The new biography of Steve Jobs confirms what was already pretty well known about the pancreatic cancer that killed him earlier this month. That is, that the man widely hailed as a genius did a pretty dumb thing when diagnosed with cancer in 2003 — he denied he had it.

Or rather, he denied he had anything serious enough to need treatment with serious medicine. Rather:

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.

Later, Jobs did turn to Western medicine to fight his cancer. But from the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, when he finally had surgery, he dithered. Everything we know about cancer stresses early detection and treatment as key to long-term survival. So it’s not a leap to conclude that Jobs may have acupunctured himself into an early grave.

It’s unclear whether Jobs thought acupuncture and juice were a real treatment, or if something else was going on in his famously intelligent head. He wouldn’t be the first person who, when faced with a deadly threat in the prime of his life, simply refused to see it as such. In the world Jobs lives in, there’s certainly no shortage of this sort of thinking, and California’s reputation as the center of it is well-earned.

My doctor friend Frank and I would occasionally bat this ball around over beers. Why were some people so ready to believe practitioners of quackery like iridology, Reiki and at least some chiropractic — yes, I think it can be effective for back and neck pain, but asthma? Please — and not their doctors? Why is a guy who went to the Colon Cleanse Academy more believable than one who interned at Johns Hopkins? We ran down the list of million reasons, but Frank, unlike most MDs, was always willing to put a big part of the blame on doctors themselves, the most visible actors in the insane ongoing stage play of American health care. They helped build their own prison, then complained the view was obscured by iron bars. Doctors are, speaking generally, very smart control freaks (like Steve Jobs, come to think of it), and patients frequently are not. After the thousandth emphysema patient who refuses to quit smoking but still complains of symptoms, it’s easy for a doctor to get high-handed, and that arrogance can seep into interactions with all patients. Pretty soon, you are the doc whose patients desert him for a nutritionist. And you have lots of company.

“Doctors like to complain about the patient who comes in with a sheaf of printouts from the internet,” he would say. “But that patient is the one who is taking responsibility for their own health. It’s all in how you look at it.”

In some ways, knowing Jobs was one of those patients humanizes him as much as his other widely reported flaws. Life is a terminal disease, after all.

The Huffington Post got their hands on an early copy, too. This is the story they pulled from it:

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Yes, regulations and unnecessary costs, like federal laws on how hard you can whip your workforce, and how many pollutants you may dump into the soil and waterways and air around your factory. I hate to say it two days in a row, but that’s f’ing rich. Yes, Jobs was “prickly,” the root of which is “prick.”

A pivot into the bloggage, and then I’m on to other things:

When I was younger, and would fantasize about exchanging faces with other women in the world, one who always ended up on my top-five list was Charlotte Rampling. Those amazing cheekbones. Those incredible, hooded eyes. That jawline. So beautiful. I saw a trailer for a new documentary about her yesterday. My oh my, but she’s gotten old. (Still looks great. It’s the bone structure.) I have a feeling that of all the women of a certain age who say they’ve never had work done, she is telling the truth.

Marco Rubio, truth-stretcher.

I agree with James Fallows: Good for WDAV, an NPR station that for once acted with common sense when considering the after-hours work of one of its employees.

A morning’s worth of work to do, and then I’m going to rake leaves. Have a great weekend.

Good lord, but the escaped-animal story gets worse and worse. The numbers are simply appalling — 18 Bengal tigers? There are only about 3,000 left in the wild. Lions are no big loss in that regard (they breed prodigiously in and out of captivity, and are known to get it on through chain-link fences, if need be), but the bears, they hurt my soul. All a grizzly bear wants is a few thousand acres of wild country to go be ursine in, and the thought of one living in a goddamn cage in Muskingum County, only to be dispatched by a sheriff’s deputy, is almost too much to deal with.

I’m declining to read any more idiot comments about the police actions, as well. Even NPR asked, “Why didn’t you tranquilize them?” The sheriff, who’d probably given about 2,000 interviews yesterday, said, “Because we don’t carry tranquilizer guns.” Good answer. Even the Columbus Zoo people, who do carry them, said the job was nearly impossible, from trying to estimate a correct dosage without knowing much more about their quarry other than its species, to the trickier matter of actually hitting one, in the dark, in the rain, in a stressful situation. Evidently the one instance in which they tried to dart a tiger went awry when the tiger responded by turning on the vet, which meant that one had to go, too.

