For a place where ideas are supposed to be exchanged in a lively manner, most newspaper editorial pages are, well, not.

The one in Columbus, when I was there, was the last stop before retirement, the place for loyal but lame geldings to put their whitening muzzles to the lush grass for the last couple of years, and be asked to do no work more difficult than carrying the children around the pasture, and have I mixed enough metaphors? (I’m told it has since improved. Considerably.) One of the young newsroom guns used to publish an equal parts scathing-and-fun internal critique of the paper, and did a hilarious takedown of Dispatch editorials. At least twice a month the page could be reliably counted on to take note of an approaching holiday, welcome it, and hope it heralded good things. I remember one such headline: Bean Can Day Awaited. Readers, do you know that “bean can day,” in quotes, does not turn up a single result in all of Googledom? Could that aging scribe have been having his own joke, turning in an editorial for a holiday entirely born of his imagination, waiting to see if it would run? I think so. He was like the National Lampoon’s Penthouse parody, where the copy around the centerfold, month after month, was the text of the writer’s resignation letter, never accepted because it was never read.

My friend Leo does his best with what he has to work with in Fort Wayne, and that’s not bloody much, but even in the high-cotton days, I wondered about the paper’s peculiar attachment to certain writers, both local and syndicated. I think we had to have been among the last papers still running the vile Joseph Sobran, years after William F. Buckley himself had cashiered the anti-semitic bastard from the National Review. (Here’s a recent effort, “Sodomy, Abortion and the Forces of Hate,” in which he refers to our “mulatto president” — still swingin’!) And then there was the uniquely awful Thomas Sowell.

I don’t think this takedown of his latest book can be improved upon, so I’ll just link, quote a passage or two, and encourage the rest of you wallow in it the way I did:

Even jeremiads should have their joys; there is something so wonderful about being a writer and a critic that delivering even bad news can be a source of unbearable pleasure. But Sowell takes no joy in anything he has to say: his tone is as dour and depressing as his conclusions. I understand that the man is a conservative, but can’t he crack a smile? Sowell is such a plodder that even sarcasm, conservatism’s reliable and sometimes amusing old ally, is beyond his reach.

This business of dreary writing escapes me. True, writing can be a torment. But then there is the payoff: the unexpected insight, the sly pun, the implication left dangling for the reader to run with. Did Sowell’s research assistants, one of whom has worked for him for two decades, ever hear him shout with joy? Did he ever run into a colleague’s office bursting with enthusiasm about a brilliant sentence that made a whole chapter hang together? I cannot believe it. There is no grandeur in Sowell’s words, no sign of human creativity, no dream or fantasy of immortality. Sowell writes as if called to grim duty.

It’s that good all the way through. I love a piece like this that singles out something you hadn’t thought of but, once it’s pointed out to you, hits you like a sledgehammer. In focusing on Sowell’s unique joylessness, he puts his finger on what’s wrong with so many newspaper editorial pages. Leo frequently pointed out that the death of oxygenated editorial pages tracked with the rise of the one-newspaper town, that the monopoly on print advertising led to the current model of point-counterpoint, on one hand/on the other hand, and what does the future hold? Only time will tell. Whatever. That doesn’t explain how Sowell found such a comfortable home on his page, but Sowell certainly towed toed the ideological line, if also being as boring as dry toast.

Joyless — that’s exactly the word for it. Elsewhere in that story I learned with amazement that Sowell has published 46 books. Forty-six! As Wolfe notes:

I confess to not having read them all. But I have read enough of them to know that Sowell is not one for changing his mind. Although he claims to have been a Marxist in his youth, his published writings never vary: the same themes—the market works, affirmative action does not work, Marxism is wrong, and, yes, intellectuals are never to be trusted—dominate from start to finish.

I’ll say. Ironic that Sowell writes like a mirror image of a good Marxist apparatchik in Stalin’s Soviet Union, ain’a?

