I won’t have any time to blog later in the morning, nor probably all day Friday. But that’s OK, because you can amuse yourselves making Hitler videos for the amusement of us all.

Back later.

Nathan Gotsch, one of those young squeaky-clean Fort Wayne guys for whom the phrase “you went to Concordia, didn’t you?” was coined, is trying to produce a TV pilot far away from the Man, man. It’s an expansion of his Josh Jennings for Congress spoof of 2006 — he produced a campaign commercial for a fictional character who decided a job in the House of Representatives would be way better than one at Subway. He got a little attention, if “being mentioned on Tucker Carlson’s show” counts as “a little attention,” and I think it does.

Anyway, Nathan got some attention from the Man, and after considering what going the traditional route would entail, decided to blaze an indie trail. He’s put together a budget for a $25,000 pilot production, and is trying to raise the dough via Kickstarter. Here’s his fundraising page.

I read the script and it’s pretty funny. (Funnier than “Reno 911,” anyway.) If you’d like to help Nathan, go to his Kickstarter page, watch the video, marvel at how much he resembles the absolute essence of a Concordia graduate, and, if you’re so inclined, kick him a few bucks. He has a week to raise about $15K. Goad to my fellow Hoosiers, past and present — although the pilot script never explicitly says so, the story’s set in Fort Wayne, and I can assume this would come up in subsequent episodes. However, if it gets picked up, I think we can expect to see Nathan’s crew in Michigan for exteriors shooting, because we have the fat tax incentives. (For now.) So win-win all around for my Midwest playas.

No pressure, just a chance to use a Web 2.0 idea for good, for a change. (You know how Kickstarter works, right? Nathan only gets the money if he reaches his goal. If not, you’re not billed. That way you aren’t giving him cash to drink away his sorrows because he didn’t get enough to make his pilot.)

Given the bummer tone of recent days, let’s make this Twinkle Thursday, and strive for optimism in all things. It’s what Josh would do.

While this isn’t exactly a happy-news sort of thing, I’m calling it out because it makes me feel optimistic about the future — of journalism, anyway. One of our readers, Kim, left it low in the comments of yesterday’s post, but let’s drag it out into the light of day:

Bob (not Greene) and all the other journos out there who have been accused of making it up: Here’s the story we used from a student journalist who was at the boring press conference but paying close attention (and recording it) because she didn’t want to get it wrong. Note the link to actually listen to the state delegate saying the words he now says were “poorly chosen” and misinterpreted. As you might expect, there’s been a fecal avalanche as a result. Rachel M., HuffPost, Sally Quinn – everybody’s weighing in. There’s a movement to skewer the student reporter because she is a student and because much larger, “actual” papers were present and totally missed it. Why’d they miss it? My guess is they were just making the doughnuts, going to a conservative legislator’s press conference about de-funding Planned Parenthood and filing that Saturday feed-the-beast story. Similar to the reason a local delegate who was present as a supporter of de-funding PP did not hear it – she admitted to not paying attention because she was talking to another delegate. Quite a lesson for the student. I’d say for public officials everywhere, too, but that would make me seem much younger than I am.

The story, if you’re not inclined to click through, quotes a state delegate’s interesting opinion about why there are so many disabled children in the world:

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Marshall, well, he now says he didn’t exactly say that:

“No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion. I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents.”

In other words: Shit. And you were recording? Double shit.

I love it when Roger damns with faint praise. In this case, reviewing “The Crazies.”

“The Crazies” is a perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the Zombie Film. It provides such a convenient storytelling device: Large numbers of mindless zombies lurch toward the camera as the hero wreaks savage destruction; they can be quickly blown away, although not without risk and occasional loss of life. When sufficient zombies have been run through, it’s time for a new dawn.

“The Crazies” stars NN.C crush object Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, two actors who class up the joint, although I watched the trailer and it uses the old “no signal” cell-phone trope. As they say in that other zombie movie: One more for the bonfire. (That link doesn’t go to an imdB page, by the way, but to a great “no signal” montage, via John August, which he credits to FourFour. Has all due credit been passed around? I hope so.)

