I believe I’ve mentioned that my husband has a new job at the paper. Alan’s the Detroit News auto editor now, which comes with new responsibilities, a laptop, a BlackBerry and the special perks an automotive journalist in Detroit enjoys, or as I’ve been putting it lately:

“When are you going to bring mama a big pimpin’ Escalade?”

The car companies keep a few sets of keys circulating through the newsrooms of the dailies and the trade papers, for reporters, critics and editors to test drive. One of our neighbors works at AutoWeek, and whenever their beige Camry is replaced in the driveway by something a little less beige and Camry-like, it’s a fair bet he’s enjoying the perks of the job. So last night I was out and about, and what do I come home to? A BIG PIMPIN’ ESCALADE. IN MY DRIVEWAY:

“You remembered my birthday!” I exclaimed, squealing over more than $70,000 of an $85,099 luxury SUV like the Midwestern girl I am. Then I commenced worrying. It’s so big we didn’t dare risk putting it in the garage overnight and having one of the bikes scratch its Black Ice paint job on the way in or out, so Alan tucked it into the second-most-secure parking space on the property. I’m sure the reason I woke up before 6 a.m. today was a nagging worry that we’d find the thing sitting on bricks this morning, or gone entirely.

But it’s fine. Now all I have to worry about is him getting carjacked on the way to work. One of our neighbors leases an Escalade every couple years, and both of fates described above — wheel theft and carjacking — have befallen them. The wheel theft came at daybreak one morning, and was accomplished by a crew of professionals who worked so fast they could probably find gainful employment with NASCAR. The theft was by two teenagers so young she thought they were kidding, until one lifted his shirt and showed her the gun in his waistband. And yes, you saw it first on “The Wire.”

It’s too bad we can’t take this behemoth on a road trip. You should see the back-seat entertainment system. Kate and I would hang back there, watching DVDs.

OK, then.

This ham-fisted p.o.s. was circulating a bit yesterday, Walter Russell Mead’s j’accuse against the baby-boom generation. I expect we’ll hear about a million more iterations of this before they lay the last of us in the ground, or, more likely, sprinkle our ashes in a sylvan glade somewhere, because we’re not into having our corpses pumped full of chemicals, man. Others with more time on their hands have handily disposed of this one, but all I have to say is, whaddaya mean “we,” white man?

Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.

Oh, shut up. I guess I missed the double-secret boomer briefings at which all this was laid out, but I also expect we’ll be paying for that Who song for a long time. As far as I’m concerned, much of the model for that which he describes, the sha-na-na-na-na-let’s-live-for-today mindset, was put in place by Grampa Reagan, and he was no more a baby boomer than I am an Escalade buyer. There are many, many of us who save for what we want, raise our children right, work hard and otherwise don’t expect much in the way of handouts. Mead himself writes:

What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity.

“There are many honorable individual exceptions,” yes, enough that the whole essay pretty much falls apart, especially when he tries to hang Jerry Sandusky on us, considering Sandusky (d.o.b. 1944) isn’t a boomer.

Speaking of which. Can this case get any more awful? “I shouldn’t have showered with those kids,” he says now. Really? Ya think? And this lawyer of his who thought this interview was a good idea? I’m speechless. I need to stop reading about this story. It’s making me too crazy.

You’ve already read this Charles Pierce jeremiad on Penn State by now, I expect, but just in case you haven’t, you should.

And now I get to edit a bunch of city council meeting copy.

I think it’s fair to say that whatever damage was done to Penn State University in recent days by the adults in charge, the cherry on the sundae was placed by its student body, members of which poured into the streets of State College last night to proclaim their anger that Grampa Joe was fired.

And that cherry was extracted from the bottle of maraschinos by the assembled nitwits of the media, who seemingly gasped as one when the representative of the school’s board of trustees announced last night that they’d found a shred of decency in their souls and done not just the right thing, but the only thing they could do in these circumstances. The press conference didn’t have the professional setup of a presidential one, i.e., the questioners weren’t mic’d, and there was only one camera. So I’m going on admittedly imperfect information, but I detected a challenging note to many of the questions, with such phrases as “resign with dignity” emerging from the murk.

