Somewhere in the firehose of information that blew past me yesterday — just another day at the office — someone said that Elizabeth Taylor, like Frank Sinatra, was a generational artist. You had to catch her early to consider her an artist at all, because at some point she stopped being an artist, pretty much stopped working at all, and was content to simply be Elizabeth Taylor ™, the brand.

That’s probably right, and I’d put people my age on the dividing line. I was about 10 when I discovered my grandmother’s stash of Hollywood fan magazines and learned of the latter. Every so often the hot couple of the moment comes along — Brangelina, Bennifer (remember that one?) — and tries to blot out the sun, but they are mere satellites to the original, Liz and Dick, whom we should be grateful came along before the mushed-names thing, because no one would have gone for a couple nicknamed Lick. Or Diz.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the alpha and omega of celebrity couples, and much in between. They were together, apart, together, apart. After the breakups, he wooed her with ever-more-lavish gifts of jewelry, which she’d wear dangling from her ears or nestling in her famous bosom. They fought in public (booze), snuggled in public (ditto). Like Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, she gave him glamour, he gave her prestige. They gave each other fits.

I’ve never understood relationships like this, but then, I’m not a movie star. I guess they enjoyed makeup sex. They certainly enjoyed drinking, which fuels the breakup/makeup cycle.

About that jewelry. I was by no means a feminist at the age of 10 or so, but even as a kid, there was something about Taylor’s romantic life that bugged me. Never mind the marriages, Mrs. Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky — what sort of woman comes back to a man after he gives her a pair of diamond earrings? Major ick factor. At the same time, she was gimlet-eyed enough to know that a girl ought to get something out of a relationship like the one with Burton, and I guess she cashed in.

In the end, if you were younger than 50 or so, you remember Taylor more for this:

…than this:

And that’s a shame. But she had a good time along the way. Women like her don’t have the Clint Eastwood Option for later-in-life work, particularly if you’ve been known as a great beauty. I think Manohla Dargis put her finger on it:

Living large proved a brilliant survival strategy as well as something of a rebuke to the limits of the studio system, both its formulas and false morality, which was all but gone by the time she appeared in “Virginia Woolf” in 1966. Her weight went up and down and the accolades kept coming. She cheated on one husband and then another at a time when adultery was still shocking, and her career kept going. She was a lovely actress and a better star. She embodied the excesses of Hollywood and she transcended them. In the end, the genius of her career was that she gave the world everything it wanted from a glamorous star, the excitement and drama, the diamonds and gossip, and she did it by refusing to become fame’s martyr.

So, bloggage? Sure:

I’m so glad Kate has grown out of “American Idol,” so we don’t have to watch stuff like this. (I’m talking about J-Lo, not the singer. Although he’s got at least as much diva Diana as mellow Marvin in him, unless I miss my guess.) You’d think, by this point in the competition, the stylists would have gotten the performers clothes that fit.

This is why people choose careers in journalism: To answer ads like this.

In Britain, he’s been stripped of his medical license. In the U.S., he’s free to keep spreading his special brand of quackery, and to a poor, minority population, no less.

Happy birthday to our regular commenter, 4dbirds, who turns 29 again today.

Sunny today! But still in the 20s. Dammit. I’m outta here, and have a great Thursday.

Open thread today, folks. Michigan’s census numbers were released yesterday, and I’m up to my eyebrows in data, trying to figure it out. Plus office hours and a writing gig that has to be finished by week’s end, so in the eenie-meanie of priorities, you lose.

In the meantime, for those of you who think I’m too hard on Charles Pugh, ex-Fort Wayne TV “journalist” and current president of Detroit’s City Council, how about this nugget of Pugh-y goodness:

City Council President Charles Pugh is blaming high rates of incarceration and car insurance premiums for U.S. Census figures pegging Detroit’s population at 713,777.