While we’re on the subject of writers, two recommendations before I leave:

This NYT piece on the discovery of a major influence on William Faulker — a diary kept by a plantation owner who was an ancestor of a childhood friend — is full of great details, not the least of which is its description of the diary itself:

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

And, finally, another NYT story on another celebrated author, this one 17 years old and German, who is battling plagiarism accusations after her hot book of the moment was found to have lots of cutting and pasting from other sources. This strikes me as a rather ballsy defense, however:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

In other words, the sampler’s excuse, i.e., I took that previous thing, yes, but I made it my own. Feh. People who say there’s no such thing as originality are, what’s the word? Unoriginal.

Finally, a good ChiTrib piece on the death of a lesbian bar. A little melancholy, but not — the story points out that as the gay community is welcomed into the mainstream, it has less use for bars as community centers. Anything that gets people out of the smoky air and into the light can’t be all bad.

OK, I’ve prattled on too long and I have much work to do. Enjoy the weekend.

Late in the comments yesterday, someone asked me to share my parallel-parking secret. I’m happy to. In the interest of clarity, I will dispense with the stuff about safety and signals and all that. You’re a grownup, you know how to drive. This is just about the raw technique, OK?

1) Pull up even with the car ahead. About two feet away, more or less.

2) Look over your right shoulder and back up straight until the parked car’s rear bumper is even with the roof support behind your back seat. (This was easier in the ’70s when all cars were boxes, but the proportions are still there. When the bumper is just ahead of your rear tires, if that’s clearer.) Stop and crank the wheel all the way to the right.

3) Switch your focus to your driver’s side outside rear-view mirror and start backing again. As soon as you see the curbside headlight of the car behind, turn your wheel to the left two full turns.

At this point the technique starts to vary depending on your vehicle’s size, but after the two-turn move, keep turning left while continuing to back up, and with any luck at all, you should find yourself parallel to the curb well within the one-foot range. Eight out of 10 times it works for me the first time. When it doesn’t it’s usually because I’ve rushed it. Rushing it is one of my big failings as a human being. Now you know.

The biggest mistake most people make is starting the turn into the space too soon. (If you have one of those cars with nothing behind the back seat, you might want to play around with this formula a bit, although it’s worked fine on hatchbacks I’ve owned.) Or they try to go in head-first — big mistake. Take your time, leave yourself room, and don’t be intimidated if you have to slow traffic for 12 seconds or so. It’ll wait.

Reverse all the motions if you’re parking on the left side of a one-way street, or in the U.K. or Japan.

By the way, I got 100 on the parking portion of my driving test, way back in the year 16.

Not a terrible day yesterday. Had lunch out, in a restaurant, with a waitress, rather than the usual standing-up-at-the-sink model of the work-at-home freelancer, so that was a plus. The snow was pretty and more or less entirely cleared by the time I set out, another big win, as the kids say. I found a parking spot on Woodward directly in front of the place, which I backed into with great smoothness and elan. And then I came home to discover my health insurance is holding me responsible for a portion of the cost of the flu shots I received a few weeks back, to the tune of $.01.

I know how these things happen. Computers can’t judge. All they see is, if you owe, you get a bill. And I owe a penny.

I’m ignoring it, by the way. I plan to wreck my credit score over this. Or else I’ll spend 42 cents to mail them a penny, so they can then reply that they don’t accept cash payments. When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

So, a little bloggage? Sure, why not:

Jim at Sweet Juniper once observed that one of the cool things about Detroit is, frequently there’s nobody around to tell you you can’t do something. A couple of my filmmaking friends went out during the snowstorm and discovered how true that is:

My role as a parent requires me to disapprove of this behavior, although I am relieved to see Sean put on a helmet and wrist guards (guffaw) before snow-surfing behind a car with another car following closely behind, and then running a stop sign. Doesn’t the Detroit ghet-toe have a marvelously creepy feeling at 1 a.m.? And no, I don’t know what that strange cutaway at the 30-second mark is.

While we’re posting video, here’s one Hank found, from the fittingly named website, I Love Local Commercials. Although I think that lady buck is actually a donkey:

Yes, I saw the newly released 9/11 photos. I don’t know what there is to say about them other than, that sure was a bad day.

It’s been a great week for weather clichés. Here’s one Alan hates: “the white stuff.” Which leads me to wonder: During the Dust Bowl years, did meteorologists call for “the brown stuff?”

