So, yesterday I spent mostly in bed, swallowing ibuprofen, changing ice packs and making phone calls. Which means little to report. Knee is still an open issue; I see the doc today.

But one of the things I ran across was this terribly sad story about Newtown, Conn., one year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary. It’s not just sad in “The Sweet Hereafter” sense, but also in the peculiar American custom of how we divide the money raised to compensate victims of a crime like this. I promise you, if all you take away from this is the difference between “the 26,” “the 12” and “the two,” it’s worth your time.

Theres also this, by John Carlisle, a Freep column worthy of his grittier Metro Times roots, about a community of squatters trying to create a utopia in one of the very worst — seriously, among a city packed with awful neighborhoods, this one is a top-fiver — neighborhoods in Detroit.

Otherwise? Open thread. I must now limp to the kitchen and make some coffee.

Now that the weather’s turned chilly, Wendy has turned into a lapdog. Nothing makes her happier than being permitted to jump up and make herself comfortable on a lap, outstretched legs or — this is a me-only privilege — stretched way out on my belly, with her nose tucked under my chin. It’s so cute you’d die. And sometimes it’s comical, as when I went out to call Alan for dinner Sunday and found him in his recliner, dog in place, her chin on his chest, both looking peaceful and cozy, except one was snoring and the other just looking sort of content.

I’ll let you figure which was which.

I love it. Spriggy never was up for snuggling. He always had to be unencumbered and ready to spring into action, just in case someone rang the doorbell.

So it was a dog-on-lap sort of weekend — cold and blustery on Saturday, autumn chill Sunday. The crap-reduction project continues apace, although most of the crap reduced this weekend was soap scum. I let the cleaning lady go, and am back to doing it myself for the first time in more than a year. New miracle product: Barkeeper’s Friend. The liquid kind. It KILLS soap scum.

But I got a few bags carried out, did some Swiffin’, put some sweaters into the get-outta-here pile. Rowed 4,200 meters on the erg Sunday. Saw “Cloud Atlas,” which seemed far, far longer (and was). And then Sunday afternoon brought the news of Lou Reed’s death. I knew to wait for Roy Edroso’s take, and of all that I read, it’s the best. Five tight paragraphs — the world’s blatherers could take a lesson.

Bloggage? I has it:

There was a homicide at a bank drive-through on Friday, the victim trapped in his hot-pink BMW with the “ask me about my grandchildren” front license plate. I offer it mainly for the chilling photo of the bullet-starred window and this quote, from a witness who heard the shots and immediately dropped to the ground: “I grew up on the northwest side of town,” he said. “It’s a natural reaction.”

What was the thief after? He didn’t jack the car, or even rob the victim, who was an older man known to rarely carry more than $20 or $30 at at ime.

Speaking of chilling, another homicide from last week, this one near Boston, a 14-year-old alleged to have killed his math teacher with a knife, and get this for a killer detail:

WCVB-TV, an ABC affiliate, citing unidentified sources, reported that the suspect killed Ms. Ritzer with a box cutter and then went to the movies, seeing Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.”

Fort Wayne peeps: Joseph Paul Franklin is set to be executed in a few weeks, whom the world mainly knows as the would-be assassin of Larry Flynt, but you locals remember as doing the same to Vernon Jordan in your fair city. And yeah, he did it:

He now regrets shooting Jordan. Although a federal jury acquitted him of shooting Jordan, Franklin admits he, indeed, shot the civil rights leader. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him now,” he said.

Finally, the holidays are coming, which means Mitch Albom is in fundraising mode, and writing self-promoting columns about it. This latest one is very strange, detailing an event that will honor retiring Tigers manager Jim Leyland and Judge Damon Keith of the federal bench, who are white and black, respectively, and the event is called “Detroit Legacies: In Black and White.” Hmm, OK. And why should you buy a ticket?

Tickets are just $40, and everyone attending will be given an autographed copy of my new novel, “The First Phone Call from Heaven,” a small way for me to thank my city.

And this blog, my friends, offered free and digitally autographed with my very own name, is a small way to thank you. Let’s have a good week.

It takes all kinds, but for me? Small towns have always given me hives. I’m happy to drive through them and stop at the local antique store or whatever, but to live in one? Not for me. I need a decent library, a movie theater where I can see something first-run, a bookstore or two and — very important — a surprise around the corner once in a while.