Pugh told The News today that city officials know of thousands of Detroiters who are incarcerated in other municipalities who will soon get out. Those people should be counted “when they get out and come back to Detroit,” said Pugh, adding that he doubts the city has lost more than 200,000 people in a decade.

“We know that there are thousands of people because of car insurance that have addresses in the suburbs,” he said. “We need to let those people know, look, this is not an effort to catch you and to prosecute you. We want your numbers so we can get federal dollars and state dollars.”

An undercount of prisoners! What a maroon. As a friend says, “Why make it easy for Rush Limbaugh to fill an hour?”

OK, so: Sayonara. The rest of the week looks pretty grim, but I’m going to try to grab time here and there for you, dear readers. And at week’s end, I’m gonna sleep like a corpse.

The Russian textbook I use is the same one my teacher used as a college student at Indiana University, c. 1960-something. The pattern sentences and reading describe not Russia but the Soviet Union, rich with nostalgia for anyone who lived through the Cold War. Everyone is always going from the library to the university, attending ochin interyesny lectzy or perhaps a zacyedanieh klooba, playing shakmatii or going to see “Lyebedinoye Ozero” at the Bolshoi. (Very interesting lectures, club meetings, chess and “Swan Lake,” for you Yanks.)

This week’s reading was about an Amerikanskii, Bob Cook, whose name transliterates amusingly as Kook, who visited Leningrad and stayed at the historic Astoria Hotel. Very nice, but very expensive, Kook tells his studentskii kloob. I’ll say. If I’m reading their website correctly, a deluxe room, double plus twin, perfect for our family when we travel, is 36,000 rubles per night, or — gasp! — $1,275. Don’t forget the 18 percent VAT, too, and buffet breakfast at $58 per person. I guess if I ever get there, it’ll be your basic Soviet-era concrete block guest house for the Derringers.

At this point we stopped the lesson and discussed the siege of Leningrad during World War II, one of history’s great stories of cruelty and endurance. Adolf Hitler planned to take the city, burn it to the ground, raze what couldn’t be burned and rename the city Adolfsburg. He planned to hold his victory party at the Astoria, and even printed invitations. Alas, Joseph Stalin had other plans, and the blockade and siege lasted 900 days. The dead numbered 1.5 million, most from starvation. Sydney, my teacher, met a woman who lived through it, who said they stripped the wallpaper in their home and and scraped off the paste to eat. The bread ration, given to only a few, was mostly sawdust. They ate rats on the street, their beloved pets, each other — cannibalism was common.

But in the end, Leningrad was spared, and today we can all visit the Hermitage, if we can afford to get there. Kook then traveled to Moscow, and we looked at photos of Krassny Ploschad — Red Square — and I wondered if I ever will get to see Lenin’s Tomb with my own eyes, lying in his own red square on Red Square. One of these days. By the way, the old Soviet version of Bloomingdale’s, GUM, which translates roughly to Universal Government Store, is now a shopping mall. Super-expensive in the New Russian style, konyechno. Here’s a joke about the New Russian style:

Boris Nikolayevich is walking down the street when he runs into his friend Andrei Ivanovich. “That’s a lovely tie,” Boris Nikolayevich tells his friend. “Thank you,” says Andrei Ivanovich. “I spent $900 on it in Paris.” To which Boris Nikolayevich replies: “You fool! You could have stayed in Moscow and paid $2,000.”

As you can tell, today I am empty of thought. Every time I open the newspaper, I scowl and think, what the hell are we doing in Libya?, but there are occasional amusements, like this. Apparently $P went to Israel and forgot to check a map:

Bethlehem was supposed to be her first stop of the day, according to a leaked copy of her schedule. But, after an uneventful drive from her hotel in nearby Jerusalem, her car stopped just short of the main Israeli military checkpoint outside Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank, appeared to hesitate and then performed a u-turn.

Israeli military officials declined to comment on why Mrs Palin may have turned back, but the country’s defence ministry confirmed that she had made no formal request to visit the occupied West Bank – standard protocol for any foreign dignitary.