It’s 9:47, which means my Flex Appeal class starts in 13 minutes and I must away. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you, dear readers. So I’m going out to play.

The temperature rose yesterday to a notch or two above freezing, then fell. A dusting of new snow arrived around nightfall. Fog covered everything until it froze, and that’s where it stands now — silver-plated world. Everything is white, not too cold, and the air is so heavy with moisture it can mean only one thing. One or two more inches coming up from the south; should be here momentarily. I’d like to take a walk in it. Maybe I will.

From Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, No. 1: Never open a book with weather. Well, this isn’t a book. It’s the first draft of personal history. And I’m allowed to talk about the weather.

A job I wish I had: Smashing up the ice on the St. Clair River. Seriously. My favorite thing is when the spring rains come in cloudbursts, and the storm drain in front of my neighbor’s house clogs with spring tree-gunk, and I get to wade through the warm puddles with my rake and clear it. Actually piloting an icebreaker through a troublesome jam to send the backed-up water on its way? Bliss. It would be storm-drain clearance on steroids.

Nance’s Rules of Writing: Don’t use stupid, dated, not-very-creative-when-they-were-coined, let-alone-now catch phrases like “on steroids.”

OK, then. I don’t want to continue yesterday’s depressing discussion for too much longer — I mean, in a silver world, you want to be optimistic — but I caught part of “Fresh Air” yesterday, and it seemed to pertain, a little. Journalist David Weigel of the Washington Independent was speaking on the new right, the right on steroids, the super-righty right represented by the teabaggers and CPAC. You know CPAC — these are the folks who were making jokes about flying a plane into an IRS building and killing a 68-year-old veteran (two tours, Vietnam). And of course you know the Tea Party.

I was struck by the portion of the interview where Terry Gross asked Weigel about what the teabaggers believe about the financial meltdown that started the cascading economic catastrophes of the past two years. He said they blame the whole thing on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the Community Reinvestment Act, which is both not surprising and pretty depressing. I’ve said this before and it didn’t originate with me, but this is what we’re moving toward — a media landscape where not only spin varies from outlet to outlet, but the very facts themselves. Wall Street is not underregulated; Barney Frank is the problem. And vaccines cause autism, of course they do.

Here’s the other thing that struck me: How the sorts of wackos I used to hear on my radio show(s) back in the day — the freakazoids who stayed up all night at the card table under the bare light bulb, writing their single-spaced manifestos or letters to the editor or whatever, who would call and rant about the Bilderbergers and the Federal Reserve and the loss of the gold standard and (my personal favorite) Ezra Pound, that genius — these folks are now being welcomed into the mainstream conservative movement. And they have some new entertaining ideas, about the president’s birth certificate and death panels and so on. And a new spokesgal, who is much prettier than they are.

How comforting.

I ran into one of these guys one day, at Best Buy. I thought it was brave of him to introduce himself, although I probably should have recognized him from his public-access TV show. We chatted a bit. He was pricing camcorders, but dammit, none of them had the feature he needed. Which was?

“Night vision,” he said.

His public-access show was entertaining. This is how he gave web addresses: “H, T, T, P. Colon. Backslash, backslash. T-R-I-P-O-D. Dot — this is a period — C-O-M. Backslash. Tilde. This is the key to the left of the numeral 1, but you have to shift…”

Anyway, they were joking from the CPAC podium about Joseph Stack, the IRS bomber. Had to check to make sure it wasn’t Grover Norquist at the controls, ha ha. Imagine the reaction if– oh, why bother even bringing it up? The liberal media, etc. etc.

I’ll say this: I’m really glad I don’t live in Indiana anymore. I’m sure these folks are all over the place. I see two Don’t Tread on Me flags waving in the neighborhood here, but it’s not a friendly place for the most part, so I don’t feel like I have to smile at them or anything.

