Thrills are hard to come by in the suburbs, especially in winter. The weather’s been too warm to skitch off car bumpers, and Alan’s become focused on trapping a giant raccoon whom we suspect has colonized our deck. So Kate and I went way out on a limb last night and tried Domino’s new pizza.

I should say at this point that I was not a Domino’s hata. It was hardly ever my first choice, but I never thought it was all that awful, as long as you ordered pepperoni. Pepperoni is like chocolate — such a strong flavor that it makes up for deficiencies elsewhere in the product. We had a neighbor a while back in Fort Wayne who worked at the ice-cream plant there, and confided the corporate secret that chocolate is always made on Fridays, and what’s more, is made from the odd lots of the previous week. If you had a batch of butter pecan that didn’t quite measure up, you could salvage it by dumping chocolate into it and no one would be the wiser. (Obviously, this decision was made before the pecans were added.) Not long after that, I bought some chocolate ice cream with a distinct undertaste of cherry and knew he was right.

Since my default takeout pizza is pepperoni, I could always handle Domino’s in a pinch. They deliver fast, and — alone among the local offerings — actually seem to use their insulated heat pouches for something other than showing off on the doorstep.

Detroit is known as a pizza Mecca. Domino’s is headquartered in Ann Arbor; Little Caesar’s is here, along with Hungry Howie’s, a newer chain. Every other major chain store is here, too. We have a huge Italian population, so there are a gazillion mom-and-pop pizzerias, too. Almost all of it is inedible. Little Caesar’s in particular is insultingly bad, a fact they seem to acknowledge with their relentless price-cutting; you can get a large one-topping for $5, and the only time I ever buy it is if I have to feed Kate and her friends. I think the problem is me — I’m just done with cheap pizza. If it’s not a hand-crafted Wolfgang Puck-style offering with fresh tomato, mozzarella and basil, it’s only fuel for a night when I don’t feel like cooking.

But I was interested in how Domino’s had reinvented their basic product, after taking the step of essentially confessing, “We suck.” So I ordered. The pizza came quickly. It was nice and hot. And it was awful. Really.

It still wasn’t as bad as Little Caesar’s, but it opened a whole new vista of bad — the brushed-with-flavorful-garlic-seasoning crust tasted and felt like garlic salt swimming in a bath of oil. I had to wash my hands twice before I dared touch anything afterward. Sauce meh, cheese meh and everything else, SALT SALT SALT SALT SALT. I like salt, so this was a revelation. This was pizza for a generation raised on Taco Bell and pork rinds. This was pizza for those with no taste buds left to corrupt. If pizza was liquor, this was moonshine. And so on.

David Brandon, Domino’s CEO, recently made news by giving up pizza to become the new athletic director at the University of Michigan. To which I’d say: Good career move.

Just try not to do to the Wolverines what you did to a large pepperoni. Although you could argue that they’re already the Little Caesar’s of Big 10 football. Nowhere to go but up.

Looks like Massachusetts is going to be a loser for the Democrats today. Martha Coakley has no one to blame but herself, another blue-state Democrat who thought she was attending a coronation, not an election. What it means for health care reform? (Shrug.) Talking Points Memo lays out a few strategies. The GOP conventional wisdom is that this is a “referendum” on Obama, but I’m sticking with the more conventional cliché, about all politics being local. Coakley was a terrible candidate with a nose-in-the-air sense of herself, and the sooner people like that learn the necessary correction, the better. Scott Brown is of a piece with the current GOP — dumb and obstructionist — and I’m at the point of thinking, if this is the government you guys want, maybe it’s the government we deserve. Sure hope you don’t lose your health insurance.

What can you do? Order more bad pizza.

Looks like we’re heading into another rash of high-profile exits. Kate McGarrigle yesterday. Dennis Hopper, soon. (He’s said to be “in his last days,” but wants to divorce his wife first. Hmm.) Who’s No. 3?

And now it’s 10:30, and I’ve blown deadline yet again. Time to hop to the shower and prepare for the rest of the day.

I’ve never gotten used to the MLK holiday. Newspapers are famously stingy about granting holidays in the first place, and this one falls in with Columbus, Presidents’ and Groundhog as one you might write about, but never get to enjoy. Schools are famously generous with holidays, so for working parents who must make arrangements for child care so soon after the end-of-year holiday child-care headaches, MLK Day is just more exasperation.

When it was instituted, J.C. wondered how long before we’d see “I have a dream” mattress sales on the long weekend. Haven’t seen that yet, but I did get a few e-mails from my retail favorites promising “three-day holiday sales” that don’t actually mention which holiday. It does coincide nicely with January clearance.

Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t control when he was born, but it is interesting that he was born in a month that we all agree could use a few more paid days off. February would bump up against the presidents, March/April has spring break/Easter complications, May is Memorial, June is…well, it’s June. July has Independence, August vacation, September Labor and the start of a million new things. October? That would work. November no way, December ditto.