If nothing else, this week has been instructive in many ways. You want to know how these things happen? Now you know. It also gives me a new appreciation of Myles Brand, the Indiana University president who gave the boot to Bobby Knight way back when. While no rioting was involved,* it was hardly a popular move, especially outside the university. And when it comes to IU basketball, and Penn State football, and most other college sports, it’s mostly outside the university. Thanks again to Sherri, who found this excellent essay earlier in the week, with this key passage:

…this is why college football evokes such extreme emotion, and this is why schools work so damn hard and often take ethical shortcuts to forge themselves into football powers: If they are successful, then the game serves as the lifelong bond between alums and townspeople and the university, thereby guaranteeing the institution’s self-preservation through donations and season-ticket sales and infusions into the local economy. It is a crass calculus, when you put it that way, which is why there will always be skeptics and there will always be those of us for whom college football is (other than our own families) the purest emotional attachment of our adulthood, and there will always be some of us who bound between those two poles.

I wonder if anyone inside the Penn State bubble has a sense of how the story is playing outside, how agog the rest of the country is. Which seems as good a time as any to direct you to #1 Party School, a “This American Life” episode about the drinking culture at Penn State. Definitely worth a listen; seek out the “play” button and let it roll while you do other things. It has to be said that the behavior described therein is not confined to Penn State; the drinking culture on college campuses is similar across the country, but at its worst at big schools like Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State, etc.

If you don’t have time for the whole hour, just listen to Act Four, in which the relationship between alcohol and college athletics is briefly examined. Graham Spanier makes an appearance, too.

So. Today is? November 10, 36 years after the cold-weather hurricane that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald, and 35 after Gordon Lightfoot’s famous one-take recording of his song about it. Today’s cold-weather hurricane is taking place in the Bering Sea, where they’re expecting the equivalent of a Category 3 storm, only a lot colder. I wonder where Sarah Palin is spending November. Wasilla? Or Arizona?

So, conventional wisdom says Rick Perry is out of it. We’ll see. Was it over when what’s-his-name bombed that place, I can’t think of it. Oh, hell — it’s on the tip of my tongue.

So late already? Time to get moving. Happy Thursday.

EDIT: * I’ve just been handed a bulletin in the form of an email from a longtime correspondent, to wit:

There was rioting involved when Knight was fired.

I know, because I rioted, and saw Brand burned in effigy on the lawn of his presidential home….

Said correspondent is now a learned scholar working on his doctorate at a top-drawer university. There is hope for all those punks who turned over the TV truck last night. That is all.

I got plenty of nothin’ today. Municipal election rewrites tapped me out this morning, so let’s make today an open thread, your call. But I nominate:

* The Paterno/Penn State scandal, still unwinding. A good NYT column on it makes the obvious point:

In the world of big-time college sports, (the term “scandal”) has been cheapened by overuse. If these allegations prove to be true — Sandusky has maintained his innocence — they’ll be a far cry from football players’ trading memorabilia for discounts on their tattoos.

A better comparison would be the sexual molestation scandals that rocked another insular, all-male institution, the Roman Catholic Church.

The parallels are too striking to ignore. A suspected predator who exploits his position to take advantage of his young charges. The trusting colleagues who don’t want to believe it — and so don’t.

Even confronted with convincing proof, they choose to protect their institution’s reputation. In the face of a moral imperative to act, there is silence.

We like to say “never again” in our society, right before it happens again.

* Elections elsewhere. As Kirk observed in yesterday’s comment thread on the Ohio returns, particularly as it pertains to the Issue 2 blowout, “A law that just required state employees to pay a certain percentage of their health insurance and pensions could have withstood a referendum, but those dumbasses had to over-reach and try to bust the unions.” Exactly. They overreached. Heady from their 2010 victories, convinced the world was backing them, or perhaps fearful they’d never get another chance, the GOP went all-in. And lost. Interesting portents for next year, I’d say.

And a person is not a person, no matter how small — at least in Mississippi.