Oops.

You know you’re a joke when a business weekly makes fun of you. Congratulations, Hoosier tea partiers.

The Free Press informs me I’m paying the highest auto-insurance rates in the country. No surprise there — I just came through the six-month premium season here at NN.c Central, otherwise known six weeks in the Po’ House, but these numbers are stinky. A prototypical 40-year-old man with a clean driving record pays $2,541 a year? What does he drive, an Escalade with spinners? We pay about $2,000 a year for two cars and two drivers.

CNN beats up on Fox. For once.

Off to the showers for me. Have a great day.

For a few months now, Kate has been playing in a band with a couple of her girlfriends. The three of them take a rock-band class at a local music school — and let me just tell you, all the music schools in the country owe a big debt to Jack Black for that whole “school of rock” idea — and that’s where they found their drummer, Scott. Together, they are Po. Named for the Teletubby. They were nameless for a long time, until one day when Alan was cleaning the basement and came across Kate’s old talking Po doll. He started to put it in the bin for the Goodwill and must have squeezed her sensor, because she said, “Goodbye!” He took this as a sign we should keep it, and name the band after her. After a while, Kate agreed. If they’re still together when they’re a little older, they can tell people they’re named for Edgar Allen. Or for their parents’ financial state after paying for their music lessons and instruments.

At first I thought the idea of a guided group lesson/practice ran counter to the idea of rock ‘n’ roll, but changed my mind. Their teachers have been great; last week their regular guy was sick, and his sub got Kate and Haley, bass and lead respectively, improvising and sounding like REM.

But mostly they play covers of songs they like, and Saturday was their first real gig, at a local church’s battle of the bands. It was a marathon event, as the lineup indicates, and Po played very early on, not the best spot by a long shot, even when the crowd isn’t drinking. I think this placement was deliberate; they were the youngest band there, the only one whose members were still in middle school. But someone has to warm the crowd up, and that was the straw they drew.

Not only was the event itself hours and hours, setup and preparation took most of the day. Our part wasn’t auspicious; arriving early for setup, Alan found the church locked and no one answering the door. He rapped once, then rapped again, harder. And broke the glass on the door:

“Who puts window glass on a door?” he fumed later, displaying his cut finger. “That has to be a code violation.”

Finally the minister came, having perhaps heard the glass break. Alan offered profuse apologies, his billing address, etc. A ceiling tile was taped over the hole, the amps shlepped downstairs — because these things are always in church basements, aren’t they? — and Alan came home for dinner with me and his sister, leaving Kate to the church-basement pre-show pizza party in the embrace of her peers.

We returned and paid for our tickets. I told them to keep the change for Japanese earthquake relief, but didn’t mention the window. Good karma! Pay it forward! Etcetera.

Showtime:

They sounded pretty good for a bunch of 14-year-olds. They have some work to do on their stage presence, but that will come in time. Before she left, I asked Kate what she planned to wear. She shrugged and said, “What I have on?”

“Don’t you have any leather chaps?” I asked to a look of horror. She never gets when I’m joking. I told her to find something black, so that’s what she did. Her new red hair looked great under the lights. And someday, I’ll sell this picture to Rolling Stone:

They didn’t place, although their early spot gave them hours to shamelessly work their social networks and grab the Fan’s Choice award. That’s what social networks are for, and is to be expected when you put your poll on Facebook.

I often encourage them to stretch a little, maybe cover some Ramones or “Barbie Eat a Sandwich” or whatever, but as Jack Black reminds us, rock ‘n’ roll means stickin’ it to the man, and in this case, I am the man. You can’t force art.

Have to run today, as usual, but here are a few links for your chewing pleasure:

David Carr on the New York Times paywall:

When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan. Throughout the day, I checked my news alerts to make sure the world was not ending imminently. Tellingly, I never picked up a copy of the newspaper, reading it on the new iPad where The Times is a living thing and the better for it.

