Just the one thing today, because I fear that, like the New Orleans-loving national media, this blog has totally ignored the suffering of Nashville, which came through its floods without destroying a football stadium, and, and…

OK, reset: One of our own was left more or less homeless by the flood, and he has a video camera, not to mention TV news experience.

You can start Basset’s flood journey here, and follow the right-hand menu to the other parts of his video flood coverage. Cousin, I’m here to tell you, they got flooded. Stand at your front door and hold your hand as high as your head. That’s how much water they took. Much love and support to you, Basset, whatever that means, and best of luck on your rebuilding.

And have a good weekend, all. I know what Basset will be doing. Me, I hope to catch up on some sleep.

A couple of days on one topic, and the bloggage piles up. So let’s hop to it, shall we? There’s some good stuff here:

First, the Palin family continues to stain the nation’s carpets as young Bristol mama-sees-mama-does herself into a potentially lucrative career as a public speaker. Her fee is said to be somewhere between $15K-$30K, depending on “what she has to do to prepare” to speak on such topics as abstinence claptrap and anti-abortion claptrap. Hey, you know what index cards cost these days? Sorry, that’s editorializing. I’m choosing not to be upset by this, as the sorts of groups who would pay such a fee very likely need to be separated from their money somehow. Also, Bristol needs to start her five-school college education odyssey one of these days, and needs the bucks for tuition. My only regret is, this increases the chances we’ll see her on regular old non fee-paying media. One more reason to confine my media consumption to NPR exclusively.

Also, the don’t-make-fun-of-public-figures’-families rule no longer applies. Not that it stopped anyone, but good lord, when you ask for it like this…

The people who came up with the Bacon Explosion evidently have Google alerts, because I was copied on their e-mail notification that they have sampled the KFC Double Down sandwich, found it lacking, and monkeyed with it. How? By adding a slice of Bacon Explosion, sillypants. Taste test and many photographs here.

I’m a sucker for a certain kind of liberal patriotism, and this story, about the United Nations of Hamtramck High preparing for its senior prom, touched me. DetNews columnist Neal Rubin calls Hamtramck “absurdly diverse,” and it is, more diverse than an after-school special:

“You tell ’em, ‘It’s something seniors do,’ ” says Mohamed Algehaim, 18, the class secretary. He was born here, but his parents are from Yemen, and the part about the tuxedo took some work, too.

“If you’re the first child, it’s harder to get across,” says Emina Alic, 18, the Bosnia-born class president. “If your brothers and sisters already went, your parents tell you you’re going.”

The 200 current seniors had read the memo early on. “There’s competition between classes,” says class historian Sabbir Noor, 17, whose roots go back to Bangladesh…

Throw in the Poles who still live in the old neighborhood, the African Americans who moved there in their own flight from Detroit and the rest of the ethnic fruit salad, and you get a sense of the place.

Moving on, a few couples who will not want to hyphenate their names.

Finally, it can be told: This is the project I’ve been working on since January, the 75th anniversary book for the Detroit Economic Club. It’s a custom-publishing job, i.e., work-for-hire, but it was really interesting and I count myself lucky to have gotten the gig. The DEC is a noontime speaker’s club, but one of the most sought-after podiums in the country, and lemme tell you, they have heard from everyone. (Except the Palin family.) I had full access to their archive at the Detroit Public Library, and it was pretty cool, going through files of correspondence with letters from people like Richard Nixon and Henry Ford II. The story of Detroit in the 20th century was the story of America, and it was fascinating to see who came to town and what they had to say when they got here. It certainly left me with some new ideas about how we learn history.

Anyway, the anniversary celebration starts tonight, I have to write about it for the book, and I need to throw together an outfit that won’t disgrace me in front of the movers and shakers. Both the News and Freep did stories pegged to it.

I also have an early meeting tomorrow morning, so this may have to serve for the week’s blogging. One question I leave you with: Where’s Coozledad? He hasn’t spoken up for a few days. Did he get kicked by a mule?

The thing is, Mark Souder is — how to put this? — unattractive.

Which is not to say he’s ugly. No one’s rushing to carve him in marble, but on the grand continuum of looks, he falls somewhere in the middle, like nearly all of us. If middle age should hold any consolation, it should be that we’re no longer judged on our hawtness quotient. Anyway, I’ve known many objectively homely people who prosper sexually, and I bet you have, too. Good looks isn’t all it takes to be attractive.

