I don’t know what I could say about Roger Ebert that I didn’t say three years ago, when the extent of his injury, and his badly reconstructed new face, was revealed in Esquire magazine. I wouldn’t change a word, but in looking around the web in the late afternoon, I can see that I missed a lot.

This was maybe my favorite, the public spat between Ebert and Conrad Black, who owned the Chicago Sun-Times for a while. Black was a Canadian and believed all the good things in the world were made for him and him alone, and the correspondence between the two, carried out in public, is delightful:

Dear Roger,

I have been disappointed to read your complaints about the former Hollinger International management. I vividly recall your avaricious negotiating techniques through your lawyer, replete with threats to quit, and your generous treatment from David Radler, which yielded you an income of over $500,000 per year from us, plus options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your own Web site at the company’s expense. …

…which led to:

Dear Conrad,

One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind. I am not at all surprised by your letter to me, because I would assume that is how you would feel; what is refreshing is that you say so.

Let me just say in response that I have never complained about my salary at the Sun-Times, but to describe my lawyer as ”avaricious” is a bit much; he engaged in spirited negotiations, as he should have, and he and you settled on a contract. It goes without saying that any contract negotiation includes the possibility that either party might choose to leave rather than to sign. I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself. Since you have made my salary public, let me say that when I learned that Barbara received $300,000 a year from the paper for duties described as reading the paper and discussing it with you, I did not feel overpaid.

You really had to live through the newspaper business to believe it.

This, Will Leitch’s story about how he loved Ebert, then insulted him, instantly regretted it and came to be forgiven, is the talker of the hour, but it’ll be a few more hours before you read this, and something else may come up in the interim.

You might also like to read Neil Steinberg’s obit, which is very fine.

Oh, this is such a loss. He worked so hard, for so long, it seemed he’d never stop.

By the way, if you’re looking for some longform Ebert to read, I suggest “The Great Movies” collections, particularly Vol. 1. He really loved his work.

And Roger wins the New Yorker caption contest is worth your time, too.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, shall we?

While we’re on the subject of working as long as one is able, Elaine Stritch is playing her final shows, at the Carlyle, before retiring to Michigan. She’s 88. I hope to see her in a cafe somewhere around here soon.

And not to leave you with a total bummer, here are some squirrels, in some remarkable tableaux.

Oh, and the president, doing what he does, with the cutest kid ever.

Let’s all have a happy weekend, shall we?

ADDED: An editor (of Ebert’s) speaks. Some good stuff (for writers, anyway) on his process, and what he was like to work with:

He was a celebrity in the journalism and film world, but he never pulled the star act. He was quite amenable to editing. If you needed or wanted to make a change, he was fine with that. He just rarely needed it. The prose just flowed. He was a real wordsmith.

OK, one more:

One day an inspector from the Chicago Post Office came to our editor, James Hoge, with a puzzling discovery. Several hundred empty envelopes addressed to Ann Landers had been found in the trash behind an address in Hyde Park. With an eerie certainty, Jim called in Milton and asked him for his address. Milton, whose jobs included distributing mail, had been stealing the quarters sent in for Ann Landers’ pamphlet, Petting: When Does It Go Too Far? Discussing his firing after work at Billy Goat’s, he was philosophical: “Hundreds of kids can thank me that they were conceived.”

A former mayor of Columbus liked to say he did his best thinking in the shower, and was fond of sharing the many steamy ideas he got there. When I’m in the shower, I am very nearsighted and have a hard enough time remembering all my ablutionary chores — shampoo, condition, shave legs, exfoliate, etc. — to do much thinking. But as I have all those labels close to my face, I do take a moment to read them. And I have to tell you: Wow.

I used to use a brand of Costco shampoo that promised my hair was being hydrated with essence of kelp. Which makes it good for hair why? Because it grows in water? What is in its essence that would be good for hair? Is kelp oily? I don’t think so. Maybe all those otters who frolic in it leave behind lanolin or something.

I don’t use that shampoo anymore, having switched to another Costco brand. It, too, offers moisture, but not from kelp.