And whatever else you like. See you back here tomorrow.

An unseasonably warm Election Day here in Michigan, with morning fog that’s in no hurry to leave. We had a similar fog period last November, about four days of murk that stayed all day and only thickened at night. All my east-side Detroit friends posted tweets and status updates about the weather, while the west-siders remarked on the bright sunshine they were enjoying over there. I had an errand one day that took me west, and coming back on the freeway, I could see the fog bank lurking ahead, and then I was in it, the lights went out, and it was back to London.

I guess this was a reminder that the east side is just a few feet lower in elevation. According to the usual unreliable source, i.e. Wikipedia, we’re at 577 feet, and Royal Oak, on the other side of Woodward, a lofty 663. The difference between the two? Fog.

I should live in San Francisco. Next lifetime.

I’m a little foggy myself this morning. This being a school holiday, I indulged myself in a little extra sleep, aided by my OTC sleep aid. The NYT noticed this on their Sunday Styles front the other day, one of those NYT ON IT stories they do from time to time. As usual, it was framed in such a way to be patronizing to women; sleep aids are the new “mother’s little helper,” etc. And also as usual, it was one duh statement after another:

Sleep-medicine practices are overwhelmingly dominated by female patients. Dr. Nancy Collop, director of the Emory Sleep Center in Atlanta, said three out of four insomnia patients at the clinic are women.

Duh.

Many believe that sleep deprivation among women has worsened. In the “Women and Sleep” study, 80 percent of women reported being just too stressed or worried to turn out the proverbial lights.

Duh.

Dr. Collop points to the persistent creep of technology into the after-hours, a time once reserved for physical and psychological winding down.

You’re kidding! Duh.

“My brain is just going, going, going,” said Erica Zidel, a mother and a founder of a baby-sitting company in Boston, who takes melatonin to fall asleep. “It’s so active that I can’t slow it down.”

And so on. For those of you keeping score at home, women (and yes, men too) are now expected to work full-time (and be grateful for whatever job they have, where they’re most likely working 30 percent harder than they did a decade ago), run the household, take responsibility for everyone’s laundry, cook a meal or 10 during the week, shop for groceries, “support” everyone and turn their constantly morphing to-do lists off at 11:05 p.m. for six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Maybe when monkeys fly out my butt.

Until then, I have my personal media criticism to keep me drowsy. It’s amazing to me how, on a fast-moving story like the Penn State scandal, newspapers manage to be both out of it and, in their continuing embrace of their hoary old customs, almost so far out they’re back in. Here’s the Harrisburg Patriot-News’ front page today (and if you’re seeing this on any day other than Nov. 8, you’re not going to see what I’m talking about — I’m using the Newseum’s today’s-front-pages site to link to). It’s their editorial calling for something that, on day three of this tawdry affair, seems like the bare minimum of decency — for both Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier to resign or be fired — and yet, it is presented in a way to put it on a par with the Magna Carta. The entire front page is all words, no photos, no graphics. BEHOLD THE POWER OF OUR RINGING CALL FOR JUSTICE, etc. The byline is the traditional one newspapers use in these cases: “by the Patriot-News editorial board,” which the average reader knows precisely nothing about. (My newspaper started putting bylines on editorials some years ago: “By Writer’s Name for the editorial board.” It was by far the most popular change they adopted, ever.)

WE SPEAK AS ONE, AND WIELD THE SWORD OF TRUTH, this page says. BOW DOWN BEFORE OUR GRAPHICS-FREE CONDEMNATION. READ THESE WORDS, AND TREMBLE. And so on. So I did. It’s only the university president who has to go immediately, the editorial board opined as one; Paterno can finish out the year “with the honor and admiration he has earned since taking over as head coach in 1966.” Oh. Well. It’s just a couple more games. I’m sure the retirement parties will be no fun at all.

OK, the hour is growing late, and I want to get in a bike ride before the rain comes, the wind changes and more seasonable temperatures arrive. Until then, don’t forget to vote.