Ach. We need to go out with some levity. How about this essay on Rielle Hunter’s “quiet dignity.” Not talking to the media about your stupid life choices qualifies as quiet dignity now? Evidently:

In the early days, Americans came to think of her in the sleaziest terms: the former party girl who used sexual wiles and New Age mumbo jumbo to steal Elizabeth’s husband. Most self-respecting women would feel compelled to say something, anything, in their own defense. And most modern mistresses would do much more than that. A fame-chasing Rielle would have come forward in the first days of her sex scandal, even if it meant defying John’s wishes. She would have talked and talked as the interviews declined in influence, the sad journey from Barbara Walters to Billy Bush. By now she’d have finished her book tour. We’d see her hawking an Internet sex column or sharing Twitpics of Quinn to thousands of followers.

Or maybe, just mayyybeee, she’s holding out for the big payday. Just a thought. Maybe the quiet-dignity meter was recalibrated while I was worrying about the Tea Party, but in my experience, a person who has it doesn’t say things like this:

That same spring, Rielle came to dinner at my home in New York. The Edwardses had just announced that Elizabeth’s cancer was back and was incurable, engendering a national outpouring of support. That didn’t stop Rielle from explaining to the group at dinner, which included journalists from other national publications, that Elizabeth had gotten cancer because she was filled with “bad energy.”

OK, then. Back to the sweatshop! Copy due in two hours!

Since we’ve all decided this recession, the Great Recession, will leave a wide and deep footprint in our national soul, journalists have begun sketching it out. Yesterday on “Talk of the Nation” they were discussing this story in the Atlantic, which I haven’t read and don’t intend to, because it’s February and I’m coping with my usual winter subclinical grumps, and who needs more?

This one, from Sunday’s NYT, sort of snuck up on me, hiding as it was in the Styles section; I thought Sunday Styles was the place you went to avoid reading about strife and misery, but maybe this doesn’t count, although it does to me:

In 18 months, Ms. Lentini went from editing one daily newsletter to still editing that one, as well as the 10 weeklies that generated new ad revenue at no extra cost to her company. Of course, there was a cost: her free time. “It’s, ‘How many plates can I keep going?’ ” she said. “You’re giddy with hysteria.”

She now starts at 7:30 a.m. instead of 9, and works Saturday and Sunday mornings. The night of the Super Bowl, she finished at 11. When she was first hired, she had money to pay someone to fill in during her two vacation weeks. That ended with the recession, so now she doubles her workload the week before vacation. Holidays? “I work most holidays,” she said.

Even while driving one of her daughters to an after-school job as a hair salon receptionist, Ms. Lentini works. “Bridget holds the laptop,” she said. “She’ll say, ‘Mom, you got an I.M. from the photo editor.’ She’ll read it to me, I’ll say, ‘Just put ‘O.K.,’ and write ‘tx’ for thanks. So I can work and drive.”

The story was about the new way we do more with less, and then some more, and some more on top of that, and wondered what might happen when the recession ends, if it ever really does — will we still work this way? My own experience says yes, of course we will; that’s certainly the way it was in newspapers during our long slide, which presaged the general economic collapse. I used to liken it to starving to fit into a two-sizes-smaller dress by prom night or your wedding day or whatever. Diet-diet-diet-celery-water-diet, keep pulling everything in and then comes weigh-in day (quarterly numbers) and whew, you just made it to your goal! Yahoo! [Pause.] Now lose 10 more pounds.

I wonder because I heard from an editor yesterday, pointing out several sloppy goofs in a story I’d handled, and not only was he right, I knew why I made the mistakes: Because I’d edited that story at 1:30 a.m., after a seven-hour shift on my other job. I was still working because I knew I’d have trouble sleeping that night (even though I was exhausted). Why? Because I’m stressed out at how much I have to do. It’s a loop.

I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering. I wonder why we tell our friends story after story about work, its miseries and occasional joys, and yet, so few of our entertainments are about work. (Except for the usual venues — police stations, hospitals and forensics units.) The answer is obvious, I guess: Why pay for a novel or movie about something I live every day? A few years I noticed something: How often the people I met in the pages of a book were independently wealthy, either through family fortunes or early-career windfalls that left them with the means to have novel-worthy midlife crises uncluttered by having to show up at work every day.

