My initiation into e-books is more or less complete; I have a small library, and I’m starting to get a sense of how the format suits, and doesn’t suit, my reading habits. I can tell you one thing it’s great for: Reading in the dark, which is useful when, for example, you’ve accompanied your kid to the Pop Punk’s Not Dead tour at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. Since I got my iPad, I’ve come to appreciate the ability to find a table for one, screw in my earplugs and get lost in my reading — or Angry Birds — while ignoring the clamor onstage.

Another is to save you a trip to the store. I scheduled an interview with a local author three days hence, then downloaded her novel in less time than it took me to move from desk to chaise to start reading the thing.

And, as if we needed another, it gives buyers of Apple products another reason to wallow in smug superiority.

I have two e-book apps on my device — Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s own iBooks. With the Kindle (most titles available for $9.99) app, pages slide by with a touch as though they were on a conveyer belt. In iBooks ($14.99), you get this cool page-turning effect:

(That’s Roy Edroso’s self-published “Morgue for Whores,” by the way — $2.99.) Note the ghostly type bleed-through from the previous page, and yes, that’s the actual backward text of the page. Note around the edges of the frame, where you see a book cover. Note the shadow cast by the turning page. Note the edges of the unread pages.

You can highlight in both formats. Here’s Kindle’s:

Perfectly fine. But here’s iBooks:

The edges of the yellow are ragged, the way they would be if you’d used a real highlighter. And yes, I checked — it’s random. Another highlight will be ragged in a different way.

There are two ways to look at these details. First way: And for this I’m paying $5 more? Are you kidding me?

Second way: If they’re paying attention to this sort of thing, everything you can’t see will be equally fussed over. Here’s hoping.

I leave you with a detail from the Calendar app:

Note the remnants of the previous “pages.” (If I showed you the rest of the page, you’d see that the last time I sync’d all my calendars, it duplicated most events. Which goes to show you someone needs to spend more time under the hood with the code and less fussing over torn pages.)

OK, then. Sweet, sweet Friday, how I welcome your sun-drenched dawn. Here’s hoping I can get to the gym today, so I can spend tomorrow wallowing in stiffness and pain. Bloggage?

One of my Facebook friends directs me to Michigan Senate Bill 821, recently passed by the legislature. Folks, you want to know how nitpicking regulations get that way? Here’s how, from the House Legislative Analysis Section:

Ever since the smoking ban went into effect May 1, 2010, bowling centers have reported an increased number of bowlers wearing bowling shoes when they go outside to smoke. Bowling shoes are not like regular shoes. They have a special sole that allows a bowler to slide along the alley when releasing the bowling ball. If foreign substances are picked up on the sole when a bowler goes outside, the shoe can stick or have no traction, a dangerous situation for a person in the act of throwing a heavy bowling ball down an alley.

Since the implementation of the indoor smoking ban, lawsuits against bowling centers for slip and falls have increased – reportedly, about 30-40 actions have been filed since last year. Proprietors of bowling centers are concerned that their livelihoods may be threatened by dangerous conditions created by the bowlers themselves. Legislation has been offered to create protection from liability for bowling center operators that clearly communicate to their patrons the inherent danger of bowling with bowling shoes that have been worn outside.

Indemnification from personal-injury lawsuits for bowling-alley owners — your government (mine, anyway) at work. It passed yesterday.

The lead singer of GWAR was found dead on the tour bus yesterday. No cause of death has been reported, but judging from the photo? My money’s on embarrassment.

Have to hustle to my morning meeting. Have a great weekend. November, where did you come from?

Read a fascinating story overnight, about corporate tax rates. Although the rate is allegedly 35 percent — AND CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S THAT HIGH? WHAT IS THIS, THE SOVIET UNION? — it should not surprise you to know that many companies pay far less, and some collect fat…well, you can’t exactly call them refunds, as there was nothing paid to be refunded in the first place. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” perhaps.

Here’s a chart. I notice that many of the biggest refunders are utilities, including my own, DTE Energy. I’d imagine that comes from exploiting energy policy that rewards some sources of power over others. Here’s a jaw-dropper, however:

The report said that many other companies took advantage of tax breaks that favor certain industries, including drilling for oil and gas, making video games, building NASCAR racetracks, producing ethanol, and making movies.

Video games, movies and NASCAR. If you wonder why lobbyists are as rich as Midas, wonder no more.