OK, I’m flailing. Have a good day, all.

Kate got a snow day today. I’m flabbergasted. The superintendent here is notorious for never closing school; you look at those “you know you’re from Grosse Pointe if” things on Facebook and they all say, “…you hate Suzanne Klein because you never got a snow day.” From where I sit, it looks as though we got five or six inches, remarkable only because it’s taken this long to arrive. And they cancelled school. This is surely a sign of the apocalypse.

Frankly I don’t blame her for being a hard case. All schools are local here. There are no buses. And half the student body has at least one parent who drives a hulking SUV that could scale Mt. McKinley (at least, that’s what the commercials imply). Plus, duh, it’s Michigan. I tell her she doesn’t want the Fort Wayne model, which was to cancel or delay schools at the first sign of a cloud crossing the sky, which makes all the kiddies happy until the end of the year rolls around, and the days have to be made up. Knowing what happens around here at year’s end — in which learning basically ceases after Memorial Day, replaced with a round of picnics, parties and in-class movies — I wonder why state legislators even bother fussing about this stuff.

So, anyway, snow day. I made chili last night. Used my own chuck (ground by moi), added a basket of corn muffins. There are lots of leftovers. Stop by.

Which reminds me of a story someone once told me: A couple of his acquaintance gone to see Branford Marsalis perform in (I think) Bloomington, Ind., and as they were leaving, walked past the stage entrance, where Marsalis was hanging around, talking to the fans. Little by little the crowd dwindled until it was Marsalis and this couple, and he said, “So, what’s a good place to eat around here?” They suggested a few places, and then the man added, “My wife made a pot of chili before we left. It should be pretty good by now. You’re welcome to join us.” Marsalis said OK, that sounded good, and they drove him home with them, and then back to the tour bus. I’m not sure what to make of this story, other than a) the Marsalises are jes’ plain folks; and b) one should never underestimate a touring musician’s longing for home cooking. I think it’s probably a little of both.

Does Branford’s more famous brother still do his great radio show? I forget the name of it, but it should have been called “Master Class with Wynton Marsalis.” I would catch it on Columbus’ public-radio station when I was traveling there often on Friday evenings. It was a really engaging lecture with lots of records, aimed at that precise point where a trained musician would learn something new from it, but an untrained listener could easily follow it, too. He’d tell you why Thelonious Monk was important, play a record, explain why he was a great composer, play a record, drill down into particularly engaging key changes, play a record, etc. By the end of the hour you felt a) entertained; and b) smarter. That’s a hard line to walk.

Add me to the I Hate Facebook club. If it weren’t for the fact many people consider FB my de facto e-mail account, I’d drop it entirely. They’ve retooled it yet again, and it’s the usual train wreck — reload your home page three times, and you’ll get three different news feeds, and one of them will be from two days ago. I think what they’re struggling with is success. I now have nearly 300 “friends,” many of whom I couldn’t identify in a police lineup, but are still pretty good FB players, in that they post good links and can be funny in a status-update line. Other people are far better friends in real life — my best friends, in fact — but lousy on FB, and somewhere there’s an algorithm that will let you sort them out, but Facebook hasn’t figured it out yet. What I need to do is sit down with all my 300 and do a great big cull. I did a targeted one over the weekend and friends? It felt good.

Bloggage? Oh, not very much:

I thought this Henry Paulson book excerpt from over the weekend was remarkable in the story it told about John McCain’s spectacularly dumb move in fall 2008, but the intro was one of those “huh?” moments:

With the stock market in freefall and the country headed for a crippling economic recession, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan to Congress on Friday, Sept. 19, 2008. By the following Monday, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was meeting resistance on all sides. Mr. Paulson’s next few days, marked by little sleep and no exercise, were frantic with meetings and private phone calls on behalf of the legislation.

I know many, many people who consider a daily workout necessary to remain on top of their game, mentally. I know I feel better when I exercise than when I don’t. It’s also the first thing to fall off the schedule when I get busy. I think it’s remarkable that the editor of this piece, in sketching out the condition of Henry Paulson during a truly scary stretch in his work history, would single out the fact it cost him his workout. If I’d learned that he still made time for the treadmill while the world’s financial system was teetering on the brink, I’d be pissed. Thoughts?