So it’s always bugged me how small towns always have the benefit of this chin-chucking, patronizing and completely false presumption of innocence. Looks like Michael Schaeffer agrees with me:

Last Sunday, a New York Times reporter visited Maryville, Missouri to report on the existence of a grave threat to the town’s bucolic, Real-America essence: “Ever since The Kansas City Star ran a long article last Sunday raising new questions about the Nodaway County prosecutor’s decision to drop charges against a 17-year-old football player accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, the simplicity of small-town life here has been complicated by a storm of negative attention.”

Leaving aside the dubious victimology—poor Maryville, battered so cruelly by the dark-hearted Kansas City media and their relentless “negative attention”—the paragraph also represents a great big logical problem for anyone who read the Star story, or even the 20-odd inches of stellar Times copy that followed the clunky lede: The whole point of a story of rape allegations dismissed by a political-prosecutorial complex intimately connected to an accused assaulter’s state-legislative relative is that… Maryville never featured any of that simplicity in the first place!

It’d be easy to beat up on a reporter who was tasked with following a competitor’s story and slipped into cliché. In fact, the reductio ad Rockwell is a common tic of journalistic visits to small towns, especially those put on the map by infamy. And it’s one that really ought to stop. Decades of culture wars have left us with a set of social rules where it is largely OK for rural types to slander their citified co-citizens (cf. Sarah Palin, small-town mayor and “Real America” stalwart) but where urbanites can’t dis the country folks without being deemed elitist (cf. Barack Obama, Chicagoite and “cling” apologizer).

Oh, yeahhh. Small towns, we are frequently told, are wonderful places to raise children — as though no one in a large city ever successfully launched their offspring into the world. They’re close, loving and supportive — something no urban neighborhood is possibly capable of. Everyone knows your business? That’s love, child, love and concern. Spare me. Srsly.

So, was it necessary to kick off the blog with such rancor? Yes, so I could properly contrast it with this OID story, about as OID as they come, really — a carjacking, a “good Samaritan” in pursuit, a shootout and a second carjacking, all in the neighborhood of one of my bike routes this summer:

A good Samaritan who chased down a carjacking suspect on the city’s east side Thursday morning ended up being seriously wounded in a gunfight with the suspect after the stolen vehicle was ditched into a canal of the Detroit River.

Sharlonda Buckman, a 2013 Michiganian of the Year and chief executive officer of Detroit Parent Network, stopped about 8 a.m. Thursday at a BP gas station on the 10700 block of East Jefferson Avenue to buy some aspirin when she said an armed man forced her from her 2011 Chevrolet Traverse.

…Three men nearby witnessed the carjacking and came to Buckman’s aid, with two giving chase to the suspect. Police say one unnamed man, who was driving a 2009 blue Ford Focus, shot at the suspect with his licensed firearm after the suspect let the SUV sink into a Detroit River embankment near the Edison Boat Club.

I put good Samaritan in quotes because it’s pretty obvious this situation, bad as it was, only worsened when the guys in the Focus came to her aid. And after the good guy and the bad guy exchanged gunfire? The bad guy stole the good guy’s car, too.

The Freep’s story had the better headline: Detroit police: Man carjacks woman, sinks SUV, shoots witness

Granted: Not an often small-town occurrence. But it makes the big-city papers more interesting.

Well, here we are at the end of the week. It’s looking up, now that I’ve met a new eye doctor who is going to carve that cataract out of my eye and — he says — improve my vision significantly. What joy. I tell you, if you’d told me on New Year’s Day that my 2013 would contain a chilly spring, a lovely summer and two eye surgeries, I’m not sure what I’d have said. But I guess I’ll get through it. Not much of 2013 left.

Just two bits of bloggage left, then:

Ezra Klein on Obamacare chutzpah.

And Coozledad posted this in yesterday’s comments, but it bears repeating, as a North Carolina party hack explains just what the voter ID law there is all about.

I can’t keep up with all these stupid aggregators lately. BuzzFeed, HuffPost (yes, not entirely an aggregator) and the most irritating of all, Upworthy. I couldn’t quite figure Upworthy for a while — it’s hard to give anything focused attention in the age of Nobody Reads Anything — but eventually it bored through my inattention. It’s a prissy little pass-along deal, which its homepage banner makes clear: Things that matter. Pass ’em on. The person who always sends you Elizabeth Warren fanboy/girl stuff probably found a lot of it on Upworthy.