People, real actual people, went and reported that information, some of it at personal peril and certainly at gigantic institutional expense. So The Times is turning toward its customers to bear some of the cost. The Times is hardly alone: AFP, Reuters, The Associated Press, Dow Jones, the BBC and NPR are all part of a muscular journalistic ecosystem. But it seems an odd time to argue against a business initiative that aims at keeping boots on the ground during a time of global upheaval.

Yes, exactly.

Mich-centric: Today is the day the governor unveils his plan to make local governments more efficient through a carrot-stick approach. This will be interesting to watch. I suspect there will be many, many bad bunnies around here who will not get their carrots.

I don’t know how you feel about Elizabeth Warren, but I think she’s pretty nifty. A little Warren love here and here, which you should read quick, before the paywall goes up.

Me, I have to run.

I don’t normally make a fuss about birthdays here, but what the hell, today is the 50th birthday of one of our most loyal, regular and respectful commenters, so let’s make one. Happy birthday, Brian Stouder. I mean: Happy birthday, Brian Stouder!

It’s hard to explain “Friday” to those of you who don’t live on the Internet for hours a day, but I’ll try:

About a week ago — last Friday, I think — a teenage singer named Rebecca Black released a YouTube video of herself singing a ghastly pop song called “Friday.” Actually, she didn’t release it; Ark Music Factory did. Ark is a vanity pop-music house, where well-to-do parents pay healthy-but-not-outrageous sums to have their little girls immortalized as pop singers. Black’s parents admit to paying $2,000. I think we can all agree that money would have been better-off in her college account, but it appears they got what they paid for.

I saw “Friday” for the first time last weekend, when the official video was at 13,000 views or so. It’s now closing in on 16 million, if that tells you anything. The song is catchy but atrocious — Black autotuned to a fare-thee-well, the lyrics brain-damaged:

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after … wards
I don’t want this weekend to end

It was one big fat juicy trollbait for the whole internet, which roared its approval, delivering parodies, rants, remixes and the like. All in a week! And despite Black’s whining in her Daily Beast interview — “it feels like I’m being cyberbullied” — I think we can all agree she wouldn’t be on “Good Morning America” otherwise, so she maybe should chill. Also, wipe off about 70 percent of that makeup. You’re 13!

Over the years I’ve enjoyed other stories of vanity-publishing fame, my favorite being that of John Trubee. I howled with laughter, reading his essay in Spin, about how working the overnight shift at a convenience store had made him insane, so much so that he ripped an ad from the back of one of the tabloids he was selling at 3 a.m., scribbled some angry lyrics and sent them off to a company in Nashville offering professional analysis of your song, hoping he’d get a reply saying he was sick and needed to see a psychiatrist. The chorus ran:

Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind,

repeated several times.

Instead, he was told his song had huge potential, and that for $79.95, they’d cut a demo for him. He sent the money, they did (changing the chorus from “Stevie Wonder” to “a blind man”), and the song became an underground sensation. Oh look, here’s the essay. Oh look, here’s a bouquet of links about the whole story.

Some years after that, an editor tossed a column idea on my desk — a traveling company was passing through town, seeking singing talent for possible development by country-music industry starmakers. They agreed to let me watch the “auditions,” and it was clear from the start the whole thing was a scam. They were offering to make, for a fee, a “professionally produced video” that would screen on local Nashville television, potentially reaching the A&R men, agents, managers and others who were always on the lookout for the next cowboy hat.

Those who’ve seen “American Idol” know what the auditions were like, each singer worse than the last. And yet, all but one were offered the deal: Travel to Nashville at your own expense, pay $600 or so for the video production costs, await stardom. The only one who wasn’t invited was, ironically, the best singer by far. She also had some sort of skeletal birth defect that confined her to a wheelchair in a semi-reclining position, although that didn’t stop her from winning karaoke contests all over town.