We forget how, on “Wild Kingdom,” the animal runs for a while with the dart hanging out of its butt. Imagine one running into a dark woods. Imagine being the one going in after it. Then stop talking about how they should have just tranquilized those poor beasts. Here’s a comment from the New York magazine site:

How long would it have taken to helicopter wild animal specialists and tranquilizer guns from cleveland or cincinatti, whichever is closer?

Very cinematic image, that. Get some wild-animal specialists — whose numbers I keep in my Rolodex — and chopper ’em in! I see James Franco and Mark Ruffalo, clad in safari grunge, standing on the helipad in Cleveland or Cincinnati — whichever is closer! — with their duffels, ready for the chopper to carry them into the wilds of Muskingum County where, in the middle of the night, they will use their night-vision scopes to, first, identify the beasts, and then expertly shoot them with tranquilizer. From a helicopter.

PILOT: Dammit, I’m telling you, this is too low! I could lose my license!
CHIP SUDBURY, WILDLIFE EXPERT: Just get me a little closer! Do it!

I also note that the city I was raised in, now grown to Ohio’s largest, is still being forgotten. People who’ve never been to Ohio know two cities: Cleveland and Cincinnati (which they can never spell). And that’s it.

Jack Hanna, the emeritus Columbus Zoo director who was widely quoted yesterday, has done more for that institution than any other single person. At the same time, I remember many puffy stories about how he raised many of the zoo animals in his own home, including a tiger, who slept next to his bed for midnight feedings. The parks and rec director, Mel Dodge, raised many of the zoo’s lions that way, too, keeping them as pets until they got too big. I can’t recall the justification for this; maybe it was to acclimate them early to humans, to make them easier to handle? (I do recall the time I was leaving downtown around quittin’ time, gazing emptily at the car in front of me at a light, when a baby lion’s head popped up from the back seat and the cat climbed onto the back deck. Oh, right, I thought — Mel Dodge.) I’m not saying this was bad or irresponsible, but the animals were so cute, and the coverage so unquestioning, that I wonder how many people read it and thought, “I could do that, too.”

Then, as always, there is the Detroit Way:

Which seems as good a pivot point as any to transition to the local angle. May I just ask, in the name of reason and whatever passes for journalistic standards these days, WTF makes Ted Nugent the go-to party for reaction? Not only does he have nothing to do with the story, his only tangential connection is, what? That he, too, shoots guns at animals? Wonderful. He calls it a “downright tragedy” for people to keep wild animals in captivity, to which I reply, well, that is f’in’ rich:

In 1970, Ted Nugent began accumulating wild Michigan hunting ground. That land is now known as SUNRIZE ACRES! This sportsman’s dream now contains 340 acres of perfect big game habitat, rich with wildlife and the Spirit of the Wild. Managed for optimum health and indigenous bio-diversity, Sunrize Acres is home to world-class trophy whitetail deer, wild boar, American buffalo and various exotics.

P.S. It is fenced.

Also, escapes from facilities like this are the reason one of Michigan’s biggest backcountry problems is feral swine. Which the Nuge claims don’t exist.

OK, then. No real bloggage today, mainly because, with Moammar What’s-his-face dead, I’m going to go outside and fire our guns into the air.

Happy Thursday. Watch out for roaming monkeys.

Don’t miss this fascinating blog post by the WashPost’s Ezra Klein, in my native state for some sort of Cleveland Clinic event, about how that respected health-care institution pulled off this miracle:

With 40,000 employees, the clinic is the second-largest employer in Ohio. Like most employers, it struggles to contain health-care costs. But according to Michael Roizen, the clinic’s director of wellness, over the past seven years a series of reforms instituted by the clinic’s chief executive officer, Delos Cosgrove, slowed and then arrested the growth in employee health-care costs at the clinic. This year, inflation-adjusted spending might actually fall — an all but unprecedented achievement in employer-based insurance.

The clinic took a look at grim reality — 70 percent of health-care costs are connected to smoking, poor eating habits, lack of exercise and stress — and reacted accordingly.

“We want to make it easy for you to do healthy things and hard for you to do unhealthy things,” (the clinic’s director of wellness) said.

Smokers were first banished from campus, then from the work force. (Yes, even doctors were fired for smoking on campus.) The hospital’s food services stopped offering deep-fried and trans-fat options. This part was particularly interesting:

That left fitness and stress relief. The first step was easy: Offer free fitness and stress-management classes. But the clinic still had to get its employees to attend. So they reversed the normal calculus. Usually, you have to pay to hit the gym or attend a yoga class. If you work for the Cleveland Clinic, you have to pay if you don’t.

