This swill known as Four Loko is the latest thing that will destroy the youth of America. An “energy drink” spiked with alcohol, my very own state was the first in the country to ban it outright, and was swiftly followed by others. This USA Today story is typical of the journalism surrounding the drink:

Mixing a stimulant like caffeine with a depressant like alcohol can be a deadly combination.

People who combine the two may mistakenly believe they are more in control, as caffeine can diminish only the perception of being drunk, not the actual impairment. This sober feeling can also lead to binge drinking.

“People have multiples in one night and now they’re wired and wasted,” Tabatha Haskins says while walking on the Rutgers-Camden campus. “It’s kind of scary.”

Yes, it is kind of scary. It’s exactly the feeling I get after three Irish coffees.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Red Bull and vodka the sub-25 cocktail of choice? Isn’t this the same thing? And if Mitch Albom thinks it’s wrong — and he does — isn’t that prima facie evidence that this is the latest thing for adults to fret over and lecture about? Let’s see just what Mitch has to say:

A yellow or purple can with kiwi or grape flavoring that also promises to — and this is critical — keep you awake is a dangerously tempting product.

That settles it. If Mitch calls it dangerously tempting, I’m in.

I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old that I remember a time when, if a caffeinated alcoholic drink were all the rage, a city editor would look out over his bullpen and choose a young, dumb rookie, maybe an intern, peel a double sawbuck off the wad in his pocket, and send the kid out with a photographer to score a couple of these things, consume them, and then write a story about it.

“Crack this miracle and bring me back the pieces,” he might say, at least if James Thurber were writing the dialogue for this scene. (As always when I use that line — from Thurber’s essay on his first city editor, Gus Kuehner — I Google it to see if the essay it came from, long out of print, is available online anywhere. It isn’t. In fact, every citation of “crack this miracle and bring me back the pieces” takes you to this blog. Which makes me wonder if I’m remembering it correctly.)

Fortunately, all the decent editors aren’t dead. One works for the New York Observer, who commissioned a Four Loko piece that actually requires boots on the ground, not just a baby boomer with an opinion and a bad memory. Story’s here. My favorite passage:

“Get our Loko on!” said one man near the doorway. “Let’s fuck shit up! I’m ready to ride a mechanical bull motherfucker!”

I see a marketing campaign: Four Loko — the best friend the mechanical bull ever had.

By the way, have you ever had an energy drink? I consumed half a Monster once. That’s how worried I was about this alleged rocket fuel — I only drank half. Verdict: Tasted awful, and the promised energy did not arrive. I’ll stick to treble espressos. In fact, I ordered one last night. The clerk in Caribou actually tsked me.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Do I have a big, stupid face? Is there something about it that tells people I am incapable of making decisions for myself? (Don’t answer that.) The second time this week I’ve been disrespected by a service worker. I could feel the glower building like a headache.

“No, on second thought, make it quadruple.” And I drank it down, and it barely kept me up until midnight. It could have used a shot of something.

OK, then. Any bloggage? Some, I guess:

Get ready for 2012: How the tea party is gaming “Dancing With the Stars.” I wouldn’t watch this show for $50 an hour, but the clips I’ve seen online reveal that young Miss Palin dances about as well as I do, and furthermore, is taking out her frustration at the judges by eating all the red velvet cupcakes in the green room. (Size isn’t a valid basis for judging any dancer — Jackie Gleason was famously light on his feet — but in a dance competition featuring hours of practice a day, you expect contestants to lose weight over the course of a season, and she’s definitely going in the opposite direction.)

Brown is the new black, orange is the new brown and pie is the new cupcake. Allegedly. I personally believe black will always be black, and for a damn good reason.

One of my favorite things about living in Detroit: Concept cars. Equal parts busywork for designers and fanciful flights to ensure the companies have something to reveal at car shows, every so often something amusing turns up. Today, the Cadillac subcompact.

Off to the shower. Have a good day, all.