Once I got the outlines of the arrangement, I went back to the office and called one of the Nashville newspapers. I asked where channel 56 was on the cable dial, and what time “Country Music Star Search” ran. Answer: It was a public-access channel, and the middle of the night. Then I called the singers who were already packing their bags and told them. To the last one, they all said it didn’t make any difference, that you had to spend money to make your dreams come true, and went back to gassing up the car.

I came away with more respect for the producers, who at least drew the line at taking money from a disabled woman, than for the idiots who thought they were the next Garth Brooks. Six hundred bucks isn’t so much to pay for a reality check.

How to wrap up? How about with this gallery of other Ark Music Factory product? I recommend CJ Fam’s “Ordinary Pop Star.”

Let’s keep all the bloggage light today, shall we? It’s Friday, after all:

Those of you who thought “The Player” was the last word in Hollywood bullshit will be pleased to know the bar has been raised yet again: The “Red Dawn” remake, shot in Detroit last year or the year before (can’t remember), is being digitally revised, to change the villains from Chinese to North Koreans.

Michigan’s new attorney general loves Michigan’s new attorney general.

Just what America needs: Another “Charlie’s Angels” remake.

Happy Friday, happy weekend, all. I’m outta here.

Mercy, I’m late today. That’s what happens when you put your work-work ahead of your fun-work. This is spring break for Wayne State, which I thought would be an easy one for me, but instead I found myself at two different city council meetings, and while it was in no way enjoyable, it was probably a good thing for me, as it’s easy to forget what you’re asking your students to do on a week-to-week basis.

I’m all for town-hall government, but there were times this week that I yearned to be my old colleague Andrew Jarosh, who was apparently the de facto timekeeper at Fort Wayne City Council meetings for years. I didn’t know this until I talked to someone who attended one to make a presentation.

“If someone is talking and wanders off point, Andrew catches the clerk’s eye and taps his watch,” he said. The clerk would then remind the speaker of the time limit. This apparently happened several times in a single meeting. I thought it was merely funny at the time, but now that I’m inflicting these things upon myself, I see it as nothing short of an act of heroism for everyone who wants to get out the door before 9 p.m., and preferably 8:30, and even better, 8 on the dot.

I actually tried the watch-tap on Monday, but the person whose eye I caught has no power to move things along.

What is it about a podium that makes some people believe they’re in a Norman Rockwell painting, or maybe wearing a toga and orating in Latin? It’s like a letter to the editor, only live. I think I’ve mentioned before that the letters column in most newspapers is the only thing that can make otherwise reasonable people use phrases like “I think not.”

So that’s what I did this morning instead of blogging: Parsed a liquor-license hearing for the readers of my other site. Liquor laws are never simple, alas. Most people don’t understand how much government is involved in crafting the streetscapes they experience every day, and how much is left to the invisible hand. The various social networks I’m connected to have lately featured local people offering their opinions on what “should” fill a recently vacated retail space, what “they” should get to go there. Patience I have for these discussions: Approaching zero, unless I need to tone my eye-roll muscles. People throw any number of daft ideas on the table. So far no one’s suggested a dog massage parlor, but that’s about the only thing left out.

Tomorrow is Me Time, then. I’ve been trying to find time to edit a video I shot last fall. Maybe I’ll find the time. Likely I won’t.

In the meantime, any bloggage?

Just posted on the last thread: The latest Ponzi schemer, arrested in California, was a big fan of the GOP in general and Mitch Daniels in particular.

What does Tina Fey have to promote this month? I agree with every word Tom & Lorenzo say about this unfortunate magazine cover.