And so on. But guess what? It worked. Workers are thinner, have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and barely 6 percent are still smoking. But, as Klein points out, a hospital can get away with this, claiming that projecting a message of wellness, top to bottom, is part of their core mission. Could General Motors? Hmm.

Personally, I’d love to work for an employer that picks up my gym membership, or provides one on site, where the vending machines and cafeteria don’t dispense swill, where smoking isn’t even permitted in the parking lot. But my wellness support looks like nanny-statism to others, and Big Healthy Brother to someone else.

I hear about things like this, and I think about World War II, in which national solidarity was the rule, and we could accomplish anything, and did. But that was only for four years. If the campaign against global fascism had taken as long as the war on terror, I doubt we’d still be happily practicing blackout drills and volunteering for scrap-metal drives. But with the right sort of motivation and a certain take-it-or-leave-it push from behind, we really can accomplish great things.

Here’s something else I read the other day that I found fascinating: Do you know how motorists in the Netherlands open their driver’s-side doors? Think about it. Like almost every driver in this country, when you’re preparing to get out of your car, you probably reach for the door latch with your left hand. I do, certainly. But virtually everyone in the Netherlands gets around on bicycles when they can, and motorists and cyclists must find a way to co-exist on the same roads. Cyclists everywhere know to exercise extreme caution when riding close to a line of parked cars, keeping an eye out for the so-called door-swing incident. Getting doored can shut out your lights quick, and in worst-case scenarios, send you sprawling into the path of traffic with nothing but your ribcage to protect your internal organs. When you’re riding, you always remember that the vast majority of American motorists open doors heedlessly once they’re parked.

But in the Netherlands, drivers are trained to open their doors with their right hands, never their left. Reaching across your body rotates your torso just enough to put your rear-view mirror in your line of sight. It requires you to consider what’s coming up behind you.

I wonder why so many initiatives in this country that ask us to consider the general welfare of others — whether it’s the employer who picks up our health insurance costs or the man on the bicycle — is greeted with a scowl, a shrug and “It’s a free country.”

Y’all think on that today, or maybe you’d rather discuss the OMG story out of central Ohio yesterday, with a great OMG headline: Posse hunts down wild animals on lam. (Kirk, I know space is a consideration in headline-writing, but I really missed the “the” in that one.) Hey Martha, here’s a story for you:

ZANESVILLE, Ohio — Dozens of wild animals — from bears to lions to wolves — were running loose in Muskingum County yesterday, apparently set free from their cages.

Meanwhile, the man who owned the animals was found dead on the wildlife preserve that he ran, authorities said.

The sheriff’s department is roaming the countryside with a shoot-to-kill order, schools have been closed, residents are being warned to stay inside (to avoid the deputies as much as the bears, I’d think) and by the end of this, a Columbus TV station helicopter will crash and burn. Muskingum County is a pretty rural place, full of deer hunters, and my guess is one will shoot another very soon, if they haven’t already. My sister, monitoring the situation from suburban Columbus, says the sheriff has already displayed the amusing accent of almost-Appalachia in his TV standups, talking about going after those “wuffs,” i.e., the doglike creature known as canis lupus.

And no, no one knows what happened to the owner. My guess is, it’s a suicide/liberation, although I’m sure homicide is a strong possibility, too. The second-day story will surely be how Ohio’s lax laws allow yahoos like this to keep wild zoos on private property. (Scowl, shrug, “It’s a free country.”) I recall visiting one of these during my time as a reporter there, a place down in the Hocking Hills run by two stoners who took in retired circus animals, drug dealers’ pet ocelots and other exotics. Their tiger-feeding procedure was for one to enter the cage with the meat while the other stood outside with a .357 Magnum, in case of emergencies.

I assume one or both has been eaten by the big cats by now or, more likely, gone broke feeding them.

As is usually the case in these incidents, I feel worse for the bears than I do the people. Who wouldn’t?

OK, it’s an office-hours day and I still have a story to write before I head out. Have a swell Wednesday, all. Once we’re over the hump, it’s smooth sailing into the weekend.

I think Halloween is nailed down, costume-wise: Riding breeches and tall boots, men’s formal shirt (the kind with pleats and studs and thank you, Salvation Army, for providing one already cleaned and pressed), some sort of ascot/tie, my black tail coat and the rabbit mask, which arrived yesterday. Alan’s plague-doctor getup is also ready to go, so if you’re going to The Initiation, wave to the man all in black, escorting the sexually threatening rabbit.

