I hate to point out when we’re prescient around here, but what were we just talking about? This:

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.

Good. Probably time to have that debate. Particularly when it’s accompanied by statements like this:

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”

The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

I wonder what libraries Pezzanite hangs out in. The ones I’ve been lucky enough to have in my communities are not marked by union featherbedding — I’m certain most weren’t unionized at all, although I’m unsure about my current one — nor by employees with nothing to do. I’m sure you could find a few loafers in onesies and twosies, as you can at every company, but by and large, I can’t think of a problem I took to them that wasn’t promptly addressed. From what-does-the-D-in-D-Day-stand-for to can-you-find-me-microfilm-of-this-newspaper-on-this-date, they’ve pretty much been on the job, every day.

I will admit to liking libraries. It’s one public institution I rely on, not just for entertainment but for any number of other functions, from a third-place workspace to a convenient meeting room to an enrichment center when Kate was young. You get your publicly funded sports stadiums, I get my library. Even-up.

I shudder to think of what a library run by a private corporation would look like — 500 copies of “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” and toddler storytime naming rights sold to Juicy Juice. The Allen County Public Library, in Fort Wayne, has a rare book room. Who needs that? A bunch of eggheads. The complete original folios of “The North American Indian” is probably approaching $1 million in value; no need to keep that expensive thing around and insured, and anyway, is this a proper function of government? I mean, is “maintaining a rare book room” in the Constitution, U.S. or state, or in the county charter? Didn’t think so.

But of course, selling the dusty parts of the collection aren’t what this effort is about. It’s about firing yet another rank of public employees, which are now seen not as our friends, neighbors and fellow workers worthy of respect, but as expensive piggies, latched onto the public teat with no intention of letting go. Who needs ’em? We can cycle through an endless roundelay of college students, supervised by a handful of beaten-down wage slaves, and no one will know the difference.

Connie, you want to take this one?

While I have a head of steam going, I offer this wet kiss from the New York Times to the GOP jerkoff running the campaign of another GOP jerkoff, Carl Paladino. Yes, that’s the same Carl Paladino who sends around racist e-mails “because I work in construction.” Jerkoff No. 1 is “brash,” “impish” and “no holds barred.” The Times must be preparing for a Paladino win.

Can someone make a poster of this photo? Because I would totally hang that one in my basement.

And Monday awaits. Hate Mondays, for the most part. But I fell ready for this sucker now!

Good story in the New York Times yesterday, which I heard expanded upon and rehashed on public radio, en route to Wayne State yesterday. It was about a growing movement to recall mayors and city councils, not for mal- or misfeasance in office, but for doing shit that pisses voters off. Lately, that would mean: “their jobs.”

I paid attention because it happened here. Grosse Pointe Shores, the wealthiest of our five leafy little Edens, went through a bruising recall earlier this year, aimed at the mayor and four council members who voted for a 1-mill tax increase to finance road repairs. There was a similar attempt in the Woods, where I live, over a similar tax bump, but it didn’t advance beyond the petition-passing stage. In the NYT story, the lead anecdote deals with another city:

Daniel Varela Sr., the rookie mayor of Livingston, Calif., learned this the hard way when he was booted from office last month in a landslide recall election. His crime? He had the temerity to push through the small city’s first water-rate increase in more than a decade to try to fix its aging water system, which he said spewed brownish, smelly water from rusty pipes.

“We were trying to be responsible,” said Mr. Varela, whose action set off a lawsuit in addition to his recall as mayor of Livingston, which is in the Central Valley. “But as soon as the rates started to kick in, people who weren’t paying attention were suddenly irate.”

In the radio interview, Varela said he was elected on a platform that included a promise to improve the city’s water quality, so he did. The voters’ response was, essentially, but it wasn’t supposed to cost anything!

In the Shores, city services are at country club-concierge levels. A woman I know who lives there said that on the first garbage-collection day after they moved in, there was a knock on the door. She opened it to find a city public-works employee, offering a key to her house. The previous owner wanted the trash picked up from inside the garage, he said; would she like to continue the arrangement, in which case he would keep the key, or would she like to take it back and put her own trash out? The police respond — promptly — to calls from residents fearful of entering their own houses, because they saw a strange car parked on the street; they will escort the resident inside and do a room-by-room check for monsters. For this, residents pay taxes on a par with the other Pointes, but the collapse of the real estate market has meant a disastrous shortfall in tax receipts, which means…well, you know the drill.