Perhaps kelp is in the Moisture Nutrient Complex(tm), or one of the Pure Natural Extracts. Hard to say, but it does have gentle cleansers and it is sulfate-free. Do note the long list of natural extracts in the actual ingredient list. Is this where people who finish with non-dean’s list degrees in chemistry end up?

Here’s my conditioner. It makes me laugh:

It has three naturally derived extracts that penetrate the hair, each to its own layer. Now there’s a trick, and I want to meet the man or woman who made it happen.

“Members of the board, I’m telling you, this triple-extract formula promises a breakthrough in hair-conditioning technology. We will penetrate the core, moisturize the middle and wrap the exterior of every strand! And it will be pleasantly scented, and look like a beige goo! We will transform the daily shampoo into hair therapy!”

Only it would all be in German, because Neutrogena. No, I’m thinking of Nivea. Neutrogena is based in Los Angeles.

But for total label nonsense, it’s hard to beat a brand that once carried the hair-and-makeup room for “Project Runway.”

Yes, TRESemmé, where the product instructions are presented as a friendly bit of advice from the brand’s lead stylist. I also love that “this product” paragraph, with its bold 97-percent-less-breakage claim, carefully asterisked, which presents the comparison: “vs. non-conditioning shampoo alone.” OK.

I once read a simple explanation of what soap is: A fat that strips another fat. A Lebanese man at Eastern Market sells this wonderful olive oil, and has lately started offering olive-oil soap, unscented, for $5 a bar. I think I’m going to buy one. Maybe use it on my hair.

One final note. I use this stuff, and like it:

Just soap with scratchy stuff in it. I loooove to exfoliate.

Do we have some bloggage? We do.

Those of you on Facebook? Stop clicking stuff to see what happens when the bear reaches the hiker standing on the cliff, or naming a city with no E in it. Like so much of Facebook, it’s a scam. “Like-farming.”

A great, funny read from Monica Hesse on Gwyneth Paltrow’s new book, including two recipes! For a black-bean chili and a new condiment called Spicy Cashew Moment:

The book opens with Gwyneth describing her quest to clean out her system and become more healthy after having a migraine she mistook for a stroke. (She thought, she says, that she was going to die.) Her doctor prescribes a diet: “No coffee, no alcohol, no dairy, no eggs, no sugar, no shellfish, no deepwater fish, no potatoes, no tomatoes, no bell pepper, no eggplant, no wheat, no meat, no soy.”

It’s fascinating to witness a cookbook composed from a place of such intense deprivation — a purported goal of simple nutrition transformed into a complicated Gwynethian odyssey. I’ve been a vegetarian for a decade; blindfolded, I can differentiate between soy, almond, rice and hemp milks. But my day of cooking with Gwyneth sent me to heretofore uncharted crannies of Whole Foods Market.

I keep seeing recipes calling for hemp seeds. Where the hell do you find those? Are they even legal in all 50 states?

The longer I work among the data-mad, the less susceptible I am to emotion-based arguments, but this one touched me, even if it did come via Maureen Dowd:

Scalia uses the word “homosexual” the way George Wallace used the word “Negro.” There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful.

I guess we should be cheered, because no one says “sodomite” anymore. At least not from the bench.

Happy Thursday to all. It’s supposed to be warm. Halle-freakin’-lujah.

Alan’s been auto editor for more than a year now, and one perk of the job is, he gets to take a car home from time to time. By “time to time,” I mean maybe twice a month, and he usually chooses Wednesdays. That’s his day to pick up Kate at her weekly jazz practice, and they like to listen to satellite radio together; the new cars all have it. The models the companies send to the automotive press tend to have, as we like to say, “alllll the shit on it,” expensive and loaded, the kind we’d never buy. The Buick Enclave we had over the weekend cost close to what I make in a year, at least with allll the shit on it.

But it was a luxurious ride, and if nothing else, cars like this tell me what is coming in my next one, once the technology trickles down to the lower price points.

The dashboards on some of these rides are more daunting than a 747’s, with baffling switches that control things like heated steering wheels and other crap. But we’ve become fond of a couple of doo-dads, specifically the backup camera and the blind-spot indicator.