Just checked my old tack trunk. Why yes, my spurs and riding crop are right where I left them. Oh, this should be a blast. I’m told there will be burlesque and sideshow-style geekery on every stage, another one of those odd hipster subcultures that seemingly came from nowhere. Roxi Dlite has been a Theatre Bizarre regular, and was one of the first practitioners of neo-burlesque I saw outside of late-night HBO. I totally get the idea — reclaim striptease from the evil pole-dancers who ruined it. (Striptease : pole dancing :: boxing : mixed martial arts.) I’m just wondering who decided it needed to be done, and how it caught on. New-style burley-Q girls are more likely to live in the body God gave them, and while toned and fit, don’t diet away that last layer of subcutaneous fat that separates men from women.

The geekery I trace back to the Jim Rose Circus, which I first spotted in the ’90s, when they proudly restored the circus sideshow to its former, transgressive, step-right-up glory. I remember attending an actual freak show at the Ohio State Fair as a teenager, watching people with copious facial tumors tell their stories of shame and ostracism, among other things. It seemed wrong then, it seems wrong now, but hey — watch a guy hang a 25-pound weight from his scrotum? That’s entertainment!

Here’s an interview with John Dunivant, the creative force behind Theatre Bizarre, from our local public-radio station. His dream is to someday make a living from his art, and he came close for a while, working on film sets, but the loss of tax incentives put the kibosh on that. Well, at least it’s cheap to live here.

As the hour is drawing late, a quick skip to bloggage:

Today’s OID story is a humdinger, although today the D stands for Downriver, a particular subsection of the Detroit Metro, and once you hear the story you’ll know just what I’m talking about:

Brownstown Township— A Downriver man who knew he was too drunk to drive bragged to gas station attendants that he had a designated driver — his 9-year-old daughter — who ferried him to the station and would drive him home.

Soon after, 39-year-old Shawn Weimer was arrested with his young daughter, booster seat beneath her, at the wheel of a red and white full-size panel van he uses for work.

The little girl is said to have asked the police why she was being pulled over, because she was a good driver.

I guess this story will play as comedy, but I guess the world’s children of alcoholics aren’t laughing. Although I’m snickering at the Starsky and Hutch paint job on the van. I mean, you HAVE to.

I haven’t read Michael Lewis’ exegesis of California finances, but I’m hearing good things about it, if “good” is quite the word for this:

A compelling book called Cal­ifornia Crackup describes this problem more generally. It was written by a pair of journalists and nonpartisan think-tank scholars, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, and they explain, among other things, why Arnold Schwarze­neg­ger’s experience as governor was going to be unlike any other experience in his career: he was never going to win. California had organized itself, not accidentally, into highly partisan legislative districts. It elected highly partisan people to office and then required these people to reach a two-thirds majority to enact any new tax or meddle with big spending decisions. On the off chance that they found some common ground, it could be pulled out from under them by voters through the initiative process. Throw in term limits—no elected official now serves in California government long enough to fully understand it—and you have a recipe for generating maximum contempt for elected officials. Politicians are elected to get things done and are prevented by the system from doing it, leading the people to grow even more disgusted with them. “The vicious cycle of contempt,” as Mark Paul calls it. California state government was designed mainly to maximize the likelihood that voters will continue to despise the people they elect.

But when you look below the surface, he adds, the system is actually very good at giving Californians what they want. “What all the polls show,” says Paul, “is that people want services and not to pay for them. And that’s exactly what they have now got.”

Wow, there’s a cheery passage. Think I’ll try to find time to read it later. For now, have a swell Tuesday.

I had a chore I was determined to finish this weekend — purging my office, a merciless throwing-away project that left me with two full baskets of shred, a garbage bag of trash and best of all, a clean, airy room again. These projects are notoriously boring, which is why they get put off over and over, but this time I decided to try the HBO Go app on the iPad. I’d downloaded it weeks ago, but couldn’t get through an episode of “The Wire” without a freeze every 90 seconds or so.

They must have reamed out the pipe since then, because it worked like a charm and over the course of two days, I watched (in the iPad-propped-against-a-lamp-while-I-worked sense) six episodes of season two, which is in many ways my favorite of the five. The show was building its reputation but hadn’t yet become a Thing, so it was possible to enjoy it as your own secret, while still finding fellow travelers from time to time. The setting of the Baltimore waterfront provided a rich array of dramatic possibilities and big themes, along with a visual environment that looked like nothing you’d seen before. It might be that I enjoyed it more this time because I’ve been thinking, lately, of the great economic restructuring we’re undergoing now, and a question that occurs to me a lot in the course of living in what was once the great, steaming heart of the country’s manufacturing economy: What are we going to do with these people?