Oh, and it’s St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not the least bit Irish, unfortunately. My friend Emma Downs is, however, and just posted on Facebook that her sister Nancy was named for this song, so I guess, just for today, I’ll claim it, too:

The new governor of my native state, John Kasich, revealed his budget yesterday, and the news is familiar — a lot of what you like (education, libraries) gets slashed, a lot of things Republicans like (charter schools, “privatized” state institutions) get a boost, but most people take a screwing to some extent, and the bottom line is pretty much the same no matter where you stand. New Normal, folks.

Also, today, there was a story in the NYT out of Gallipolis, an impoverished little town on the Ohio River that was only on my radar screen during college, when I was a resident of southeastern Ohio. It was about what is increasingly the only avenue to the middle class available there — “government” jobs, that pay something above minimum wage and offer health insurance. The tale of the tape:

Now, as Ohio’s legislature moves toward final approval of a bill that would chip away at public-sector unions, those workers say they see it as the opening bell in a race to the bottom. At stake, they say, is what little they have that makes them middle class.

Gallipolis (pronounced gal-uh-POLICE) is a faded town on the Ohio River, one whose fortunes fell with the decline in industries like steel in bigger cities along the river.

…Today, storefronts are mostly dark. About one in three people live in poverty. Billboards advertise oxygen tanks and motorized wheelchairs. Old photographs in a local diner look like an exhibit from a town obituary. The region has some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the state, with more people dying from overdoses than car crashes, according to Ed Hughes, executive director of the Counseling Center in Portsmouth, about 55 miles west of here.

It’s a rural Detroit, in other words, with less violence but maybe more despair. The “lucky” people in the story, the ones where two people can stitch together a household income of $63,000, have two sons, one of whom is a Marine, the other just enlisted. You want to know who puts boots on the ground while the College Republicans fight the war of ideas? There you go.

Although the story mentions “decades of decline,” you could come away with the idea that Gallipolis was once a thriving little town. Not in my lifetime, I’d wager. The region has always been the poorest part of the state, and the middle class has never had a firm footing in the Ohio Valley, dotted with towns like this. One of my roommates in college dated a young guy who’d hit the lottery of well-paid labor — he was a coal miner. Union wages for some of the most dangerous work available, with three showers at the end of every shift, one at the mine, another at home and sometimes another at our apartment, and still he left black streaks on her sheets. Coal dust gets deep in your pores. (And, of course, your lungs.)

But the woman with the two sons works as a janitor at a state institution for the mentally disabled, and considers herself lucky to have her job, as otherwise she’d be doing what her neighbors do — working three part-time jobs with no insurance. Here’s a chilling statistic:

A third of all private-sector workers under 30 have no health insurance, up from 15 percent in 1988, according to the census data.

What are we going to do with these people? Keep drumming up wars for their sons to fight? Or keep pushing propaganda at them and hope they don’t change the channel?

Well. I don’t want to hang crepe all over the place. Maybe we should change the tone to one of righteous snark-fury. Linda posted this low in the comments yesterday, but I want to make sure everyone sees it. Ezra Klein on Evan Bayh:

But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.

For those of you who didn’t know Bayh when he was human, it’s even more distressing, what a comedown this is. For a while, he was golden, the sort of New Democrat in the Clinton mold that you thought might lead the state into a more progressive future, and away from the rube bumpkins (is that redundant?) who ran things when I arrived. But sadly, no. A political friend once told me, “Evan Bayh proved that it’s not impossible for a Democrat to out-Republican a Republican.” Where did I read recently — was it here? — that he’s only waiting for his father to die before he actually declares himself a Republican? I don’t know what shape Birch is in at the moment, but I’d say if he’s sentient at all, he already knows.

OK, I have to leave you with at least one smile on a day where the skies are still gloomy (although it’s above freezing!) at 10 a.m. Here’s one:

Arianna Huffington’s journalism ethics — laughable!