So, it seems we’ll have a royal wedding to look forward to next year. For what it’s worth, I approve. The couple has had a long time to get to know one another, presumptive sexual contact and enough mileage in the rear view that there will be no ugly surprises, or nothing they can’t handle.

Prince William seems to have been both well-raised by his parents and enough of his own person to learn from their mistakes. And his grandparents were obviously chastened enough by the disaster of Charles and Diana to finally revise the job description for the future queen. A royal or aristocratic bloodline is no longer required, nor is virginity. It’s a new century, your majesty. Women are different. And in a good way. It still astounds me that in 1980, Lady Diana Spencer was required to undergo a gynecological examination to ascertain her, er, soundness.

Obviously no one can know precisely what grammy told No. 2 as he set about making his choice, but as I said, he seems to have learned well. Some people say there are two kinds of women in the world, first wives and second wives, Dianas and Camillas. I was never much of a Diana fan, so forgive me, but I think he’s found a Camilla, with enough of Diana’s virtues to satisfy everyone. Which is to say, she will look good in a dress, produce an heir and a spare and not trail a string of caddish boyfriends who will loosen their tongues to the tabs. I like the way she wears her hair long and loose and a little messy, is beautiful in an entirely approachable way and doesn’t seem to make too much of a fuss over anything. In this, she is very much an English girl, and if she isn’t a blueblood, well, pfft. You see what shopping in the luxury section got his father. Teach her to ride and shoot and no one will be able to tell the difference in a decade.

This paragraph from the NYT story made me chuckle:

The romance has had its setbacks. The pair split for several months in 2007, amid speculation (always denied) that the royal family was dismayed by the lower status of Miss Middleton’s family and that Mrs. Middleton had chewed gum and used un-aristocratic words like “toilet” and “pardon” in front of Queen Elizabeth, William’s grandmother.

I thought all Brits said “toilet.” In fact, I thought calling a spade a spade, and a toilet a toilet, was a hallmark of the British upper classes. Euphemism, especially about bodily functions, is a middle-class trait. Excuse me, but can you direct me to the powder room?

So, bloggage? Not very much:

Lisa Murkowski, throwin’ down with the mean girl.

Via one of my Facebook pals, the Westboro Baptist Church meets the Winter’s Bone demographic. Guess who won?

A website I’d fallen away from, and am now back in love with — Cute Overload. I think “cute” is one of those very current concepts, like “soft,” which Hank explores at one lengthy paragraph’s length in “Tinsel” (which by the way is out in paperback, with an excellent cover, which you should stuff into stockings up and down your gift list). We swing between extremes in so many things in our discourse; you’re red or blue, the president is a saint or a Marxist, people you’ve never met read something you wrote and send you an e-mail informing you you’re a shithead who should die in a fire. And yet we can join our hands at the table of brotherhood over LOLcats and pictures of hamsters. Go figure. Crazy world.

And with that, I have to skedaddle. Much work to do today, plus I have to make a birthday cake. It’s November 16, the day we honor the arrivals of Alan, Kate, Adrianne from our peanut gallery and Alan’s late elementary classmate, Elvis Whitehead. So I’m off to buy chocolate.

Have a great day, all.

I was out and about yesterday, and wandered into a mall bookstore — Borders Express. Like the regular Borders, only with more books by celebrities. Man, Barack Obama is the best thing to ever happen to any talk-show host looking for vertical integration. But what have we here? It’s Nora Ephron’s new collection of essays, “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections,” sure to be a best-seller.

I plucked it from the shelf, expecting something slight and breezy. I was not disappointed. Many magazines are thicker, and no, I’m not kidding. A September issue of Vogue — in a recession, even — is the OED compared to this book. I sat down with it on a step stool, to see how many I might have already read in the New Yorker, her periodical publisher of choice. At least one. Then I opened it at the halfway point and started reading. One essay was a list. A clever list, to be sure, but a list. The last two essays are lists, too. The margins are wide, the type is large, and while Ephron is, as always, a funny and engaging writer, it all served to remind me that this is “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” part 2, and “I Feel Bad About My Neck” was a book I felt very smart to have gotten from the library, because I read it in about 90 minutes and saved myself $21.95. I read about half of “I Remember Nothing” in 20 minutes. It costs $22.95.