In Columbus, Columbus Day is a holiday, of course. (But not at the newspaper.) At least it was when I was growing up. The subsequent shoving of Chris into the Dead White Male, O.G. division, may have put a stop to that. As a daughter of the city that bears his name, I retain a stubborn affection for the guy. He had an idea, and he didn’t give up: He kept on sailing toward the west and never thought of taking rest. To our great land at last he caaaaaame, and so we sing his famous name.

I like him enough that it didn’t even bother me when I grew up enough to learn that he actually landed in the Bahamas, not our great land. The point is, he crossed the ocean. During hurricane season. I’d buy that man a drink.

But we’re getting off track here, which was? I forget. Let’s go to the bloggage:

Say what you will — “What you will!” — but for an entertaining fight, you really can’t beat the hard left. From a weekend NYT story on board meetings at WBAI, the public radio station:

Mr. Steinberg held the microphone on Wednesday evening, a bemused smile frozen in place. He waited out the hecklers, not a few of whom were his fellow board members, and turned to the next order of business: whether to seat a newly elected member, Lynne F. Stewart. Ms. Stewart is a well-known radical lawyer — or rather was a lawyer until she was convicted of material support for terrorism, disbarred and packed off to a federal prison. Such credentials are like catnip to WBAI voters, who elected her last autumn before she began serving her sentence. Some board members worry that for WBAI, which is forever on the edge of insolvency, not to mention anarchy, an imprisoned member is of little utility.

For Stewart partisans, however, such talk is profoundly counter-revolutionary. So Nia Bediako, a board member, dressed down the chairman, Mitchel Cohen, who opposed seating Ms. Stewart. “You very insensitively, very unprogressively, said perhaps we could meet in prison,” said Ms. Bediako, her voice dipped in an inkwell of disdain. “This from a so-called revolutionary!”

The right likes to talk in code words (family, values, confirmed bachelor), but the left prefers the translated phrases of communist martyrs (running dog, corrupt troika and many iterations of -ist). A hilarious read.

Mariah Carey played down her beauty in “Precious, with the rest of the title an awkward tribute to the ego of the original story’s author.” So, of course, she had to bring the girls all the way out for the Golden Globes. In case anyone forgot they were there, I guess. Maybe she misunderstood the term “golden globes.”

Funny: The director of “Downfall” — i.e., the source of all those Hitler-finds-out-X mashups — reveals what he thinks of ‘em. He likey, and includes links to a couple I hadn’t seen before. The latest: Hitler finds out about the Tonight Show disaster.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that government offices will be open. Better go find out.

It’s looking as though Mark was right when he remarked, late in yesterday’s comments:

I really fear that the situation in Haiti is about to become much worse. The absence of even water could turn things into a Mad Max scene. With 48 hours of hindsight, I’m thinking we should have air-dropped 20,000 Rangers loaded to the gills with water, MREs and ammo. I hope I’m wrong.

Well, you be the judge:

A photographer working for Time magazine, Shaul Schwarz, told Reuters he had come across two roadblocks made from rocks and corpses. Residents had apparently set up the roadblocks in central Port-au-Prince out of frustration over the trickle of assistance.

“They are starting to block the roads with bodies,” Mr. Schwarz said, quoted by Reuters. “It’s getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help.”

That sounds pretty Mad Max to me. The Big Picture blog just posted a 48-hours-later update that looks the same. It’s Katrina to the power of 10, or maybe 100. It’s frustrating how this nation, so close to the United States, is still so hard to reach, having had sketchy infrastructure in the best of times, and now even the relatively simple act of landing a plane is a chest-clutcher:

“The main thing is to try to establish some order at the airport so we can start getting planes in and out,” said Col. Patrick Hollrah of the Air Force, whose disaster-response team arrived Thursday night from New Jersey aboard a C-17 cargo plane.

In the cockpit of the plane, air traffic chatter could be heard through headsets, giving some sense of the barely controlled confusion in the skies. Planes were being forced to circle for two to three hours before landing.

Yeesh. Meanwhile, what do we think of this? That’s Sanjay Gupta, the CNN correspondent and neurosurgeon, stepping between roles to treat a newborn on camera. I didn’t see it, but the L.A. Times said the network gave it significant play, which sounds about right for CNN — sure, there’s devastation as far as the eye can see, but our handsome staff doctor treated a baby with a cut on her head.

I have CNN on now, and learned that treating the desperate and dying is a daunting task. God damn alliteration. You want a news medium ripe for a total reinvention? Take TV news. Please. I’m often struck, whenever I watch news, either local or national, how paint-by-numbers every part of it is. The local team will feature a man and a woman, one of a non-white persuasion but not threatening to white people, that variety Jon Carroll once brilliantly named Gene Eric Ethnic. The national anchor, usually a hot babe, boots to the correspondent in the field with their strange line readings and head/hand gestures:

Celia, I am STANDing in front of the remains of what was once [gestures] a GROCery store here in Port-au-PRINCE. As you can see, the building is partially collAPSED, and those Haitians who were able to get OUT [furrows brow] are now trying DESperately to help those…who were left [cocks head] beHIND.