The standard taxpayer response is Tim Gunn’s: Make it work. That’s what’s going on now. Maintenance schedules are lengthening, user fees are rising, municipal employee salaries are frozen or trimmed; small perks like car allowances are disappearing. In the Pointes, we’re still in patch-patch-patch mode. But my students in public-affairs journalism, each of whom is covering a city in the metro area, are turning in stories that turn my hair white. One city is likely going to sell or otherwise privatize their municipal rec center. One school board held their first-year meeting in a cacophony of complaints about students not getting counseling services they need, thanks to millions in budget cuts just now being felt. More are surely coming.

The collapse of the auto industry surely would have brought some of this to pass no matter what, but for me, this is one more turn of events to blame on the people who wrecked real estate by turning the mortgage market into a casino. However, it is our mess to clean up, which is one reason I’m paying a great deal of attention to who is representing me in any number of public-policy arenas of late. When I think about it, I wonder what could have been easier than running a well-to-do suburb in the high-cotton days, the money flowing reliably year after year, the most perplexing decisions in how to spend it all. But those days are gone. We need people who are present, and engaged, every step of the way.

For the record, I have to say I understand the anger of voters, and it’s not as simple as them being big babies, as Michael Kinsley once called American taxpayers, who want everything, now, and at Third World prices. It’s very hard to justify tax increases in a recession, when everyone is already making do with less. I wonder if maybe this is one of those fulcrum moments in American history, when we redefine the whole idea of what “public” really is, and the very idea of a municipal rec center passes into memory as something we could once afford, but can’t anymore. Oh, well — kids can play basketball in their driveways, and isn’t an indoor pool just a little too luxurious, anyway? Why do we need libraries, when we all have broadband? And so on.

One thing I do know: I’m no longer paying attention to bumper-sticker politics. Don’t you even knock on my door and tell me you’re going to push for “balanced budgets.” If you can’t tell me how, take your literature down the road. The job’s too important to be a resume-padder for some lawyer looking to make partner next year.

Eh, let’s lighten up with some bloggage:

Tom and Lorenzo wind up a season’s worth of “Rachel Zoe Project” recaps with another winner. You are encouraged to check out the screen grab of the star in a dress that reveals her bony chest and the edges of her sad little fat-starved puppy-ear breasts. Her husband keeps bugging her to have a baby, but not to eat a sandwich. The body protects itself first, Rodger; I doubt this woman has ovulated in the last decade.

For the architects in the room, a WSJ column about the perils of designer buildings. I don’t know if the facts are entirely present — this is entirely out of my knowledge zone — but it echoes the experience of the Snyderman family of Fort Wayne, who once had a sexy Michael Graves house that went wrong from day one.

Speaking of celebrity architects, I met the owners of this Frank Lloyd Wright house in Detroit at a party a couple years ago, when they were still mid-restoration. Everybody seemed to know where this place was, but I didn’t, and so hadn’t seen it until the magazine story this month. Man, what a jaw-dropper. I know Wright houses are notorious for problems, but to live in a space that gorgeous would almost be worth a few leaky windows. Make sure you check out the photos.

The owners also have the best and most creative florist shop in town. Yeah yeah, I know — gay men, flower arranging, yadda yadda. But these guys are good. I remember talking to one about the difficulties in getting their early customers to appreciate the beauty of a bunch of daisies, tied in rough twine, stuck in a Mason jar. They don’t deliver out my way without a huge surcharge, which is probably for the best. I’d go broke cheering myself up.

And with that, I think it’s time to say adieu for the weekend. Our heat wave is ending. I’ll try to console myself with an apple pie.

Nothing here is the least bit startling to anyone familiar with the Detroit area, but the graphic representation is arresting:

That’s the racial/ethnic breakdown of the Metro: Whites are red, African Americans blue, Hispanics yellow. I don’t think Arabs have a color, or you’d see their numbers, too. If you click the photo itself, you’re taken to the Flickr page where I found it, which contains notes you can mouse over, and see the various neighborhoods/municipalities. (I live in the little comma of red curved in the southeast, on the lake. Here’s a map for Chicago.) Everything, and I do mean everything that happens in Detroit? Is about race. City-suburban relations in particular are like disputes between armed fiefdoms. If we cooperated we could maybe get something done around here. But no.