Let’s not discuss what Mark Souder looks like today, because really, that has nothing to do with his unattractiveness.

He does not, in the strictest sense of the word, make one want to draw near. Politicians should have at least a modicum of charm, and Souder has none. In my opinion, anyway, which you should maybe discount, because he was elected once and comfortably re-elected six more times, so obviously somebody liked him. But everything about him, to me, just…grated.

He was a right-wing, family-values Christian elected during the 1994 GOP sweep, back in the Newt Gingrich/Contract With America days. He said from the beginning he believed in term limits (the whole Class of ’94 did, remember?) and wouldn’t run for more than three. When it came time to walk the talk, he reneged, saying the census had redrawn his district, so the pledge was nullified. He lost some supporters then, but not enough.

And even if I weren’t inclined to despise him for his politics, there were his campaign ads. In years when he wasn’t being seriously challenged (most of them), he bought up chunks of talk-radio ad space in the fall, and he’d deliver these 30-second cornball sermonettes, in his unattractive, Porky Piggish voice, about the lessons he learned as a boy growing up in Grabill — hard work, faith, family, etc. In what should have been an early hypocrisy alert, it should be noted that when Souder grew up and could live anywhere, he chose not to live in Grabill.

Grabill is a small town in suburban Fort Wayne, Amish, very conservative, that has in recent years thrown in with agri-tourism, in that there are many antique stores and olde-tyme shopping opportunities. Chief among them is Souder’s General Store, run by guess-who’s family, where you can buy penny candy and Amish clothing and the like. The story goes that Souder became a conservative when, as a teenager, he helped with payroll and was appalled at how much the government required they withhold from employee checks. He was, however, also a member of the Apostolic Christian Church, one step to the left of Mennonites and traditionally pacifist. This gave young Mark the best of both worlds — bedrock conservatism and an open-and-shut case for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.

But guess where he stood on the invasion of Iraq? Shock and awe, bitches! You can see, perhaps, why I find him so deeply unattractive.

(I covered a lot of this territory a couple years ago, here. Read if you’re so inclined.)

As his time in Congress lengthened and his seniority gave him more power, he used it for some frankly awful ends. He’s in favor of the endless drug war, and is author of the Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment, which bars federal financial aid for any student convicted of a drug charge, down to simple possession of marijuana. (He claims it was misinterpreted by the evil Clinton administration, and was only supposed to apply to students so convicted while in college. Oh.) He’s one of those northern-state congressmen who likes to chastise Texans who don’t want to build a giant fence with an accompanying army on their southern border. He’s pro-intelligent design, anti-gay marriage — you know the drill. I see via his website that he’s also opposed to online video poker. Hallelujah, there’s something we can agree on.

He’s also pro-abstinence education, but I’ll leave the chuckling over that to the folks at TPM.

I have to say this: Of all the things I thought might bring Souder down someday, sex is the last thing I would have considered. Money, yes. Sex, no. He’s just not attractive enough. Again, set aside his looks and tell me, what part of this man’s personality, style, affect would be attractive to any woman? Does he seem like the kind of guy who can tell a good story, even a good joke? Do you get the sense all his time in the corridors of power has left him with even a modicum of sophistication, someone you wouldn’t mind being seated next to at a dinner party?

The most interesting thing I ever read about the man came not long after his election, when the Contract With America was proceeding through Congress, and it came time to cut arts funding, so that no museum would ever display another Robert Mapplethorpe photograph again. Souder, I read, was having second thoughts; he’d recently started learning French horn, and was being taught by a member of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. He was troubled to learn that slashing arts funding would hurt a lot more orchestras and children’s theater groups than it would gay photographers and the curators who loved them. Now that’s something I could have talked about with the guy, but when the time came? He voted with the herd. So much for the arts broadening a man.