You want to know why Rachel Maddow is such a success? She breaks the mold. In some ways, I wish she wasn’t so overtly partisan, just because I’d like to see how she could bring her big brain and no-journalism-school training to straight reporting.

That’s one reason I like much of the web reporting newspapers are doing now. Perhaps because their reporters are too homely to put on camera, they avoid the brain-dead standups and walk-and-talks you see on the local stations.

Which seems as good a time as any to segue to the bloggage, in which it seems to me that the big swingin’ schvantzes of Fox News are taking the opportunity to show the new young doxie on the team who’s the big dog in town. This TPM post about Glenn Beck calling “bullcrap” on Sarah Palin gives an incomplete view of the total weirdness of the segment. For that, you need Jon Stewart, national treasure.

The story made reference to Beck asking Palin to “name her favorite founding father.” She tried the Couric Evasion (“all of them”), which didn’t work then and isn’t working now, because this is Glenn Beck, dammit, and he doesn’t take answers like that from you, missy. Sarah finally settled on George Washington, “because he led them all,” and everyone went away happy.

(I would have said, “Thomas Jefferson, of course — the cute one!”)

Elsewhere, well, two words: Chihuahua airlift.

A local story, but a significant one: A beaten UAW puts its country house on the market. Includes the ashes of Walter Reuther.

Early meeting. Gotta run.

I guess you should save these sorts of entries for birthdays that end in a zero, but in previous years I’ve let this day blow right past me, and if 2009 taught us anything, it’s that you never know when your number might be up. One minute you’re a painfully thin plastic-surgery addict who needs hospital-grade anesthesia just to grab 40 winks, the next you’re in long-term storage in your golden casket while your insane family fights over the DVD rights to your funeral service. You know? Never pass up a chance to party. And so…..

[Toots madly on party horn.] Happy Blogversary Day! Today we are nine.

I remember it as though it were yesterday: J.C. set me up with Adobe GoLive 5.0, and designed a simple template. I huffed and puffed and scanned and uploaded and sized and resized and cursed and scratched my head and sent out a bunch of e-mails inviting people to my “personal website.” There was a picture of 4-year-old Kate, one of Alan, one of Pilcher House (home of my college newspaper), a few more this and a dozen more that. My links page, what the kids today call a blogroll, was a big wad of narrative prose, explaining why I liked all my links. (That was what the internet was all about then — having the attention span to read 200 words at a stretch.) I believe I may have included the coffee pot at Cambridge University, but maybe not; that was very early-WWW, and I’d had broadband for two years by then.

I connected to the server, uploaded the whole thing, sat back and allowed myself to be proud of my personal website for about 15 minutes. And then it dawned on me: What am I going to do tomorrow?

Because that, as always, is the conundrum. You can have a corner of the internet to yourself, and you can invite all your friends to see it, but unless you’re a somebody, and even if you’re a somebody, it has to change once in a while, and if you’re a nobody like me, it better be changing a lot. And so I got up the next day, took down the first day’s main-page copy, and wrote something new. What to write about, now that I’d introduced myself? The events of the previous 24 hours, that’s what, and that’s how we got started.

At the time, I was a newspaper columnist writing four times a week in the paper. Justlikethat, I became a personal website operator writing five times a week for the internet. (I hadn’t yet heard of a weblog.)

Sometimes people ask me what I told my bosses. I told them I was setting up a website, and was that OK? As I recall, the only tentative objection was from the editor in chief, who wondered if I might end up in competition with them by “selling something.” Yes, ha ha ha ha. I think everyone in the office checked in the first day. I got 100 hits. And then everyone forgot about it, and NN.C became the naughty cousin of Nance-in-the-newspaper. I’m still amazed at what I got away with, just because people didn’t read it.

For instance, I told the story of the army men at Fort Wayne Newspapers: One day early in the decade, and sorry, but I’m not digging up old CD-ROMs to find out which one, an employee noted a solitary green army man, the toy kind you buy by the bag, placed high on a stairwell windowsill. It was aiming its gun at the staircase. Looking around, the employee found another. A search revealed they were all through the building, maybe a whole bag full, in unobtrusive places, atop vending machines and dusty shelves, apparently mobilizing for attack.

And that’s how Human Resources treated it, as an OMG OFFICE SHOOTING EARLY WARNING, and there were hushed conversations in offices and the strangest memo I’ve ever seen, that spoke of the army men without actually saying what they were, so that you’d read it and be somewhat alarmed but not informed, and, well, it was one of those days worthy of “Office Space.” I wrote all about in here, even quoted from the memo. It got linked by a couple other bloggers, ha ha, and no one said a word about it in my office because nobody read it.