First Toyota, now a Honda recall? The Detroit auto executives must feel like a boxer on the mat at 7 on a 10-count, looking up through the blood and sweat to see their opponent suddenly suffer chest pains.

Betty White’s Super Bowl ad is giving her a little career lift. Ha ha. It’s funny to see the old-bag veterans of Mary Tyler Moore’s show get a second, third or maybe fifteenth wind. Cloris Leachman was all over Comedy Central for a while, working blue-blue-blue at some roast a while back. She called up some young hunk and planted a soul kiss on him, and don’t think that didn’t rock the house. There’s nothing funnier than a horny old lady, as Betty already knows from having chased Lou Grant back in the day.

And with that, I think I’m out of here. Happy snow day, all.

I think I just shot my writing time firing off a thousand-word memo to the students staffing GrossePointeToday.com. It started off as a general guide to covering small city councils, and, as usual, became something else. When something starts with “be on time” and ends with a little story about how I overcame my fear of the New York City subway system, I know I’ve lost the thread. Ah, well. Someday, kids, I’ll be famous, and that memo will be worth something. If I can stop writing memos long enough to get anything else done, that is.

I’ve got about a million things on my mind at the moment, so let’s fall back on that time-tested trick of lazy columnists everywhere — the three-dotter. I called it Items in Search of a Column when I was doing that sort of thing, but I’m repudiating all ties with my former employer, having learned yesterday that they laid off the last remaining full-time staff photographer, along with two other people, late last week. (What’s more, they called the guy in from his vacation to fire him.) A newspaper without photographers, yes. Reporters now carry point-and-shoot cameras and take their own pictures, the standard bush-league model. When I joined that outfit, it was a year off of winning a Pulitzer Prize and, needless to say, writers wrote and photographers photographed. But that was a long time ago.

I’m changing my resume, anyway. New item: 1984-2004: In a coma. It would be less embarrassing.

…For the record, while I only heard it from an adjacent room, it sounded like the Who sucked eggs at the Super Bowl. If nothing else, it inspired my daughter to ask, “Why do only old people perform at halftime?” Alan: “Because the last time they let young people do it, Janet Jackson showed her boobie.” She did like the laser light show, but for the love of Mike, can we book someone other than the Motown All-Stars or some other geezer outfit for 2011? Just a thought.

…More bad news from my hometown: Casa d’Angelo on Fairfield is closing its doors. “Declining revenue,” etc. Today’s story says it’s a domino effect following the closing of a nearby hospital SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, and the emphasis should tell you what I think of that one. Well, it’s their business, they can do what they want. But it’s a loss for the neighborhood that will no doubt be cheered on by the knuckle-draggers, who have been trashing Fort Wayne’s south side as long as I can remember. They think it’s unsafe, which struck me as ridiculous then and even more so now that my bad-neighborhood meter has been recalibrated to Detroit standards. I used to despair that Hoosiers would rather buy a new house in a subdivision exactly like every other one than a craftsman bungalow for half the price in my neighborhood. Looks like nothing has changed.

…Does anything ever change? Sometimes I wonder.

…My cheer at the Saints victory, which was previously predicated on the simple thrill of seeing a feisty underdog defeat their smug betters, escalated to joy upon watching this video. The fact it irks knuckle-draggers who resent the conflating of a football team with the social upheaval of Hurricane Katrina is just the whipped cream on my sundae.

…I hate the new Facebook, whatever it is at the moment. Someone asked the other day if I’d pay for Facebook. Most days, I’d pay to be forcibly disconnected from it. Even as I continue to use it, yes.

…Jezebel on unretouched Madonna. Thanks, LAMary. I find these photos as impossible to resist as chocolate cream pie in the refrigerator, something Madonna doubtless hasn’t tasted in decades.

And with that, it’s into the shower with me. Sorry for the scrambled eggs, but we have a snowpocalypse under way, and I need to run my errands early.