I think I’ve read too many novels, because when these things happen, when powerful men take proactive steps that they know hold the seeds of their destruction, I want to get inside their heads. Why, Tim Goeglein? Why, Mark Souder? Why, in one’s 50s, when the hot blood of youth has cooled considerably, does one take up with a married woman? She’s no hot-fudge sundae of erotic possibilities, just your basic cute northeast Indiana Republican hausfrau, with a bit more polish than the ones you see shopping at the mall in Christmas sweaters. Maybe, like a lot of guys who fall well short of the George Clooney looks standard, he thought that he would never again find a woman other than his wife willing to go to bed with him, and decided not to deprive himself of the experience. Or maybe he was, like Mark Sanford, actually in love.

But here’s the thing these guys will never, ever understand: It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re all adults here. We know how hard it is to stay married, particularly when you’re separated from your family all week. Everybody’s human, and we all have feet of clay. If you were a Democrat, you might have gotten away with this. (At least, at this writing. The reports are saying this fling would have landed him before the House ethics panel, which suggests it was more than a little slap-and-tickle between adults.) They don’t get that all that family-values crap is a double-edged sword, and if you live by it, you can die by it, too.

Or maybe he’s not that complicated at all. From his statement:

It has been a privilege to be a part of the battle for freedom and the values we share.

Apparently he sees himself as a warrior, too. And that “share” part? Whaddaya mean “we,” white man? I don’t cheat on my husband.

In honor of this happy day, a bloggage fest of Soudernalia:

Souder equates consensual teen sex to date rape.

The youthful indiscretion had been going on six (!!!!) years (!!!!!!!). Trysting spots were public parks, probably because he couldn’t afford a $50 Red Roof Inn room on a congressman’s salary. The rumors were hot and heavy, which I have to assume means much of the Fort Wayne media knew about it. His paramour, “a strawberry blonde, also worked as a Mary Kay cosmetics consultant and is married to a successful homebuilder and Kosciusko County Commissioner. On Facebook, where she maintained a profile, she routinely sent high-fives to Souder — clicking “Like” –when he posted his congressional activities on his page.” All of which I had to learn from the Washington Post. (I expect a weaselly Kevin Leininger column by the end of the week, full of Scripture and admonishments not to judge, etc. And that will be the end of it.)

But let’s luxuriate in it while we can, eh? And now, I click a big Like for all of you, and turn it over to the snark.

The TV season is winding down, and before it does, I want to throw a little love at “Breaking Bad,” the other show airing at 10 p.m. Sunday. I’m working then, but that’s why God made DVRs. Like “Treme,” “Breaking Bad” rewards second and third viewings, although it’s not what you’d call nuanced or subtle. The story of a 50-year-old high-school chemistry teacher who decides to take up methamphetamine production could easily become a cartoon, but in its third season seems to have hit its stride as a sort of waking nightmare of evil’s effects on those who choose it.

Walter White tells himself he got into meth-making as a way to leave his family financially staked for life without him — he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in the pilot episode — but as his condition improved and the cancer went into remission, which it had to do if the show was to have more than one or two seasons, the tone shifted and Walt began to grasp the dimensions of the monster he’d loosed into the world. Bodies began to fall. His partner, a hapless man-child aptly named Jesse Pinkman, fell victim to all manner of misery, from heroin addiction to the O.D. death of his girlfriend. The climax of last season was the mid-air collision, a mile or two above Walt’s house, of two commercial aircraft, an accident caused by a distracted air-traffic controller. Who was? The father of Jesse’s dead girlfriend. His attention wandered when a bit of radio traffic used her name in a transmission: Tango Delta Jane two oh three…

This season, the stain is spreading, and reaching closer to Walt’s immediate family. His wife, Skyler, now knows where the money came from, but she’s unmoved by his motivation, and has left him, along with their teenage son and newborn daughter. The latest victim is his brother-in-law Hank, a DEA agent who fell victim to a pair of identical-twin Mexican assassins gunning for Hank, and…

This is sounding ridiculous, I know, but it isn’t. Or rather, it uses its made-for-TV improbabilities well enough that you don’t find yourself rolling your eyes. If I have one criticism of the narrative as it’s unfolded, it’s the abandonment of one of the most interesting themes of season one — the crumminess of a certain middle-class American life, and how one living it can be so easily seduced by money, i.e., a way out of it. Walt’s very survival is threatened because his health insurance doesn’t cover the good chemo drugs. He and his wife attend a birthday party for a college friend of Walt’s, also a chemist, whose path took a different turn, and who lives in lavish splendor. The friend offers Walt a job at his company (with much better health insurance) out of pity, concealing it well, but Walt figures it out. The shame and humiliation such a gesture inspires in the one it’s bestowed upon is a difficult emotion for an actor to summon. But Bryan Cranston does.