Anyway, Upworthy recently ran a…cute feature about Detroit’s bankruptcy. It’s not journalism, but more of a nothingburger illustrated with funny, funny GIFs. Way up at the top of the page, note the credit: “made possible by the AFL-CIO.” I don’t have anything against the AFL-CIO, but what this post is peddling is the Maddow version of why Detroit went bankrupt, which involves a) an eeeevil Republican governor; b) revenue sharing; and of course, c) the emergency manager, who is known in this world as the “local dictator.”

It’s not a fact-free version, but it is enormously lacking context, as well as a lot of other facts. But this is common; even among people who do read stuff, they are increasingly likely to like only their own media, who feed them this stuff. The right wing has their own version of why Detroit happened, and it boils down to a) Dumbocrats; b) Coleman Young and c) Dumbocrats.

So I’m grateful to Jeff Wattrick at Deadline Detroit, who put up a counterpoint to Upworthy, also with funny funny GIFs, that’s just as lively and fun to read, only is a lot closer to the whole truth.

And isn’t Upworthy. So there’s that.

I hate to link to Steinberg two days in a row, but I liked his sane take on the recent news that Jews were headed for extinction — at least the secular-leaning Jews most of us know:

So recognizing my own bias, why care? It isn’t as if there is an intrinsic need for a small Jewish minority to question mainstream beliefs anymore. We set the example, now exit the stage, to join the Shakers. Other faiths will step up. The Muslims are doing a fine job as the new minority American faith on deck, and they can complain about crosses in the public way as loudly as Jews did. Societies now has gays to test how much it really believe in tolerance of fractional minorities.

And there will always be some Jews. A core of Jewishness, kept alive by the hermetically sealed world of the Ultra-Orthodox and the Hasidim. Their society is designed to endure—that’s where the whole non-change thing comes in. Sure, we smirk at them for the black hats and wigs and 17th century traditions. But they know that if you swap your heavy black coat for a smart Calvin Klein jacket, you’re halfway a Unitarian. As long they exist, there will be a steady stream of secular Jews dribbling away from them, like the tail of a comet.

Mighty level-headed, I’d say.

Very different, but equally worth your time, is this startling obit for Erin R. Wagman:

Erin Wagman, also known as Erin Borgmann, died of acute alcohol poisoning on October 19, 2013 in Rapid City. She was 42 years old. She died alone.

A writer’s first job is to tell the truth. Someone did.

I think the fall is sapping my energy. It was cold, honestly cold, this morning and I’m not sure I’ve entirely recovered. We’ll see about tomorrow.

Late meeting Monday, no time to blog, but I have a few links:

Only in Canada: A fatal showdown on a downtown street? WITH KNIVES:

Police have identified persons of interest and expect to file charges soon following the Saturday morning stabbing death of a University of Windsor student, one of six men stabbed during a “horrifying” block-long downtown knife fight.

Gautham (Kevin) Kugathasan, 19, was pronounced dead at hospital after being transported from the scene, said Windsor police Staff Sgt. Todd LaMarre.

(Why do Brits and Canadians drop the article before “hospital?” I always wondered that. They also do it with “university.” We say “Bob’s away at college” but not “away at university.”)

The ocean is broken. This one’s a bummer.

Another school shooting. If only those middle-schoolers had all been packing heat. The world would be a safer place.

Tomorrow, see you again.

Because I have a very modest public profile as a writer, I get a lot of social-media connection requests from people I don’t actually know. Over time, I’ve developed a general rule: I accept nearly all friend requests on Facebook, followers on Twitter, whatever the hell they call it on Google Plus. And then I wait, and see what happens — what people post, how they use the platform in general, whether they feel the need to have a screaming bald eagle as a profile picture. If I like what I see, or feel neutral about it, I generally keep them around. If I don’t, I either bump them down several notches on the ladder, “hide” or just unfriend them.

They have to be pretty bad to be unfriended, but I was in a tetchy mood the other day, and unfriended someone I probably should have kept around. (Mood: VERY tetchy, come to think of it.) I did it because I kept seeing baldly inaccurate political posts in my feed, and it was one of those fuckitlifestooshortforthiscrap things. This time, I actually read one post, and followed the links all the way back. Here’s how one went:

OBAMACARE WILL ALLOW GOVERNMENT AGENTS TO ENTER YOUR HOME! linked to a slightly less hysterical post saying the same thing, which linked to a HHS website, which outlined? Anyone? Yes, a visiting-nurse service for patients who have difficulty traveling to a doctor — brand-new mothers, the elderly, the carless, etc. Those are the government agents. Nurses.