My partner in GrossePointeToday.com went to a conference earlier in the year, where everyone had to give a presentation on their area. She started with some photos of life around here — the pretty houses, the lake — and finished with one taken a few blocks away in Detroit. The audience gasped. Yep.

In the suburbs, race has its own set of euphemistic vocabulary. My favorite is “changing demographics.” I went to local Republican headquarters to cadge some McCain-Palin yard signs, props for our zombie movie two years ago. The guy who gave them to me said he couldn’t believe all the Obama signs in the Pointes, which he attributed to changing demographics. Because I was in the process of taking his signs for the purpose of making fun of them, I didn’t suggest the alternative, i.e., his ticket sucked, but there you are.

I don’t have much time this morning — more office hours — and precious little bloggage, but what I have is magnificent, a Mitch Albom takedown by someone who’s even more irritated by him than I am. My source on this speculates that perhaps Albom is gearing up to take over Andy Rooney’s job whenever America’s designated lovable coot kicks the bucket. Hmm. Hadn’t considered that. He’s certainly qualified, and he’s precisely the sort of get the producers of “60 Minutes” would consider golden.

Anyway, enjoy. If his editors won’t handle Albom, someone has to. I’ll be back tomorrow.

For dinner at Casa NN.C night before last: Mark Bittman’s espresso black-bean chili. Verdict: If you’re a chili purist, probably not for you. But an adventurous eater will find cinnamon, coffee and brown sugar worthy, interesting additions to a bean soup. Plus, it will make you fart like a machine gun, with interesting bass notes lingering in the room. But that’s the price we pay for eating natural foods.

Next time I’m making it with the chocolate variation.

The book that recipe is from — “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” — is not only the single best vegetarian cookbook I’ve ever clapped eyes on, it’s probably the only one you need. Pair it with “How to Cook Everything,” and you could take the rest of my cookbook library. I’d be pretty well-set.

That’s the gist of the comments at the link, above; I now draw you to the one made by Isaac Mizrahi, a fashion designer. Emphasis, as they say, mine:

Throw away all your old recipes and buy How to Cook Everything. Mark Bittman’s recipes are foolproof, easy, and more modern than any others.

What was I saying just last week about the five all-purpose adjectives used to describe fashion? What was one of them? Uh-huh, yeah. You listen to your auntie Nance from now on out.

Oh, I can’t wake up this morning, so I’m scanning Facebook to see what all my local friends thought of “Detroit 1-8-7.” So far the verdict is brutal. I reserve judgment. I couldn’t watch it last night, but I turned it on to stave off sleepiness and as a counter to the mortar barrage of acorns landing on the roof in the wind. I’ll catch up with the DVR over the weekend. Plus, you can’t judge any show by the pilot; if there’s one thing TV promises you, or should, it’s long-term character development over the course of 10 or 12 hours. I did hear one good line: “We fight them here so we won’t have to fight them in Ferndale,” which as network cop-show lines go, is pretty good. (Keeping in mind that “The Wire” pretty much ruined all network cop shows for me forever.) I’ll give the producers credit (literally, as a big part of this production is subsidized by the taxpayers of Michigan) for shooting here; I saw a few familiar faces in there, people I know in our little community of creatives. If the show does for Detroit actors even a fraction of what “Law & Order” did for New York’s, then I’ll tune in every week.

I’m having trouble waking up because today is pretty much the sort of day I’d order from the menu in September — overcast, rainy and warm. The southwest exhaled a big gust of hot air yesterday, and it reached 87 by day’s end, followed by rain. The rain arrived at 4:30 a.m. with wind, making me curse the skylight in my bathroom; how on earth do people sleep with these things over their beds? In even light rain, it’s like having a drummer sitting five feet over your head, improvising. Throw in the acorns for a month every year, and it’s ridiculous. I see why people fall into the Ambien embrace when they get to my age, but there’s something about being female and middle-aged that makes me avoid prescription meds of all but the most essential sorts; I get the feeling it’s just a short hop to Judy Garland’s street. Every night I read about teenagers arrested with fistfuls of pills no doubt cadged from mom and dad’s medicine chest, Vicodin and Xanax and all the rest of it. Mama isn’t that high-strung just yet. Just tired.