EDIT: If you want to read something about the Penn State case written with the more flexible Fencing Foil of Truth, Lawyers, Guns and Money has been doing some nice work.

As yet another child sexual-abuse scandal begins to unwind, this one in State College, Pa., I find myself moved to ask:

What sort of person, upon entering a college locker room later in the evening and hearing “rhythmic, slapping sounds” he believed to be sexual activity, and who walks further into that locker room and sees a boy “whose age he believed to be 10 years old,” with his hands up against the wall and a man in his late 50s having vigorous anal intercourse with that boy — what sort of person immediately leaves the room, “distraught,” goes home to tell his father, and supposedly tells the head coach of the football program, but doesn’t go into specific detail, so that the coach later says he only heard the two were “showering together.” What sort of person does that, I ask you?

The reeling back, I understand. The brain does that, asks, did I really see that? But give it a few seconds, and it sinks in: I just saw an AARP-eligible adult fucking a 10-year-old. What do I do now? The fact this graduate assistant did nothing of consequence, this I find astonishing. This wasn’t a teenager, but a boy. This was rape by even the narrowest definition. Who doesn’t walk back in and break things up? And even if he had a reason to leave, who doesn’t call the police immediately? And if he had a reason not to do that, who then would tell others but somehow leave out the nature of the act he witnessed?

I just don’t believe it. If Penn State football coach Joe Paterno claims he was told the boy and his former defensive coordinator were merely “showering together,” I say he’s lying. And if he isn’t lying, he’s taffy-headed. And if Penn State doesn’t have a row of heads — taffy, silver-haired and otherwise — on pikes by the end of the week, then I guess we have a situation like that Stephen Colbert quote people keep passing along, which I will modify to suit: That either we accept that criminal sexual abuse of children is wrong and we are morally and legally obligated to stop it whenever we can, or just admit that when it conflicts with the interests of the most powerful church in the world, or a college football program, we simply don’t want to do it.

What’s most disgusting is the fact the boy in this case was one the alleged perp, Jerry Sandusky, found through his special charity to help “at-risk” kids. I’ll say they’re at risk. And the thing is? Predators know this, and cut kids like this out of the herd like jackals. I recall a case in Fort Wayne, a lawyer of extremely minor reputation who would contribute columns to our op-ed page. He owned rental property, and one day he put aggressive moves on the daughter of one of his Section 8 tenants, pushing her against a wall and feeling her up. Fortunately, the girl and her mother refused to be cowed by this stuffed shirt, called the law and got his ass charged.

If you want to know why youth organizations now have to have elaborate, creepy policies regarding contact between teachers/counselors/coaches and the young people they serve, now you know. Thank Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, et al.

OK, then. Eastern Standard Time arrived this weekend with the usual fun of an extra 60 whole minutes of sleep, followed by nightfall at dinnertime, and friends? Not ready for that yet.

Do we have any interesting bloggage? Let’s see…

Dahlia Lithwick hardly ever writes a lousy column, but this one, about Herman Cain and sexual harassment in general, is particularly good. And in keeping with today’s rancid theme, I might add.

If you’re young, chances are you’re worse off financially, in comparison to your elders, than any time, ever.

Gee, can you tell I hate Mondays? So have a Monday, then. I’m off to have mine.

My initiation into e-books is more or less complete; I have a small library, and I’m starting to get a sense of how the format suits, and doesn’t suit, my reading habits. I can tell you one thing it’s great for: Reading in the dark, which is useful when, for example, you’ve accompanied your kid to the Pop Punk’s Not Dead tour at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. Since I got my iPad, I’ve come to appreciate the ability to find a table for one, screw in my earplugs and get lost in my reading — or Angry Birds — while ignoring the clamor onstage.

Another is to save you a trip to the store. I scheduled an interview with a local author three days hence, then downloaded her novel in less time than it took me to move from desk to chaise to start reading the thing.

And, as if we needed another, it gives buyers of Apple products another reason to wallow in smug superiority.