Rick Snyder, the new governor of Michigan, drastically reduced our film tax credits, on the grounds that governments shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” for special treatment. (Then he turned around and top-downed a bunch of other ideas and “best practices,” which goes to show we all have a different idea of what constitutes a winner and a loser.)

What I don’t know about tax policy could fill the Grand Canyon, but I do know I studied the wrong thing in college. A lawyer friend of mine likes to say he wouldn’t trade his B.A. in economics for anything, that no single field of study explains the world as well as econ. I’d say he’s right.

So what’s your major, anyway?

I have an interview to do in 45 minutes, and I intend to ride my bike to it, because what’s the point of doing hyperlocal journalism if you can’t do hyperlocal transportation along the way. I haven’t been doing as much cycling as I usually do in the fall, but that’s to be expected, considering the near-constant rain we’ve been having. I have to remind myself to be alert to autumnal cycling hazards; one year in Fort Wayne I nearly came to ruin after thoughtlessly riding fast under an aesculus glabra tree that had dropped its fruit all over the Rivergreenway. I use the Latin name so I don’t wreck the punchline: It would be ironic indeed for an Ohio native to be felled by a buckeye.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Mitch Albom, infamous crafter of over-the-top obituaries, stays his hand (mostly) and does one I actually enjoyed reading — about his piano teacher. It’s good because he mostly keeps himself out of it, although it has enough head-smacking phrases for a few winces; the man’s cancer battle had “gone to a minor key,” not to mention this entire paragraph:

Sing a song of Matt Michaels. Make it sweet and melodic as the best jazz tune, make it funny and smart and a little whimsical, a trill note here or there. Make it smoky and coffee-stained and gently inspiring to anyone who hears it. The old expression goes, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but that is false. Sometimes, those who can do teach anyhow, and the world is better for it.

Ugh. But the guy left behind a million stories, and Mitch wrangled a few of them. Kate’s wonderful bass teacher gets to tell one, so there’s that.

Mark my words: At some point in the near or distant future, Kim Kardashian is going to claim her whole joke of a marriage was planned for just this reason.

Jim at Sweet Juniper’s other kid — that would be “Juniper” — was a ghost for Halloween. But not a sheet ghost.

My phone just alerted me that it’s time to head out. The weekend is drawing so, so near, I can almost taste it.

Right around the time its workplace shootings made “going postal” a new catchphrase, I read something interesting about the U.S. Postal Service — that while Americans overwhelmingly disliked going to their post office, they liked their individual letter carriers almost as much.

I’ve found this to be true in my own case. When our last carrier in Fort Wayne would leave a package, he’d always put a dog biscuit on it for the member of the household who greeted him most enthusiastically. It got to the point Spriggy would recognize the uniform — I think it was the stripes down the side of the pants — and pull madly at the leash whenever we encountered a mailman or lady, expecting to find a treat in one of those pockets.

I thought of that when my former colleague Brian Tombaugh posted this picture on his Facebook:

Halloween was Mailman Mike’s last day of work before retirement. Yay, Mike.

How much sleep did you get last night? I got: Not nearly enough. So expect a train wreck today. And in that spirit, let’s reconsider a topic we’ve perhaps batted around here in the past, but is always worth another round, i.e. The ’70s: Haters gotta hate.

Rod Dreher takes a detour from his graphomania to throw out a little nugget to his readers:

I was watching the long “American Experience” documentary on Nixon the other night with my oldest son, and it was really something to see overripe crappiness everywhere. The hair, the clothes, the cars, the … everything. No wonder we got Nixon.

James Lileks has, of course, made ’70s hate a cottage industry, publishing at least one book and millions of words of irrational disparagement of the decade. I take issue, friends. It’s true that much of it looks preposterous in hindsight, but you can say that about all of them. And for every one of you cranks who reels off the list like an indictment — disco afros wide ties polyester leisure suits Loni Anderson metallic wallpaper hot combs — I can think of another. The Ohio Players, Ramones, Patti Smith, Halston’s cocktail dresses, the films of Martin Scorsese, the Washington Post Style section — all trends and people and institutions that got their start, or first flowering, in the 1970s. Show me a ’70s-hater and I’ll show you someone like Dreher, who apparently spent it in front of a television eating Cap’n Crunch, or Lileks, who spent it in North Dakota.