Reading the paper in the morning is becoming a real challenge. Not the paper-paper, but…oh, how about the Freep? On a morning when nuclear disaster looms across the far Pacific, a Web headline:

Alice Cooper shocks at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction

I looked at that for a minute before clicking. Really, what could a 63-year-old Republican golfer do that would be considered shocking, even by the wet-behind-the-ears web staff? Appear before his monthly root touch-up? But I’ve heard Vincent Damon Furnier speak before; he’s a witty man who’s always in on his own joke. OK, you’ve got me. I’ll click.

Alice Cooper came into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a boa constrictor.

Cooper, also known as Vincent Furnier, wore a blood-splattered shirt and brought schoolkids along to sing “School’s Out.” It all seemed appropriate for a band that inductor Rob Zombie said invented the rock show.

That’s it? That’s the shock? A snake and a stain and a few kids? Kids sing on the original “School’s Out,” a hit delivered well past Alice Cooper’s prime, in my opinion. (I lost interest after “Love it to Death,” but all my peers found it.) Even at 14, I knew when I was being “shocked.” The last interview I heard with Furnier — I’m going to call him that, because Alice Cooper was the name of the band — he made a big deal out of putting one over on the squares, how parents were so terribly upset by him, but their kids knew it was just showbiz. For the record, I’d like to note that my parents were never upset by Alice Cooper, not even a little bit. I don’t think they were even aware of them. They followed the Don and Betty Draper model of adulthood, in the sense that they acted like adults and didn’t want to rap with me about what was goin’ down.

To my mind, Alice Cooper was the band made to order for Bob Greene. He went along on their 1973 tour, promoting “Muscle of Love,” an album I don’t recall making it into the collection of a single person I know. I bet whatever he wrote about them was really, really shocking.

I’m vamping here because I don’t want to read any more about Japan for a while. It’s making me very sorry I read Martin Cruz Smith’s novel “Wolves Eat Dogs,” in which Moscow militia investigator Arkady Renko follows a case to Chernobyl. I’m sorry I remember so well the passage where a scientist there tells the story of the night the reactor blew at a drunken party:

In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow.

It should be noted that no black fireballs have appeared in Japan, but I have to wonder about the 60 workers left behind, trying to cool this thing off. I wonder if this is a suicide mission. I note that the power company’s apology is being parsed in Japan, making me sorry I don’t understand all the nuances of the apology in Japanese culture. I should have paid more attention during our Japan worship/paranoia phase back in the ’80s.

So let’s go bloggering, eh?

Evan Bayh signs with Fox. I’m so totally, totally surprised! I saw him on the network news a few days back; he and his wife were in New Zealand when the earthquake hit there. Susan looked sort of puffy. Not fat-puffy, or crying-my-eyes-out-from-fear-of-aftershocks puffy, but more like my-life-sucks-and-I’m-self-medicating-with-box-wine puffy. She was always his greatest asset, a warm and funny charmer to balance his robotic affect; what happened, Hoosiers?

Does anyone have a more contemporary photo of Owsley Stanley? Although kudos to the NYT for this hit of microdot:

Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.

And after he got there, I guess he just liked the weather.

And that’s it for me, pals. A swell Tuesday to all.

Some years back, Alan and I saw Bill Maher’s Broadway show in New York. He spent a few minutes talking about people whose response to 9/11 was to put American flags on their SUVs. This was, “literally, the least you could do,” Maher said.

This was 2003, before Facebook and Twitter and the rise of what we’ve come to call slacktivism. It was before People magazine could write a story like this and not have heads explode across the country:

In the wake of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan Friday afternoon – which triggered a 10-meter tsunami and a lingering threat as far west as the California coast – celebs have taken to Twitter to reach out after what may be the biggest such disaster on record to strike the country

(It ended like that, too. No period. Like a tweet, sorta.)

I guess this is what constitutes “reaching out” these days — reaching for your iPhone and pecking out a text message. This was Lea Michelle’s contribution:

So devastating to hear about the huge earthquake & tsunami Japan. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone there.