I have two e-book apps on my device — Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s own iBooks. With the Kindle (most titles available for $9.99) app, pages slide by with a touch as though they were on a conveyer belt. In iBooks ($14.99), you get this cool page-turning effect:

(That’s Roy Edroso’s self-published “Morgue for Whores,” by the way — $2.99.) Note the ghostly type bleed-through from the previous page, and yes, that’s the actual backward text of the page. Note around the edges of the frame, where you see a book cover. Note the shadow cast by the turning page. Note the edges of the unread pages.

You can highlight in both formats. Here’s Kindle’s:

Perfectly fine. But here’s iBooks:

The edges of the yellow are ragged, the way they would be if you’d used a real highlighter. And yes, I checked — it’s random. Another highlight will be ragged in a different way.

There are two ways to look at these details. First way: And for this I’m paying $5 more? Are you kidding me?

Second way: If they’re paying attention to this sort of thing, everything you can’t see will be equally fussed over. Here’s hoping.

I leave you with a detail from the Calendar app:

Note the remnants of the previous “pages.” (If I showed you the rest of the page, you’d see that the last time I sync’d all my calendars, it duplicated most events. Which goes to show you someone needs to spend more time under the hood with the code and less fussing over torn pages.)

OK, then. Sweet, sweet Friday, how I welcome your sun-drenched dawn. Here’s hoping I can get to the gym today, so I can spend tomorrow wallowing in stiffness and pain. Bloggage?

One of my Facebook friends directs me to Michigan Senate Bill 821, recently passed by the legislature. Folks, you want to know how nitpicking regulations get that way? Here’s how, from the House Legislative Analysis Section:

Ever since the smoking ban went into effect May 1, 2010, bowling centers have reported an increased number of bowlers wearing bowling shoes when they go outside to smoke. Bowling shoes are not like regular shoes. They have a special sole that allows a bowler to slide along the alley when releasing the bowling ball. If foreign substances are picked up on the sole when a bowler goes outside, the shoe can stick or have no traction, a dangerous situation for a person in the act of throwing a heavy bowling ball down an alley.

Since the implementation of the indoor smoking ban, lawsuits against bowling centers for slip and falls have increased – reportedly, about 30-40 actions have been filed since last year. Proprietors of bowling centers are concerned that their livelihoods may be threatened by dangerous conditions created by the bowlers themselves. Legislation has been offered to create protection from liability for bowling center operators that clearly communicate to their patrons the inherent danger of bowling with bowling shoes that have been worn outside.

Indemnification from personal-injury lawsuits for bowling-alley owners — your government (mine, anyway) at work. It passed yesterday.

The lead singer of GWAR was found dead on the tour bus yesterday. No cause of death has been reported, but judging from the photo? My money’s on embarrassment.

Have to hustle to my morning meeting. Have a great weekend. November, where did you come from?

Read a fascinating story overnight, about corporate tax rates. Although the rate is allegedly 35 percent — AND CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S THAT HIGH? WHAT IS THIS, THE SOVIET UNION? — it should not surprise you to know that many companies pay far less, and some collect fat…well, you can’t exactly call them refunds, as there was nothing paid to be refunded in the first place. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” perhaps.

Here’s a chart. I notice that many of the biggest refunders are utilities, including my own, DTE Energy. I’d imagine that comes from exploiting energy policy that rewards some sources of power over others. Here’s a jaw-dropper, however:

The report said that many other companies took advantage of tax breaks that favor certain industries, including drilling for oil and gas, making video games, building NASCAR racetracks, producing ethanol, and making movies.

Video games, movies and NASCAR. If you wonder why lobbyists are as rich as Midas, wonder no more.

Rick Snyder, the new governor of Michigan, drastically reduced our film tax credits, on the grounds that governments shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” for special treatment. (Then he turned around and top-downed a bunch of other ideas and “best practices,” which goes to show we all have a different idea of what constitutes a winner and a loser.)

What I don’t know about tax policy could fill the Grand Canyon, but I do know I studied the wrong thing in college. A lawyer friend of mine likes to say he wouldn’t trade his B.A. in economics for anything, that no single field of study explains the world as well as econ. I’d say he’s right.

So what’s your major, anyway?