The central narrative of “The Wire’s” second season was this very problem, as illustrated on Baltimore’s waterfront: Technology at ports requires fewer and fewer dockworkers, but the people who have done it for multiple generations have failed to get the message, and the economy has failed to offer any alternative other than “work two jobs.” Our society has always produced people across a range of intellect and abilities, and for most of its history, the bargain we made with them was simple: If you’re willing to work, we’ll find something for you to do, and — this is key — you’ll be able to make a living at it. It might not be a lavish one, but if your dreams are modest, there’s a place for you.

I was in a dollar store in Warren a few years back, and saw a young couple there. The woman looked older than her years, but had the sort of whip-thin edge that suggests a survivor — cosmetologist, shift supervisor, maybe a waitress. Her companion, on the other hand, was dressed in the oversized clothing favored by hip-hoppers, which made him look like a toddler playing Eminem dress-up. He tagged along behind her like one, too, occasionally goosing or otherwise bugging her, and you could tell she wasn’t enjoying any part of it. For the first time, I got an idea of why women like this would rather not marry the fathers of their children. The baby has an excuse, pops. What’s yours?

The morning is moving toward maturity, and it’s Hella Monday, so here goes with the bloggage:

New York City’s least-known, but hardest-working, casting director.

An electric fence at the Mexican border? Shucks, I was just pullin’ your leg! And all the people who cheered were, too.

Let’s try for better tomorrow. For now, gotta run.

My clutch is giving me problems, and the garage — more of an automotive-care emporium, really — is encouraging me to be there as early as possible this morning. As that will require me to be ambulatory, and walking will require coffee, I can blog for as long as it takes me to consume two cups. You get me between sips.

And mostly, you’re getting tasty linkage. Because sleep deprivation is cumulative, you see, and I’m getting about five hours a night, starting on Monday. By Friday, I’m incapable of coherent thought, and so grumpy I WILL CUT A BITCH who gets in my way. You know you’re old when the most exciting thing about your Friday is, you can have two glasses of wine and go to bed at 11.

But as tired and crabby as I am, I’m not incapable of amusement, and friends, let me tell you, the more I learn about Herman Cain, the more amused I am.

It’s possible to believe a national sales tax is probably inevitable and still find Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan — which, I’m sorry, sounds like a pizza special, like $5 footlongs — not just wrong, but ridiculous. Howard Kurtz:

“I can explain it in a minute,” Cain told The Daily Beast. “All taxpayers play by the exact same rules. That’s what people love about it.”

This must be part of his short-attention-span strategy, in which no bill can be longer than five pages, or was it three? Anyway, after I read that story I was perambulating around Facebook, and found this comment on my ex-congressman’s always-entertaining page:

simplified taxes is a great idea, but I am not fond of the idea of 999… flipping it upside down gives you 666… yeah it sounds silly to think that way, but honestly I think I am not the only one that thinks this…

Excuse me? Wha-? I’m so glad I don’t live in Indiana anymore, even while I know there are people who think this way living within a quarter-mile of me here. They’re just less likely to write me letters, and expect to have their lunacy treated respectfully.

Here’s a story from the Center for Michigan that is pretty much the center of all the news I’ve covered on a hyperlocal level: The Big Flush: $180 billion vanishes from Michigan. The real-estate collapse, basically. A large chunk of it was mine, too. Thanks, Wall Street.

While on one level this is the height of professional irresponsibility — i.e., spinning opinions about a medical case where you haven’t even opened the file — that’s what the internet was made for, amirite? And so a Harvard Medical School instructor offers this intriguing idea — that Steve Jobs doomed himself by attempting to treat his pancreatic cancer with “alternative medicine,” allowing it to establish a beachhead, after which, well, we all know the story. As I’m old enough to remember laetrile, this doesn’t sound farfetched to me.

Two cups, gone. I’m ready to fight my way through Oct. 14, 2011. Have a good weekend. I plan to spend a large chunk of it in a prone position, eyes closed, breathing slow and deep. Ah, middle age.

So yesterday I was reading, and enjoying, “The Great Leader,” Jim Harrison’s new novel (currently on the nightstand), when I come across this on page 93:

He hit the radio OFF button when someone on NPR used the word turd iconic.