If you send me an e-mail on the weekend and I don’t respond immediately, please to forgive. I’ve started trying to make at least 36 hours of the weekend internet-free. It’s an intention that doesn’t always work out, but when it does, I’m able to go almost a day without knowing the biggest political story of the day was that Sarah Palin wrote something on her hand.

People, please. Obviously, it’s funny. Obviously, it’s what she might call kinda ironical-like, given that it came in a speech with yet another crack about Obama and his TelePromTer. But as they say: Consider the source. This is she-who trying to recapture what turned out to be the high point of her career — her speech in St. Paul at the GOP convention. And based on what I saw and read (and cousin, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch the whole thing) it wasn’t even that good — your basic goulash of god-bless-America and thank-you-soldiers-for-our-freedom, and the obligatory backhand to the “professor of law” currently occupying the Oval Office. Your basic red meat for the knuckle-draggers, all delivered completely off the top of her head, because of course she doesn’t use a ‘prompter. Neither did George W. Bush.

If you want to get upset, read…well, you better read this first, the Cliff’s Notes version of yet another I-think-I’ve-got-Obama’s-pedigree-doped-out think piece, and then, only if you dare to swim in slime on a crisp winter morning, should you read the comments on the original piece, because cousin, nothing anyone ever said about Sarah Palin’s baby even comes close.

That’s the second time I’ve used “cousin” as an interjection today. Can you tell I saw “Inglourious Basterds” this weekend? A hoot. We ain’t in the pris’ner-takin’ bidness, we in the Nazi-killin’ bidness, and cousin? Bidness is a-boomin’. Finally, a use for Brad Pitt’s lazy tongue. But he’s not the star of that movie; Christoph Waltz is, and looking at the other Oscar nominees for Best Supporting, all I can say is, if he doesn’t take it home, we live in a cruel world where justice is an illusion.

Which means he could very easily lose, because: See above.

So, how was y’all’s weekend? I spent part of it in the dusty stacks of the Detroit Public Library, and part of it writing (with the internet turned off!), so I saw little of note. Oh, except for the Super Bowl, which I watched with one-third of my attention (I was working at the same time, but it was a slow night for non-football and non-advertising news). As I believe I stated, I was rooting for New Orleans, on the usual irrational grounds: New Orleans is more fun than Indianapolis, Peyton Manning needs that smug smile wiped off his face, it’s always fun when the underdog wins. Usually my backing is the kiss of death, so it was nice to see sometimes it isn’t. I see we’ve already had the red-state chime-in in the previous thread, about how now all Katrina-related wounds are healed and we must hear no more about it. I was unaware of this attitude; is it prevalent? If so, some news: Ain’t gonna happen, cousin.

Also, it would seem we finally, finally have a major snowstorm headed our way. If it comes, it will be only the second shovel-able snow we’ve had this season, which must amuse you east coast folks. Nevertheless, I’ll take it. Droughts are droughts no matter the season.

Bloggage? Not much, but there’s this: Nate Silver on she-who. I’m going to do some rounds and study Russian.

Almost forgot! My favorite commercial.

I’m moving to Coozledad’s vegetarian farm.

The Ice House wasn’t having a very good day. The sun was out, and the temperature was on its way up to a high of 36 or so, and the roof was melting:

Apparently this has been a problem all along. The hipsters-in-charge weren’t too happy about the uncooperative weather. The bus and tarp were along the southern exposure, trying to block the sun from the very nice icicles. Otherwise, they were holding up OK:

I can never resist the Tri-X setting on the new camera for long:

Overall? Eh. It’s an interesting achievement, but ultimately — ice on a house. Perhaps I lack imagination.

Yeesh, what a week. You should not be surprised to hear that current events have schadenfreude thick in the air in Michigan. One of my Twitter follows is retweeting every Toyota joke that comes down the pike. My favorite is the new Toyota marketing slogan: “There’s no stopping us now!” They make good cars; they’ll pull through, but stuck accelerators are scary things, and handling a PR disaster like this is not for the weak of stomach. Ay yi yi, but being No. 1 is suddenly seeming a hollow victory.

They may think different in Silicon Valley, but manufacturing is not for the faint of heart. A million widgets that can fail you any number of ways, and now all this software. Alan was having a problem with the throttle on his Subaru a few months ago, and asked the dealer to check it out. The diagnosis? Some old code in the computer. No wonder the best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne can’t work on his own car anymore.