I have an interview to do in 45 minutes, and I intend to ride my bike to it, because what’s the point of doing hyperlocal journalism if you can’t do hyperlocal transportation along the way. I haven’t been doing as much cycling as I usually do in the fall, but that’s to be expected, considering the near-constant rain we’ve been having. I have to remind myself to be alert to autumnal cycling hazards; one year in Fort Wayne I nearly came to ruin after thoughtlessly riding fast under an aesculus glabra tree that had dropped its fruit all over the Rivergreenway. I use the Latin name so I don’t wreck the punchline: It would be ironic indeed for an Ohio native to be felled by a buckeye.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Mitch Albom, infamous crafter of over-the-top obituaries, stays his hand (mostly) and does one I actually enjoyed reading — about his piano teacher. It’s good because he mostly keeps himself out of it, although it has enough head-smacking phrases for a few winces; the man’s cancer battle had “gone to a minor key,” not to mention this entire paragraph:

Sing a song of Matt Michaels. Make it sweet and melodic as the best jazz tune, make it funny and smart and a little whimsical, a trill note here or there. Make it smoky and coffee-stained and gently inspiring to anyone who hears it. The old expression goes, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but that is false. Sometimes, those who can do teach anyhow, and the world is better for it.

Ugh. But the guy left behind a million stories, and Mitch wrangled a few of them. Kate’s wonderful bass teacher gets to tell one, so there’s that.

Mark my words: At some point in the near or distant future, Kim Kardashian is going to claim her whole joke of a marriage was planned for just this reason.

Jim at Sweet Juniper’s other kid — that would be “Juniper” — was a ghost for Halloween. But not a sheet ghost.

My phone just alerted me that it’s time to head out. The weekend is drawing so, so near, I can almost taste it.

“Patchy dense fog,” the guy on the radio said this morning. I guess they can’t say “lovely wisps of water vapor will cling to low-lying areas, including creek bottoms and golf courses, catching the early morning light in opaque streaks of loveliness that remind us of the dying of the season,” but that’s what it looked like as I drove Kate to school this morning. I’m not supposed to drive the morning shift, but as I said yesterday, it’s good to get out of your rut from time to time. Sometimes you see the morning light in new ways.

Then I came home and read this story, from AnnArbor.com, which replaced the daily newspaper there a few years back, and discovered I’m the same old grump. On just one readthrough, I spotted facts repeated in adjacent paragraphs, the governor’s name misspelled and windy quotes that needed a trim. Argh:

Dennis says, if passed, the bill would be an insurmountable blow to U-M.

“Surmount” and its variants apply to obstacles and other things you have to get over or around, not blows, even figurative ones. I’m sure two or three more reads would turn up more fat and gas, but editing brave new experiments in journalism isn’t my job. (Well, yes it is, but not this one.) Point these things out to people who aren’t in the journo-biz, and they look at you funny, but dammit, EDITING MATTERS. Proper use of quotes matters a lot. This is how you don’t do it:

“I am concerned for the university as a whole,” Dennis said. “It would be a really damaging blow to the university’s reputation as a fair and humane employer. I think it would cause us to lose faculty and never get them back.”

“It would just be tragic for the university,” he added.

I tell my students: Avoid using quotes to carry information. Use them to comment on the information. They are the pinpoint spotlights of storytelling, drawing your eye to important or interesting facts. The first and last lines of that four-sentence quote are unnecessary. In a squeeze, so is the second one.

Everybody loves the last scene of “A River Runs Through It,” but my favorite is the Zen writing lesson:

NARRATOR: Each weekday, while my father worked on his Sunday sermon, I attended the school of the Reverend Maclean. He taught nothing but reading and writing. And being a Scot, believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.

REV. MACLEAN: Good. Now throw it away.

Throw it away! Now that’s a man who knows the value of words on paper. Every so often a group of Buddhist monks show up at the Allen County Public Library and spend several days making a sand mandala in one of the public spaces, after which it is poured into the river. That’s all we do, although newspaper people have the added thrill of knowing their words are now lining my rabbit cage.