I wasn’t exactly twirling with Andy and Liza at Studio 54 myself, but I was young and attentive to the world around me, such as it was in Columbus and Athens, Ohio, where I spent the decade. The difference between Columbus and Fargo and whatever Louisiana hellhole spawned Dreher must be the watershed between love or dismissal of the decade.

So, with that in mind, I give you…my high-school yearbook:

I’m actually on that page twice. That’s me walking out the door of the all-night graduation party, squinting at the camera flash. Granted, those pants? Mistake. But I’ll stand by all the rest of it, including my Jane Fonda shag. (My high school was so large that I don’t recall a single other person on that page. The Superstars of 1975 numbered around 750, as I recall — the largest, then and now, in the school’s history. Damn baby boomers.)

OK, time to go. Bloggage?

No. None. (I told you I didn’t get any sleep.) Happy Wednesday to all.

“Patchy dense fog,” the guy on the radio said this morning. I guess they can’t say “lovely wisps of water vapor will cling to low-lying areas, including creek bottoms and golf courses, catching the early morning light in opaque streaks of loveliness that remind us of the dying of the season,” but that’s what it looked like as I drove Kate to school this morning. I’m not supposed to drive the morning shift, but as I said yesterday, it’s good to get out of your rut from time to time. Sometimes you see the morning light in new ways.

Then I came home and read this story, from AnnArbor.com, which replaced the daily newspaper there a few years back, and discovered I’m the same old grump. On just one readthrough, I spotted facts repeated in adjacent paragraphs, the governor’s name misspelled and windy quotes that needed a trim. Argh:

Dennis says, if passed, the bill would be an insurmountable blow to U-M.

“Surmount” and its variants apply to obstacles and other things you have to get over or around, not blows, even figurative ones. I’m sure two or three more reads would turn up more fat and gas, but editing brave new experiments in journalism isn’t my job. (Well, yes it is, but not this one.) Point these things out to people who aren’t in the journo-biz, and they look at you funny, but dammit, EDITING MATTERS. Proper use of quotes matters a lot. This is how you don’t do it:

“I am concerned for the university as a whole,” Dennis said. “It would be a really damaging blow to the university’s reputation as a fair and humane employer. I think it would cause us to lose faculty and never get them back.”

“It would just be tragic for the university,” he added.

I tell my students: Avoid using quotes to carry information. Use them to comment on the information. They are the pinpoint spotlights of storytelling, drawing your eye to important or interesting facts. The first and last lines of that four-sentence quote are unnecessary. In a squeeze, so is the second one.

Everybody loves the last scene of “A River Runs Through It,” but my favorite is the Zen writing lesson:

NARRATOR: Each weekday, while my father worked on his Sunday sermon, I attended the school of the Reverend Maclean. He taught nothing but reading and writing. And being a Scot, believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.

REV. MACLEAN: Good. Now throw it away.

Throw it away! Now that’s a man who knows the value of words on paper. Every so often a group of Buddhist monks show up at the Allen County Public Library and spend several days making a sand mandala in one of the public spaces, after which it is poured into the river. That’s all we do, although newspaper people have the added thrill of knowing their words are now lining my rabbit cage.

Let’s hop quick to the bloggage, so I can get a workout in today:

The Onion proves, once again, that it is America’s truly indispensable news source:

A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Northeast and Midwest.

The latest from Chest magazine (yes, it exists): Your blue jeans may have killed Turkish garment workers. Have a nice day!

One for Connie, Beth and the rest of you librarians and archivists, via MMJeff, a library mystery that reminds me, a little bit, of the guy who leaves cognac and roses on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave every year.

Jon Corzine, financial genius, nearly bails out of the company he ruined with a measly $12 million severance package. I can’t stand it.

Happy Tuesday to all.

Every time I take a mini-break, like I did this weekend, I think I should do it more often. Sometimes you get to feeling like a mule on a towpath, dragging the same load down the same road day after day, and that’s no way to live. You have to shake up your head from time to time. And so when, talking to my old friend Adrianne, wondering if we were ever going to actually see one another in the flesh again, I threw out the idea of a girls’ weekend in a third city — Washington D.C., where we’d wander the Mall and see people we both knew there, and maybe some others.

And that’s what we did. Just in time for an October nor’easter.