One of the many things to admire about “Office Space” is how well it captures the existential misery of life in a cubicle farm, from the chirpy receptionist to the passive-aggressive boss to the ritual of the office birthday cake. You can almost taste the cheap frosting. My favorite sequence in “Up in the Air” is when the three main characters sneak into another company’s Miami team-building party; there’s something about the way the m.c. greets all the members of the best! sales staff! in the southeast region! that sent chills down my spine. (Not that I’ve ever been to such an event. In journalism they just bark, “Back to your oar, 42.” The Miami sojourns for Knight-Ridder were known as Prick School.)

And yet, existential misery is preferable to unemployment, isn’t it? The new normal will be no Miami at all. And no health insurance. The new model for freelancing is Crowdspring, which puts a high gloss on the feeding frenzy. It works like this: You post a project, saying, “I will pay $300 for a logo for our start-up business. It should convey the idea of “bookishness,” but be really smart and sorta techno and have blue in it. Show me what you got.” And then dozens of starving designers (or writers, if that’s the project) do the work and submit it. You pick your favorite and pay your pittance, and everyone else goes home hungry. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

If you have a job, you’re grateful. If you have a job you like, you have rubies and diamonds. Pause a moment to appreciate it.

The Daily Telegraph asks a number of writers to list their Top 10 rules for writing. Part one here, link to part two in part one. Will Self made me laugh:

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Now, I must go to work. (Which I like very much. I only wish it paid better, especially when there’s eight inches of snow atop my aging roof.)

My friend Michael called mid-week to wonder if I’d be free for some cross-country skiing Sunday. Sure. The temperature rose to 38 that day, and continued balmy through yesterday, so we melted down to a walk through Elmwood Cemetery. It’s the oldest in the city. We were on the lookout for the titans — Coleman Young, Russell Alger, Sonic Smith. We found only Alger, but it was a lovely day and we weren’t really looking that hard. We did see the liquor king:

And the beer king:

There’s a group site for firefighters:

I didn’t know firemen would seek common burial, but I suppose these were the men without families, or maybe the ones who thought no one could understand them like the guys. The emblem was a mystery to me, but Michael’s dad was a firefighter. He said they’re bugles, which were the “get out of the way” alarm, blown by the crews in the days before sirens. Learn something new every day.

I’ll come back on my bike in the spring. This is a place to spend a morning.

The balminess ended today:

Who wants to go skiing?

OK, then. Speaking of skiing, I gather there was a hockey game last night, which “we” won, and as a result I am supposed to be exultant. Reader, I am not. I am wearying of the every-other-year we-fest that is the Olympic games. Excuse me: the (kettle drums go bum-bum-bum-bum; cue trumpets DAAAH DAAAH DA DA DA DA DA, etc.) games of the 23rd Olympiad, or whatever. I want some grumpier color commentators; I am sick of being told how proud I am of “Team USA.” I want someone to ask, “Why do the snowboarders look like they put on all the clothes in the hamper? Snowcross? What’s next? Demolition derby?” This event always seems to go on four days too long. I know it’s coming when the voice of Morgan Freeman makes me want to throw things.

On the other hand, what else is there to do? It’s February. Anyway, Alessandra Stanley looks at the jingoism angle today:

Even the calm, professional Bob Costas, who is the great exception to the NBC rule of smarminess, felt he had to explain himself on Saturday night for enthusing about the unexpected victory — and infectious joy — of Mark Tuitert, a 29-year-old Dutch speed skater who surprised everyone, including himself, by beating the American Shani Davis in the 1,500-meter race.

“And this is to take nothing away from the interest in the States about Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick,” Mr. Costas said apologetically, “but what this means in the Netherlands, I mean, this is their national pastime, this is so huge there.” As Mr. Costas spoke about the new Dutch hero, the screen behind him carried a huge portrait of Mr. Davis, who took the silver medal.

Well, exactly.

Bloomberg follows Rachel Maddow on the great underreported story: Republicans who thundered against the stimulus who now say, dude, where’s my stimulus? (Quietly.)

And with that, I’m away. Monday waits for no one, even with five inches of snow in the forecast.