(I allowed one of these jackbooted thugs into my home after Kate was born. She told me I had a cute baby, and that breastfeeding would get easier.)

It seemed to crystalize something I’ve become increasingly aware of: No one reads anything anymore. And the social-media business model has this as its cornerstone. Just keep clicking, sheeple. Click, like and comment! Retweet!

Earlier this week, during the discussion of Yoffe’s rape column, attention fell on this sentence: “Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes.” Now, a reader with a room-temperature IQ could understand what she was saying here: That these perpetrators don’t hold a gun to a woman’s head, but keep refilling her glass. Nevertheless, this was a typical comment: “Someone needs to tell Emily Yoffe ALL rape is violent,” followed by the amen chorale. Don’t read. Forget comprehension. Just react!

Miley Cyrus, a woman who hardly speaks in Zen koans, gave an interview to Rolling Stone where she mentioned Detroit, and Detroit being as parochial as any tank town, the local media picked it up. The passage in question:

Miley’s transformation from America’s sweetheart into whatever the hell she is now kicked into high gear three years ago, when she went to Detroit to shoot a movie called LOL. “Detroit’s where I felt like I really grew up,” she says. “It was only for a summer, but that’s where I started going to clubs, where I got my first tattoo. Well, not my first tattoo, but my first without my mom’s consent. I got it on 8 Mile! I lied to the guy and told him I was 18. I got a heart on my finger and wore a Band-Aid for two months so my mom wouldn’t find out.”

Which a local TV station tacked onto a blatant traffic grab:

Miley Cyrus says she grew up in Detroit. How does that make you feel?…

Which prompted the usual responses, which ranged from “stupid bitch” to “she’s a liar.” And so a vapid pop star’s pedestrian observation on how she came of age was twisted into her somehow lying about an upbringing that’s been in every celebrity magazine in America, including Rolling Stone.

Nobody reads anything. Except you, of course. You’re reading this, and you understand it. Bless your heart.

So, bloggage:

This story cries out for satire, and maybe TBogg is up to the task, but man, just read this stuff:

James Hancock wanted to meet a woman who shared his core values. But when you’re a strict Objectivist, it can be a little tricky.

So he found a dating site catering to Ayn Rand aficionados. And he found one, and now they have…well, I guess you’d call it a marriage:

They now live with their 3-year-old daughter in North Walpole, N.H. Their dog, Frisco, is named for Francisco d’Anconia, the mining tycoon in “Atlas Shrugged.”

…Mr. Hancock says the couple’s shared Objectivist values ensure familial harmony. If their daughter doesn’t want to brush her teeth, they both agree that she has to do it. “There’s no back-and-forth or ‘well, just let her do it this one time,’ ” he says. “We know that if we don’t do this now, it’ll be worse later. So that’s logic and reason instead of just emotion and inconvenience.”

I don’t know how I missed Motivational Biden until now:

My new favorite person to see Tom & Lorenzo pick on is Allison Williams, daughter of Brian, co-star of “Girls.” She cultivates a sort of classic American/thoroughbred style that frequently comes across as boring. Or, as T-Lo put it, “She looks like a Chief of Surgery’s wife attending a hospital benefit.”

Attend the benefit of your choice this weekend, because it’s HERE.

OK, so I have to wonder if I’ve got some sort of tone-deaf thing going on here. You reality-check me:

Emily Yoffe wrote a column for Slate yesterday that I thought made sense, if via a stupid headline. College women: Stop getting drunk isn’t precisely what she was saying. Rather, to stop getting so drunk they are literally incapacitated. To stop binge drinking. To protect their bodies the same way they’d protect anything valuable — with prudence and common sense.

Well. It had hardly hit the floor before the outrage began, most of which boiled down to why not tell men not to rape, Emily? Huh? Why not start with the perpetrators? Sure. Because that totally works. So hey, men! Stop raping women. There were also the usual comments about Saudi Arabia and victim-blaming and stuff like this and stuff like that.

Meanwhile, I found passages like this:

Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.

…and this:

“I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.”

…and this:

“I’m not saying a woman is responsible for being sexually victimized,” says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. “But when your judgment is compromised, your risk is elevated of having sexual violence perpetrated against you.”