We escaped the snow, but Saturday was all about a chill, driving rain that relocated everything indoors. It turned out that was OK, as the activities mainly consisted of going from one loud, yakking restaurant or bar table to the next one, catching up and/or getting acquainted with friends old and new. Hank Stuever picked me up at the airport Friday, and we went from there to lunch to a driving tour of the city, which was really more of a sitting-in-traffic tour, but who cares? We talked and talked and talked, moving from there to a bar near Union Station, where we met Adrianne (aka Mrs. Lance Mannion) and an old colleague of hers, and an old colleague of ours, and that was another 90 minutes of talking, before Hank peeled off and the rest of us headed into Chinatown for dinner, and two more hours of blah-blah and when I tell you I woke up with a sore throat on Saturday, believe it.

I also wished I’d written everything down, especially that one story about Somebody Really Famous, but as I recall, that was on a doesn’t-leave-the-table-basis anyway, so it’s just as well.

Saturday we slept late and headed off to the National Archives, there to gaze upon the charters of freedom, as they were called. Fun fact to know and tell: All of the guards in the chamber whose voices I heard had the lilting accents of the Caribbean. “Note the typo in ‘Pennsylvania,'” he said, and it kind of made my heart soar a little. We are a nation of immigrants, after all.

From there it was on to the National Gallery, because it was close, and a surprisingly nice lunch in the cafe there with Barbara, whom you all know as 4dbirds. Then some Warhol, then home to treat the barking dogs and prepare for dinner with Roy and Kia, at some tapas joint near the Verizon Center, for another two hours of talk and alcohol, and then on to one of those yuppie brewpubs for more of the latter, and even though my throat is really sore now, it was a wonderful time. Roy fell on the considerable dinner tab with the energy of a future posthumous Medal of Honor winner covering a hand grenade, and I really wish we had fought him harder for it. But special occasions and all that, right? The only thing that could have made the weekend more memorable was if I’d perhaps stolen a horse from the outdoor stabling at the National Horse Show, which we passed on our walk back from the restaurant.

As Alan drove me to the airport Friday, I reflected that so much of what I found jaw-dropping about Detroit when I first moved here is now simply part of the scenery, and while I still see things that blow my mind fairly regularly, when you stop seeing your own town, that’s when it’s wise to travel. D.C. is thriving, and has apparently not been informed we’re in a recession. There are so many high-rise cranes at work, you’d think you were in Dubai. Hank says he and his partner couldn’t buy the equivalent of their two-plus-den apartment in their neighborhood for less than $700,000, even though it appears whole buildings full of new condos are going up everywhere. You heard it here first: THE TEA PARTY IS RIGHT. UNCLE SAM IS A VORACIOUS BEAST.

My only regret is that I forgot my goddamn camera, so the only picture I took was of the Exorcist steps, with the iPad. Oh, well. We have our memories.

And now it’s Monday, Day of Suck, but fortunately, being away from the ‘nets for most of the weekend, I got a little bloggage:

Gene Weingarten considers the Online News Association conference, where the keynote speaker was the founder of I Can Has Cheezburger. A taste:

I love journalism, and frankly, even in this bewildering new form, I’m just glad that it’s still alive. My newspaper, for one, is actually hiring. I am looking at a new office-wide job posting for “an experienced, hands-on designer to help create Web-based and mobile applications … for various non-news verticals.”

Huh.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now, but Joe Nocera got his mitts on some Halloween pictures from a law firm that specializes in foreclosures, and you should not be surprised by what they show. In Gawker’s comment thread on the subject, however, I found this jaw-dropping entry from something called the Irvine Housing Blog, about HELOC abuse aided and abetted by Countrywide, and at least partially corrected by you and me. Talk about a scare for Halloween.

On a lighter note, Jim at Sweet Juniper has made another fantastic Halloween costume for his son – Rocketeer.

This and that: Seeing Roy this weekend, I was reminded of one of my favorite pieces of his, The Ballad of the Reverb Motherfuckers. That link is to Part 1. You want the rest, Google ’em yourself.

Time to get the day underway. I feel refreshed and rejuvenated, or maybe I’m still just a tad drunk.

Some of the great steps of modern cinematic history, and I visited them today.

I’m a big believer in food therapy, although the older I get the less often it takes the form of eating a bowl of raw cookie dough. One of the new activities I spoke of yesterday requires me to drop Kate off downtown at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, which is a strange time. If I head back out to the ‘burbs I run into after-work traffic, and so I look for stupid little errands to burn time until it thins out. Check out a possible bike route, buy a dozen tamales in Mexicantown, whatever. Yesterday I popped into a venerable downtown bar/restaurant called Cliff Bell’s.