This makes putting a flag on your car look like a two-year hitch in the Peace Corps. You actually have to go to a store or corner gas station or whatever, select and pay for the flag, figure out the plastic clip thingy, affix it to the car and take it down when it’s torn to ribbons.

Ah, well. This all seems like a very small thing after an event that actually changed the coastline of Japan — it’s now “wider,” the earth’s axis shifted by 6.5 inches. You read stories like that, and you realize we are all just ants crawling around on a picnic blanket, and every so often someone shakes the blanket.

Tiny, insignificant ants.

That’s a cheerful thought for a Monday, wouldn’t you say? How about a change of subject? A few people have sent me the “Michigan is screwed” video that’s been going around, Rachel Maddow breaking down the details of new GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s budget plan, spinning it as an evil plot to not just smash unions, but be the flying wedge of a Republican takeover of EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING I TELL YOU, until one day in the near future it is complete and Snyder peels off his face to reveal that of a SkyNet commander, OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS.

Well, that’s one way to spin it.

Every fact in that report is correct. What it lacks is context. It is true that Snyder’s budget — still in proposal form, still not enacted — raises taxes on the poor and elderly and strips business taxes to the lowest in the Great Lakes region. What Maddow doesn’t tell you is the first is the loss of an earned income tax credit averaging $432 a year, and that Michigan is among a dwindling handful of states that doesn’t tax pension income. If all you do is benchmark the practice, it’s probably time for Michigan to join the rest of the country.

But the real meat of her report is the part about state officials being able to swoop into any municipality or school district and stomp it to pieces under their jackboots, a fate she implies is right around the corner for any number of cities and towns — the part about the sign on the outskirts with “founded in 1872” being made obsolete is a bit much. This part of the plan is only the beefing up of the state’s existing emergency financial management law. Stephen Henderson, a Freep columnist — and no conservative — provides context:

For years, local governments and school districts have been able to walk right up to the brink of financial disaster without any intervention from the state. So when state officials do rush in, they face horrific conditions with too few options for balancing the books.

That’s why cities such as Pontiac have made so little progress getting costs under control even with emergency financial management. It’s why Robert Bobb can’t do what the accountant in him knows needs to be done to fix Detroit Public Schools. And it’s why officials in Hamtramck were just a few months ago begging the state to let the city go bankrupt so drastic steps could be taken.

The state’s current rubric for dealing with financial emergencies is weak to the point of flaccidity. Legislators are right to firm up the consequences of inaction.

He goes on to say that wiping out elected officials and smashing existing contracts goes too far. But he’s right that for now, there’s too little sanction placed on cities that screw up.

There’s a great deal of discussion about the budget proposal in the state now. Much of it — led by Mitch Albom, Rochelle Riley and a few other high-profile Michiganders, along with many of my friends — is about the loss of the generous film tax credits, which would undoubtedly take all the air out of the movie and TV production going on around here. That concerns me, but frankly, that’s not my ox being gored. I’ve long thought the amount we’re handing out is unsustainable over the long haul, or even the short one, although I’m sorry to see it go.

What’s far, far more worrisome to me is are the proposed, and enormous, cuts in education funding — primary, secondary and higher — as well as municipal revenue sharing, which will have a far greater impact on our way of life than whether the next Mitch Albom film project is shot in Detroit or not. Virtually all education monies in Michigan come from the state, following an overhaul in the 1990s designed to fix inequities. I frankly can’t believe this isn’t getting more attention, but then again, Albom has no children.

The forces of all the affected constituencies are girding for the battle ahead — the AARP, Michigan Municipal League, Albom and his fearsome quiver of dramatic repetition, et al. One of my local school-board members has written a bit about these issues on his blog, including the emergency financial manager proposal, and the school-funding issues. (I suspect he’s very proud of the latter entry, which works on a Winnie the Pooh metaphor. Michiganders, show your luv with a click.)

I guess it’s all in how you look at things. It could be worse. We could live in Japan.

Manic Monday — must run.