This mostly hurts because Ephron used to be big, could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any of the big swingin’ ones at Esquire back in the day, as smart about pop culture as anyone, and a lot funnier. She filed memorable essays on feminism, the Pillsbury Bake-Off, Rod McKuen and my personal favorite, an account of the birth of the feminine hygiene spray. My BFF Deb and I were twin Nora groupies, and we both went to see her on her “Heartburn” book tour, another slender volume but with a power-to-weight ratio worthy of a Mexican boxer. Deb saw her in South Bend, and wrote me a very entertaining letter about Nora’s dismantling, from the podium, of a Notre Dame brat who phrased an accusation in the form of a question, essentially charging Ephron with the single-handed destruction of her two marriages. At the appearance I saw, she said that the bread pudding recipe had omitted six beaten eggs, and I went home and made the notation in my copy, next to the passage where it’s woven into the narrative. Of course I could find it in a minute because I’d already read the book about three times and knew right where it was.

It’s not that these essays lack weight. It’s that they lack editing. The piece about egg-white omelettes, a food rant lite, could have gone, but then the book would have been 155 pages instead of 160. So could those lists (152 pages and falling…). And so on. But I guess maybe that’s the point, as the theme of this book, and the last, is aging and how it diminishes you. I really don’t think Ephron’s writing is so diminished, it’s that so much less is expected of her. And her publisher seems to expect very little of us, certainly. I guess we’ll pay $22.95 for anything.

Ephron is older than me, but I’m feeling older these days, too. Friday night I took Kate and a bunch of her friends to a concert — five bands, co-headlined by Anarbor and VersaEmerge, but Anarbor is all they were interested in. My job at these things is to drive, pay for things, hold coats, say as little as possible and stand in the background, a combination human ATM/factotum. I dressed accordingly — jeans, black sweater, black jacket and because I knew we’d be standing in line in the outside chill followed by the usual overheated club, one of my nice silk scarves around my neck. You know, for that little pop of color.

One of the girls lacked a ticket. I left them in line and walked inside to buy one. This is at the Majestic Theater complex on Woodward in Detroit, cornerstone of the Detroit music scene. Three venues, two restaurants and a bowling alley. White Stripes, Von Bondies, Electric Six, Was (Not Was) — you get the idea. A security guard directed me to the bowling alley, where I found a thirtysomething hipster spraying disinfectant into bowling shoes.

“Hi, I need one ticket for the show upstairs tonight,” I said.

He looked me over for 1.5 seconds and said, “The doors will be opening soon, ma’am, and your son or daughter can get a ticket at the top of the stairs then.”

Oh rly?

I looked him over for 1.5 seconds and said, “How do you know I’m buying for my son or daughter? How do you know it’s not for me?”

He said, “Your ascot?”

I felt bad about my neck. But not for long. Because soon we were upstairs, ticketed, the girls bolting for the stage so as to stand within sweat-spraying distance and me? I went to the bar. There were several other people of roughly my age there. All parents. No ascots, but some remarkable stories — one had driven his daughter all the way from Buffalo, another from Youngstown. To see VersaEmerge, with a female lead singer who reminded me of Natalie Merchant, if Natalie Merchant sang like a cat being strangled. The Buffalo father told me about how much he loves traveling with his daughter and how cool she is and how many shows they see together. When he started buying Crown Royal shots for the bartenders, I excused myself and wandered around taking low-light pictures.

Mostly bad ones, which usually happens when I try to duplicate the Tri-X photography of my early colleagues:

Alan and I disagreed on whether the Magic Stick is a pool hall. I insisted it was, he said it wasn’t. I win, although during shows, the pool tables become the roadies’ area:

And the neon backs me up.