So, can we round up some bloggage to flesh out this undercaffeinated, phoned-in entry? Let’s seeee….

With the exception of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I generally stay away from the political bloggers at the Atlantic, but I stumbled across this Andrew Sullivan post on Sarah Palin Jr. yesterday, and it made a point I have been making with unbelievers for a while, i.e., most people have no idea how crazy religious-right voters are, what they expect, what they see as their baseline conditions for backing a candidate. I recall a conversation with your basic eastern elitist, a Jew, about the evangelical right’s support of Israel, which I told him had nothing to do with their desire for his people to have a homeland, but rather a precondition for the return of Jesus, and he told me I was the crazy one. Folks, I am not. Sullivan gets it:

O’Donnell is an important figure not because she is a flake, as Bill Kristol says. She is important because she is as yet too guileless to lie about her real views, or to conceal the reactionary worldview that animates them. She is not an outlier. She is a very powerful way to understand what the theoconservative project is really about – and what the GOP base truly believes in.

She is the modern GOP. And maybe her emergence will help more people snap out of denial.

OID: Ten men, including one MSU football player, charged in theft of laptops from Detroit Public Schools. I ask you. No, I don’t.

OK, time to hit the shower, drink more coffee and trudge off to office hours. Have a good one, all.

The New York Times had a story on brick theft in St. Louis yesterday. I’m late getting to it, yes, but somehow I doubt brick theft is a big issue in the blogosphere. The gist: Scrappers, crackheads and other scavengers are taking advantage of abandonment and social disarray to steal the city’s red bricks, “prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.”

The preferred harvesting technique is arson. Then,

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”

It is a crime that has increased with the recession. Where thieves in many cities harvest copper, aluminum and other materials from vacant buildings, brick rustling has emerged more recently as a sort of scrapper’s endgame, exploited once the rest of a building’s architectural elements have been exhausted. “Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”

You have, Royce? You heard right:

I ran this picture a while back. I took it in the fall of 2008 while escorting a pair of French journalists around the city. They wanted to see the $1 houses, and this one was across the street. This house had been looted, scrapped, torched and, when we visited, was giving up its final harvest — the bricks. Two homeless-looking guys were at work with crowbars and a rubber mallet, taking them off one by one and knocking the mortar off. They were tossing them on a pile, but I draw your attention to the pallet in the side yard, the bricks neatly stacked and wrapped in plastic, awaiting the fork lift to take them off…somewhere. I guess to the south, where developers will prize their distinctive character.

In many ways, this photo inspired a screenplay I’ve been working on for a while now, and will finish — 30 more pages! — if I ever get a minute or two. It started me thinking about scrapping in general, how this economic disaster has made it so much easier to take the accumulated wealth of our region and distribute it around the world. Whole factories are being disassembled, their assembly lines cut out with torches, loaded onto freighters and shipped off to places where labor doesn’t demand a living wage and certain safety precautions. Abandoned houses are being stripped of their plumbing and window frames, which is trundled off to the scrap yards and sold by the pound. And now the bricks. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.

See, it just slayed me how systematic all this was, how the sleazy mortgage brokers and other sharpies figured out how to descend upon a city that any fool could tell you was already a pretty well-picked-over carcass to begin with, and still find some marrow to suck out of its bones. This neighborhood, the Realtor told me, had been a functional concern until fairly recently. I wouldn’t have wanted to live there, but a lot of people a little closer to the margins had found it acceptable enough. And then the knock came one day, a former drug dealer trading up to home refinancing, and that was the beginning of the end. They wrote loan after loan against these modest little houses, aided and abetted by their friends in the business, who didn’t care they were loaning 110 percent of a house’s worth to someone whose residency in the working class — and chance of repaying even a fraction — was tenuous in the extreme; their end came out of the fees, the risk passed down the line to some other sucker. Who, it turned out, was us.

Then it all caved in, and the fun really started. Seen above.