…made it pretty clear: If you’re assaulted while you’re drunk it’s not your fault. But why not improve your odds of not being assaulted?

Every so often we have a crime wave here in Grosse Pointe, where thieves target unlocked cars parked on the street and steal whatever they can. Sometimes they break windows to get in, but more often they’re looking for people who’ve left things unsecured. Of course, these thieves shouldn’t be entering cars. Unfortunately, they do. Locking your car improves your odds of being left alone.

So my question is: What am I reading wrong here? Anyone care to give it a shot? I have to send these things out for feedback from time to time, because I’m aware that, sitting alone in my little home office all day, I might, technically, be going mad.

Hope I’m not.

Today was sunny and mild, but by late afternoon cloudy, overcast and en route to Autumn in Earnest. Pizza for lunch, a few chocolate-covered peanuts for dessert, a nice catch-up with a former colleague, to whom I gave our American Girl dolls and associated stuff. My goal is to get as much crap out of the house by the new year, whether through donation, sale or dragging it to the curb. I get these bouts once in a while, but this one I’m following through on. The vast crap reduction project is a go.

Bloggage? Don’t got none today — I’m watching those Tigers. There are about 50 zillion stories to read about the last of the shutdown, and I should probably start making my way through ’em.

Arguing with a writer over what he should have written sort of defines “pointless.” That’s one reason I hold the speech-he-should-have-given column trope in low regard. And when we’re talking about Mitch Albom? That’s like Wendy barking at the mailman. The mail will arrive tomorrow. Sorry, Wendy.

But I have to say, this column — which, as bad Mitch columns go, is far from the worst — left me a little fish-mouthed for a while. The gist: Mitch is taking some time off in the midst of the biggest local sports story of the year to tend his charity in Haiti, where he and some of his volunteers watched game two of the American League Championship Series via laptop.

I think of what a talented writer, a Jon Carroll or Pete Dexter or Steve Lopez, could do with that material. It’s rich with possibilities — the contrast between grinding poverty and the luxurious details of American baseball; the tiny-planet angle, the weirdness of the game being beamed down into this dark spot on the map, under the eternal, indifferent stars; or maybe Mitch, well-established as a hater of computers and the internet, might admit to some second thoughts about his prejudices. Hell, give me enough time and I could think of a dozen more approaches that might turn this unusual occurrence into something people once looked to columnists to provide, a simple moment that illuminates an eternal truth, or just a good story, well-told.

Or, y’know, whatever.

But no. First comes self-promotion:

Many will remember where they were for the game. I will never forget. We had taken a crew of 23 volunteers — plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. — to aid in the reconstruction of the Have Faith Haiti Mission, run by a charity I helped start…

Next comes log-rolling:

Normally, we give up on the outside world. We have made these trips before (seven of them, thanks to Roger Penske and Pentastar Aviation, who donate the use of a plane).

Then comes more than a dozen paragraphs of the Hey, Didya See That Game school of sportswriting, where Mitch relates the key events in a contest already 48 hours old, then records his friends’ insightful responses: “Yes!” “Scherzer has this.” “It’s Detroit’s night.” Every so often, it’s like he rouses himself enough to remember yeah, right, the dateline on this sucker is Port-au-Prince and offers a detail:

I noticed a small lizard dart across the wall.

But there’s drama, oh yes there is, as when the laptop crashes at a key moment, but comes back in time to record David Ortiz’ grand slam, after which Mitch reveals the sort of sports acumen that justifies his salary — I knew it was over — and calls it a night.

Ladies and gentlemen, remember to tip your waitresses. The mailman has been driven from the door yet again.

On to the bloggage, then:

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the confederate flag-wavers in front of the White House Sunday:

It is the wisdom of the crowd that matters. The wisdom that marked Sunday’s crowd was the idea that the president “bows down to Allah” and needs to “put the Qu’ran down.” The wisdom that marked Sunday’s crowd was the notion that Obama was not the president of “the people” but the president of “his people.” The wisdom of Sunday’s crowd held that the police, doing their job, looked “like something out of Kenya.” It’s not so much that a man would fly a Confederate flag, as Jeff Goldberg notes, in front of the home of a black family. It’s that a crowd would allow him the comfort of doing it.

Three episodes in, it’s pretty clear that “Homeland” has jumped the shark. But it was fun to see Erik Dellums back in the saddle.

Rielle Hunter is sorry. So very, very sorry. And coincidentally (I’m sure), she has a new book out this week.

