said.

Which sort of fills out the entry for today, but I want to add one more, a website that should be a book and probably already is, but one you can look at right now — Ugliest Tattoos, name self-explanatory. Whatever you do, don’t click the “sexual” tag. OK, I warned you.

Now add your own recommendations. And for those who use the Kickback Lounge, I’d get your names tattooed on my heart if I could.