I don’t want to bug out early, but I must. Another redonkulous day ahead, capped by yet another middle-school dance. I haven’t heard any Lady Gaga in a week — this’ll do me good. A little bloggage before I go:

A woman who collects Playboy magazines. Because why not?

Not everyone working at a newspaper is miserable. My old college classmate Mark just spent a month in Afghanistan for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and came back with one of those great old expensive series newspapers do so well. Part 1 commences here.

For you writer fans, a new interview with Martin Amis.

Christopher Beam looks at that weird sheep ad. EDIT: Bad link fixed. Sorry. And thanks for the heads-up.

And I’m off to the shower.

If luck smiles on my schedule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The managers of the project haven’t announced its location yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s difficult to keep an abandoned house that has been carefully covered with ice much of a secret. They’ve surrounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get disturbed before the official project photographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the temperature should be high enough that things should be a little drippy. High pressure promises preservative temperatures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guerrilla art projects going on around here — a previous cadre of hipsters painted abandoned houses, from roof to foundation, including windows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I wonder if we’re on the tipping point of becoming a playground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bartender become a real-estate developer, but now it’s even easier. In “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Barlow remarks that Detroit is a pretty big canvas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated concern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attaching a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while certainly worthy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judgment until I see it. One of the very few conservative critiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big explanation text, that when an artist has to post a signboard telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint signifies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “reference the contemporary urban conditions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look forward to seeing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Saturday, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban conditions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, anyway. I’ve reached the stage of winter where feeling bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get outdoors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hibernate the season away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stewart on? And Stewart said Fox has “taken reasonable concerns about this president …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If everyone is hip to this, why do these things keep getting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to suddenly read a million words to get up to speed, and several hundred of the words involve morons whining that they should have to pay for something and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last weekend seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announcement. Amazon is using cheap e-books to sell Kindles, and MacMillan is trying to hold the line on selling its inventory at a loss, for obvious reasons. Here’s Virginia Postrel at the Atlantic with something of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stupid things people are saying in the wake of last week’s events, including (in so many words), “it’s not like writing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for anything I can steal with impunity.” (I’m thinking this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those people saying, “E-books are great, because then the last barrier standing between the dedicated amateur and his vast readership will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile readers any any publisher within driving distance. And please, in keeping with your views about the real work of publishing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental proposal to help little-seen independent films get a little more-seen, offering feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the comments have already started:

“The beginning of the end,” wrote one user in comments; “i thought the purpose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seriously [sic] selling out,” apparently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where people think nothing of paying $4 for a cup of coffee could they balk at the idea of paying a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy breakfast, step one to improving one’s perspective on winter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

A great time was had by me at the Mitten Movie Project last night (and probably at least some others). The monthly festival of short films featured the director’s cut of “The Message,” our December 48-hour challenge short, and please don’t laugh — unlike most director’s cuts, this one really was better than the original. (Yes, of course it grew. By two minutes.)

The Mitten is curated by one of our producers, Connie Mangilin, who keeps a relentlessly upbeat attitude about film in Michigan, large and small. She frequently works on the large productions, in part to finance her participation in the small ones. Knowing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amazing to see how many people even bother to do it, and gratifying that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the problem was, and forgive them for it. When you can’t pay people, you get people willing to work for nothing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Amateur actors are more likely to have grating upper-Midwest eeaccents that can reduce even well-written dialogue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hipster types, which becomes a problem when you’ve written a role for, say, a gangster. A word to directors: Putting sunglasses on a guy with a soul patch and a visible piercing doesn’t make him look particularly threatening. He just looks like an arty hipster douchebag. By the way, many professional actors have voice problems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska southern Missouri, but has a persistent contemporary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludicrous in many roles, particularly as Achilles.)