Johnny Weir, his Wikipedia bio (locked to further editing until “disputes are resolved,” hmm) tells us he is a Russophile who taught himself to speak and read Russian. Well, that explains a lot — why his name is written on his skates in Cyrillic letters, why he speaks to his Russian coach in Russian, why his signs of the cross just before performing have a certain Orthodox flavor to them, perhaps even why, when he looks at the ceiling and gives thanks for not turning his triple Axel into a spinning buttfall*, you can clearly read his lips saying, “спасибо” — “spasibo” for those of you who don’t have the Cyrillic keyboard set installed, or, in ‘merican, “thanks.”

* “spinning buttfall” — phrase attributed to Dave Barry

I love Johnny Weir. I love how people want to ask him if he’s gay. Why do you even need to ask? Isn’t it obvious? Although it’s true, in a world where gay people have joined the mainstream and a fair number of them look, speak and act just like us, that some are still unnerved by how unlike-us he is. You’re not one of them Anderson Cooper-type queers, are you, you can sense them asking. Well, hell no. He’s fierce! He’s fabulous! When I look at him, I think of the line from “Little Big Man,” after Dustin Hoffman has returned to the Indian tribe of his boyhood and re-met Little Horse, his very sensitive chum with the great feathers: He had become a “heemanee” for which there ain’t no English word. Johnny Weir is a heemanee; there is no English word.

Anyway, I thought he got robbed. I was really pulling for him, and I thought he put on a fine show, and yes, I speak as one of those every-four-years skating fans, which is to say, I can’t tell a triple Axel from a triple toe loop, although I think I finally know a triple Lutz when I see one — the knee sticks out. Both the Lutz and the Axel are named for the skaters who first did them. And that’s about what I know. But that’s OK, because Scott Hamilton and Dick Button are both excellent color commentators. I encourage you to read this story on Button, the transcript of an NPR story that aired a couple days ago. Button’s opinion on Weir is one I can respect (the fierce costumes and “conservative” skating are like “two feet going off in opposite directions,” and hence the low scores).

When Button leaves us, I hope Weir gets that job. We need a heemanee’s take on the figs.

OK, then. I’m writing about figure skating to avoid writing about Angry Joe Stack, the kamikaze pilot. The question now seems to be whether the attack was or wasn’t terrorism. Hmm. I’m going to stake my position out thusly: It depends. The attack is roughly parallel to what Tim McVeigh did in OKC, with one major difference — I don’t think Stack identified himself as part of a movement, although lord knows there are many more out there exactly like him. McVeigh’s attack wasn’t a suicide bombing because he hoped to do it again. He thought he had compadres out there who would join him in his helter-skelter homemade revolution. (He did and he didn’t, and I recommend “American Terrorist,” out of print but still widely available from used bookstores and presumably your public library, as the best single book on the subject. No flashy theories, no big-journo showboating, just dense with facts by two plodding, diligent reporters.)

A lot depends on how those others react to this, and we’ve seen from past events that frequently one crazy asshole with a big idea gives a lot of other crazy assholes the strength to carry out their own big ideas. I know this sounds muddled, but all I can say is, like pornography, I know terrorism when I see it, and while I see some of it here, it doesn’t appear to be clear-cut. It will likely lead to more security in government buildings, however, which are already secured to the point of a Detroit liquor store. Expect paying a call on the Social Security or IRS or even the post office to become even more of a pain in the ass.

This is maybe more of a question for Pilot Joe, but I wonder what sort of attention general aviation gets from law enforcement these days. I wonder what’s stopping the Black Sunday scenario. It would appear the answer is: Not much.

With that, I’m sure I’ve irritated enough of you that it’s time to make an exit. Still much to do today. Much to do over the weekend. Much to do, period.

Yay, Mitch Albom is reporting from Haiti.

Will there be stupid one-sentence paragraphs?

Do you even need to ask?

Who will be in the photos?

Could it be Mitch Himself?

Again: Grow up.

Actually, in mellow moments, a state of mind I strive to reach more frequently, I wonder if Mitch is the world’s happiest man these days. I wonder if, as so often happens in life and three-act screenplays, whether the brass ring he was chasing hasn’t revealed itself to be cheap paint covering zinc and not that shiny at all. I had a drink not long ago with someone who admired Albom’s early work in Detroit, and says he really was a different guy, once upon a time. He had wit and style and — this is key — enough of a bad-ass inside him to occasionally be naughty. Then he saw the opportunity to cash in by warming hearts. There’s always a buck to be made in the heart-warming trade. Ask the people who make greeting cards and much of the advertising inflicted upon us during events like the Olympics. In Mitch’s case he made many, many bucks, and now look what’s become of him.