A few years back, I toured the Edsel and Eleanor Ford estate with Kate’s Brownie troop, a Cotswold-style mansion on the shores of Lake St. Clair, the sort of thing built by the second generation of a great fortune. The guide pointed out all the architectural details that had been imported from some dismantled English country home — the windows, the floorboards — and it made me wonder if it hasn’t always been thus. Wealth is created, then stolen or traded, traveling around the world in tidal waves of destruction and reconstruction.

I bet the Fords bought their windows fair and square, however; the developers snatching up those nicely wrapped pallets of St. Louis and Detroit brick, not so much. But they have plausible deniability.

In case you’re wondering, I put a few human beings in my fictional story. My struggle is how to make a story that’s essentially about worthless real estate compelling. Get me rewrite.

Another ridiculous day ahead, so better hop to the bloggage:

Ohio University’s Rufus Bobcat delivers an end-zone smackdown to Brutus Buckeye, and friends? I couldn’t be prouder. When your little MAC team is about to serve as an early-season hors d’oeuvre for the Big 10 behemoth 90 miles up the road, the least you can do is get a little mojo for the school any way you can. The guy says he’s not sorry, and he definitely would do it again. Hell yeah.

Gene Weingarten mourns the death of the English language, citing in his evidence:

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”

I shared with him one of my favorites, which appeared in a small Ohio daily way back when: “(The film) contained more violence than a Peck & Paw production.”

Bonus for those who’ve read this far: The brick-theft story, in the venerable and still fully staffed New York Times, contains a similar homophone error deep in the copy. Find it, and I’ll give you…my sincere respect. UPDATE: Eh, never mind. It’s been fixed. Bricks are stacked on a pallet; the original version had them on a palette. That would have been hard to hold.

A good day to all.

There’s something about autumn that gets me in the mood to batten down the hatches. Alan took Kate to a Matt & Kim concert Saturday night, and…

…may I just interject something here? I think I’ve mentioned before that Kate’s enthusiasm in pop music isn’t for superstars like Lady Gaga, but these smaller, less well-known artists like, well, Matt & Kim. In the last year she’s been asking to go to their concerts. She doesn’t ask for much, so if certain circumstances are met (parent escort, not a school night), I generally say yes. But these bands don’t play at arenas, or even at theaters, but at clubs. Rock clubs. And while I guess I always thought I might someday sit down with my daughter at a bar, I didn’t think it would be when she was 13. Last night it was Matt & Kim at the Majestic, and next month she has tickets for All Time Low at the Shelter. The Shelter is the basement part of St. Andrew’s Hall, a.k.a. “the most dangerous concert venue in America.” That’s not literally true. It’s just outside of touristy Greektown; the description refers to all the hip-hop acts that got their start there. Still. The accompanying parent on that trip will get the full treatment from me — don’t let them get too close, nowhere near the speakers, no moshing, whatever.

Saturday night they didn’t get home until after 1 a.m. Alan said the show was pretty good. (Although he mentioned that Matt recalled their last gig in Detroit, after which he was robbed at gunpoint.) Kate got her CD signed by Kim. That’s another reason she likes these little bands — the meet ‘n’ greets at the merch tables. Lady Gaga doesn’t do those, methinks.

OK, back to hatch-battening. While they were out, I tackled my home office, where I was losing the battle against the heaps of paper that work their way into our lives. Why so much paper? I’m striving toward a paper-free existence, and the rest of the world is picking up the slack, plus some, it seems. I sort into piles, then re-sort, and by the third time through I’ve usually made my peace with throwing most of it out. It can take me days to clean an office. My final six months at my last full-time employer were the best, because I’d made a resolution: In hostile territory, it’s best to travel light. When I quit, I walked out with my coffee cup, one file folder and 20 years of memories. It. Felt. Great.

Oh, and the ankle’s better, thanks. If it happens to you, follow RICE therapy immediately. Also, praise G-d for ibuprofen. It made all the difference. It’s still puffy and sore, but I was able to go for a little bike ride yesterday without howling in pain. Progress.