Wednesday dawns, the week advances, and we’re all 24 hours older.

It’s been a long day, with the sort of desk-bound screen-staring and maddening phone calling (the bank again). I salvaged it with a little gym time, but now I’m sitting here in a soggy bra, thinking I might go to bed soon and shower in the morning.

Sometimes, I just don’t have much to say. (Or I have a lot to say, but can’t say it. Like, about the bank.) Which means you might need some bloggage to get you through. I haz some.

Charles Pierce is quite good at towering rants, but this one might be a needle-pegger:

It is not merely unseemly, but positively obscene for people like Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, and the unspeakable Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods to use surviving World War II veterans to advance a political agenda that would make the lives of those veterans immeasurably worse. …How dare these idiots? Tailgunner Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, the constitooshunal skolar from Utah, and Ms. Palin. How dare they traffick in this manner of grave-robbing? They would all throw these veterans off Medicare, close the VA hospitals, bury the brave old men and women in substandard nursing homes rather than give an inch away of their indomitable ideology of entitled selfishness. Ted Cruz doesn’t think the government has a role in making the lives of these veterans easier. Mike Lee thinks the Founders wanted vets to starve. Sarah Palin doesn’t think, period, and is proud of it.

“60 Minutes” did a piece on Detroit Sunday. Frankly, it wasn’t very good. One always has to consider, when judging these things, that not everyone has the knowledge you do, and so, complaining that a piece is superficial sort of misses the point. I’ve seen “60 Minutes” only a handful of times in the past, what? 30 years? And it seems so, so tired — the aging correspondents with their towering self-esteem, the strolling long shots with the subject, all of it. But as disappointing as the segment was, this web add-on was awful. Glib, cliché-ridden, smug — the definition of parachute journalism. Argh.

So, maybe a palate-cleanser? T-Lo on Madonna. Who is apparently turning into Michael Jackson, only with more zippers. Those gloves!

Let’s try again tomorrow.

Not to appear ungrateful for the spectacular weekend weather — on Saturday, I found myself sitting in blazing sunshine, watching the boats go by on the Detroit River, wearing sleeveless linen — but we could use some rain. A mulch-don’t-rake fall lawn-care strategy only works if there’s enough rain to beat down all those shredded oak leaves to the earthworms, for whom they’re intended. Otherwise it just looks like leaf confetti.

On the other hand, who’s going to argue with 75 degrees in October? Not too many, that’s for sure.

And what a weekend it was. Dinner with friends, drinks with a friend, enough exercise to feel non-slothful, a new haircut. Shorter, because why the hell not? I’m still figuring out what it really wants to look like, but it no longer wanted to be the length it was. Nothing like a new haircut to welcome the fall. If it ever stops being summer.

Oh, and the Tigers won. (EDIT: Also, they lost.) Almost forgot about that, although I can assure you, no one here did.

So. We watched “Room 237” Friday night, new to Netflix, and recommended, even though I think it’s a rather flawed film. It’s about a number of batshit fanboys (no women, interestingly) of “The Shining,” who are convinced the film contains layers upon layers of deeper meaning than what’s commonly understood. Some of these are reasonable (the film is about the Holocaust) and some are insane (the film is Stanley Kubrick’s confession that he used his talents to help NASA fake the moon landing) and all are, at the very least, interesting.

Alan had less patience with it than I did, but we both found it both amusing and exasperating, and — as long as we’re looking for deeper meanings than the obvious — to really be about internet culture, and how it’s taken so many things and turned them into a colossal waste of time.

The bit about the red and yellow Volkswagens was funny, though. I have to watch “The Shining” again, now.

Some quick bloggage before I run a couple errands in the last of the afternoon:

Chuck Klosterman on “Room 237.” Good stuff.

Thomas Frank on the creativity industry, which is not particularly creative, and is, in fact, almost entirely wrong. When I say “the creativity industry,” I’m talking about the talkers — the people who write books and give TED talks on what’s allegedly this incredible creativity renaissance we’re allegedly experiencing, at the same time we’re stripping income streams from actual creative people and making it harder to make a living. Being creative, that is.

The Affordable Care Act signup website is a disaster, or so the NYT says. Has anyone here used it? How did it go?

Oh, and speaking of: Neil Steinberg finds Dan Savage’s defense of the ACA to be most persuasive.

And let’s hope the week goes well for all of us.