Sorry, Alan.

So, let’s skip to the bloggage:

As Thanksgiving drew nearer, Mr. and Mrs. Albom were discouraged by how many of their lovely invitations to spend the holiday in their gracious Bloomfield Hills home were returned with regrets. It was such a small request — spend five days in the bosom of one of America’s most beloved writers, providing him with column fodder, uncompensated by anything more than turkey. What is wrong with people these days, anyway?

It could be worse. You could be reminiscin’ with Bob Greene.

The crime that dare not speak its name: Term papers for hire — the perp’s side of the story. Seriously, worth a read.

Finally, we had some remarkable weather here this weekend — dense, pea-soup fog that lingered most of the day Friday and returned Saturday. Here’s the view of the water from the median strip on Lake Shore.

Best part? The foghorns.

Have a great Monday.

We’re stuck between over the river and through the woods and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

My old pal Mark the Shark — a lawyer, a Great White — once worked on a recount case. It’s pretty simple, he explained; basically, you recount the easy ones (submitted by machine) and then fight over the absentees one by one. It’s tedious, but it’s like moving a pile of rocks from one place to another. Keep at it, and it’ll get done.

I’m hoping, however, that the Alaska vote-counting takes a good long while. And it likely will, what with ballots arriving via snowshoe-wearing carrier pigeons from above the Brooks Range and all, and the little problem of Joe Miller and his own tea party sharks. Here’s a post from the Anchorage Daily News’ Alaska Politics blog. Scroll down to the bottom, where they’ve posted photographs of a few of the write-in ballots already being challenged by Miller’s sharks. They clearly say “Lisa Murkowski,” every one of them correctly spelled. The only possible problem I could see is perhaps a certain roundness to the lettering that makes a few letters rub up against one another. Also, Miller has imported one Floyd Brown to help him out, Brown being the warlock who conjured the Willie Horton ad for George Bush. Sayeth Brown:

“The stories of manipulation are just almost mind boggling,” Brown said at a press conference called this afternoon by the Miller campaign.

The only evidence that the Miller campaign would provide was an affidavit from a poll watcher in Fairbanks, Rocky MacDonald, who complained that the ballot box at the Tanana Valley Fairgrounds “was unsecured in that the electoral judges had access to the inside of the ballot box with a key.”

“The electoral judges opened the ballot box several times to clear jammed ballots and rearrange by hand the ballots in the box to make space for new ballots,” MacDonald wrote.

Mind-boggling, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The entire process will be tied up in the courts for a good long time, I’m sure. Slate has a pretty good outline of Miller’s arguments. Irony alert: This tea partyin’, states-rightsin’ renegade is relying pretty heavily on federal precedent, particularly Bush v. Gore:

Miller wants election officials to count only those ballots for Murkowski in which the oval is properly filled in and her name is properly spelled. How strong are his arguments? Whether the statute requires proper spelling is a difficult question of statutory interpretation. The reason that Alaska election officials said it did not, and instead adopted the looser standard of “voter intent,” which allows for misspellings, is the Alaska Supreme Court’s long-standing use of a rule of interpretation which reads ambiguous statutes in favor of the voters. (I’ve dubbed this rule the Democracy Canon.) In this case, throwing out minor misspellings would disenfranchise voters for a technicality. I’ve traced use of the voter intent standard in state courts back to 1885, and Alaska has a particularly strong version of it. The state’s courts say that election statutes must be read in favor of allowing votes to be counted unless the legislature has made it unmistakably clear not to read a law this way.

Yes, it’s clear Alaska wouldn’t want a man’s vote negated because he lacks letterin’ skills. But we’ll see what we can do.

So, anything else hopping this morning? Not much. We have pea-soup fog out there, and I’m headed out in a bit, driving closer to the lake. I’m hoping to hear some foghorns coming from the water. When conditions are right you can hear them all the way up to my unfashionable neighborhood, but they’re loud enough further east to awaken light sleepers. We’ll see.