The usual crazed week lies ahead, but I have a jump on things — nothing like a mild sprain to get your paperwork done — and I think I’m ready, just as soon as my loins are girded. In the meantime, some bloggage:

Leave it to nerdy NPR for something like this: When everyone in the world is being called a socialist, what does a real, admitted, avowed one say? These people are not socialists. In part 2, what is a libertarian, and why many of the Republicans who claim to be so, are not.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/09/17/129936548/the-friday-podcast-socialists-libertarians-part-1

The Wall Street Journal has its own axe to grind with the web, but I think their reporting on online privacy, or lack thereof, is pretty prize-worthy. Bottom line: Nothing on the web is free, and the price you pay is your personal information. (Except here at NN.C, where all I know about Dwight is that his ISP is somewhere in the Chicago region. Or was. Maybe.) The latest installment is on the worst offenders — websites frequented by children. Lovely.

Only in Detroit: The Guerrilla Marching Band. Watch the video for some great glimpses of Hamtramck — pierogi, For Sale or Lease signs and fat people. Great town.

Out the door, I am.

Oh, look: Christine O’Donnell was on the record back in the ’90s claiming Bill Clinton needed to be tried for the “murder” of Vince Foster. As Talking Points Memo helpfully explains, the Murder of Vince Foster was to the ’90s what the Kenyan Birth Certificate is to the oughts.

But that’s not all — she also claimed “scientists” have created “mice with human brains.” “Fully-functioning” human brains, no less.

Well, that’s good. My own feels little Swiss-cheesey at the moment; I could use a donor that comes without moral baggage. Although, I dunno. I’m trying to cut back on cheese.

The thing is, I know these people. I do. Not well, but I know them. They were seemingly half the population of Indiana back in the day, and would occasionally call me up to gnaw on my ear about Vince Foster, among other things.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but could I show you some literature about another candidate?” one called to me as I made my way into my polling place on election day. “It’s Bo Gritz. Rhymes with ‘rights.'”

Oh yeah, that guy. He’s still out there. My measure for Crazy back then was whether the lunatic in question had a radio show available on shortwave; many of their natural constituency lives far off the grid in Unabomber cabins and need that extra service. Nowadays, the internet serves for everyone, and I guess they do their reading at the library when they come to town for more 50-pound bags of rice.

But Vince Foster was a biggie, even with mainstream crazies. Was it Dan Burton who restaged the shooting (using watermelons) in his back yard, before concluding yes, yes, it was MURDER? He was a Hoosier. I don’t know why Christine O’Donnell didn’t relocate to Indiana when she was looking for a launch pad for her political career. She’d fit right in. She’d be mainstream.

Speaking of which, I guess everyone has heard by now of the twin Comedy Central rallies planned for D.C. next month. If I could, I would so totally be there:

Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we’ll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila. Join us in the shadow of the Washington Monument. And bring your indoor voice. Or don’t. If you’d rather stay home, go to work, or drive your kids to soccer practice… Actually, please come anyway. Ask the sitter if she can stay a few extra hours, just this once. We’ll make it worth your while.

That’s the Jon Stewart side. Over at Colbert’s end of the Mall, it’s the March to Keep Fear Alive:

America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear — that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear — forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need. They want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget — “Reason” is just one letter away from “Treason.” Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.

I like that line about reason and treason. That’s worth stealing.

I’ve got a meeting in 45 minutes that’s a 25-minute bike ride away. Should I? Of course I should. I’ve been staring at a screen all week, and it’s time to remind my body it exists below the level of its burning eyeballs. So, a skip to the bloggage:

New York City hit by a tornado-like storm. It’s always strange to think of New York as even vulnerable to weather at all.

Madonna is “a director.” Ha. The project is “W.E.,” allegedly about Wallis Simpson. Terrific — another Madge-branded project on a strong woman who is simply ahead of her time and cannot be grokked by the squares. Can’t. Wait.

The new Kickstarter I’m backing — the Mower Gang. They go out with lawn mowers and weed whackers and reclaim city facilities from nature. The video is recommended — last summer they found, and reclaimed, a velodrome. In Detroit! They’re currently trying to raise $600 to make a labyrinth and maze in some overgrown grass. Chip in if you feel like it.

Onto the bike, and outta the door.