The producers are starting to circle around back to it, a little bit. Now that Skyler knows there’s almost a million dollars in cash in a duffel bag in her crawl space, she’s starting to think about its implications. The scene where she walks into her lover’s bathroom and glories in the radiant floor heating was priceless. The things money can buy! (Although if I were her, I’d start with a kitchen reno. Her kitchen is almost gloriously ugly. But at this point, she might as well just buy a new house. Torch the kitchen. Remove the duffel bag from the premises first.)

I hope they continue in this vein. Identical-twin Mexican assassins can only take you so far. Although, sooner or later, the violence and misery has to reach Walt himself. He’s dodged so many bullets, many of them literal, that delaying it will soon be counterproductive. He made a big decision early on that sets everything in motion, and another one this season to keep it that way. But until he loses a finger or a child, it hasn’t cost him enough.

One final thing: I’m struck, watching this show, by its depiction of masculinity. I mentioned Jesse was a man-child, although he’s becoming more of a man. (He’s shed the overgrown baby clothes favored by so many young men these days, anyway. And the loss of the child isn’t doing him any favors.) Walt’s sense of himself as a failed father, husband and provider — especially the latter — is what made him start down this tragic path. Hank, the DEA agent, is a macho cartoon. So far, the most fully integrated man is Gustavo Fring, the kingpin mastermind played by Giancarlo Esposito. Calm, cool, ruthless — just a little more seductiveness and he’d be the devil himself.

We’ll see what happens to Walt & Co. before the month is up. (I think.) Please, no more plane crashes.

And now I must skedaddle. Although I’m sure the Hoosiers among you would rather talk about MARK SOUDER’S RESIGNATION?!??? A SEX scandal? Someone wanted to SLEEP with him? I have just fainted.

Saturday was opening night for “Tosca” at the Detroit Opera House, and it’s a tossup what was more entertaining — the Puccini or the people-watching. Fortunately, there were two intermissions.

Women in floor-length dresses, weird party frocks with bubble hems and mink off-the-shoulder necklines, anything black, Lucite necklaces, pearls, bling. (And Botox. Shiny face was everywhere.) Men in black tie, regular tie, T-shirts, shaved heads and mohawks. One hot tranny-ish mess, well over six feet, in towering silver stripper heels and strapless satin dress, hair the color of cherry Kool-Aid.

Opera fans. Who knew?

“Tosca” was very enjoyable. I can’t speak with much authority, as it’s only the second opera I’ve seen performed. The first was at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Bizet’s “Carmen.” As I recall, the singing was fine, but the company was so impoverished the staging was minimal, not much more than a bare stage. Add to that the book (French) and the supertitles (Spanish), and it was, literally, pretty much all blah-blah to me.

Supertitles gave opera a second wind when they were introduced in the 1980s. I’m sure there’s some purist out there who disapproves, but I’m not one of them. I don’t speak Italian, German or French, and my music education was spotty enough that I need and appreciate a little help.

“Tosca” is pretty accessible, though; it’s Italian, the music is glorious, the plot a simple matter of jealousy, political oppression, betrayal, rape (attempted), murder, tragedy and suicide. What’s not to like? And when Tosca pours out her heart —

Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,
non feci mai male ad anima viva!

(I lived for art, I lived for love,
Never did I harm a living soul!)

— who can’t sympathize?

That was Saturday. Sunday brought the redemption our recession-battered state needs. Break out the hummus and kebabs, Miss Michigan was named Miss USA.

Hummus? Yes. Miss Michigan is Arab-American, a nice Lebanese girl from Dearborn, Rima Fakih. Reportedly she’s Shi’ite Muslim. The photos of her in her un-burka alone will likely keep her father up at night, for fear of both a fatwa and Donald Trump, come a-courting with his tongue hanging out. She is, how you young men say? Smokin’.

Seriously, however, this backgrounder on Fakih from the Freep is a pretty good picture of this community, its contradictions and, for want of a better word, diversity. She grew up in Queens and moved to Michigan seven years ago. The story mentions her being in high school when 9/11 happened — a Catholic school. In other words, Miss USA is a pretty American girl.