Let’s hop quick to the bloggage, so I can get a workout in today:

The Onion proves, once again, that it is America’s truly indispensable news source:

A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Northeast and Midwest.

The latest from Chest magazine (yes, it exists): Your blue jeans may have killed Turkish garment workers. Have a nice day!

One for Connie, Beth and the rest of you librarians and archivists, via MMJeff, a library mystery that reminds me, a little bit, of the guy who leaves cognac and roses on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave every year.

Jon Corzine, financial genius, nearly bails out of the company he ruined with a measly $12 million severance package. I can’t stand it.

Happy Tuesday to all.

This fall has been maddening, mainly because of changes in everyone’s lives that are screwing up all my attempts to get a handle on things, order being the only thing that gives me a modicum of peace of mind in this crazy world full of uncertainty, crazy Republicans and a freelance income stream. Kate started high school, where the bell rings 20 minutes earlier than it did in middle school, meaning earlier mornings. Alan started a new job, shifting from a night shift to days. There are new after-school activities, new friends, new everything, and just when I think it’s settled in, something else comes up.

Plus, I’m still working until 1 a.m. every weeknight, which means I don’t get to sleep until 1:30, which means even more sleep deprivation, the Grump-o-Meter rising through the week until today it actually shorted out. I awoke to a clamorous house before 7 a.m. — Alan shepherding an earnings story onto the web from our kitchen table, Kate with her usual teenage grooming rituals — and actually felt calm. I think it was the collapse of will, a certain caving-in of the belief that I will ever again have a rewarding job that pays a decent salary, with a 401K, a paid vacation and a more or less normal schedule. I will never again get more than five hours of rest in a night, except on weekends. And year will pile upon year, and then I’ll be dead. Om.

Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I’m done cooking for the week. Roast chicken Saturday, meat loaf Sunday, baked ziti Monday and pot roast last night. (Really good pot roast. I’m the only one who likes it, which suggests a certain hostility in adding it to the weekly menu, but if you don’t like this pot roast, there is something wrong with you.) There are plenty of leftovers, and if anyone dares to look me in the face and ask what’s for dinner, I’ll jerk my thumb in the direction of the refrigerator and bark, “Microwave.”

Oh, I’m just grousing. I’m gearing up for an R&R weekend day after tomorrow, after which everything will smooth out for a while.

But now I have to head down to campus, for an internship fair. We have a table and a banner for our little hyperlocal website, although if I were being honest, I’d substitute one reading CHANGE YOUR MAJOR.

I have a little bloggage today:

Tony Fadell is a graduate of Grosse Pointe South High School, and is generally called the inventor of the iPod, although obviously that other guy had a lot to do with it, too. He left Apple a couple years ago and formed a new startup, about to unveil its first product — a programmable thermostat that’s as beautiful, and as easy to use, as an iPod. (Only a native of the frozen Midwest would see the utility of such a thing. My allegedly programmable thermostat is a steaming piece of crap, and should have been smashed in the driveway with a sledgehammer long ago.) The bad news: It costs as much as a month of gas heat. Still: WANT.

Jon Stewart, Pat Robertson, the GOP field: Comedy gold.

Must run.

Roger Ebert grades on the curve, and by genre, which can sometimes surprise the novice reader, perhaps when flashy trash like “Point Break” gets three and a half stars. (The fact that movie was released in 1991 and I still remember its star rating should tell you something about how personally I take shit like this.) He’s been tough on Steven Soderbergh, like a parent disappointed that a child is not working up to his potential. One of my fondest movie memories was the year we got eight inches of snow on Christmas eve, scuttling our holiday driving plans, and leaving me to snuggle under Kate’s brand-new sleeping bag on the couch and watch “Ocean’s 11” on HBO, which I enjoyed immensely as a perfect little soap bubble of a summer movie. Ebert gave it three stars, and this dismissal: “I enjoyed it. It didn’t shake me up and I wasn’t much involved, but I liked it as a five-finger exercise. Now it’s time for Soderbergh to get back to work.”