I have a rather busy morning today, pals, and frankly, I’m a little tapped at the moment. Things will ease up after noon, but I think I’ll use the time to catch up on a little housekeeping — real, literal housekeeping — instead of blogging. Fortunately, good peanuts for the barflies today:

Fascinating: Farm boy steers his steer to a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair. Twice. He wins in 2010 with Doc before it’s revealed that Doc is a clone of Wade, who the same kid showed to the same title (“big steer”) two years previous. You have to be from Iowa — or Ohio — to understand how important a big championship at a big state fair can be, and while this has aspects of a joke, it was obviously intentional; the kid’s dad is president of a bovine-genetics firm. And maybe you have to have an amateur’s interest in animal husbandry, as I do, to find this interesting, but it is.

Fierce! Woman pulled over for suspicion of drunken driving walks the line like it’s a runway, demands her “Amanda rights.” Via Eric Zorn.

Fu’ u’: Via Roy, a look at libertarian thinking on the Tea Party. It all started with George W. Bush, says Steve Chapman, only it was apparently an invisible movement then. Huh. Meanwhile, Carl Paladino is a vile racist, and I’ll cut any bitch who says he isn’t. But, following Chapman’s reasoning, the GOP is “lucky” to have him.

Faboo: When your baby photo becomes a meme, better lie back and enjoy it.

Back tomorrow, with 50 percent less lameness.

So I’m scanning this and that yesterday, trying to get caught up on all the didjusee motes of the day, and I discovered this. It’s a post about photos taken at the National Federation of Republican Women annual board meeting in Charleston. Some photos from the event — themed “a Southern experience” — were posted to Facebook, and, well, you decide for yourself:

The African Americans, I learn through further Googling, were paid re-enactors. The man in the middle is the South Carolina state senate president Glenn McConnell, and no, I don’t know why he’s dressed in Yankee blue, as he, too, is a re-enactor, and like all good southron boys, prefers the home team’s uniform. Maybe he swings both ways.

It appears the event may well have been innocent; these could have been the “Gullah singers and storytellers” referenced in the event’s flyer. And maybe McConnell can’t resist a chance to put on the old-timey clothes and the uncomfortable shoes and let his freak flag fly. The desire for vaccinated time travel runs strong in white guys like these, and I won’t even speculate that he wishes he lived c. 1860 so he could legally own the people on his left and right. It was a simpler time all around, wasn’t it? The government mainly stayed out of a man’s business and women wore heaps of petticoats, making seduction that much more exciting. You could pour yourself a glass of sippin’ whiskey of an evening and sit on the veranda, watching the sun go down, knowing tomorrow will be about the same as today.

A while back the Embassy Theater in Fort Wayne screened “Gone With the Wind” for a summer movie, with guests encouraged to come in period attire. The Lincoln Museum felt the need to pass out a flyer informing the audience that the picture of the Old South onscreen was — gasp! — idealized and divorced from reality. I recall a passage about B.O. and bad teeth. Noted, but I thought it was party-pooping just the same. (There’s no question the African Americans in that photo have benefited from fluoridated water and toothbrushes. Good teeth and shoes are the giveaway of reenactors everywhere.) So maybe I’m out of line here, but the next time I read that old perennial from the op-ed page — When Will Black People Learn That Only Republicans Have Their Best Interests at Heart? — I’m going to show them that photo. Among many others.

I didn’t get both my stories done yesterday — one down, one to go — and so must duck out early today. Fortunately, I have bloggage:

Llewd, Coozledad’s bull, is up to his old tricks. That mischievous scamp.

I wish I had a booty like Inez Sainz. That’s all I have to say about that.

I don’t want anybody else. When I think about you I …watch Christine O’Donnell’s teenage self opposing masturbation. She asks the timeless question asked by girls everywhere: If he can please himself, why am I in the picture? Guys, you want to take that one? Maybe Llewd can start us off.

And with that, I have 1,200 words to write for someone else. Lucky me.

This is Fashion Week in New York. You might not know this, but in the Nall-Derringer co-prosperity sphere, with its alarmingly New York-centric newspaper and magazine subscriptions, it’s hard to escape. Maybe you’re feeling lost. I will try to help.

As some of you may know, I once covered fashion. Sort of. Here’s how it happened: My paper’s longtime fashion writer, June Wells Dill, a grandmotherly sort of woman who occasionally wore hats, was retiring. At the staff meeting to discuss her replacement, no one else wanted the job.

“Does it still include a couple trips to New York every year?” I asked. It did, I was told.