However! Already the far-right carping has begun. Roy has the roundup. Ahem:

Tonight, they celebrated and laughed at us from within at Dearbornistan’s Hezbollah restaurant, La Pita, where workers openly sing Hezbollah war songs and anti-Semitic “ditties” in the kitchen. It was the site of Fakih’s victory party, where falafel, and hummus, and hate were all on the menu, as they usually are there and throughout Fakih’s community.

Falafel, hummus and hate were on the menu. I’m going to write that one down.

I suspect, at the end of all this, Fakih will take her big pile of dough, spend it on law school tuition, and maybe, insh’allah, meet the author of the above passage in court someday. Now that’s something I’d like to see on prime-time television.

Not to crash the mood too much, but a little bikini news was welcome after the far more tragic incident earlier in the weekend, in which police executing a no-knock warrant in Detroit accidentally shot and killed a 7-year-old girl. More will be revealed on this one, no doubt; the current official version is that the first person police encountered tussled with them in some way, causing the gun to go off. I’m withholding judgment, but Jesus Christ, no-knock warrants? Flash-bang grenades? Note this detail:

Outside the home, the department’s special response team was prepared to go in. Film crews with A&E’s “The First 48” reality show, which follows police departments nationwide during the crucial 48 hours after a homicide is committed, were taping the team for a documentary. Police spokesman John Roach said the tapes will be reviewed as part of the investigation.

I’m sure that had nothing to do with the decision to go in like gangbusters, right?

We’ll see. In the meantime, I have Monday to get into gear, and an aria to sing in the shower.

With last night a pretty slow one on the health-care editing beat, this story in the NYT made me snap my eyes wide open: “Law & Order” is thisclose to cancellation. Get OUT. I thought I’d never see the day. Literally. As long as the show could continue to calve spinoffs, I thought there would always be a place somewhere on the NBC schedule for the bifurcated drama of separate but equal branches of the criminal justice system. It might dwindle down to “Law & Order: Nuisance Animals,” but dammit, it would be enriching Dick Wolf and employing east-coast actors at all levels of the food chain. It would be, as the lingo goes, part of the brand. Not having it there will take some getting used to. (And will likely never happen. I may outlive the series itself, but surely I won’t outlast syndication.)

I’ve never been a huge fan of the series — see Lance Mannion or James Wolcott for that — but I’ve watched quite a bit of it. I came to it late, when its earliest seasons were already rotating through daily syndication on A&E. It was after Kate was born; she got hungry about the time the 1 p.m. episode was coming on, so I got in the habit of watching while she nursed. (All those soft-focus pictures of mothers gazing with love at their suckling infants? Bunk. You do that for the first day. Then you catch up on your magazines.)

I soon learned the rhythms of the show, as well as its too-obvious signposts. The wry, cold open, in which two stereotypical New Yorkers stumble across a body while arguing about rent or restaurants; the first misdirection; the second misdirection; the arrest at the bottom of the hour, followed by the legal strategizing in the second half, which always finished with a wry walk-off line by D.A. Adam Schiff. I learned that if you see an actor you recognize in a seemingly minor scene early on, that’s the one who will be on trial later on. (This was a syndication thing; Wolf was pretty good about hiring good actors on the upward trajectory of their career, so just because they were better-known in 1996 didn’t mean they were in 1991, when the episode first appeared.) I enjoyed the stunts — the sweeps-month two-parters with “Homicide: Life on the Street,” most notably. For some reason those stayed in the syndication rotation, which was disconcerting; stripped of their first half, they felt orphaned.

And like everybody else, eventually I tired of it all. The flip side of such a well-run machine was numbing predictability and, worse, a certain arch smugness — L&O more or less became the self-appointed court of last resort for the endings you wanted to see in real life. Early on, the writing staff established itself as unapologetic headline-rippers, basing its fictional stories on real-life cases that didn’t end satisfactorily, and giving the public the ending it wanted. O.J., Kobe, JonBenet — they all appeared in slightly altered form, with the usual legal disclaimers. (When I was at Michigan, I sat through a few sessions of a TV-writing class with a faculty member who’d done time in the L&O writers’ room. The first order of business was to establish a file full of ripped headlines to base spec scripts on. I was astonished at how many in the class at this prestigious university couldn’t figure this one out. Here she was, giving you a license to dispense with your own imagination, and they couldn’t wrap their heads around it.)