Short shrift, I know, but I still feel like crap. So here’s something:

Not to keep coming back to Slate, but, well, Jack Shafer likes the Wall Street Journal’s series on internet privacy as much as I do:

And you thought the Web was “free.” You’re paying with your privacy.

If you don’t have the time, or the subscription, to wade through the WSJ series, he provides a nice summation.

A poem for fall, via Sweet Juniper.

And now I have to run. Have a great weekend, all.

Kate is playing in the school jazz ensemble this year, and one of the numbers they’re working on is the “Mission: Impossible” theme. (You weren’t expecting “Sketches of Spain” from eighth-graders, I hope.) This necessitated explanations: Yes, it was a movie, but it was a TV show first. It played into the ’60s vogue for all things spy-related, but as one-hour dramas go, it wasn’t bad at all. It was about a special force of secret agents who went around the world doing… oh, hang on. Let’s just look on YouTube.

I thought that if YouTube had anything, it should have at least one example of the opening set piece, where Peter Graves gets the mission, and all of those great pop-culture catch phrases: As always, if you or any of your IM force are caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This recording will self-destruct in 60 seconds. Good luck, Jim.

And YouTube had something, but it wasn’t the MI I remembered. It was the pilot episode. Not Peter Graves, but the old DA from “Law & Order.” Not a little tape recorder, but an LP in a featureless office where cryptic glances are exchanged. A different voice giving the mission. What the hell?

Well, the internet got me into this mess, and the internet can get me out. The usual Wikipedia caveats apply, but this sounds likely:

The leader of the IMF is initially Dan Briggs, played by Steven Hill. However, Hill, as an Orthodox Jew, had to leave on Fridays at 4 p.m. to be home before sundown and was not available until sundown the next day. Although his contract allowed for filming interruptions due to religious observances, the clause proved difficult to work around due to the production schedule, and as the season progressed, an increasing number of episodes featured little of Dan Briggs. Hill had other problems as well. After cooperatively crawling through dirt tunnels and repeatedly climbing a rope ladder in the episode “Snowball in Hell,” the following week (“Action!”) he balked at climbing a stairway with railings and locked himself in his dressing room. Unable to come to terms with Hill, the producers reshot the episode without him (another character, Cinnamon Carter, listened to the taped message, the selected operatives’ photos were displayed in “limbo”, and the team meeting was held in Rollin Hand’s apartment), and reduced Briggs’ presence in the five segments left to be filmed to the minimum. As far as Hill’s religious requirements were concerned, line producer Joseph Gantman simply had not understood what had been agreed to. He told Patrick J. White, “‘If someone understands your problems and says he understands them, you feel better about it. But if he doesn’t care about your problems, then you begin to really resent him.'” White pointed out, “Steven Hill may have felt exactly the same way.” Hill was replaced (without explanation to the audience) after the first season by Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, who remained the leader for the remainder of the original series and in the 1988–1990 revival.

For the record, I have never locked myself in my dressing room in my life. For the record, I’ve never had a dressing room. If I ever get one, maybe I’ll lock myself in, just for the hell of it. See what it feels like.

Something else I never would have known about here it not for YouTube: Tarp surfing.

And with that, it seems we have skipped to the bloggage. A few weeks ago we discussed a case here in which the local Fox affiliate played a significant role. Here’s another, far more tragic. At what point does seeking TV exposure cross the line into mental illness?

Dumb story, still funny — Joe Biden, comic icon. (You can see the Onion’s Midwestern roots here — only a Wisconsin-centric publication would give the vice president a Trans Am.)

And now I’m off to the shower, and to catch a rabbit. Thank a veteran today, or just turn everything up to 11.

You know how being sick with a subclinical malaise is — you feel fine until, all of a sudden, you feel awful. That’s me today. Let’s see how far fine can take me this morning.