Yes. [Fist pump.] It’s always good to find allies in this cruel world. The paragraph goes on to condemn “closure” (total agreement) and “embedded” (neutral) and the whole idea of punditry. Having once been a pundit of sorts — or “pundint,” in Sarah Palin’s pronunciation — I say right on, Jim.

Tom & Lorenzo have inspired me to watch “The Rachel Zoe Project” from time to time, although I find I can rarely get through an entire episode, because it’s more boring than a five-hour speech by Fidel Castro, and because the star and everyone around her uses the English language the same way we used those heavy metal records on Manuel Noriega — as an instrument of torture. She’s a happy abuser of “literally,” which she pronounces “lit’rully,” with a distinct pause at the apostrophe: Oh my god, I’m lit’rully dying here.

Zoe has a job that barely existed a generation ago — she’s a stylist, which means famous people pay her to tell them what to wear, and sometimes magazines pay her to dress their sets and models for photo shoots. If you want to know why we will never again see another Cher on the red carpet, it’s because of people like Zoe. How “stylist” became an actual job could be an interesting topic, encompassing some ideas of wide interest, particularly the rise of self-appointed grassroots fashion critics, people like Joan Rivers and bloggers like T-Lo, which has left chronically insecure Hollywood types terrified to put a foot wrong in their public outfits. Throw in the rise of paparazzi photography as a cultural force and marketing tool, branding as ninja practice and the freelanceification of everything, and you might have a decent show. Alas, Bravo’s producers settle for scene after scene of Zoe being driven around Los Angeles in a black SUV, moaning My head is lit’rully exploding, which must be their idea of Drama.

You have to look for the entertainment. I find it in the language.

Every occupation has its own jargon, and styling is no different. Take pull, for instance. Zoe’s minions do a pull before a shoot, which basically means they remove every single item from her cavernous closets and transport them to the shoot location (known as set, never with the definite article), where it’s all transferred to rolling racks and hangers shoved back and forth with much murmuring of she will so love this and this is so crazy sexy and I’m lit’rully dying over this one. That only two or three outfits are selected from this mobile garment district never seems to bother anyone, as it’s a given that you must have the widest possible selection of clothing to choose from. Why not leave everything on rolling racks, perhaps in a truck or something, and drive it around?

Because then it couldn’t be pulled, stupid. And pulling is a skill. Requiring many assistants.

Once pulled, Rachel will make her choices, adding some more of her nonsensical expressions of enthusiasm — bananas, maybe, or I die. Afterward, everything is pronounced fabulous. Nothing Zoe does is ever less than fabulous. A non-fabulous look, or an unhappy client, would make more interesting television, but that’s asking too much.

That’s episode outline 1A. Outline 1B is when Zoe is dressing a client for a red carpet event, known simply as carpet. What Anne Hathaway or Cameron Diaz or Jennifer Garner or Kate Hudson wears for carpet is an operation requiring a great deal of driving around, blabbing into phones, and perhaps some eyes-shut rubbing of the temples just before the commercial break, because OMG my head, it’s lit’rully killing me. But it always works out! Zoe and her minions gather to watch the Oscars or Emmys or Whatevers in her living room, the same way we do, only of course they pronounce all of Zoe’s clients so crazy sexy beautiful I lit’rully can’t stand it.

But even this isn’t enough to make me watch very often. I’m bananas that way.

And now, I must do a pull in my own closet. I predict — Carnack envelope to forehead — I will pull blue jeans with either a black or white top. Lit’rully the same thing I wear every day.

So let’s go to the bloggage, eh?

Ezra Klein: Could this time have been different? A look at where the stimulus went wrong, and right. HT: Cathy Dee.

More language nitpicking: The Occupy movement is cropping up in “scores of cities across Michigan.” No. A score = 20. Later in the story we hear that “nearly 20” Facebook pages have been created for Occupy events in the Mitten. Which would mean we’d have to see another 20 to have plural scores. Maybe I’m quibbling, but I don’t think so. Not lit’rully, anyway.

I still contend that “Occupy Detroit” is funny, and “Occupy the Upper Peninsula” is downright hilarious.

I’m so glad Charles Pierce is writing about politics. So, so glad. Lit’rully, very glad.

Off to office hours. Enjoy Thursday, all.

I was covering a local candidate forum last night, and missed the latest GOP debate. I understand that in a brilliant move to round up Sarah Palin’s little lost lambs, Rick Perry located the American revolution in the 16th century. Awright. Between this, Herman Cain’s skatting on Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Michele Bachmann’s vaccine-caused retardation and the seven or eight embarrassing moments yet to come in the next month, Barry’s got the second term all but sewed up.