NN.C was my shadow column. In the paper, one Nance, on the internet, dog Nance, because on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Nobody knows you’re a nobody in Fort Wayne, Indiana, either, and that was the other revelation of the internet for me. (The first was that everybody can talk to everybody; I sent an e-mail to Warren Zevon and he wrote back, a stunning development.) The second was that for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to be limited by my newspaper’s lousy circulation. I’m bad; I’m nationwide.

You think this is nothing, but you don’t know that one reason I took the job in Fort Wayne was, I thought it might lead to bigger things. Knight-Ridder was then a respected newspaper chain, and I foolishly believed they treated their smaller papers as farm teams for the bigs in Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit, San Jose. They did, but not the way I thought they did, and anyway, by then I was part of a couple and had a mortgage and life was getting complicated. I despaired of ever getting out of the place, and in 2002 Bob Greene finally got his junk caught in his fly. I banged out a few hundred words, uploaded, went to bed and got up the next morning to look at e-mail. The first one was from a writer at the freakin’ New Yorker: “Great rant,” it began. Holy shit.

Over the next few days I gave an interview to Newsweek and one to a magazine in Japan, answered dozens of e-mails, got linked all over. I thought maybe I should give my bosses a heads-up that I was likely to be quoted in a national magazine. Oh, you wrote something about Bob Greene? Are you still doing that website thing? They still weren’t reading it.

Well. I don’t want to go on too long here. But I do want to note the day, because it was a turning point. I got my Knight-Wallace fellowship because of the blog. I got my first freelance contacts because of the blog. I met a dozen or more people that I correspond with today and visit when I can because of the blog. I haven’t enjoyed every day of this, not by a long shot. I’ve considered shutting it down for a few weeks or months, just to clear my head and maybe let something else fill in the time I spend here, but then I stop and consider that every good thing that’s happened in my career since January 14, 2001 was because of the blog. (A couple of the bad things, too, but not many.)

Someone once wrote me and said, “I read somewhere that there are people who like to write and people who need to write, and you must be one of the second kind.” I never thought of it that way, but I guess it’s true. This is, and remains, my daily download, my quasi-diary, my shadow life, my batting practice. In Pete Dexter’s final newspaper column, long after he’d become a successful novelist and screenwriter, he wrote that a Hollywood producer of large repute asked him why he still bothered to write a column for peanuts. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I just need it.” The rest of the column was his announcement that he no longer needed it, but I’m not there yet.

Happy Blogversary Day. Time to get to work.

I’ve been curious about Haiti since reading, some years back, Graham Greene’s “The Comedians,” and Madison Smartt Bell’s “All Souls’ Rising.” I’ve known people who traveled there on missionary work and came back with the sort of haunted look that comes when one has acclimated to seeing children walking around with cleft palates and physical evidence of malnutrition a short plane ride from the richest nation on earth. There was a group who went there from a small Christian college not far from Fort Wayne, who stumbled across a voodoo ceremony in progress. The reporter’s account of the innocent Christian youth beholding, with their very own eyes, what they considered to be a summoning of demons, was a bracing read.

The last scene in “Silence of the Lambs,” where Dr. Lecter calls Clah-reece during her FBI graduation party? And he walks off down the strange tropical road, silently stalking his nemesis from the asylum? That was Haiti, and even though it was never identified, one look at the place told you that if a psychopath on the lam could find a place to eat a man in relative peace and quiet, this was the place. At least in the western hemisphere.

Which is not to say Haiti’s problems are entirely self-created. The French and the slavers and the Duvaliers all have blood on their hands. And when a place is as poor as Haiti, an earthquake of that magnitude will have a multiplier effect it wouldn’t have in, say, Los Angeles. Or even San Francisco.

My curiosity about the country didn’t extend to plate tectonics. I didn’t even know Haiti was on a fault. Shows what I know. (Nothing.)

Sorry for the late start today. High-level negotiations this morning resulted in me evidently agreeing to eat a horse between now and spring, i.e., a big project. How do you eat a horse? One bite at a time. Expect distractions. Less time for web-surfing, and so on. Which is fine, because it’s giving me ADD, and I don’t need to see any more photos like this, evidence of when Brad Pitt morphed from the Sexiest Man Alive to the guy who twists his beard into beardy dreads. Ew. Brad and his common-law spouse issued a statement about recent events:

“We are devastated by the news from Haiti. We will work closely with our good friend Wyclef Jean to support the humanitarian efforts on the island and help those who have been injured and left without homes and shelter.”