As for my comments about “Winter’s Bone,” I keep coming back to a minor thread of the story — the main character, a 17-year-old girl, and her intention to join the army. The film is the story of this girl, Ree Dolly, and her quest to find her father, dead or alive. Charged with cooking meth, he bailed himself out by putting their house up for part of his bond. Now missing and presumed a fugitive, the family is days away from losing everything. And they don’t have much to lose. The Dolly family — Ree, her mentally ill, nearly catatonic mother and two young siblings — lives at the edge of the edge, in the Missouri Ozarks, in the sort of grinding, rural poverty where a neighbor stopping by with some venison and a few potatoes is the difference between being hungry that night or not. Career options seem to be limited to cooking meth or touring beautiful Fallujah. Ree’s inclination toward the service is covered in only a few lines, but it stuck with me.

She’s certainly qualified, with an interior toughness that you get only after years of the sort of things we see in the movie – poverty, criminal activity, an insular rural culture where women bond with men for the same protection it afforded Neanderthals, then learn to never, ever open their mouths. About anything. I’d hire her to be an army of one. And while I know that the armed service has always been a step into a sort of stability for exactly this level of society, it’s impossible not to think about our current military adventures overseas and think Ree might be no worse off dealing crank.

I was strongly reminded of Annie Proulx’s short story, ‘Tits-up in a Ditch,” two years old but surely in an anthology somewhere by now (and, for you New Yorker subscribers, in the digital edition), another story of just how hard hardscrabble can be.

Anyway, I had a late dissenter in Monday’s thread, calling “Winter’s Bone” a whole lot of wannabe Cormac McCarthy. I see the criticism, but I disagree, or rather, I don’t find wannabe-McCarthy enough of a charge to make it not worth your time. The story is smart about so much, and, like “Frozen River,” has the sense to show far more than it tells, and trust its audience to figure it out. There are some wonderful supporting performances, especially by John Hawkes and Dale Dickey, both of whom could have been cast on bone structure alone, but follow it up by actually climbing inside the skins of their characters. A truly haunting film.

And now I am racked with a coughing spasm. Looks like awful is just around the corner, so let’s get some bloggage out of the way, shall we?

Sarah Palin’s career as an economic policy critic, cut tragically short. Not that anyone would dare to tell her so.

Speaking of Alaska, Anne Applebaum makes a few points:

For whatever the reason, the hypocrisy at the heart of the (Republican) party – and at the heart of American politics – is at its starkest in Alaska. For decades, Alaskans have lived off federal welfare. Taxpayers’ money subsidizes everything from Alaska’s roads and bridges to its myriad programs for Native Americans. Federal funding accounts for one-third of Alaskan jobs. Nevertheless, Alaskans love to think of themselves as the last frontiersmen, the inhabitants of a land “beyond the horizon of urban clutter,” a state with no use for Washington and its wicked ways.

Duh.

And speaking of monetary policy, as someone who used to host a radio show where I heard from insane Fed-bashers on a regular basis, I was interested to read Bethany McLean’s explainer on how Fed-bashing has gone mainstream, in Slate.

Irresistible headline, funny column: For black men who have considered homicide after watching another Tyler Perry movie. Via Hank.

And because monetary policy isn’t all we’re about here, some pop-cult — JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, via Roy. I see strong correlations with Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, i.e., a retro soul band with four white hipsters in the back row, playing in their stingy-brim fedoras, etc., with an ol’ skool African American vocalist out front. If anyone can name a third, I’m calling trendsies. Nevertheless, “Baltimore is the New Brooklyn” is quite the toe-tapper:

Finally, for those who weren’t paying attention in the comments yesterday, a note from MMJeff:

You’ve said it before, but your readers are truly awesome people; yesterday I learned from our LCCH staff that they wanted to know what “Nancy Nall” was or who she was, because through the link on the website we’d gotten a couple of donations that noted your name as the reason for the giving, and also a “Jeff.” A third is inexplicable and distant-ish (New Jersey) and may well fit with the other two.