Mmm, happy hour. (But I can’t drink on weeknights.) Not too crowded. Lovely venue, restored in 2006 to its full Art Deco glory. Framed newspaper articles in the foyer outside the ladies’ describe it as a former speakeasy, or “blind pig” in the local jargon. It also says it opened in 1935, two years after Repeal. Well, I guess it could have been a blind pig before that — there were certainly enough of them. More fascinating fact: Blind pigs were the source of 50,000 jobs at their peak during Prohibition. Fifty thousand! That earns them a place at any economic-development table in my world.

But today is 2011, and the drinks are considerably more expensive. I saw complaining on Yelp about $12 martinis but as I said, I wasn’t drinking. I looked over the menu and saw just what the doctor ordered: Steak and eggs. It came in the form of a petite filet on a small potato cake, topped with a runny one sunny side up, napped with bernaise. It was raining and chilly outside, and all that warm protein just hit the spot.

On the way home, I took a few side streets to the freeway and watched a lone cyclist cross my path — no lights, dark clothing, with what appeared to be half a dozen hula hoops carried crosswise across his body, but a closer look revealed them to be insulated cable of some sort. A scrapper taking his treasure to the yard. I bet he won’t be enjoying the steak and eggs at Cliff Bell’s anytime soon.

How did the morning slip away again? I’ll tell you how: Editing copy. My reporters are young, they’re inexperienced, and they don’t always deploy their adjectives with care. May I also add that their only role models in pop culture are TV types, and every time one of these show ponies asks, “And how did that make you feel?” before tipping the mic in the subject’s direction, God kills a kitten. At the very least He gives me another story to fix, written by someone who thinks that’s how you do journalism.

I shouldn’t talk. My students teach me something every day, and seeing them grow over time is genuinely rewarding. One I would have written off a year ago called me a couple weeks back, shaking with excitement over being sent to New York to cover Occupy Wall Street. The story he filed was better than anything he ever wrote for me. I hope I had something to do with it.

But now I must away, and I will not be in my regular place tomorrow. I’m off for a weekend of R&R in an undisclosed location, although I’m sure there’ll be photos. But tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., I hope to be looking at Detroit from a rapidly ascending airplane.

Meanwhile, here was the most eye-opening story from last night’s health beat:

Expectant mothers are more likely to die from murder or suicide than from several of the most common pregnancy-related medical problems, a U.S. study said.

You don’t say.

One of my Facebook friends posted this video two days ago, on the birthday of Father Charles Coughlin. Remarkable in many ways, but perhaps mostly for the casual use of “voluble” in a newsreel script. But how did he feel? Also note the use of dramatic reenactment.

I have to go. I hope it’s not raining where you are, because it sure is here.

This fall has been maddening, mainly because of changes in everyone’s lives that are screwing up all my attempts to get a handle on things, order being the only thing that gives me a modicum of peace of mind in this crazy world full of uncertainty, crazy Republicans and a freelance income stream. Kate started high school, where the bell rings 20 minutes earlier than it did in middle school, meaning earlier mornings. Alan started a new job, shifting from a night shift to days. There are new after-school activities, new friends, new everything, and just when I think it’s settled in, something else comes up.

Plus, I’m still working until 1 a.m. every weeknight, which means I don’t get to sleep until 1:30, which means even more sleep deprivation, the Grump-o-Meter rising through the week until today it actually shorted out. I awoke to a clamorous house before 7 a.m. — Alan shepherding an earnings story onto the web from our kitchen table, Kate with her usual teenage grooming rituals — and actually felt calm. I think it was the collapse of will, a certain caving-in of the belief that I will ever again have a rewarding job that pays a decent salary, with a 401K, a paid vacation and a more or less normal schedule. I will never again get more than five hours of rest in a night, except on weekends. And year will pile upon year, and then I’ll be dead. Om.

Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I’m done cooking for the week. Roast chicken Saturday, meat loaf Sunday, baked ziti Monday and pot roast last night. (Really good pot roast. I’m the only one who likes it, which suggests a certain hostility in adding it to the weekly menu, but if you don’t like this pot roast, there is something wrong with you.) There are plenty of leftovers, and if anyone dares to look me in the face and ask what’s for dinner, I’ll jerk my thumb in the direction of the refrigerator and bark, “Microwave.”

Oh, I’m just grousing. I’m gearing up for an R&R weekend day after tomorrow, after which everything will smooth out for a while.