Beautiful. Not to take anything away from the couple, who at least attempt to walk the walk, but that sentence is a sterling example of contemporary press-agentry, ain’a? The second-most overused word on the planet (“devastated”), followed by a name-drop with oak-leaf clusters (“our good friend Wyclef Jean”), a gratuitous adverb (“closely”), a squishy verb (“support”) and a redundancy (“homes and shelter”). Someday I want to see a celebrity statement that reads: “Why does God punish Haiti so? We can’t know the answer, but in the meantime, I’m going to sign checks until I get writer’s cramp.”

Someone is always devastated by something. It’s the awesome of transitive concern-verbs. Another reason to love the Google: You can look up the phrase “is devastated by” and see how it’s being used:

Woman linked to Jon Gosselin says she’s devastated by the lies, says People magazine’s headline. (Lie! Lie! In the copy, she’s merely “sickened.”)

Ryan Seacrest is devastated by the news Simon Cowell is leaving “American Idol.

The Octomom’s doctor is devastated by charges he’s unfit to practice medicine.

Paris Hilton, devastated. Barry Gibb, devastated. It’s the nervous breakdown of our age. A secret reader of my grandmother’s Photoplay magazines, I always wondered about that mysterious phrase. Also, “collapsed from exhaustion.” My nana never told me what I later learned: It’s a euphemism for “too drunk to work.”

Not much bloggage today, but this:

Sarah Palin: Gettin’ paid, yo.

Time to start eatin’ that horse!

FWIW, I don’t think Harry Reid needs to fall on his sword for having used the word “Negro” approximately 40 years after its sell-by date. As one of our commenters put it yesterday, it’s hard to get older people to change their language, citing the nursing-home residents she works with. They insist on using such unfashionable terms as “colored girl,” for instance. Reid isn’t that old, but he’s old enough to have seen a few of these memos come down the pike, sometimes literally so — my paper was an early adopter of “African American,” at a time when even many black people weren’t using it, and it frosted my cookies, too.

That was a different time, though. I’m speaking of the late ’80s, when these things changed in far more formal ways, before it was one of those internet things that just appeared overnight, like Lolspeak or FAIL. There was a cadre of people in my newsroom — I believe their organizational title was the Committee for Chapping Asses — who curried favor from higher-ups by policing our pages for Wrongspeak, and no infraction was too small to generate a passive-aggressive finger in the face.

“I notice that when you slugged that story” — renamed a file, for you civilians — “on the Sino-Japanese trade talks, you called it SINOJAP,” one memorable exchange went.

The accused explained that yes, under our system for naming story files, we were only allowed about eight spaces to indicate to the database manager what the story was actually about, i.e. SHOOTING, or CITYCNCL.

“You need to know that JAP is an unkind term for certain Asian-Americans…”

“Yes, I know about World War II, thanks, but as you well know, we frequently abbreviate words in slug lines, and anyway, the only people who even see that are editors, and are you seriously implying that I had some racist intent here?”

“No, but this is something you need to be sensitive to. Other papers now abbreviate Japan as JPN. Thanks.”

You should have heard him the day an artist drew a cartoon of a mosquito as a kamikaze pilot. But those were the times. There was a huge blow-up over whether residents of the United States could be called “Americans,” seeing as how that was that excluded residents of other countries on the North and South American continents. You could no longer write about homosexuals, or even gay people; it had to be “gay and lesbian,” every reference, all the time. If we hadn’t been located in the ultraconservative Midwest, I’m sure it would have blossomed to “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and transgendered.”

Some of this stuff was easy to swallow; I believe you should call people what they want to be called, at least in polite relations, so OK, fine, you’re now African American, go with God. Other tiffs were more about the person doing the correcting than anything else; see the great abbreviation battle above. And some was just stupid, as the trend for making all those who endured a disease or traumatic experience not sufferers or victims but survivors. Mostly what I objected to was being told, as a writer, what my word choice had to be, usually by little weenies who couldn’t write an amusing text message, let alone 700 words of snappy prose.

And I didn’t like when the rules were enforced through robotics, although it did lead to some interesting items in Columbia Journalism Review whenever governmental bodies proudly reported their budgets were “back in the African American,” or when an outdoors writer (inevitably a dork freelancer who had enough trouble coming up with alternative ways to say “big fish”) was told he had to find a new word for certain bass lures, because the computer wouldn’t let him use the word jig anymore.

In his days as a police reporter, Jeff Borden noticed you could peg a cop’s age — and sometimes much more — by how they filled out their reports. The oldest would write MC (male colored), the middle-aged ones MN, and the youngest MB, and the hard-core racists MU (male usual). Orwell was right. Language matters. But that’s something I’m sure Reid knows by now. Peace be with him.

Slate looks at the same topic. Great headline: Watch what they say, not who they do.

I’m growing to hate Mondays, the busiest day of my week. Upside: By Wednesday, you feel the week entering a glide pattern. Not this one, though, with a big story due at the end of it and other kamikaze mosquitos buzzing around my head. I don’t have any more bloggage today, although maybe you’d like to discuss the a-bornin’ career of Sarah Palin, Foxy Gal…whatever it is she’ll be doing now. Finally, an excuse to buy a real wardrobe!