Among the highlights last night: “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” a short about Toby Barlow, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Covington, the inspiring soul behind the Georgia Street Community Collective, a reclamation of a battered neighborhood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has featured the GSCC a time or three, and when I mentioned it here some months back, one of you fabulous NN.C readers hit their Paypal button and donated $50. I learned of this sometime later, and while I know whoever did it wasn’t looking for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doctor but an awesome karaoke singer — in Telugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actually worked in various Telugu-language films; it’s the one spoken in southern India, and the videos playing during his karaoke performance featured himself in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance number. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Peewee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The existence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our easily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a finalist in the competition (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bitter tears.

So, then, bloggage? There must be some:

I was struck by this picture of she-who, presumably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she definitely has the Fox Parentheses, the styling of the hair into punctuation marks framing the face. For some reason this is the preferred hairstyle of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pictures and be careful how often you kiss them. I predict we’ll start seeing a lot more caramel-colored highlights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The former Sen. Coats was one of the birdbrains behind the Communications Decency Act, an early attempt at regulating smut on the internet, a staggeringly dimwitted piece of legislation that was overturned by the Supreme Court unanimously. When you can get Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Antonin Scalia to agree on something, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a better tomorrow.

I’ve been so disappointed by the fourth season of “Big Love” I’ve taken to sending jeering e-mails to a friend who still likes it. My latest said I’m starting a petition to send it back to Univision and restore the original Spanish dialogue, because surely this allegedly prestigious HBO drama was kidnapped from its ancestral home in the telenovela big house.

But then, watching it, I realize it’s been like this since at least the third season, although that one stopped just this side of the line between incredible-but-entertaining and ridiculous-and-insulting. This season is turned up to 11.

What happened? In the first season, the story of a polygamous Utah businessman balancing a household of three wives was promising and interesting. It raised questions: What is family? How do we integrate religion into our Monday-through-Saturday lives? What do we owe our community, and what do they owe us? When we’re pulled in more than one direction, how do we keep from being pulled apart? And so on. The second season was even better, once the producers figured out that sex with three women on consecutive nights isn’t all that interesting, even by HBO standards, and started looking at the toll polygamy takes on women, both in the suburbs and in the creepy rabbit warren of Juniper Creek. It was in many ways a replay of Carmela and Meadow Soprano’s tango with the mob in that other show, but it was still worth exploring, and raised another question: Why do we cling to the chains that bind us? (Answer: Because they make such pretty jewelry.)

If anyone’s asking questions now, they’re right out loud and in the script: Don, will you take the bullet? Was that baby you’re caring for kidnapped from an Indian reservation? Could it be because you’ve never really dealt with the miscarriage you suffered in Season 3? And so on.

I swear, if it weren’t for David Simon, HBO would be toast with me. “Entourage” moved from ridiculous-but-entertaining into just-plain-offensive virtually overnight; whenever I land on it now I stay long enough to see whether they’re still serving the same tired salad of misogyny sprinkled with screeching homo-hatred (“Ari: Keep your eyes on Andrew Kline. Lloyd: Keep my eyes on him how? Ari: Pretend he’s Zac Efron’s ball sack.”), with a side of sure-I-believe-Jamie-Lynn-Sigler-likes-short-fat-penniless-guys. Look, one of the gang has a new girlfriend! She’s tall, beautiful and anorexic. Look, Ari’s on a rampage! He’s insulting his gay assistant again. Actually, Ari’s the most interesting character on the show, in the sense that it’s interesting to watch the blackly self-loathing Jeremy Piven deliver lines like this:

Mrs. Ari: What time is it?
Ari: I don’t know. My cock doesn’t wear a watch.

And he ran away from a David Mamet play? I’m not the world’s biggest Mamet fan, but he’s William Shakespeare compared to this.

Hurry hurry hurry, “Treme.” Which is sort of a nice segue to the bloggage. (Yes, I know, a bit early, but I’m having a bad morning, people. I am Ari Gold today.

Anyway, I’m told the parents of this young actress will be featured extras in “Treme.” Although now I’m looking forward to their daughter’s career:

And for anyone who’s ever had a relative whose last words were “Hey ever’body, watch this,” the sad tale of one man’s attempt to top his last wacky party stunt. Must reading. For once, the comments on a Free Press story are worth a look: He’s GOTTA be a white guy. Well, hell yes.

The cock crows 10:30. Time to start the day.