Anyhow, I told them, and told them I’d thank you “personally” for the venue and the opportunity; I also took the liberty of posting a news story at the thread yesterday with general thanks. Your kind words a few days ago have spurred some help our way, and direct donations are very appreciated by our service coordinators because that big hunk o’ HUD money comes with a million strings on it — we love it, and would close (many of our units, anyhow) without it, but there’s no room for creative problem solving and social worker skills. You fill out the forms, you work the process, you turn the crank and out comes the sausage.

The $35,000 we raise is small next to our $1.2 million total annual budget, but it represents so much more than that, to the staff and those they can do useful, interesting, and cool things for. A few weeks ago, they bought some nice shoes for a woman who got a good outfit for a job interview, and the service coordinator decided her self-confidence needed some rocking heels with the donated clothes. Federal dollars cannot be used to buy rocking heels, apparently; “local” fundraising can.

Again, thanks! I come for the recipes, not the fundraising (and a little provocation, occasionally), but this was just so unexpected, and so timely. And you may have picked up a few more readers from the Newark OH area in our offices at the Coalition.

This has happened before, with other worthy causes. You guys? You are the best. Srsly.

OK, off to shower and Wayne State, there to spread my germs around campus. Which may well be where they originated, for all I know.

An illness has o’ertaken our house. I’m going back to bed for 90 minutes. See you sometime after that. Until then, discuss:

Is Lindsey Graham talking tough because he knows he’ll never have to dollar up? Or is this insanity President Palin’s 2013 No. 1 on the to-do list?

“The Walking Dead” — I do not like so much, Sam-I-am. I’m assuming this is the end of any sort of content restrictions on basic cable.

I could not bear to watch Jorge Bush last night with Matt Lauer. What did I miss? Did he offer any new details on his bloody baby brother? Like, among other things: How big a jar? And what did they do with it afterward?

If I’m going to be functional at all today, I must get more sleep. Later.

So how did you spend your extra hour Sunday? I read two stories that might have eluded me otherwise, the one about how the USDA is pushing cheese down our throats at the same time it’s fighting obesity, and the one about Courtney Love.

I enjoyed the latter. I guess ol’ Court is trying for a…whatever act this is. It’s not going 100 percent well. This is her after telling a New York Times reporter to wait for her in her hotel room and she’d be along directly:

Shortly after 8 p.m., Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked and leaning on Mr. Kiefer for support. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance — “Not you,” she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her — to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.

After failing in music and acting, Courtney is finding the fashion world is still interested in her, and with shenanigans like this, you can see why. If there’s one thing fashion demands from a woman, it’s total coolness with being naked in a room full of clothed people, and obviously she has that part nailed.

As for the cheese story, I am reminded of the observation of Elaine Benis, after confronting the stuffed-crust pizza: “Will we never run out of places to conceal cheese on a pizza?” Nope, don’t think so. Speaking of which, if there’s such a surplus of cheese, whatever happened to the old five-pound blocks, i.e., guvvamint cheese? Back when the cheese distributions were going on, I knew several people who came into some who weren’t, shall we say, poor enough to qualify. (Easy explanation: Elderly relative who simply can’t eat five pounds of cheese before it dries out, molds or otherwise becomes inedible.) They all said it was the best American cheese they ever ate, creamy and rich and nothing at all like Kraft Singles. Why not make some more of that stuff? Beats paying Domino’s to come up with a new iteration of Heart Attack Lovers’ pizza.

What I didn’t read about: Keith Olbermann. Don’t care. Suspend him, don’t suspend him, makes me no never-mind, as Keith and I have sort of broken up. Of course the whole idea of finding him guilty of, what? Subjectivity? Is totally absurd. This has less to do with journalism than a tuna sandwich. Which makes me think this is about something else entirely. Like getting him to reconsider a contract demand, or something.