UPDATE: From the Department of Too Good to Wait Another Day, the sad-but-not story of the death of Mighty Joe Rollino, yesterday in Brooklyn.

A story in Sunday’s NYT makes the case for George Clooney, movie star AND actor. I agree 100 percent. As a withered crone, of course my hubba-hubba interest in him is, in a word, gross, so I lay that aside and concentrate, like the writer of this piece does, on how he does it. We saw “Up in the Air” over the weekend, and there were several points where I noticed what isn’t appealing about his physicality — he’s a little too thin, and has the big Hollywood head first pointed out by LAMary some time back. (As an Angeleno who has seen many in the flesh, she called actors “the lollipop people.”) There was an angle here and there where you could see his neck is getting crepey, although he retains the Clooney sparkle and will until he dies.

What I like about him is his (seeming) professional pluck, uncommon in a movie star capable of phoning it in until retirement. He comes across as not only a nice movie-star guy, but one who really is all about the work. He takes chances, stretches himself, is unafraid of both failure and unflattering camera angles that show his softening neck. He has the self-effacement and good sense not to whine about how hard it is to be him, at least in public. I know a few people who’ve had personal encounters with him and say he’s pretty much as advertised, and if it really is all bullshit and he’s just very good at snowing fangirls like me, then, well-snowed, sir.

Terrence Rafferty gets it right at the very beginning:

He’s the kind of actor who could float along forever on his genial presence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn’t. (Or doesn’t always.) That’s the mystery.

That is, indeed, the mystery. It’s hard to imagine another actor carrying “Up in the Air” as capably as he does, even when you look closely and see where he gets help. He plays a son of a bitch who happily fires people for a living, but gains our sympathy through the early introduction of an even bigger monster, a young underling who wants to fire people for a living via teleconference. He makes a pitch for the comparable dignity of doing such ugly work in person, and you almost forget that he’s the guy who makes his living through outsourced terminations in the first place. It’s the Don Corleone trick; he’s happy to make his living from violence, gambling, prostitution and protection, but not from drugs. He’s the best bad guy in the room.

I try not to read too much about movies I intend to see in theaters, but it was hard to miss the chatter about “Up in the Air,” particularly as it was partially shot here and touches the raw wound of job loss. I read beforehand about how Jason Reitman, the writer and director, had to make a tonal shift in his script as the story was, as we say in journalism, overtaken by events. But whatever he had to rewrite or rethink, he did it exceptionally well. It’s so sure-footed. I think one reason I liked this movie so much is, we don’t see enough stories onscreen about people’s work lives (unless they’re doctors or lawyers or police, that is). We certainly don’t see many about people who work in white-collar office jobs, and I found myself moved by shots that weren’t even particularly fussed over — the pans of offices already half-empty, the extra chairs pushed into a vacant cubicle, the phones piled up on the floor, the way everyone sees Clooney walk in and immediately cower in fear. I’ve been there; my office looked like that when I left, and one of the exciting new ad hoc committees for 2005 was supposed to be the rearrangement and removal of furniture so it didn’t look so tumbleweedy.

I also like Rafferty’s career assessment of Clooney, as he called out my two favorite performances — “Out of Sight” and “Michael Clayton,” and the best part of the latter film. It’s the final, two-minute shot of the Cloonester in the back of a cab:

He flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cabbie to drive, and it’s only then that you understand how eloquent Mr. Clooney’s body language has been throughout the preceding two hours — how tensely he’s been holding himself, how warily he’s been sizing up his dangerous world. As he sits in the cab, just riding, the camera stays on him for two full minutes. He does nothing, apparently. His expression hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he’s been through in his blankness, his emptied-out eyes. You can’t stop looking at him. It’s a great, daring piece of acting. Only a movie star could get away with it.

(I disagree with that last sentence, by the way. Bob Hoskins, “The Long Good Friday,” end of discussion.)

OK, then. Movie Monday it is, I guess. We also caught an oldie I’d never seen before, “Bound,” on cable Friday night. More on that when I recover from how good it was.

Bloggage? Sure:

The Harry Reid story is leading the weekend news cycle as “Game Change,” the new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, gets circulating. But don’t miss this excerpt in New York magazine, about the meltdown of another handsome man, John Edwards, who fell for the oldest trap in the world.

Speaking of Reid, who still says “Negro,” anyway? Doesn’t he know the code word yet? “Articulate?”

This NYT Styles story was so stupid it made my brain hurt. Thank God for Terrence Rafferty.

I’m late getting to the big New Yorker profile of John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and, it would seem, the model for Steve Martin’s character in “Baby Mama.” Note well:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better. He told me, “If I could, I would wave a magic wand so that Americans ate better, because the diseases that are killing us—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s—these diseases have a high correlation with diet. And that is something that most people do not understand.”