You don’t have those on your car? The former not only shows you what’s behind you, but also draws a little lane with green/yellow/red zones — sometimes with audio cues when you get too close to cars and walls and pedestrians. And the blind-spot indicator is pure genius, a yellow lamp that lights in your outside rear-view mirror when you’re not in a safe lane-changing zone.

The jury is out on a Cadillac option Alan sampled a while back — a rumble thing that shakes under your ass when you drift from your lane. He thought it was silly, but I pointed out that on my Lansing commutes, it’s not unusual for — I swear — half the passing cars to be piloted by someone who is staring at a phone. I’ve seen so many motorists drifting out of their lanes at 80 miles per hour that I’d be in favor of making the rumble-ass feature standard equipment on everything from zillion-dollar Cadillacs down to Kia subcompacts.

Actually, it would be nice to get an ass-rumble whenever we drift astray, don’t you think? I’ll let you think on that for a while.

So, bloggage?

“Mad Men” starts Sunday with some new evidence on how far we’ve fallen since the 1960s:

We see Don reading “The Inferno” from Dante while he and Megan lie on the beach in Hawaii. As the camera lingers on Megan’s bikini bottom, Jon Hamm’s voice over thoughtfully recites, “I went astray from the straight road (pause) and woke to find myself alone (pause) in a dark wood.”

When was the last time you saw anyone reading Dante on a beach? I ask you.

Happy Wednesday, all.

Late start today, and I apologize. A poor Sunday sleep makes Nance a wrung-out rag on Monday evening, but honestly, I can’t even plead that. I felt fine last night, but chose to power-watch some more “Homeland.” I now have three episodes to go in season 2. A perfect place to stick a bookmark in the story? Hardly.

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, even for a Monday, which is typical. Though I’m sure it’s mainly coincidence, I have my best days when everyone else is having terrible ones, and yesterday I learned of two premature, tragic deaths in my extended social circle.

For those who’ve been here a while: My former News-Sentinel colleague Emma Downs lost her husband, who suffered a heart attack on Valentine’s Day and had been hospitalized ever since. Forty-two years old with a 7-year-old son. And Marcia K., who used to comment here for a while but doesn’t anymore, and who has suffered her own share of grief in the interim, got another when her nephew was one of those killed in the massive pileup on I-77 in Virginia over the weekend. One month from graduating Duke Law. This is, truly, a broken world.

But I had a good day and was rewarded with another week of vacation. So I’m taking it, because, as these examples abundantly illustrate, you never know.

That won’t be until June, however. In the meantime, here’s an open thread. I have to get back to work.

First (long) bike ride of the season was Saturday. Fifteen miles at a bit of a clip left me thinking:

1) God, am I out of shape.
2) Even for Detroit, this is a lot of broken glass on the street.
3) I need a road bike.
4) No you don’t. Get your ass in shape and stop thinking equipment is the answer to this scurrying-on-a-wheel feeling.
4) But I’m in my top gear and I’m scurrying! I need a bigger ring.
5) Shut up and look at the scenery.

So I did. It was a gorgeous, warm day, which in Detroit means all the snow is gone, but the detritus of the winter has not yet been cleaned up or overgrown. Belle Isle is not looking good, which makes sense in a bankrupt city I suppose, but a trash-strewn shame just the same. The conservancy folks haven’t gotten busy yet, so we’ll see what we have in another month. And even on a bad day, Belle Isle has the river and a breeze and lots of birds, so — did I say breeze? Whose idea was it to make eastbound the first part of this ride, anyway?

The bike will only come when the right Craigslist bargain drops into my lap. But for now, I think another couple of padded-crotch shorts are definitely in order. Plus a lot more time in the saddle.

All in all, it was a grateful-to-be-alive sort of day. I needed it.

Saturday night was the dilemma of the season: “The Ten Commandments” on ABC or a gorge on “Homeland,” screening as part of Comcast’s free-everything weekend? I did a little of both, savoring just enough of the restored Technicolor cheese-fest and then three straight hours of watching Claire Danes do her face-crumple cry thing on Showtime. “Homeland” has grown on me, although I can see it painting itself into a corner this season, but if ANYone think they’re going to spoil the second half of the season for me in comments, I will CUT YOU. It’s better than any other Showtime series I’ve seen, by a mile. There are those who like “Dexter,” but I watched it a couple times and meh. “Nurse Jackie” had me for a time, but then meh. Dollar for dollar, I’m still an HBO girl. And I hope that soon I won’t be an anything girl, because I’ll be out riding my bike so much.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Easter. We went to Toledo for lunch with Alan’s sister, then to the museum for a couple of hours. It’s a very good museum for a city its size, thanks to the Libbeys and other responsible local tycoons. I spent a little time with “Alex,” a Chuck Close canvas.

I wish I could afford more art. If I won the lottery, my indulgences would be, in order: Travel, art, land. Not a house, land. All I really want out of a house anymore is a fireplace and a decent kitchen, and not even that’s essential. Art-wise, you go through our house, and you can see our starving-reporter days (framed posters), then less-starving (framed prints), then photos, and a painting or two. I still like everything we have on the walls, whatever that means.

Do I have bloggage before I make dinner and we watch “Game of Thrones?” Why yes, I do:

Laugh-out-loud funny is Anne Lamott, describing dating in late middle age, something I hope I never, ever have to do:

…91 percent of men snore loudly – badly, like very sick bears. I would say that CPAP machines are the greatest advance in marital joy since the vibrator. It transforms an experience similar to sleeping next to a dying silverback gorilla into sleeping next to an aquarium.

…Yet union with a partner — someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies, read together in bed, do hard tasks together, and to be loved by. That sounds really lovely.

Who is killing the prosecutors of Kaufman County, Texas? (Texas has a Kaufman County? Who knew?)

In Detroit, “garden supply centers,” particular those with “hydroponic” on the sign, is a nudge-wink that means “medical marijuana will be in your future sooner than you think.” Apparently this is the same elsewhere, too, although for one couple, it just meant fresh vegetables year-round. To the police’s embarrassment.

Monday awaits! Enjoy your week, y’all.

Finally, sun. Finally, spring. Happy Easter to all.

It’s Good Friday, and if y’all don’t mind, it’s still Holy Thursday as I write this and I really want to watch “Top of the Lake” on demand and practice my Oz accent.

Here’s something: I have been trying (unsuccessfully, so far) to get this guy, John Corvino, to write for Bridge. He’s a friend of a friend, and recently published a book, “What’s Wrong With Homosexuality?” Corvino teaches philosophy at Wayne State, and approaches these questions from his discipline. I’ve seen him lecture, and he’s terrific.

In connection with his book, he’s released a collection of YouTube videos that breaks the big question down into small pieces. You might like to watch a few of them on this slow Good Friday. Or maybe not. But here they are.

Have a great holiday, all. See you Monday. April Fool’s. We’ll have some fun.

I had a sudden and unsettling change in my vision in the last week — a spot of blurriness, dead-center in my right eye — and after a few days of fretting, got in to see an ophthalmologist today. I told her I was concerned about macular degeneration.

“Oh, so you’ve been online?” she asked, with just a whisper of condescension, enough that I wondered if I should ask if she went to a college of osteopathic medicine because she couldn’t get into a real medical school. But I didn’t. I’m sure doctors deal with a lot of hypochondriacs, and I’m sure the web has enabled new frontiers of symptom-searching and rare disease obsessions. I’m sure it comes up a lot.

However. The flip side of a doom-fearing patient is one who is taking an interest in their own health. My friend Dr. Frank always said he’d rather have a patient with a sheaf of Reader’s Digest clippings, half of them crap, than the lump who sits there and says, “What kinda pills you gonna give me for my emphysema?”

So that was the afternoon’s irritation. That, and the dilated pupils.

It turns out I have a fluid deposit on the macula. (“So yes, it was something.” — my doctor.) Need to see another specialist. The treatment might be waiting it out, or surgery. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted. I already told Alan that if I’m struck blind, I intend to be one of those blind people who insists on touching everyone’s face. I will out-blind Stevie Wonder. But I doubt it will come to that.