Or not. Max Headroom Romney still floats above the fray. Way to pick your opponents, Mittens.

The local forum was put on by our chapter of the League of Women Voters. What mensches those folks are, arranging these deals every year so that none of us need go into the voting booth ignorant. Not that it makes much difference to most people, alas. Every term I discover how much my students — college students — don’t know about participatory democracy. Most of it is a function of simply not having lived very long; they don’t know how city councils work because they have never given a thought to city council, period. Nothing like buying property, paying taxes and having children to pique a person’s interest in public affairs. But I also wonder how much civics education is going on in schools these days. I took it in junior high. Today it might be wrapped into a general social-studies curriculum. I hope some of it is sinking in.

The warm weather will be leaving in a matter of hours, and it’s already cloudy and threatening rain. Leaves are falling like snowflakes, but it sho’ is purty out there.

I have quite a bit of tasty bloggage today, so let’s hop to it, shall we?

Your daily funny: Elizabeth Warren promises revenge vouchers.

Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was booked to appear tonight at a local fundraiser for the Center for Inquiry. But he was dropped at the last minute, when organizers learned — yes, learned — that he was an atheist. (From watching Fox News!!!) He’s complaining, but I’d consider myself lucky. If they can’t read a newspaper, they certainly can’t hire a decent caterer.

OID: A city so broke that the power company comes in and repossesses its streetlights. I didn’t think that was even possible.

Rochelle Riley is African-American, so this punchline doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough for me, after reading this titanically dumb column: What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

I haven’t been linking to NYT stories as much, knowing most of you can’t get behind the pay wall, but this story was so weird I can’t resist: Remember Professor Irwin Corey? “The world’s foremost authority?” I guess you’d call him a comedian, although as I recall, his schtick was to go on bubbly talk shows like Mike Douglas, Joey Bishop and maybe Carson, where the host would play straight man, asking him questions, which he would answer in long, convoluted bursts of verbiage. (We were so easily amused back then, but as I often think, watching contemporary comedy: It beats semen jokes.)

Anyway, Corey is still alive, lives in New York and is something of a panhandler, only the money he collects is sent to children’s charities in Cuba. He’s 97 years old. You really can’t make this stuff up, can you?

Off to work for me.

Our local science museum is closed, allegedly temporarily, although the light is growing dim. The institution’s financial problems are broad, deep and rather simple — it doesn’t have any. Money, that is. It can’t borrow, as it’s already tapped out a line of credit and defaulted on a loan. You think to yourself, how could things have gotten so bad?

No simple answer, but the biggest chunk? Bad management. Also, those stupid mummies.

The billboards for the “Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato” exhibit were everywhere for a while. I seem to recall they emphasized the actual human corpses!!! angle, and coming so soon after the museum hosted one of those Chinese real-bodies exhibits, I wondered if I couldn’t spin it into an essay for someone, as it seemed so obvious that was the hook.

For those who’ve never been to one, the Chinese exhibits — Body Worlds, Bodies: The Exhibition, one or two others — were a gimmicky attraction a while back. It used a technique called “plastination” to put a whole cemetery full of corpses on display, many with baroque cutaways revealing various internal systems. All the specimens were Chinese, which led to obvious questions about provenance, as they say in the art world. Patrons were assured all was on the up-and-up, that the individuals had donated their bodies to science willingly, and don’t give it another thought. On the other hand, no one ever saw a signed release, either.

I snuck away to see it while chaperoning a field trip with Kate’s fourth-grade class. I found it…interesting. Not terribly ghoulish, but not without a distinct whiff of it, either. (“There is no odor,” an elderly docent assured us as we rode an elevator to the special floor, the same briefing where we were handed the donated-to-science story.) There were moments of strange beauty — I recall a circulatory system standing alone like a red cloud — and others I found unnecessary, like the preserved fetuses. But OK, I saw it, cross that one off the list.

When the bodies were followed by the mummies, it seemed to bespeak a trend. Further reading was appalling. The mummies were “accidental” because they’d been interred in above-ground burial niches in a particular mountain town, where the combination of high heat and low humidity dessicated them quickly. They were discovered when families could no longer pay a municipal grave tax, and the bodies were evicted from not-so-final resting places. They were collected for the exhibit the old-fashioned way, with pesos.