And now? I was going to ruminate for a bit on “Winter’s Bone,” an amazing film we caught this weekend, as well as “The Drummond Will,” which was that black-and-white English film at the film festival Friday, but a press release just fluttered over the transom. Police have made an arrest in a year-old home invasion and assault in Grosse Pointe Park, a pretty scary crime for these parts. It only took 11 months to get DNA evidence from the state crime lab. ELEVEN MONTHS. Remember that the next time you watch “CSI” and Marg Helgenberger tells some clown she’ll put a rush on it. So now I have to write a story.

“Winter’s Bone” can wait a day, I guess. But if you get a chance to see it today, take it. It’s that good. Bye.

On today’s to-do list:

Write a little.
Make apple crisp.
Clean at least one bathroom.
See some English film, “the first black-and-white feature shot on the Red,” at a bar in Ferndale, part of the Ferndale Film Festival.

I guess things could be worse. I work a full day (night, really) on Sunday, so I guess I can start drinking on Friday at lunchtime.

What’s “the Red,” you’re maybe wondering. It’s a camera system, and I think the actual name is RED, all caps, but meh. It’s a light, small, low-cost digital alternative to professional film cameras, very big among the indies and, increasingly, the studios. The FAQ. Because you care, right? Anyway, while this sort of thing — fussing over cameras and such — is not my part of the game, it’s a) free, b) includes pizza and c) takes place in a bar. Win, win, win.

Actually, rounding up today’s conversation starters, I see the internet is a rich and fruitful place this morning. Let’s dispense with the small talk and get to cases, shall we?

Sparky Anderson died yesterday, which means it’s time to check in with none other than Detroit’s favorite grief counselor sports columnist, li’l Mitch Albom. Jesus flippin’ Christ, guess what his lead is?

I had a dream about Sparky Anderson a few days ago. He looked old and his hair was brown, and I called to him, but he didn’t recognize me. Only after I said my name did he smile.

And then it ended.

Any armchair Freudians want to take a crack at that? I mean, no wonder the guy is a monster. Even his subconscious tells him that his name brings smiles to the world. Although Mitch doesn’t quite get it:

I’d been wondering about that dream because Sparky doesn’t usually show up in my REM cycle. And why was his hair brown? Sparky? The original White Wizard? Then, Thursday afternoon, I heard the jarring news: At age 76, Anderson, one of the most colorful, charming, perfectly suited managers baseball ever produced, had died in California.

Now he’ll start thinking his dreams are telepathic. Although can even a dream get through to Mitch? Who, once again, finds the death of an old man “jarring.” I ask you. Although, given how close Anderson’s death was to Ernie Harwell’s, he really can’t resist a different angle:

It would be fitting to ask Ernie Harwell — he and Sparky walked together every morning on road trips — but we lost Ernie this year, too, and it seems like some heavenly roll call is taking place in our town.

The Two Baseball Legends You Meet in Heaven — I smell box-office boffo! (Actually, Albom is at work as we speak on a play about Harwell. Which is probably why Sparky’s obit clocked in at under a million words.)

Moving on, has everyone heard the Cooks Source story by now? After all, it’s nearly 24 hours old, a graybeard in internet time. Here’s the gist: Writer discovers a piece of hers, published some years back on the internet, now exists in ink-on-paper form, in a magazine called Cooks Source. She e-mails the editor and asks for a) an apology, and b) a small donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. She gets, in return, the back of the editor’s hand, in one of the stupidest reactions to a reasonable request I’ve yet heard in journalism, and friends, that is saying something. Anyway, the internet got angry. You don’t want the internet angry. Edward Champion has a good one-page summation. Who edits this rag? Tim Goeglein?

Every boy should have a mother like this.

Have you heard about the president’s trip to India? Have you perhaps heard that “34 warships” are steaming there even as we speak? I have. I read it on the dumber conservative blogs. Guess what? It’s not true. I know how shocking that is to some of you, but there you go.

And with that, I’m getting dressed for a brutal workout, followed by a shower, followed by that movie in Ferndale, followed by apple crisp. Because it’s the weekend, suckas. And weekends are for apple crisp.