If I went to Haiti, I’d hire the roughest, toughest fixer I could find and ask to be taken on the Full Carnage Tour. I’d want to see voodoo ceremonies and makeshift hospitals and squatters living in rubble piles. Mitch has to go to the Caring and Sharing Mission, where he will write about the Noble Poor, Who Are Down But Not Out, Because They Have Love. Just a scan of the subheads makes your teeth hurt:

“Seeing the miraculous,” “Feeling joy and pain,” Doing what we must” — has a story ever announced itself to be more joyless? Could there be a single thing in there you feel you haven’t read before? Haiti is poor. Haiti is tragic. Haiti is our responsibility. Haiti is yet another opportunity for Mitch to warm your heart and tell you again what you already knew — it’s bad, but others are on the case, fighting the good fight, and yes, you can write them a check — while simultaneously throwing in little details of what a good guy he is:

It does not take long to settle in here. I put down my bag, blow up an air mattress and place it on the floor of the pastor’s quarters. That’s it.

Millionaire Mitch sleeps on the floor. That’s how poor Haiti is.

I wonder if, late at night in his counting-house, surrounded by his treasure chests full of gold or bales of cash or in his cashmere underwear personally woven by his investment advisor, if he ever looks out the window at the moonlight on the snow and thinks, This job used to be more fun. When your whole life is one long Good Deed, when you walk into every public event with that half-smile of smug self-effacement (yes, it exists), when you sit behind a microphone and say things like, “No, no the real heroes are the people who do this work every single day. I’m just the guy who tells the rest of you about them” — is there ever a small voice inside that says, You are so, so full of shit. Go ahead, tell them that, Mr. Modesty.

No, I didn’t think so, either.

Here’s my heart of hearts speaking: When I learned Warren Zevon was a friend of this man, my opinion of Warren fell by 37 percent. That’s saying something.

Oh, well. There are still honest writers in the world. Roger Ebert responds to the Esquire piece. Says he’s not really dying all that fast, and that his cholesterol is excellent. Which is sort of funny, when you think of it. Ebert gets the Tom Sawyer experience of attending his own funeral and hearing what all his friends have to say about him. What a lucky guy.

The man who made his bones wearing a stupid bow tie, name-dropping philosophers and making a who-farted expression on a thousand Sunday-morning news-chat shows says loathing for Sarah Palin is born of “snobbery.” Now that’s bein’ ballsy, George Will!

Back to the mangle for me, folks.

From the number of times this story turned up in my Facebook feed yesterday I have to assume everyone’s seen it by now, but not all of you stay online all day, so what the hell. It’s about Roger Ebert, and what his life is like now that he’s lost the ability to speak, eat and drink. (He lost his jaw to cancer four years ago, and reconstructive surgery has been one failure after another.)

Ebert posed for a picture; with his imperfectly fixed face, that requires no small amount of courage in and of itself. I’m glad he did, not just because it’s better to show one’s broken face than to hide it, but because even a face that’s half-gone can still show the man within. Look at the eyes, squinched a little in what looks like merriment, although you can’t say for sure at first glance — the mouth has been shaped by surgeons into a simulacrum of a smile, and maybe that’s what leads your impression. But once you read the story, you know: This is a man who smiles, who still smiles, who in fact seems to be smiling much of the time. He’s angered not by the fate of his physical body, but by the same things he was angered by before, that anger us all — petty bullshit, money-grubbing, spotty internet service.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.