But you have to give Dick Wolf credit for helping show business. I once read that the best and worst thing that can happen to an actor is to get cast on a soap opera — the best being the steady work that can last for years, the worst being, duh, the soap opera. I guess L&O was the upmarket version of that, although his best people rotated through pretty quickly and a few went on to greater things. I wish Sam Waterston would do something else, ditto Diane Wiest, but it’s not like anyone’s beating down the door to cast geezer actors in anything, and both have had stellar careers in film and theater. You can’t blame anyone who chooses to make a living in such a perilous business for choosing job security, and the show isn’t terrible — the earliest seasons are still my favorite, and some of the writing in those brief scenes is so tight and economical, it’s almost haiku.

But they lost me at SVU, a shameless effort to attract the same sickos who enjoy the repulsive CSI franchise. Rape simply isn’t entertaining for me. (Not like MURDER, anyway!) I get really sick of hearing about fluids.

Latest word is that the show will likely not go away; if Wolf can’t reach an agreement with NBC, he’ll be off to a cable channel. So maybe the previous 800 words don’t mean anything. But if it does, I’ve said my piece: Once I was a fan. I’m not anymore. Roll credits.

The best single episode, IMO: “The Troubles.” Argue your own case in comments.

Wow. Is it ever murky outside. Radar promises another day like Tuesday — i.e., all-day rain — and at the moment it’s about 8:30 p.m., light-wise. Lucky for me I have this glowing screen to make rod-and-cone destruction that much easier.

Moments in My Career When I Realized I’d Bet on the Wrong Horse, a continuing series: When I learned that the Boston Globe labor agreement with copy editors included two 10-minute “eye breaks” to preserve the rods and cones of those required to stare into computer screens all day. Although, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve never experienced so-called eyestrain in my life. Like heartburn, for me it’s essentially mythical.

The real toll computer work takes on your body is elsewhere — wrists (repetitive strain), shoulders (hunched and knotted in fury as you hammer out angry blog comments), back (connected to shoulders; see above). And you don’t hear much about Secretary’s Spread anymore, do you?

That’s because everyone has it.

Yes, it’s another one of those mornings, folks. Freaky dreams, grounds in my coffee, cascading rain. And then there was this story in the NYT, about a family of five that was killed in Montreal after a sinkhole opened under their house and swallowed it justlikethat. The incident, the story said, was “a stark reminder of a hidden menace under many parts of Quebec, one that dates back 10,000 years to an ancient inland sea.” What the what?

Michel A. Bouchard, a professor of geology at the University of Montreal, said the area around St. Jude rests on an unusual variety of “sensitive clay” that was originally the bed of an ancient sea. Lake Champlain is a remnant of the sea.

Because the clay formed in salt water, Professor Bouchard said, the molecular structure of its particles resembles playing cards arranged as an unstable house of cards, rather than stacked in a deck, as occurs with clay formed in fresh water. A variety of events can break the molecular bonds holding the clay particles together. When that occurs, the clay can spontaneously liquefy with little or no provocation.

“Even a fly landing on the surface can set it off,” he said.

I love it when experts describe these things as “reminders.” Like whoever built this house knew it was going on a “sensitive clay” with the molecular structure of a house of cards that could be collapsed with the additional weight of a fly, and just…forgot it, somehow. Look at that photo and note the tiny red dot near the bottom, where the road enters the sinkhole. That’s the truck owned by the world’s luckiest motorist, who suddenly found himself falling into muck and took an hour to crawl back to safety.

The whole thing was so silent and sudden, the story says, that neighbors were left wondering only why the power had gone out.

Someone should write a scene like this into a movie, and wait to be massacred by critics who would call it a wee too deus ex machina for belief.

In other news at this hour, the Freep presents the results of a reader survey on their Top 5 turnoffs in restaurants. No. 1? Being called “you guys” by overly familiar servers. Get used to it, I’d say. There’s a hipster-doofus outdoor store in our neighborhood called Moosejaw, where “you guys” is the height of formality. I haven’t been called “dude” there yet, but I fully expect it. I will roar Dentu-Creme breath at them when it happens. Sorry, grandma.

And that’s all I have today. What a lousy week. I can sense readers flowing away like rainfall in the gutters. Oddly freeing, somehow. And yet, sometimes the fields have to lie fallow for a while. This might be one of those weeks.

Sarah Palin has a new book coming. Via the AP:

It will include “selections from classic and contemporary readings that have moved her,” according to HarperCollins, along with “the nation’s founding documents to great speeches, sermons, letters, literature and poetry, biography, and even some of her favorite songs and movies.”

Anyone want to make predictions on the songs-and-movies selections? No fair going with the easy stuff; Lee Greenwood will probably be credited as co-author. And yeah, there will be the usual suspects: Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” speeches, etc. But I’m thinking Powers Boothe’s great paranoid right-wing fantasy description of the invasion of the U.S. by Russian/Cuban/Nicaraguan forces in “Red Dawn” will be a particular favorite:

Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico. Cubans mostly. They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas and wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I’m here to tell you. They opened up the door down here, and the whole Cuban & Nicaraguan armies come walking right through, rolled right up here through the Great Plains.

Henry Fonda at the end of “The Grapes of Wrath”? I’m putting that one at 50-1.

When Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Bob Bennett published “The Book of Virtues,” i.e., a bunch of public-domain fairy tales lightly dressed with moral highlights by a card-carrying member of the VIP Club at eight Vegas casinos, I thought I’d seen the ne plus ultra in gall. I guess somewhere in Alaska, a young mother was taking notes.

I was going through my iTunes collection the other day, despairing. I should have listened to J.C. back when he told me that metadata was as important as the data itself, and if I didn’t start tagging, sorting, playlisting and so on, I’d be sorry one day. John? I’m sorry. When it comes time for my sophomore book effort, the one where I offer moral lessons and patriotic inspirations from my favorite songs, I’m going to be well and truly screwed. On the other hand, I rather like the way it crashes up against itself from time to time. It just followed Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings with Merle Haggard (“Mama Tried,” my personal desert-island Merle track AND a moral lesson).

Eh. At least there’s a certain merry fun out of kicking Sarah around, as opposed to the numb bleakness of listening to the right wing discuss Elena Kagan. She has no judiciary experience, unlike, say, the well-seasoned Clarence Thomas, who was nominated to SCOTUS a whole 18 months after taking his first judicial post, on the D.C. Court of Appeals. We don’t know what she believes about anything! Unlike Thomas, who sat through his confirmation hearings steadfastly insisting he had no opinion whatsoever on Roe v. Wade. He hadn’t really given it any thought. Srsly. Oh, well. One of the rites of politics is this occasional charade we have to go through with judicial nominees. So it goes again.

I am amused by the speculation about Kagan’s you-know-what. I wish she were out, writes Jack Shafer, so we could get this debate over with. That could be worthwhile, although if that were the case, I’d want the debate to be retroactive, and John Roberts would have to explain this photo. And that sweater.

The new coffeemaker is installed — thank you, husband of mine — and working. It’s a Krups. It has a “coffee is finished” alarm, which strikes me as unnecessary and a little too Teutonic for our household. You know the coffee is done when the pot stops burbling. I turned it off. The death of the Braun was a little ahead of schedule, but acceptable — it had a specialized, hard-to-find Brita filter that had to be replaced every two months, and my goal was to have it die when I was smack out of filters, but I still have two left. If you need a box free of charge, holla and I will send them to you for the positive karma alone.

A little bloggage?

John McCain, shameless bastard. Once again, I find this border-fence stuff simply appalling. My loathsome former congressman, Mark Souder, was writing ham-fisted guest columns for my own newspaper for a while, and in one, mocked a city in Texas border country for not wanting the fence in their community, because it would ruin river views, among other perfectly good reasons. And now McCain is advocating 3,000 more cops down there, a “finished dang fence,” and, presumably, a moat, some razor wire and perhaps machine-gun nests. Weren’t these the same folks worried a about jack-booted thugs a few years back? It’s all in how you look at it, I guess.

This was a big story on the pharma beat this week — genetic tests for $30, to reveal your medical future mwa ha ha ha — and I can’t decide whether to do it myself. I’m leaning toward yes. I think I have the emotional maturity to handle bad news, and good news could be actually money-saving. You don’t need to take prophylactic drugs for conditions you’re at low risk for getting, for instance. If nothing else, it’s one of the most interesting stories I’ve read since those weight-loss fat-shedding pills went OTC. “Wear dark pants” — now that’s not a patient instruction you see every day.

OK, let’s bring this train wreck to stop, shall we? Time to get a little work done, and then clean the house. Yes, John McCain, clean the dang house!

Tuesday morning:

Previous night’s sleep, in hours: Six. Not bad. Pretty typical, in fact. Nothing a couple strong cups of dark roast can’t take care of. Grind, filter, water, switch.

Nothing.

The coffee maker is broken.

I’m going back to bed. See you later.

The catering gig was a mixed bag. I miscalculated for lunch, and came up short by about three people. Of course it’s embarrassing and unfair; the people who come to lunch last are frequently the hardest-working of the crew, and you feel bad that they have to settle for peanut butter. But I miscalculated on two fronts — the weather (freezing) and the fact this is a war movie, and young men possess the sorts of appetites that make mothers all over the world put off buying new clothes, for fear of running short for the groceries. Should have doubled the chili.

But we did OK at dinner (lasagna), and I felt somewhat redeemed. When people are working for nothing — and with every one of these things we do, we get more people, and they work harder — the least you can do is feed them.

I mentioned the weather. Boy, did it suck. A front blew through Friday night with tornado watches and violent thunderstorms, followed by temperatures that didn’t touch 50 degrees all day, with a steady 25-30 mile per hour wind, many stronger gusts. In other words: Suckitude. And I was inside all day. A memo ahead of time mentioned the need to keep lots of water on set, as some of the actors would be wearing rubberized costumes and would need to hydrate frequently. Ha ha. They were the lucky ones.

But that’s water gone by, and now we look forward. I had lots of down time between meals, and spent it catching up on my web-surfing. As Monday is my busiest day, I offer you plenty of bloggage:

Beautiful Lena Horne, gone at 92. I saw her a few months back in “Cabin in the Sky,” which TMC was showing during Oscar month. Fun fact from her NYT obit:

One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.

She had the va-va, and certainly the voom.

Why Two-Newspaper Towns are Good, this chuckle from the Detroit News. Short version: New pedestrian bridge opens in Detroit, is instantly hit by taggers. Surveillance cameras clearly show one of the taggers is a Free Press copy editor and blogger, whose blog frequently mourns the collapse in civility and good citizenship. Here’s the passage that caught my eye, from her spectacularly lame mea culpa:

I was excited when I saw the bench and that people had written on it and wanted to add my tag to it. That’s what we did in New York City when I was young: We put our tags on the park benches.

Social scientists speak frequently of “new norms.” There’s one, right there.

Deadspin has a remarkable document, a letter of castigation by the owner of a party lodge where the Miami University chapter of the Pi Beta Phi sorority had their spring formal. Short version: They arrived drunk, got drunker, puked everywhere, peed in the sinks, pooped in the bushes. Miami University had a reputation, when I was growing up in Ohio, as academically rigorous, preppy, snotty and very Greek. The Pi Phis at Miami would be 10 times worse, on all measures, than those at Ohio University, where I went to school. I guess that’s …changed.

Via Lance, Digby on the Kent State shootings. She quotes Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” on the reaction to the tragedy:

When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones – America – support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up? …”

…A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell. Another rumor was that five hundred Black Panthers were on their way from elsewhere in Ohio to lead a real riot; and that Allison Krause was “the campus whore” and found with hand grenades on her.

As Digby, and Lance, point out: Ann Coulter et al is nothing new in this country.

Hank Stuever on Betty White in the WashPost, and on his own blog, the SNL Homowatch. From the blog, after the Scared Straight sketch:

I would need several thousand words to dissect why America has always thought prison rape is so hilarious. (Not only hilarious, but acceptable. We are a culture that believes strongly in “don’t drop the soap” jokes as a normal way to taunt criminals; indeed, we seem to hope that our most offensive male criminals will in fact be repeatedly raped by other men in prison; “making” someone your “bitch” is recess playground vernacular now.)

And because I’m late getting to this, Hank, again, on why writers should tackle the subjects that scare them. Wise words, those. And now, I’m off.