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and many others have chronicled, has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else. In his Wall Street Journal column, Mackey wrote of “the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health. Unfortunately, many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, and one-third are obese.” Inarguable as this assertion may be, it struck a discordant note. People who may look to Whole Foods to agitate for changes in the food system, or who have been bankrupted by medical costs despite eating right, might wonder if it was quite the moment to be preaching personal responsibility.

Worth your time.

And another week begins. At least it was a pretty weekend. Enjoy it.

Well, we got our snow. The world is white — I’d guesstimate we topped out at three inches or so — and the neighborhood resounds with the blast of two-cycle engines. No, wait — the last one just stopped. That would be ours, and don’t give me any crap about it, Lance Mannion, because we have a long driveway and this ain’t Atlanta. So now the world is white and quiet, and our little part of it is safe for pedestrians. Winter is on. Temperatures remain low, and I’m hoping the snow is safe for a while. It’s been a while since I went out in my North Face and mirrored Ray-Ban aviators. Winter’s own bad-ass.

But today’s question concerns indoor activities: Do you buy movies on DVD? Why or why not?

I ask because I don’t. Or hardly ever, now that Kate is past childhood and the time-for-mom technique of parking her in front of a video. In Ann Arbor a few years ago I came across a tent sale for Border’s warehouse stock, a real Blondie-goes-to-Tudbury’s free-for-all, and they had unsold or cutout or made-obsolete-by-the-director’s-cut DVDs for sale for $5, the magic price point for me, and I think I bought three — “The Producers” (and if you wonder whether it was the original or the remake, you don’t know me at all), “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and “Taxi Driver.” I have watched the first two once, and the third maybe three times, mainly for the featurettes. That’s the most DVDs I ever bought at a sitting, but I have maybe a handful more, mostly Criterion Collection classics, that I never or rarely watch.

I wonder because someone must buy DVDs, beyond Blockbuster stores. I see DVDs at garage sales. They’re never, ever, a movie anyone with half a brain would want to watch, even on cable. Being hoodwinked into spending $8 on a ticket before the reviews buried it, sure. And yet someone said, “Ellen DeGeneres in ‘Mr. Wrong’? Yeah, that’s worth $20.” Most movies are crap, and most do their briskest DVD sales in the first month. And the only DVDs I’d buy are things like “Rashomon,” 60 years young.

A few years back I did a story on the great American paperback book, and had a fascinating chat with the author of a coffee-table book devoted to the subject. The paperback, he said, is truly a democratic wonder, and pointed out that the standard price point of mass-market paperback has, over time, tracked amazingly close to that of an hour of work at minimum wage. Before paperbacks, Americans who weren’t wealthy enough to buy hardcover books — and there were millions of them — patronized lending libraries, which were not the same as public libraries, more like video stores for books. You paid a fee to check a book out for a few days, and brought it back. The paperback dime novel, printed on cheap paper and easy to stick in a lunch pail or back pocket for a few minutes’ break time, represented a revolution in bringing books to the masses.

Of course, the masses don’t always want to read the Harvard Classics, so then we got the glorious genre of pulp fiction, about which I will one day write at greater length. It so happens that in the last year I read collections of two of my favorite writers’ early work for the pulps (Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald), and boy was that interesting. Your English teacher tells you fiction is art, but there’s a special kind of art created by having to get a lot of exposition up top, before the reader has to turn the page. I’ve always admired fiction writers who could make their living entirely from writing and not teaching, and you get a glimpse of how it’s done — by pleasing the reader. Those who can do it and make it fun to read are well and truly artists, if you ask me.

I guess buying John D. MacDonald’s pulp collection would qualify as buying the DVD. (Although I didn’t. It was a gift.)

I am no longer making sense. I’m distracted. I’ve been thinking about a story I’d like to pitch, which really interests me. Now to find a functioning publication that might pay me for it. That’s the challenge.

So, what do you have cued up for the weekend, besides getting out your shiny aviator shades?

One bit of bloggage: I see John Goodman has been added to the cast of “Treme,” by our fave David Simon, now shooting in New Orleans. Goodman will play a “college professor,” I read. Let’s hope his character is named Ashley Morris.

That is all.

It has snowed almost every day in the past couple of weeks, but there’s almost no snow on the ground. We’re getting a form of non-snow, I think, that always seems to be falling but never accumulating. There’s snow everywhere, but the grass isn’t covered yet, which has always been, for my money, the start of winter-in-earnest.