I came late to my appreciation of Ebert. I was a Siskel partisan, once upon a time. Siskel was like me — snooty, irritable, a fan of Art. Ebert, the tabloid critic, was more of the hoi polloi, giving three and a half stars to action movies, space epics and other crap. It was a while before I realized he was as difficult to please as any discerning arbiter, but he knew enough about movies and why people see them to judge them as individuals. “Con Air” is not “Citizen Kane,” but he didn’t see any reason to rub anyone’s nose in it if they preferred action to Orson Welles. Mostly, I was in awe of his productivity. It’s pretty common — or was — for large newspapers to have an A critic and a B critic, the latter of whom was sometimes a freelancer. The A critic does the big-movie reviews and most of the related stories, roundups and the like, while the B critic sweeps up behind him or her, or just lightens the load. It’s not unusual for half a dozen movies to open on a summer weekend, ranging from blockbusters to art-house fare, and that’s a lot of stuff to see, consider and review in a week. Five years ago, I changed planes in Chicago on a Friday and picked up a Sun-Times. Ebert had bylines on six reviews, and I believe they covered that range of ambition. His take on the barrel-bottom straight-to-video entry was as considered, and as respectful, as his thoughts on the $200 million tentpole playing in all the multiplexes.

Respectful doesn’t mean boot-licking, by the way. Like my old screenwriting teacher Terry, who was also a critic, he walks into every film expecting to enjoy himself. (That’s what the audience does, after all; why would you pay eight bucks to be punished?) To the extent that the film fulfills or disappoints that expectation is what he bases his reviews on. It seems like a small thing. It isn’t. You might think you’re a movie fan, but imagine what it would be like to be required to see everything, and then write about it afterward, to have to form an opinion, support the opinion, and then present it to a general audience in a more stylish way than merely saying whether it was awesome or sucked.

Now imagine doing it for 40 years or so, never losing your enthusiasm, and in fact adding to your workload with extra assignments like his Great Movies series (which began as a Sunday column, swapped off every other week with the music critic, who wrote about the Great Albums), and the TV show, and the teaching gigs, and the film-festival work, and all the rest of it.

Now add cancer and facial mutilation, the literal loss of your voice. Tell me how you feel about it then.

The fact Ebert is still at work in any capacity, much less at full speed, is nothing short of a miracle. His last extended leave, when he nearly died, he missed months of movies. When he came back, he resumed his old blistering pace, and then watched the movies he’d missed, a few at a time, writing reviews of them, so that the record would be complete. I think he knows what his opinion means to the moviegoing public. I don’t see a lot of movies in theaters, but I try to catch up with the bigs eventually, and I never feel like I’ve watched it all the way until I’ve opened the laptop afterward to see what Roger thought of it.

Lord knows he’s not perfect. I disagree with him on many films, and his fondness for Spike Lee will always come between us. But in every other way — expertise, attitude, practice — he is nothing short of a hero.

Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled “Go Gently into That Good Night.” I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Years ago, I was watching the cultural kerfuffle over “The Passion of the Christ,” probably on Amy Welborn’s blog, because that was the sort of thing she wrote about a lot, back then. Ebert gave the film four stars, but the review is hardly worshipful, and he states outright that “it is the most violent movie I have ever seen.” I mentioned this review somewhere in her comments sections, and someone else retorted, Roger Ebert is an old man and he’s dying. His opinion no longer matters, or words to that effect. This was before his illness had taken its most serious tolls (he’s fought it for years), but I was amazed by not only the cruelty of that remark, but its utter ignorance. Roger Ebert’s opinion not only still matters, it will matter for a long time after he’s gone. If that isn’t the best epitaph a writer can hope for, I don’t know what is.

The holiday bollixed up my Monday chores and I have to slice one item from the list. Folks? It’s you. Sorta. I leave you with this long, long, long NYT examination of the Tea Party movement, which you may discuss, if you like. I’m not entirely sold on it; there are too many passages like this, that meander on and on, making some pretty sweeping assertions without any actual human beings offered as proof:

They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books.

But it generally tracks with what I’ve observed anecdotally, and it underlines a fear I’ve had for a while, i.e., that someone from this gang is going to make an attempt on the president’s life:

…in Indiana, Richard Behney, a Republican Senate candidate, told Tea Party supporters what he would do if the 2010 elections did not produce results to his liking: “I’m cleaning my guns and getting ready for the big show. And I’m serious about that, and I bet you are, too.”