The show was gussied up with material about life in a 19th-century Mexican village and other cultural displays, but the attraction was the bodies themselves. To me, this was a distinct call-and-raise on Chinese political prisoners; come look at bodies of people who could be the parents or grandparents of living people, with no real science attached beyond the stuff that could be covered in a paragraph.

And the Detroit Science Center actually curated this thing, dumping $1 million into it in hopes it would be a moneymaker when it went on the road, but there was a lawsuit, and so far it’s only opened in one other city (Dallas), and it didn’t do so well there, either.

I don’t have a particularly Catholic view of human remains. When the soul, if any, departs, our bodies are just 100-plus pounds of inconvenient meat. But I think we have the right to determine what happens to our meat afterward, and I bet all those Mexican folks had no idea they’d be put in a traveling sideshow. It was maybe a bridge too far.

So, bloggage?

Of all the things I thought would sink Rick Perry, I never thought it would be the casual racism of his family’s hunting-camp moniker, but whatever. As in most questions about racial issues, I turn to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I think he has this one about right.

Meanwhile, as is often the case, Cooz offers us some musical accompaniment, with apologies to John Prine:

When I was a young pol my family would travel
to a corner of Texas where the ranches once lay
There’s a big n… rock we couldn’t flip over
so we paid us some n…cowhands to paint it one day

Repeat chorus.

If you missed this yesterday, don’t.

A beautiful day is shaping up outside, and I have errands to run, which I think I will do on the bike. So I’m outta here, all.

The talk surrounding Ken Burns’ “Prohibition” dislodged a memory from my earliest days as a newspaper columnist, when I wrote about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Jay County, Ind.

This would have been…1984? Not a day later than ’85, certainly. And the WCTU, one of the driving forces behind a century-old social movement almost universally believed to have been a terrible mistake, was still alive and kicking. Even considering that Jay County was decades behind the times, it was surprising.

More surprising was the meeting itself — the members not as old as I expected, but the form of it, the structure, was 19th century. There was a sermonette, a short two-woman play, ending with a call to take the White Ribbon Pledge, a promise to not only live a life of abstinence from intoxicating liquor, but to raise one’s children the same way. I don’t recall if fathers were mentioned, although surely they must have been. The message, however, was that alcohol was yet another mess made by men, to be cleaned up by women.

Those who read “Last Call” know the material in last night’s episode of “Prohibition,” how many parallels exist between that time and ours, not the least of which was the conflict between urban and rural America. Jay County is pretty rural, with a few small towns here and there. The people I’ve known from places like this, the ones who had problem drinkers in their families, describe a pattern of imbibing that more closely resembles crack cocaine than convivial tippling at the local tavern — crack seal, pour glass, repeat until violent, abusive or unconscious.

(Terry Ryan’s father, as described in her most excellent memoir, “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” followed this model as well.)

So it’s not surprising that, faced with this level of consumption, eventually the pendulum swung as far as the Volstead Act. I haven’t seen the documentary yet, but as I recall, much is made in the early chapters of how much Americans drank in the years leading to its passage; visiting Europeans were staggered by it. It was a way to avoid dodgy water supplies and blunt the pain of daily existence, which was grim in both cities and towns — back-breaking labor in farm or factory, a child every year, and of course, a terrible war that stacked bodies like cordwood without resolving much of anything. Average consumption then was about three times what it is now, if I remember correctly.

I’ve been doing some reading on college binge drinking, and it has a ring of familiarity — the pounding of shots, consumption with the goal of getting as ripped as possible as soon as possible. It sounds positively…rural.

Those who watched last night — what did you think? Did it make you want to take the White Ribbon Pledge?

So. Monday. I HAVE to change my life. I never have time for anything, especially on Monday. And Tuesday. And, increasingly, most of the other days, too.

Bloggage? Some:

Jim at Sweet Juniper has a photography show coming up. More buildings, I gather, like this one. Never seen that …place before. I bet it’s seen its share of shot-pounding.

On the subject of obesity, a weight-loss story to inspire you on a Monday.

After almost a year of carrying the bag, I turned concert-chaperone duty over to Alan Friday night; he took Kate and a friend to see Wavves down at the Magic Stick. I asked him for the report and he said, “Very young crowd, very intense. I was trying to find Kate up at the front, and the next thing I know, she goes surfing past me.” He got out the camera for the second pass, but she never made one. Fortunately, someone was packing video. I asked, “Do you do that often?” She said, “I needed to get to the back, and that was the fastest way.” I guess. Just try not to get dropped on your head, OK?