Meanwhile, it’s freezing everywhere else, particularly Florida, where, my newspaper informed me this morning, iguanas are falling from trees. This seemed to warrant further investigation, so — thanks, professor Google! — I typed “iguanas falling from trees” into the search window, and…

…may I just stop for a moment to marvel at that? I went to Ann Arbor yesterday, had lunch with a couple of people to talk about this and that. I mentioned my brother-in-law’s amazing ability, honed after years of falling asleep on the couch in front of late-night television, to be able to give you the name and stars of any Western movie you can name after less than five seconds of viewing time. In the time it takes you to stop on a channel and think, “What’s that?,” he will reply, “‘My Darling Clementine,’ Victor Mature, Walter Brennan, Henry Fonda.” He’s a human IMDb. Which made me think of working nights in a newsroom before universal ESPN and the internet, when all the staff did was answer the phone, report scores and settle bets. Who played second base for the Dodgers in 1950? Won won the Heisman Trophy in 1961? And so on.

Google handles all of that now. If you phoned a friend on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” today, and they were anything other than a hunt-and-peck typist, they could answer your question in the time it takes to exchange pleasantries. Once or twice, late in that show’s prime-time run, I think that actually happened. You either know about the Beaufort Scale or you don’t. It doesn’t come to you after a long uhhhhh.

To a future with fewer urban legends, if also not so many excuses to call a buddy and catch up, under the pretense of asking a baseball question.

Back to iguanas. It’s true, they’re falling from trees, and this is apparently an urban legend all its own. They’re not Florida natives, the little bastards were introduced by careless pet owners, and they’re spreading. Falling iguanas is, I hear, a “long-standing Florida urban legend,” but not any more — some TV guy captured an actual falling iguana on video, which is almost enough to forgive his atrocious English usage. (The cold weather, he tells us, is “an opportunity to rein in on the critter.” Although I bet, in the script, he spelled it “rain in.”)

But there you are, a frozen falling iguana. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

As long as we’re on the subject, though, I’ve given myself an opening to bring up a piece of e-mail that’s been kicking around since before Christmas, one of our regular readers, who quotes it here:

Crable ”didn’t need to do it. He wasn’t going to jail. He wasn’t under arrest. They were actually going to give him a ride out of there and give him a helping hand to diffuse the situation,” Troyer said.

Story here. It’s about a police shooting, so it’s maybe it’s a little tacky to bring it up in the context of a usage error, but oh well. I see “diffuse” and “defuse” mixed up all the damn time, to the point I don’t think anyone knows how to use them. I’ll give it a try:

Diffuse can be a transitive verb, but is mostly intransitive, and in my opinion, should stay that way. It means, “to spread over a wide area.” Bob’s beer fart diffused through the room, which quickly emptied. The writer of the passage above should have used defuse, as in disabling a bomb, or in this case, to reduce danger or tension. As the gasping crowd moved through the doors, the senator defused the awkwardness with a witty remark. Let’s try to remember this in our written expression, eh people?

You come here for chitchat, you leave with an English lesson. That’s the way we roll here.

Meanwhile, it’s snowing heavily all over the Midwest. Chicago is expecting a foot. All reports here say to expect it to taper off as it reaches southeast Michigan, and we may get an inch or so. In other words, the grass may well still be uncovered this time tomorrow.

I don’t know how many of you followed the link yesterday to the story about the Dearborn sweatshirt, in which the class of 2011 commissioned a design that depicted “11″ as twin towers, with the school’s bird mascot bearing down on them, and the phrase “you can’t bring us down.” The fact the school in question is predominantly Arab is just icing on the cake of awkwardness, a situation just begging to be defused, but I had to chuckle at the e-mail I received from a friend, who said:

What goes around comes around. When I was in high school (class of ’86) our class had to have a unifying costume-decorating theme for the annual spring “Olympics” competition opening ceremony. Everything had been done already: cowboys & indians, rock & roll, military, etc. Then we seized upon a brilliant idea: ARABS. Yes, the whole class showed up in towelhead regalia. You know, like, rock the casbah? Inappropriately and inaccurately spanning everything from burqas to belly dancers to Sikhs. I wore a three-piece suit with a towel on my head and carried a gas can. You can be assured we never gave a single thought to any actual Arab-Americans who might have been attending the school or the ceremony. I do remember a banner in our hallway that read: We’re So Sheik.

That’s one way of looking at it. Remember the Iron Sheik, the wrestling heel? He wore a burnoose and waved an Iranian flag. Iranians aren’t Arabs and don’t wear burnooses, but no one ever said cultural caricatures were subtle. A photography intern I knew years ago took the Sheik’s picture backstage while he shaved his head and chest; I think he was naked, too. Good picture, although the goods were nothing special. Now you know.

Late start today, but a full day otherwise. Enjoy what’s left of yours.

Friends, I have a pile of stuff today, and won’t be free until late afternoon. Until then, talk amongst yourselves. Proposed topic: Is Coozledad affording his plush retirement by publishing under a pen name? Discuss.

LATER: My morning interview was postponed and I have a little window here, so some more meat on the table: Class of 2011 in predominantly Arab high school rethinks an item of spirit wear. I won’t even touch the comments on that one — they’re exuding little smell lines.