Here’s where Richard Behney stands, by the way. He hasn’t a chance of being elected to anything, but funny how his story — jus’ a plumber/entrepreneur who enjoyed sittin’ on the back of his truck at the end of the day, talkin’ about life — is pretty much a word-for-word match to the typical teabagger profiled in the Times piece.

This part tickled me:

(Ron) Paul led Mrs. Southwell to Patriot ideology, which holds that governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

These folks used to call my radio show, many years ago. They’re Jew-haters to the last man. Maybe Joseph Sobran has a future in journalism after all.

OK, now I must away. Tomorrow should be better. Alan’s off this week, and we’re thinking of going to Windsor for dim sum, like the effete yuppies we are. Is dim sum worth traveling for?

I think I weigh 300 pounds today. Our weekend was a mad dash to Chicago to see friends, and so it consisted of five hours in the car, one hour in hotel, two or three hours of dinner, sleep, two or three hours of breakfast, five more hours in the car. There wasn’t time for anything else, but it was good, if you like eating and driving, and I always like the first and usually like the second. If nothing else, it’s good to see a beautiful, thriving city from time to time.

We crossed the Mitten on a winter weekend because our friends from Turkey are back in the States for a while. Fatih was a Knight-Wallace Fellow and his wife, Idil, was the smartest of the spouses. She learned Russian in eight months while we were there, yes, zero to fluency in eight months. She thought she should learn because of all the Russians in Istanbul these days, and also they were planning on having a baby soon, and Russians are the go-to nannies, the way West Indies natives are in New York City. She did indeed get pregnant in Ann Arbor, had some minor complications that made her doctor forbid her from long plane trips in the third trimester, so they stayed an extra couple months and had the baby in Michigan. When they returned, Idil interviewed nannies in Russian.

Fatih told me that for something like $300 a month, you can hire a college-educated Russian woman — if you’re lucky, even one with an M.D. — to be your nanny. “Wouldn’t a woman with a medical degree feel a bit overqualified for child care, and perhaps resentful?” I wondered.

“No, you want one with an advanced degree so you know she’s not a prostitute,” he said. Oh.

So now Idil is pregnant again, and they’ve elected to give birth in the States again. To take advantage of the Greatest Health-Care System in the World? No. So that their daughters will have matching passports. Good thinking. We always knew Idil was smart. Between learning Russian and otherwise exploring Ann Arbor, she took some grad-school entrance exams, too, just for the hell of it. She got a perfect score on the math sections, and close to perfect on the writing. That really bugged her. “What is a nine-letter English word that means ‘talkative’?” she asked.

I thought for a minute. “Garrulous,” I said. She smacked her forehead as though she’d forgotten who George Washington was. Their 5-year-old speaks four languages fluently. She’s going to need dual citizenship, once she grows up to take over the world.

You’ll want to watch out for her. She’s blonde like her mother, a Tatar.

There’s nothing like spending time with ambitious international cosmopolites to make you feel dumb. We went to breakfast with the Bordens and Carpenters, and mostly talked sports and music, but it was smart sports-and-music talk. I learned about Bill Wirtz from Borden, and more from Wikipedia:

Wirtz died at Evanston Hospital on September 26, 2007, following a brief battle with cancer. …During a tribute and moment of silence for him during the Blackhawks home opener on October 8, 2007, the Chicago crowd displayed their displeasure with Wirtz’s operation of the organization by booing the proceedings.

Man, hockey fans can be tough.

And of course this weekend we watched a bit of the Olympics. I have very few strong feelings about the winter games, except that all that trick skiing is silly, but then, luge is pretty silly, too. Speed skating is my life’s great missed opportunity; it’s the one sport I’m truly fascinated by. (I followed the clap-skate discussion closely, a few years back.) Very Hans Brinker.

And, of course, the speed skaters have Stephen Colbert on their side.

In some ways I hate February in Olympic years; there’s too much on TV. This week, I’m going to have to choose between Westminster and the games. I hope nothing good in Vancouver is opposite the terrier group.

So how was your weekend? Bloggage? Not much:

The Alabama shooting case gets ever-weirder. Hello, Professor Crazypants.

With that, I’m off.