But now I have to head down to campus, for an internship fair. We have a table and a banner for our little hyperlocal website, although if I were being honest, I’d substitute one reading CHANGE YOUR MAJOR.

I have a little bloggage today:

Tony Fadell is a graduate of Grosse Pointe South High School, and is generally called the inventor of the iPod, although obviously that other guy had a lot to do with it, too. He left Apple a couple years ago and formed a new startup, about to unveil its first product — a programmable thermostat that’s as beautiful, and as easy to use, as an iPod. (Only a native of the frozen Midwest would see the utility of such a thing. My allegedly programmable thermostat is a steaming piece of crap, and should have been smashed in the driveway with a sledgehammer long ago.) The bad news: It costs as much as a month of gas heat. Still: WANT.

Jon Stewart, Pat Robertson, the GOP field: Comedy gold.

Must run.

Roger Ebert grades on the curve, and by genre, which can sometimes surprise the novice reader, perhaps when flashy trash like “Point Break” gets three and a half stars. (The fact that movie was released in 1991 and I still remember its star rating should tell you something about how personally I take shit like this.) He’s been tough on Steven Soderbergh, like a parent disappointed that a child is not working up to his potential. One of my fondest movie memories was the year we got eight inches of snow on Christmas eve, scuttling our holiday driving plans, and leaving me to snuggle under Kate’s brand-new sleeping bag on the couch and watch “Ocean’s 11” on HBO, which I enjoyed immensely as a perfect little soap bubble of a summer movie. Ebert gave it three stars, and this dismissal: “I enjoyed it. It didn’t shake me up and I wasn’t much involved, but I liked it as a five-finger exercise. Now it’s time for Soderbergh to get back to work.”

He was similarly sort of meh about “Contagion,” which Kate and I saw last weekend and I loved. I think it’s because I can no longer suspend disbelief to watch the vast majority of thrillers; I have to believe in paranormal activity, or exorcism, or that women walk into creepy dark houses in the dead of night, or that cars can jump off freeways and land in drivable condition, or explosions can be outrun, or whatever.

But “Contagion” thrills by being fictional but absolutely realistic and utterly believable, which means I was well and truly freaked out. A particularly nasty flu virus, trailing central nervous system complications, gets into one woman, who infects three continents in one night of business socializing in Asia, and things go downhill from there. Social disintegration is one of those things I sometimes think about as a large-metro-area resident, although we should all think about it. Fact: Three months before the Y2K milestone, a large water main broke in Fort Wayne, disrupting water service to a big chunk of the north side. Within hours, residents were shoving one another in grocery aisles, fighting over the bottled water. Northeast Indiana has a wide streak of homespun paranoia, but I thought that was a remarkable turn of events for a place that’s generally friendly and neighborly.

We all know what happened during Katrina. Does anybody think a killer flu wouldn’t have the same effect?

Anyway, if you liked the “Traffic” part of Soderbergh’s back catalog, you’ll like “Contagion.” Nothing like watching a scene of American corpses being shoveled into mass graves to light up an October evening. I should also note this is the second Soderbergh film in my memory to feature a blogger as the bad guy. Not the bad guy — that would give them too much credit and screen time — but as a certain type of bottom-feeding sleazebag scuttling through society’s basement. “Blogging is graffiti with punctuation,” one character tells another. Hey, I resemble that remark. But I still really liked “Contagion.”

I was rolling through town yesterday, doing this and that, listening to my local NPR station, when I heard a soundbite from the Sunday chatfests, Michele Bachmann bringing the Krazy:

“I believe that Iraq should reimburse the United States fully for the amount of money that we have spent to liberate these people,” said Rep. Bachmann in an appearance Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” …“We are there as the nation that liberated these people,” she said. “And that’s the thanks that the United States is getting? After 4,400 lives were expended and over $800 billion? And so on the way out, we are being kicked out of the country? I think this is absolutely outrageous.”

You know what I think? I think Bachmann should change her name to Andrew Dice Clay and hit the comedy circuit. Stupid, offensive, thuddingly unfunny — who would even notice the difference from the original?

“These people,” she says. There must be a formal term for that form of address — the direct accusative, perhaps. “You people” is the more common form; remember when Ross Perot got raked over that one? He was speaking to a largely black audience, and said something like, “And who pays the most when that happens? You people.” Utterly unjustified, that charge, and taken entirely out of context. If he’d said “you guys,” no one would have even noticed. I recall the incident mainly because it was the day one of my lemon-faced, right-wing colleagues made a truly funny newsroom quip about it:

“See, if he’d said, ‘People of you,’ he’d have been fine.”