How do you deal with doctors who get on your nerves?

And as always, I have to say: I’m grateful to have health insurance.

I don’t have much bloggage today. Some interesting data from the Wonkblog: Nine facts about marriage and childbirth in the U.S.

Beyond that, it’s just Wednesday night, and now, Thursday morning.

There’s no use pretending the story of the day is anything but Buzz Bissinger. Sorry, homosexuals, even your landmark Supreme Court arguments can’t steal the spotlight from this:

I own eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves. Those who conclude from this that I have a leather fetish, an extreme leather fetish, get a grand prize of zero. And those who are familiar with my choices will sign affidavits attesting to the fact that I wear leather every day. The self-expression feels glorious, an indispensable part of me. As a stranger said after admiring my look in a Gucci burgundy jacquard velvet jacket and a Burberry black patent leather trench, “You don’t give a fuck.”

I don’t. I finally don’t.

But this meltdown-masquerading-as-an-essay is more than 6,000 words long, and that’s just 100 words and change. There’ so much more, including but not limited to sex, marital, kinky and pathetic; money, vast and unthinkable; magnums of champagne; Tom Ford cosmetics (used by the author) and so much, much more. Long story short: Buzz Bissinger, author of “Friday Night Lights,” has been going insane for the last few years, and has spent nearly $600,000 on high-end clothing, most of it from Gucci, lending the piece its ridiculous, wan headline, “My Gucci Addiction.” It’s like calling a deep dive into the culture of high-school football “High School Football.”

Don’t drop out, no matter how embarrassed you are, before you get to the sex part. Because that’s really the icing on this cake of tawdriness.

If you think I’m maybe getting too much glee from another’s public confession, be advised BB has been something of a jerk of late. Now we know he was being an even bigger jerk on the websites of the world’s high-end retailers.

I’ve known some shopaholics before; some of them had untreated mental illness, usually bipolar. My next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne was a house cleaner, and told me of trying to organize the closet of one of these souls — unsuccessfully, as it turned out, as she just went out and refilled the closet floor with a million more bags. You get a hole inside, you look for a way to fill it.

Speaking of filling holes, and change, and going a little nuts, here’s a story to bum out all your journalists: A 17-year-old just earned more than you will in your lifetime by inventing an app that boils your lovingly crafted story down to 400 characters. Yes, not words, but characters — that’s the new currency.

I guess we can talk about the homosexuals after all. I’ll go out on a limb and say Prop 8 will go down 6-3, with Alito and Sca-mos on the other side. Anyone want to float a different idea?

There’s very little of a bum mood that can’t be banished by a Monday-night screening of “Sunset Boulevard” on the RetroPlex channel. What a great movie. I can’t believe they made a stupid musical from it. Why try to improve on perfection? “Sunset Boulevard” had me as soon as Joe Gillis said he was going back to his $35 a week job behind the copy desk at the Dayton Evening Post.

It’s the pictures that got small, all right. William Holden — such glorious self-loathing.

So, Monday night and the week is off to a pretty good start. Kate got an A+ on an impromptu essay in her AP class, so it seemed to call for a celebration. Mexican food, a Diet Coke, the simple things. Alan’s still sick, but it won’t last forever. And Saturday’s forecast is for bright sunshine and 48 glorious degrees.

In the meantime, drink deep of some pretty good bloggage, although it will only depress us again:

A story you can sip or drink deeply from, one of those Planet Money/This American Life collaborations, looking at the thorny problem of disability. As in: How many Americans are suddenly so designated:

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

In other words, people on disability don’t show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs — who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that — is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It’s the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

The story itself is a quick read, the link to the radio show a deeper dive.

But because a story that grim deserves a little palate-cleanser, how about this, via Bassett:

Some Tennessee legislators feared creeping Sharia, but sometimes a floor-level basin is just a mop sink. Not a foot bath.

The first step of the week is the hardest. Welcome, Tuesday.