He was similarly sort of meh about “Contagion,” which Kate and I saw last weekend and I loved. I think it’s because I can no longer suspend disbelief to watch the vast majority of thrillers; I have to believe in paranormal activity, or exorcism, or that women walk into creepy dark houses in the dead of night, or that cars can jump off freeways and land in drivable condition, or explosions can be outrun, or whatever.

But “Contagion” thrills by being fictional but absolutely realistic and utterly believable, which means I was well and truly freaked out. A particularly nasty flu virus, trailing central nervous system complications, gets into one woman, who infects three continents in one night of business socializing in Asia, and things go downhill from there. Social disintegration is one of those things I sometimes think about as a large-metro-area resident, although we should all think about it. Fact: Three months before the Y2K milestone, a large water main broke in Fort Wayne, disrupting water service to a big chunk of the north side. Within hours, residents were shoving one another in grocery aisles, fighting over the bottled water. Northeast Indiana has a wide streak of homespun paranoia, but I thought that was a remarkable turn of events for a place that’s generally friendly and neighborly.

We all know what happened during Katrina. Does anybody think a killer flu wouldn’t have the same effect?

Anyway, if you liked the “Traffic” part of Soderbergh’s back catalog, you’ll like “Contagion.” Nothing like watching a scene of American corpses being shoveled into mass graves to light up an October evening. I should also note this is the second Soderbergh film in my memory to feature a blogger as the bad guy. Not the bad guy — that would give them too much credit and screen time — but as a certain type of bottom-feeding sleazebag scuttling through society’s basement. “Blogging is graffiti with punctuation,” one character tells another. Hey, I resemble that remark. But I still really liked “Contagion.”

I was rolling through town yesterday, doing this and that, listening to my local NPR station, when I heard a soundbite from the Sunday chatfests, Michele Bachmann bringing the Krazy:

“I believe that Iraq should reimburse the United States fully for the amount of money that we have spent to liberate these people,” said Rep. Bachmann in an appearance Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” …“We are there as the nation that liberated these people,” she said. “And that’s the thanks that the United States is getting? After 4,400 lives were expended and over $800 billion? And so on the way out, we are being kicked out of the country? I think this is absolutely outrageous.”

You know what I think? I think Bachmann should change her name to Andrew Dice Clay and hit the comedy circuit. Stupid, offensive, thuddingly unfunny — who would even notice the difference from the original?

“These people,” she says. There must be a formal term for that form of address — the direct accusative, perhaps. “You people” is the more common form; remember when Ross Perot got raked over that one? He was speaking to a largely black audience, and said something like, “And who pays the most when that happens? You people.” Utterly unjustified, that charge, and taken entirely out of context. If he’d said “you guys,” no one would have even noticed. I recall the incident mainly because it was the day one of my lemon-faced, right-wing colleagues made a truly funny newsroom quip about it:

“See, if he’d said, ‘People of you,’ he’d have been fine.”

OK, time to get moving on what promises to be a ridiculously busy day, but not in a bad way, if that makes any sense. How about some bloggage:

Here’s a little something for my homosexual friends. And everyone else who enjoys a good barn-dance song.

Here’s something I wrote for a local public-policy magazine. It promises to be of interest to approximately .02 percent of you — Michigan teacher contract negotiations and education funding, whoo — but click on it anyway, so they throw me another assignment.

New York magazine is looking at food television all week. In the opening installment, Adam Platt writes:

Back in the distant, quaintly mannered era of Jacques Pépin and Julia Child, cooking shows were a guilty pleasure, enjoyed by a handful of high-minded home cooks and the occasional obsessive, fatso schoolboy (like me). But in the last fifteen years, that equation has dramatically flipped. It’s the non-cooks now who tune in to see Emeril Lagasse’s latest recipe, then rush out by the millions to purchase the latest signature frying pan endorsed by Bobby Flay.

Yes, I’d agree with that, because the target market for designer cookware is almost entirely non-cooks. Real cooks pick it up at their garage sales a few years later.

It’s about to rain, and I have to take out the trash. Happy Tuesday to all.