OK, time to get moving on what promises to be a ridiculously busy day, but not in a bad way, if that makes any sense. How about some bloggage:

Here’s a little something for my homosexual friends. And everyone else who enjoys a good barn-dance song.

Here’s something I wrote for a local public-policy magazine. It promises to be of interest to approximately .02 percent of you — Michigan teacher contract negotiations and education funding, whoo — but click on it anyway, so they throw me another assignment.

New York magazine is looking at food television all week. In the opening installment, Adam Platt writes:

Back in the distant, quaintly mannered era of Jacques Pépin and Julia Child, cooking shows were a guilty pleasure, enjoyed by a handful of high-minded home cooks and the occasional obsessive, fatso schoolboy (like me). But in the last fifteen years, that equation has dramatically flipped. It’s the non-cooks now who tune in to see Emeril Lagasse’s latest recipe, then rush out by the millions to purchase the latest signature frying pan endorsed by Bobby Flay.

Yes, I’d agree with that, because the target market for designer cookware is almost entirely non-cooks. Real cooks pick it up at their garage sales a few years later.

It’s about to rain, and I have to take out the trash. Happy Tuesday to all.

The clock on the wall says it’s almost time to go to Theatre Bizarre. Are the Derringers ready to attend Detroit’s best Halloween party?

Alan researched his look very carefully, and would like you to know he is a plague doctor, not one half of Spy vs. Spy, although granted, the resemblance is remarkable. He says the latter was based on the former, but his aim was the former.

Honestly? On the grand spectrum of costumes, ours were at the conservative end. The most enthusiastic comment I got was at the Detroit CVS drugstore where we stopped to buy straws, so that Alan might be able to drink without removing his mask. He stayed in the car (“If I go in dressed like this, they’ll call the cops”) while I negotiated the Saturday night crowd in my formal riding costume. “Where’d you get them boots at?” a woman waiting on the next line asked. Answer: A catalog.

The Masonic Temple is a grand old Detroit institution fallen on hard times, due to its location in one of the worst neighborhoods adjacent to downtown. They had guarded parking, but the area around it was, as usual, full of skulking wraiths and the homeless. Which gave the lit-up, rocking hive around the Masonic the feeling of a naughty Brigadoon. The lobby and entrance featured jugglers, stilt-walkers and one of the many TB props, in this case, the Fiji Mermaid:

It’s a moving mermaid skeleton, with a very nice water effect.

Just a short tour around one floor — there were seven or so levels, including mezzanines — showed how well John Dunivant and his crew used the space. The 1920s Masonic made a great backdrop for the Theatre’s ’30s-carnival props and sets, and honestly, it was hard to separate the things the crew brought from the permanent architectural details of the building. I especially liked it in this room, where the chandelier and clock look like an organic part of the stage:

Those booths at either end were where the suspension artists performed — the hooks-through-flesh folks. It freaked me out, but no one seemed to be in any pain.

One room had a simple but arresting effect made with red can lights overhung with white scrims. I think this might be the best single picture I took. It’s a barbershop quartet who sang there:

There were several different venues within the space, with something going on at each one. I liked the smaller spaces, so we ended up seeing lots of burlesque, like this naughty-nun act:

She had a padlock on her g-string. Har. Elsewhere were the aforementioned carnival acts, bands and, in between, stuff like this DJ, with his steampunk rig:

Which brings us to the costumes. As I said, we were the equivalent of Grosse Pointe squares, at least as compared to the Goat Girls:

And Swamp Thing:

Note, just to the left of Swamp Thing — an elevator operator, in the traditional uniform, with zombie makeup. He actually rode the elevator up and down, announcing floors. They really thought of every detail. This lady is a Detroit school teacher who obviously threw her costume together at the last minute:

She’s a MEAP test. This is the time of year for our state’s standardized test. I’m sure it haunts her nightmares, much as Swamp Thing might.

After a couple hours in my riding boots (which are made for riding, not walking) I was happy to just sit and watch the parade flow by.

We left after 1, and things seemed to have hit another gear, but there were still plenty of people left to fly the flag. Theatre Bizarre isn’t so much a party as it is a conceptual art installation that uses all its guests as participants. We’d done our part, and someone else could stay until dawn. This is your correspondent, over and out: