I’d forgotten about this until Gail Collins mentioned it in her column today. A little lagniappe for the weekend:

The things you learn when you farm news for pharmaceutical companies: Sunday is the 50th anniversary of FDA approval of the birth-control pill. (What? You say it’s in USA Today? Well, I saw that days ago.)

I also saw this about the same time. It’s an essay by Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal, which sets out to explain the seeming paradox of blue-state divorce rates — they’re the lowest in the nation — and ends up explaining a lot more about the so-called culture war. It does it without resorting to the usual accusatory and/or defensive language. And while you may have a different take on it, to my mind the nut graf was this:

For generations, American family life was premised on two facts. First, sex makes babies. Second, low-skilled men, if they apply themselves, can expect to get a job, make a living, and support a family.

It’s the third sentence that interests me, because it’s a truth that gets overlooked too often, especially by the chattering classes, because it doesn’t apply to them. But it’s at the heart of everything, and it boils down to this: The social contract is broken. The old deal used to be that if you had a great idea, you could get rich, but if all you could was work hard — and there was no shame in being nothing but a hard worker — you could still make a living, and that living could support your family. Not so much anymore.

But that’s not really what the essay is about. It’s about the two things that upended the apple cart — the global information economy and the birth-control pill — and how two groups of Americans, which you can call red and blue for lack of a better term — have dealt with it. It’s not perfect as social theory — it ignores religion, for the most part — but it gets the big things right, and it’s not a terribly long read.

And that is all I can leave you with today. I’m still midway through my food prep, and I have a meeting, a doctor’s appointment, a happy hour and a middle-school dance to fit in around a trip to Costco for the dessert. Sorry, Laura — while bread pudding is a splendid idea for dessert (and shows your growing NOLA attachment — it’s going to be a big mess of cookies made by someone else. At least that’s if the traditional wrap dessert in our little crew (PIE, GLORIOUS PIE) is going to happen.

Have a great weekend.

Memorial Coliseum, the big concert venue in Fort Wayne, maintained a “parents’ room” for big nights, where guess-who could go for a little relief during the show. I wrote about it once, and although it was before I was a parent myself, all it took was 30 seconds in the house during an M.C. Hammer show to appreciate the sweet relief it offered to anyone not in the M.C. Hammer demographic — good lord, that volume was painful.

The contrast couldn’t have been greater. Management provided free Pepsi and pretzels, laid out decks of cards and rolled in a TV with VCR. Movie of the night: “Driving Miss Daisy.” I only wish I was kidding. Mothers crocheted and fathers chatted while their futures unspooled on TV. They could only wish that the kids they’d so kindly taken to the show would be responsible enough, and wealthy enough, to hire a driver for them in their dotage. But it was blessedly free of can’t-touch-this, so you couldn’t complain.

It wasn’t my best column, and I remember it mainly for the tiff-ette I had with a young African American copy editor, who thought I’d emphasized the wrong contrast in my scene-setting. It wasn’t about “Driving Miss Daisy,” the movie about being old, playing while teenagers danced ecstatically down the hall, it was about Morgan Freeman being a forelock-tugging servant while M.C. Hammer, young and strong and rich, gets it done on his own terms. Well. Who’s laughing now? M.C. Hammer will be lucky to get a job as some old lady’s chauffeur, as even the comeback tours will go away eventually, and maybe sooner.

But I digress. Detroit being a hipper town, and the Fillmore a smaller venue, they had a different place for the parents, what few there were who accompanied their children to the show last night.

“Would you like to sit in the bar? It’s just off the lobby,” the nice ticket-taker asked as I showed her my main-floor ticket on re-entry during the opening act’s set. The pain must have shown in my face. I hope the relief did, too. And while, being a responsible adult, I didn’t exactly get M.C. hammered, I did enjoy a tall Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy while watching ultimate fighting on the bar TV. The beer was lemony, and the fighting was disgusting. Really. Blood smeared the mat while the fighters grappled in, frankly, rather homoerotic style. One guy, the bleeder, was getting his ass kicked, but refused to surrender. They went down in another clinch, and the dominator leaned close to his ear. He appeared to be saying something, and I hope it was, “Jesus Christ, your blood is spoiling my footing. Tap out, you moron.” Finally, he did, and the director took the time for a dramatic overhead shot of the carmine aftermath.

This, friends, is what is killing boxing, a sport I’ve finally come to appreciate during all my Miss Daisy stay-at-home Saturday nights, which is when they show the bouts on HBO. I like the strategy of it, the skill needed to score while protecting yourself, the necessity of enduring a certain amount of what must be crushing pain in pursuit of victory. I like the trainers’ corner talk, which, being HBO, is not censored: “You’ve got to put this fucker down,” etc. (For the non-English speakers, they provide translation.) And I like watching the cut men work their magic with icy enswells and petroleum jelly. A good cut man knows as much or more about the blood vessels of the human head than a doctor.

At one point the ultimate-fighting bout was stopped so that a guy in latex gloves could examine the bleeder. He wiped the fighter’s face with a towel. Somewhere in a squared circle in heaven, Cus D’amato wept.

I went back into the house for the last 10 minutes of 3Oh!3’s set. I hear they’re tight with Ke$ha. The less you know about both, the better.

And now off for stock-up shopping for my weekend catering gig, as well as boat-launching. Every year the latter gets easier, and I’m told I will not be required for much. Huzzah. But I still need some heavy-duty foil pans, racks, maybe some sterno. Restaurant-supply store, here I come.

Some bloggage:

Thanks to Michael G for finding this nice Ken Levine appreciation of Ernie Harwell. Crisp, simple, to the point and worth your time. Meanwhile, it appears yesterday’s treacle-fest by Albom was only the warmup. Today:

There is a sound to silence. We heard it around the world Wednesday. It was the sound of tears, laughter, noses sniffling, voices quivering, it was the sound of a million baseball memories echoing in the sudden silence of the Voice of Summer…

Get a grip, Mitch. The funeral is still a couple days away. Today Harwell lies in repose at Comerica Park, which was setting up for the event as we left the show last night. Lights on, no ballgame. Sad.

Good lord, will you look at Nashville these days? I wonder if we should send the Bassets dry clothes, a blank check or a snorkel. If you didn’t see the comments late last night, here’s the dispatch from Chez Basset:

Cleanup continues in Nashville… haven’t been in position to hear much about the rest of the city, but on my street everyone seems to have friends, volunteers, whoever coming by to help dump the contents of the house out into the front yard.

My house and the one next door are only 35 yards from the Harpeth River, which is normally down a little hill, the other side of a treeline and down maybe a ten- or twelve-foot bank. Sunday morning, though, it was counter-top high through our place, and I just added a few pictures of the result to my stream here.

So… we lost lots of books, all the furniture, all electronics and major appliances, clothes, so on, so forth… but I have been amazed by the level of help and support we’re receiving. Friends are putting us up and feeding us, co-workers are coming by to help shovel out, a total stranger walked up to me as I was getting into my storage unit and gave me stacks of boxes, tape to stick them together, and a dolly, all the wet clothes out of our closets are piled in a friend of a friend’s garage and they’re letting us wash them, visitors came down our street handing out food and drinks… really helps make it a lot more bearable.

That said… our house will have to be stripped to the bare frame from about eye level down to the ground, doors, windows, and HVAC replaced, it’s gonna take awhile and be expensive. We have insurance, though, and an apartment, and a storage locker… we’ll get through it.

You always get through it. But nothing short of all-consuming fire destroys a house quite like a flood. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating if you’ve never been through one: In a fire, pfft, it’s gone, but after a flood you can actually recognize your wedding album or Christmas decorations. It’s just that they have a thin layer of brown slime covering them, and sometimes it smells like raw sewage, too.

In 1993, a photographer and I went to Iowa to cover the flooding of the Mississippi and its tributaries in Iowa. (Fort Wayne media loves a flood. If we can’t have one ourselves, we’ll go looking for others’. I bet they’re on their way to Nashville now.) A homeowner took me through his house, which had filled to the gutters with Raccoon River floodwaters. “Check this out,” he said, opening the washing machine. It was full of water the color of chocolate syrup, reeking of poo.

I think he was planning on taking the insurance money, tearing the house down and buying something on higher ground. Floods are pretty awful.

So Basset, we’re thinking about you. Anything you need, say the word.

While we’re on the subject of misfortune befalling the NN.C community, J.C. set up a page compiling all of Whitebeard’s comments on one page, just as he did for Ashley when he left us. The comments are separated from that which prompted them, but oddly enough, they make a certain kind of sense. I see he was one who joined us aprés-Goeglein — his first is March 1, 2008. It’s now on the right rail, whenever you want to check in.

I’m going to have to make this a short one today — my schedule for the rest of the week is insane, and tonight I’m taking Kate to a school-night concert, the second of the year, a treat because she gives me no problems (other than refusing green vegetables) and regularly brings home sterling report cards. We’re seeing a band called Cobra Starship, and I wish I could tell you more about them, but in the age of the iPod, I have never even heard a single note of their music. For all I know, they could perform hip-hop in the nude, and if they do, please, don’t spoil the surprise. I’m certainly grateful that my kid is into the indie bands, because that means I only have to drive to the Fillmore, which is downtown, and not to the bleedin’ Palace of Auburn Hills, the arena-size destination in Outer Mongolia, Oakland County.

So let’s skip right to the bloggage, eh? There’s some good stuff today:

Oh, look: The co-founder of the Family Research Council is caught red-handed arriving home from an extended vacation with a rentboy. No, really, an actual rentboy, hired from Rentboy.com. As lame excuses go, this one certainly takes the pink-frosted cupcake:

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.”

It doesn’t trump “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” but “please, Lucien, come over here and help me lift this” is certainly a strong contender. The luggage-handler notes that he is uncircumcised. Strange qualification, mmm? I’d say something here, but honestly — what more needs to be said? How about this: The man with the heavy luggage is the author of a book entitled “Shaping Your Child’s Sexual Identity.” Dan Savage’s blog entry on this is titled, “Is Every Right-Wing, Anti-Gay Christian Bigot Sucking Off Rent Boys?” I think the answer is clear and simple: Yes.

The New York Times had a recent blog entry about the theft of Facebook account data, which coincided with a weekend of hinky activity in friends’ Facebooks. FB is sort of on probation with me already; I really don’t want to give up my account, but if they can’t keep it more secure and respect my privacy, I might have to give it the heave-ho. Via LGM, the Rocket.ly blog on the Top 10 reasons you should quit.

Finally, you baseball fans probably know Ernie Harwell, the voice of the Detroit Tigers for decades, died yesterday. As local news goes, this is on a level with an al-Qaeda strike on the RenCen. But of course everyone knew this was coming — Harwell announced his terminal cancer diagnosis months ago — and so everyone had time to plan coverage. A loyal local correspondent looked at Mitch Albom’s column and made this incisive comment:

I was looking at the Freep this morning for the coverage of Ernie Harwell’s death. Of course I had to read Mitch to see how Mitchy he got. He didn’t disappoint, as I’m sure you saw. But it occurred to me that this passage is what is especially maddening about the guy:

“…simply by doing the same gentle thing over and over, simply by being there, by remaining consistent, pure, good and true, even as things around him became anything but. Ernie stood out because he stood still. He was reliable as a rock. A soul in a void. A heart in a sometimes heartless world.”

This takes an excellent observation, turns it into a wonderful turn of phrase – “simply by doing the same thing over and over again” – then over-writes it into oblivion. There it is, a glimpse of the old, great sportswriter, smothered by the sappy pap celebrity.

Yep. I’d also note the faux-meaningful phrases — what, pray tell, is “a soul in a void” — but as concise summations of What’s Wrong With Mitch go, this is pretty good.

And now I have to get to work. Have a good day, all. I’m off to search for earplugs.

For a while there, I wondered whether “Treme” was shaping up to be David Simon’s “Stardust Memories.” The second-episode emphasis on a trio of do-gooders from Madison, Wis., who descend on New Orleans after Katrina to help “the lower nine,” which they freely admit they’d never heard of before the storm — I squirmed a little.

Every disaster has do-gooders, and most of them are ignorant of the authentic geography or cultural rhythms of the place they’re seeking to help, but what’s the alternative? People who text HAITI to a number on their cell phones? The ones who buy a ticket to a benefit concert, or tint their Facebook profile picture a certain color in a gesture of solidarity? (Maybe so. Ever since I watched a collection of relief items for Hurricane Hugo victims, and saw car after car of people apparently using it as an excuse to clean out their basements, I’ve made my personal do-gooding a cash-only deal: Send money, and await further instructions.)

The characters in “Treme” were there to build houses with their church group, and people certainly needed those. And while they were daffy and ignorant and didn’t know why it costs extra to get a musician to play “Saints” — and were almost certainly big fans of “The Wire” — they got their wild night out in the real New Orleans, and maybe that was the point of those characters after all. They were there to demonstrate that like all great cities, New Orleans will transform you if you let it. You arrive a cheesehead and leave something else.

And it’s not like Simon spares the natives, either. Another daffy douchebag, the local DJ/layabout Davis McAlary, is one of those guys who has no qualms about lecturing his gay neighbors — gentrifiers! the nerve! — about this or that obscure musician who grew up around this or that corner, figures of towering importance they are somehow diminishing, simply by their presence and their skillful home decor. Of course McAlary, played by the fabulous Steve Zahn, is white himself, but he’s a different kind of white guy. He’s a musician, and even though the sole composition of his we’ve heard is ridiculous, that gives him a license to live there that the gay men lack. He’s the opposite of an Oreo, black on the inside. At least he seems to think so.

(Bonus in-joke: He’s a Goddard College graduate, alma mater of David Mamet and attended by our own J.C. Burns. Ha.)

Treme is a neighborhood, and isn’t in the ninth ward, but the series isn’t as narrow as that. It’s shaping up to be yet another Simonesque look at a suffering city, asking how it got that way, why it stays that way and why we should care. So far, it’s pretty clear: It got that way because a terrible storm collapsed badly constructed and maintained floodwalls; it stays that way because the local civic culture and institutions tolerate and foster incompetence, and the federal government can’t seem to make them change; and we should care because of the music. Music is to “Treme” what drug dealing was to “The Wire,” in this case the literal rhythm of daily life. Brass bands parade down the street. Every bar has a stage, and buskers sing on every corner. Anyone with a tambourine or something to bang on can pour out their joy or misery at the drop of a hat, and does.

I had to watch the third episode twice before I grasped that the uptempo song Dr. John sang near the beginning of the hour, “My Indian Red,” was the same as, or based on, the a capella dirge the Mardi Gras Indians were singing at the end of it, mourning the loss of one of the tribe, whose body had only recently been found. Music is everything in New Orleans, and all it takes is a key or tempo change to take it from joy to sorrow. Or to anger, something you clearly hear in Sonny the street musician’s pissed-off “Saints” for the Madison trio. (And they were right — he was the one who suggested it, not them.)

With four episodes down, you can see subtler themes emerging — the way lopsided success can strain a relationship, the corrupt nature of institutions, the satisfactions and sorrows of personal responsibility, and — that Simon biggie — Why Cities Matter. Although the most interesting character of all, Clarke Peters’ Albert Lambreaux, is working his own thematic agenda entirely, and I’m not sure what it is. His might be a slow-motion crackup caused by PTSD, or maybe just the mystery of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, which everyone refers to frequently — “the tradition” — but never actually explains or illuminates. More will be revealed, I’m sure.

And then there’s the Ashley Morris stand-in, Creighton Bernette, who delivered the coup de grace in episode four this week — a version of his best-known rant. (There were so many to choose from.) I can now die happy. I hope Ashley, wherever he was, saw it too. If his own heart hadn’t given out two years ago, I’m sure he would have died of awesomeness, right there.

And that seems the best note to end on, especially as a little investigation yesterday by Sue turned up the sad news of what’s become of our once-regular commenter, Whitebeard, aka Duncan Haimerl. Died of a heart attack while recovering from cancer surgery. One of the obituaries noted:

Duncan’s wife, Nancy, takes solace in the fact that Duncan’s mind and sense of humor never failed him. We saw that as he filed columns a few hours before surgery and soon after he began recovery, joking about the details. Duncan found something he loved – cars, and writing about them – and he never stopped doing it, never lost the pure joy of it.

Nancy would like Duncan’s old colleagues and friends to know about the news, and that his suffering at the end was minimal.

RIP, pal. If there’s an afterlife, Ashley’s there, and this week, he’s buying every round.

I don’t care what anyone says, and yes, I’m biased, but our guy is funnier at the White House Correspondents Dinner than their guy ever was. President Obama’s timing is great, he strikes just the right tone and whoever’s writing his material is pretty good. I loved his aside after the stuff about Michael Steele — he did the same Steele bit last year, but hey, it still works.

(Plus, he has a great smile. That’s No. 482 on the endless list of things that drive Republicans crazy about him. George Bush smirked, Sarah Palin’s still looks like the pageant runway and John McCain’s was some sort of numb rictus. But when Obama’s having fun, he looks like he’s having the most fun of all.)

Obama was in the Mitten earlier Saturday, speaking at the University of Michigan commencement. Sellout crowd. He told students to contribute to democracy and keep their minds open to opposing viewpoints. (Outside, protesters called him a socialist. Ho-hum.) The university gave him an honorary degree, his second as president. I wonder if there’s anyone at Arizona State, the first university to snag him as a commencement speaker but the only one to deny him an honorary degree, still feeling sheepish about that spectacularly boneheaded move.

Which makes now a good time to twist the knife with this Daily Show segment. Let’s all line up and give Arizona a swift kick. Boneheads.

Do any of you keep tabs on the Photoshop Disasters blog? You should, as Photoshop is one of the most pernicious forces afoot in culture today, unless I’m using it to remove a zit from a picture of me, in which case it’s OK, really. I do get peevish when I see it used to make awful people like Kimora Lee Simmons into space aliens, but am amused when it reveals who really lost a foot in that “Mad Men” episode last year. (Missing limbs are a recurring theme.) This is funny, too, considering Toyota’s recent problems. But perhaps no single person (other than Madonna) has been Photoshopped more than the “Sex and the City” quartet of perimenopausal beauties who get stranger-looking with every new chapter.

The poster is bad enough. But this Harper’s Bizarre cover — misspelling CQ — is somehow worse. I think it has something to do with the expression on Sarah Jessica Parker’s face, which looks entirely assembled from parts. Sometimes I wonder if the paparazzi would be so insatiable if celebrities didn’t hide behind this nonsense. Street pictures of SJP reveal about what you’d expect — a stew bird with veiny, sinewy Madonna arms. But I’d rather look at that than this.

A little bloggage before the first cop shop bicycle tour of the year:

Sweet Juniper teaches eco-terrorism to the children of the inner city. Kidding. But there’s something about “seed bomb” that sounds sinister. It’s not.

During my year in Ann Arbor, one of my Turkish friends referred to Greeks as “lazy and stupid people” as casually as you’d remark on the weather. I know the Greeks have given us a lot, but criminy, people, when your nation is upside-down in debt, PAY YOUR TAXES.

It seemed half my Facebook friends were sending me spam and other crap over the weekend. It was cartoonishly easy to spot, as I am a geezer and most of my friends are geezers, stick to conventional spellings of HAWT and eschew emoticons. This might have something to do with it. In the meantime, open no gifts.

A stretch, some more coffee, and then I’m off. Tomorrow: Treme so far.

Almost forgot: Good thoughts to the Bassets, flooded out in Nashville over the weekend.

Jim at Sweet Juniper has a brief but hilarious post about a chapter of parenthood that has passed for me, i.e., the parental experience of the playground. You should not be surprised to learn that it’s different in Detroit than in San Francisco, his last residence. (When an essay turns on the fulcrum, “Then I smelled the weed,” you know we’ve entered a new city.) And yet, in so many ways, it’s the same.

I used to love to take little Kate to Fort Wayne’s various playgrounds, mostly Foster Park and, when we felt like getting the bike trailer out, Kid’s Crossing at Lawton Park. I’d push her in the swing and hope for another kid for her to play with, so I could concentrate on the people-watching and eavesdropping. You never knew what, or who, might turn up.

There was one family whose schedule matched mine for a time; the son took a tennis lesson while his three sisters killed time on the swings. They were nice girls, clad in the unmistakable clothing of the home-schooled Christian — “modest” hemlines, long sleeves, a certain Little-House-on-the-Prairie vibe to the cut and print — but they were lively and sweet, played easily with others, and I always enjoyed watching them. One day they showed up, all three of them wearing some sort of kerchief-type headgear, obviously gleaned from a close reading of that ol’ misogynist, St. Paul, and it was like their mother had tattooed WEIRDO on their foreheads. The other kids kept their distance, and they did the same.

Weekends were different. That’s when you saw the fathers, either because of custody arrangements or just to give mom a break. Fathers relate to their children differently — they hover less, they care a lot less about clean clothing. Once I watched one beam approvingly as his daughter wallowed in an enormous mud puddle, as happily as a pig. Every stitch of clothing she wore was ruined, and her dad kept looking around to beam — that’s my kid, yep — as though he deserved some sort of medal for coolness. As the designated laundress of the family, I withheld my approval. Dirt has its place on a kid, but this was ridiculous.

And there were the fathers who were looking for girlfriends, playing the sensitive-dad card, or maybe something else. One memorable Sunday, a young father commandeered a large portion of the play structure as his personal workout facility. He stripped off his shirt and began hoisting himself around, doing chin-ups and various abdominal moves, punctuating each rep with an ear-shattering ARRRGHHHAHHH that penetrated every corner of the park, the sort of grunt-yell that brands you an asshole even in the gym, much less on the playscape. Everyone glared, but he continued until every muscle was shining and engorged, then looked around for the babes he seemed sure would soon start flocking. I don’t think any did.

A dad tried to pick me up once, as I read Ruth Reichl’s “Tender at the Bone.” “Tender…at…the…BONE. Now, what could THAT be about?” he leered. As though I brought a dirty story to read on the playground. Because I’m such a horny mom. Sheesh.

The full breadth of the human carnival parades before us, every day. It’s a crime not to notice.

No bloggage today, other than Jim, because once again I have to clean myself up and cover three miles by bicycle in, what? Fifteen minutes? Best get movin’! Have a great weekend.

Around the middle of February, I decided there was a damn good reason that getting to the gym required approximately the same motivation as a nude crawl through — well, through the mile or so of depressing suburban landscape between it and my house. We’re always being admonished to listen to our bodies, and my body was making it quite clear that it wished to indulge its inner bear and hibernate the rest of winter.

Plus, I had this book project that was blotting out the sun, and so. You know what happened next.

The book is down to the last details, leaving the house is no longer a trial, the light is kind and plentiful and I am, predictably, flabbed out again. This time, I need to combine the usual strategy of regular exercise and sensible eating with something more drastic — I’m going low-carb, pals. Send search parties if I’m not back in a week.

I likely will be. I’ve tried Dr. Atkins’ whack diet in the past, and it’s always worked the same way: By day three, I’m hallucinating about potatoes. By day five, I’d pay $500 for a single slice of toast. After a week, it’s all over. But — listen to this rationalization — those have always been with the zero-carb plan, and this time around — listen to this, it’s pure bullshit — things will be different! I’m just trying to stay under 30 grams a day. Tough, but doable.

This morning was a good omen: The cheese omelet folded together so beautifully, it looked like a picture from a magazine. My omelets tend to be tasty, but messy, because I overfill them. I threw in as much cheese as I felt like eating, and it was a perfect little envelope of melty deliciousness.

But we shall see. There’s no doubt low-carb diets work. The problem is, they’re hard to sustain, especially if you like food. Who doesn’t like food? Atkins people, who can go on and on about bacon, but recoil in terror at a roasted sweet potato. I love cauliflower, but show me a person who’s satisfied with a cauliflower vichyssoise and I’ll show you someone who is profoundly missing the point of dinner.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, going back to the gym feels good-bad. Bad in the inevitable soreness, good in the reassertion of muscle, that which can be felt through all the fat, that is. After two weeks, my low-grade back pain is gone, and even my knees feel better after all those squats. I’ve come to believe that the world would be a better, less cranky place if every home contained a well-used Pilates reformer. When I started mat Pilates classes last year, someone said here they are a revelation, and that is Word, friends. If you’re long of torso like me, I beseech you to give them a try. So does your back.

And that makes approximately 500 words of the most boring subject matter on the planet, and that’s all I will inflict upon you. I just want it on the record somewhere: I’m trying.

It seems I’m overdue for a few words about “Treme,” and they are coming. It’s traditional for HBO to give TV critics four episodes of its shows before they write a review, and that’s what I’m giving myself before committing, but so far: I am digging it. It would be a surprise at this point if I didn’t: Like all good white people with New Yorker subscriptions, I’m a David Simon fan. Anyone interested in looking at the problems of American cities, fairly but passionately, is someone I’m willing to cut a lot of slack. And what happened to New Orleans in 2005 is, it became Detroit more or less over the course of a few days — depopulated, blighted, dysfunctional, but with the same can’t-kill-it pulse. I’m interested to see where it’s going.

And how can you not love a show with snappy dialogue like this?

I brought beignets!
Who you fuckin’?

So, bloggage? Some:

Um, what?

A massive oil spill vile mat of flame in the Gulf of Mexico? Boy, I miss the ’90s. Life was simpler then.

As shallow and simple as my brain is in the morning, of course I’m going to read any story with a headline that asks, Why does this pair of pants cost $550? (The photo was of a male model is distinctly run-of-the-mill khakis.) But when they can get this line above the jump —

“The cost of creating those things has nothing to do with the price,” said David A. Aaker, the vice chairman of Prophet, a brand consulting firm. “It is all about who else is wearing them, who designed them and who is selling them.”

— that’s how I spell WIN.

And now I’m off. Enjoy the end of the week.

Maybe it’s because of my recent experience in filmmaking, but these days, I find different things catch my attention when I watch a movie. So it was with “You Don’t Know Jack,” the HBO film about Jack Kevorkian; I kept noticing the production design. For you civilians, that’s a term of art that describes the general visual look of a film — everything from the costumes to the sets to the way the actors’ hair is styled. Many people have a hand in creating this, but it’s the production designer who oversees it all.

The design of “You Don’t Know Jack” is… I guess you’d say it’s fitting. It’s blue and damp and chilly and depressing, all of which suit a story about a man who helped dozens of people, in debatable degrees of illness or disability, end their lives with a number of contraptions he assembled from spare parts, from his “Mercitron,” which used saline and potassium chloride, to various gas arrangements. No one looks good. Everyone lives in a crummy apartment and drives a beater. The actors who aren’t cadaverous are Michigan-fat, or are buried under heaps of unflattering wardrobe — you can practically see the pills on the cheap acrylic sweaters, and you just know every sleeve has a snotty Kleenex shoved under the cuff. Only the lawyers look good.

Kevorkian gets a 360-degree portrayal from both the script and Al Pacino, who nails the look and manner and muffs the Detroit accent. (No shame, Al — it has confounded many others.) As the story unwound, and Kevorkian and his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, make fools of the Oakland County prosecutor time after time, the design becomes key, because you see what made Kevorkian so dangerous to the status quo; he had nothing to lose. He didn’t care about anything but his passionately held beliefs and his odd hobbies (his macabre paintings in which he used his own blood as pigment, most notably). Take his medical license away? Lock him up? His lodgings behind bars weren’t much of a step down from his place in Royal Oak, or wherever he was living at the time.

The state finally had to write a law specifically aimed at him, which he defied just like he said he would, before they could finally lock him up for longer than a few days. And he did the time like a pro, I have to say, getting out last year and heading back to another crummy apartment. He’s not assisting suicides anymore, but he’s out and about. One of my Facebook friends spotted him in the Royal Oak library last weekend, got a picture taken with him and posted it. Local celebrity. The prosecutor who forfeited his public-service career — he was turned out of office by an exasperated public tired of financing his Ahab-like pursuit of Dr. K — wound up at the Thomas More Law Center, i.e. Tom Monahan’s Catholic Warriors, who in their high-profile cases aren’t doing much better.

(pause)

I wasn’t going to post this today; we’ve had so much discussion of death in this space of late, and some of us are having some uncomfortable brushes with it of late ourselves. But as if to mock my recent mention of a tax refund, last night our power went out. When I was checking the breakers, I flipped the main one, and couldn’t flip it back. Neither could Alan. Which means I have to call an electrician this morning and, assuming the worst, pay a huge bill. My laptop battery is down to 6 percent, so I’m hitting Publish and then going offline until I have juice again. Argh.

The AP carries an interesting story today about huitlacoche, known as corn smut to you Hoosiers and others with a more English-speaking connection to the land. The black, slimy plague upon the ears is actually pretty good for you:

…test results just published in the journal Food Chemistry reveal that an infection that U.S. farmers and crop scientists have spent millions trying to eradicate, is packed with unique proteins, minerals and other nutritional goodies.

Corn smut has a Spanish name because — this is no surprise for you foodies — it’s considered a delicacy in Mexican cuisine. (“Considered a delicacy in” is the grown-up version of belching at the dinner table, which, every 13-year-old who does it will tell you, is actually considered a compliment to the cook in some cultures.) You can find huitlacoche recipes in Rick Bayless’ excellent Mexican cookbook, but I’ve never made it myself. My former colleague Carol Tannehill made some in the newsroom once, for a story on strange ingredients, if I recall correctly. The corn smut had to be specially ordered and arrived frozen, but it thawed into something that very closely resembled drain-clog slime — black and gooey and entirely gross.

Carol prepared it in a simple tortilla-wrap recipe, sliced it up and passed it around. And readers? It was delicious. It tasted like dirt, but in a good way, the way the best mushrooms do. If there was gourmet dirt, that’s what huitlacoche tastes like. I didn’t expect to like it, and only sampled it because I’ve always been a human garbage disposal and can choke down almost anything in the name of science or a blind taste test. And I had seconds.

I don’t have much for you today because I spent my morning catching up on some long-neglected friends, including Hank, and read his rave review of Kim Severson’s new book, which I didn’t even know existed. Severson is one of my favorite food writers, and probably my single fave among newspaper food writers, and this news is welcome, indeed. I bet Kim has eaten huitlacoche, and please, save the lesbian jokes.

I was happy to read this because I finally caught “Julie and Julia” on DVD, and have this review: Cute. It’s a cute movie with moments of shining grace. Once again, Meryl Streep didn’t so much act as disappear into her character, and I appreciated the movie trickery involved in getting her to stand head-and-shoulders over everyone around her (step stools, I imagine). The best lines I’ve read before, as they’re mostly Nora Ephron’s, not Julie’s or Julia. The line about the predictability of cooking in an uncertain world — that’s Nora’s, as is the stuff about not crowding the mushrooms. As a coming-of-age movie for women that doesn’t overemphasize sex (the big theme in all male coming-of-age movies) but makes it part of the narrative just the same, it worked beautifully. It’s Ephron’s best work to date, and that’s something, IMO.

And now on to the bloggage on this sleep-deprived morning. Just one piece, but it’s a good’un:

So, what do we think of the Jewish joke Obama’s National Security Advisor told yesterday? I note the reaction of the crowd, at a pro-Israel think tank, presumably full of Jews: Laughter. Good enough for me. Jews are famous for their collective sense of humor, so I’ll take my cue from them, but Roy ventures into the world of the rightbloggers, a very humorless place.

Phoned-in this may be, but I have a busy day ahead, and so: Farewell.