“OK, I’ll do it,” I said. And that’s how the big papers handled staffing, once upon a time. At least in the women’s department. And so I packed my suitcase and my portable computer — a primitive device that weighed a ton, generated a printout as you wrote and somehow managed to transmit an electronic copy of your story back to the newsroom — and went off to New York.

An aside: I required training on the computer. Because 90 percent of the newsroom travel at the time was done by the sportswriters, I was taught by our Cincinnati Reds beat writer.

“And this is how you make a quote mark. You’ll need this if the dresses have anything to say,” he said. A real wiseguy. Have you ever heard the sorts of things baseball players say? You could put that shit on a user key, only we didn’t know what a user key was, back then.

Anyway, off to New York I went. I didn’t go for Fashion Week per se, which didn’t exist in the current form. Rather, all the designers showed around the same time of year, and you ran around between their studios or whatever they had booked for their 20-minute shows. But that was for the New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily and the other bigs. Papers from Rubetown went for Eleanor Lambert’s coordinated week of shows, which was actually the forerunner of Fashion Week itself.

In my era, the event was held at the Plaza, and I sat there on the runway and got a self-taught crash course in descriptive writing. The thing about fashion is, after a while it’s just a blur. Dress dress dress suit suit suit dress dress dress wedding gown. (The wedding gown is — was — the traditional finale of every show. Does anyone do that anymore?) So I quickly learned the jargon, tissue faille and gabardine and ruching. And then I learned about the details, bateau collars and swing pleats and bugle beads. And then I learned the high-level vocabulary that everyone uses, almost all of which is meaningless and can be recombined endlessly. It’s based on a few simple adjectives, which I reveal to you now:

1) Modern
2) Sexy
3) Unconstructed / Constructed
4) Edgy
5) Retro

“It’s an unconstructed jacket with retro touches, very modern and sexy.”

“I love that edgy, constructed thing he has going on. It’s modern and retro at the same time. Which is what makes it so edgy.”

See how easy? Watch a few episodes of “The Rachel Zoe Project,” and play along. Rachel is famously inarticulate, so drop unconstructed/constructed and substitute major: “This collection is so major, so sexy and modern, I just love it.”

It’s amusing to me how often “sexy” gets thrown around, given how many clothes are designed by gay men, who have no sexual interest in women, and displayed on walking hangers with no tits or ass to speak of, parading with angry scowls on their faces, perhaps with violent slashes of neon-green eyeshadow or with their hair greased into threatening spikes. Some of these people have strange ideas of sexy.

Here’s a sexy dress, or so I’m told, one of the most famous red-carpet dresses ever, the Versace safety-pin dress worn by Elizabeth Hurley in 1994. I thought she looked like a streetwalker. Any dress you have to be glued into, that has to be minded at every minute lest your boobs pop out or your abdomen reveal a wrinkle, isn’t sexy to me. Halle Berry’s Oscar dress — that’s sexy.

But I’m getting away from my point. Oh, wait: I didn’t have one.

Can I just ask one question about Rachel Zoe, however: What, exactly, does she do for her clients that qualifies her to be called a stylist? A stylist, as I understand the job, puts together looks for you. Every time I see Rachel Zoe, she’s just shopping, swanning around fashion shows and boutiques, loving everything and name-dropping: I love this for Demi. It’s so major. She cadges free dresses, and her clients try them on, and she claps her hands. What’s her business model? How is she paid? Did Cameron Diaz finance those crackbrain shopping trips to Europe? I don’t get it. If you have the means to hire her, you should be spending your money on someone who can really help you look your best — a gay man.

Anyway, I have to go. There was a Tom Ford show yesterday, and I’m on the hunt for photos. Oh, wait — only one photographer was allowed to take pictures (which explains all these point-and-shoot pix of someone’s nostrils, with credit lines to the reporter). A fashion show with no photographers. How modern. How edgy.

Bloggage?

You know all that talk about how we’re going to have to come to grips with retiring later? Have you ever noticed how often it’s written by people with jobs like “economist” and “college professor?” A look at what work, real work, is like for many blue-collar workers, and why they can’t work until they’re 70.

Jon Stewart, last night. It’s worth watching just for his “Community Center of Death” graphic open.

I have two stories to write today. Nothin’ big — just 2,000 words by day’s end. Groan. Better get to it.