Boy, the Hack Thirty is really presenting some heavy betting possibilities. If you’d have asked me to rank the lazybones of the punditocracy at the start of this project, I’d have had Jonah Goldberg and William Kristol at one-two, or certainly in the top five. But Kristol is on the board at No. 17 and Goldberg at 7, which makes me wonder who, possibly, could top them.

I figure they’re saving Tom Friedman for late in the rollout, but who else? James Lileks long ago slid into irrelevancy and graphomania; have you read his 40,000-word debrief on his fourth Disney vacation, or are you still plowing through his day-for-day, wave-for-wave, blow-by-blow of his National Review cruise? Mitch Albom doesn’t write about politics. Ann Coulter has been reduced to clowning for the gays — those boys loving a good tranny as they do — and only appearing in front of the Barbara Walters ™ SuperSoft camera lens. Kathleen Parker? Maybe, but there’s no way, as awful as she is, that she could punch her weight with Goldberg. This bears watching. Good call on Laura Ingraham, though — the poor gay man’s Coulter.

Truth be told, I think the problem is column-writing itself. Talk about a gig whose time has come passed. I’m glad I had my time in the game, but all I miss is the regular — not generous — paycheck. The best columnists, then and now, have to walk a very narrow line between reporter/observer and opinion monger, and that is hard enough to do in a normal city, virtually impossible in Washington, where everyone with skin in the game (which would be everyone, period) is whispering in your ear and buying you drinks and inviting you to their dinner parties and winking as they slap you on the shoulder. It’s all just a crazy game, isn’t it? Sooner or later even the sharpest minds and pens go dull. Usually sooner.

What do they say about opinions? And right now, the best ones are showing ’em for free on the internet. That’s not a business model, that’s a hobby.

No. 6 just went up. Marc Thiessen. Can’t quibble with that one. Keep it up, guys.

The holiday weekend is in progress, and this will be the last regular blog entry of the week, although with a house full of wired company, I expect we’ll do some mini-blogging here and there, so by all means, stop back. Also, tomorrow is my natal anniversary, and if there’s anything a girl deserves on her birthday, it’s a day off (and some cake). Thanks in advance for all your good wishes, and no, that’s not a nudge to leave any. I just know what good folks y’all are.

A li’l bloggage? Maybe:

Another great feature from Detroitblog: The people who live — legally — at the Packard Plant. A touch of country in the city:

Besides Hill’s dog, a shaggy rottweiler named Baby, they’ve got a couple of pet raccoons, and they feed lettuce and carrots to a family of rabbits who moved in during the winter. The pheasants that flock around here have provided food in the past. “We do a lot of hunting here,” says Lott, 47. “You ever ate city pheasant yet? Oh, it’s good eatin’. They’re homegrown.”

Rats run wild, kept in check only by the several cats Hill keeps or the sharpshooting skills of Lott and fellow tenant Greg Erving, 65. “We shoot rats in here all night,” Lott says. They use high-powered pellet guns. “It’s a real war going on. You can hear them fighting amongst themselves. Biggest rats in the city. They’ll come over and rob your food in a heartbeat. They’re bold.”

Thanks to Jezebel (I think) for teaching me about Dickflash. If only I could unlearn it now.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and many happy leftovers.

How far will you go to win an argument with your spouse? Below, behold the old plastic wrap, and the new plastic wrap. Alan does not believe what I told him Saturday, that the original two-pack of 750-square-foot wrap was purchased at Costco in 2005, and therefore we have gone five years between plastic-wrap purchases. He doesn’t see how this is possible, even allowing that I am not given to Marabel Morgan-type stunts with the stuff. We agreed to write “November 2010” on the ends of both boxes of the new stuff, and see if it lasts until Kate’s freshman year in college.

Who is Marabel Morgan? some of you are wondering. Boy, am I dating myself. OK, for you young’uns: Morgan was an early squall in the culture wars, a retrograde Anita Bryant type who peddled a series of extremely successful books for women, advising them how to put the zip back in their marriages, “zip” being defined as sex, mainly, although she did write a cookbook along the way, too. Probably her most famous advice was for wives to wrap themselves in nothing but Saran Wrap and greet their husbands at the door with an icy martini. I guess the martini was a consolation prize for seeing his wife’s sweaty, mashed privates encased in plastic, but whatever blows your hair back. Morgan followed the Biblical formula of wives submitting to their husbands. What’s the flip side of that one, Bible people? I guess the Promise Keepers model, which also requires submission from our side of the aisle, alas. I’m not much of a submitter, all things considered. I guess that’s why I didn’t get married until I was 35. I guess that’s why I fight with my husband over plastic wrap instead of dressing in it.

One final note: Martin Cruz Smith’s new novel features a torture-execution featuring plastic wrap. I’ll spare you the details.

So how was everyone’s weekend? I went to Costco. Got some plastic wrap. I also went to the opera — “La Boheme” — and saw “The Kids Are All Right.” Enjoyed both very much, but it was the film that left me grinning. I love movies where you can luxuriate in the writing, and this was one of them. The story of a lesbian couple and family under stress when their sperm donor enters the picture gets so much right, I don’t care about the little things it gets wrong, and now that I think about it, I can’t really recall any. Highly recommended for Thanksgiving weekend DVDing, as long as there are no kiddies in the room. (There are several brief-but-explicit scenes of boinkage.)

Busy Monday, as always. So let’s get to the bloggage:

I know that sometimes I beat up on the Free Press, but they actually do have a few writers worth their generous paychecks, and one of them is columnist Brian Dickerson, who shares my curiosity about that line in all the Cialis, Viagra and related ED medicine ads: See your doctor if you have an erection lasting more than four hours. I always chuckle over that, and frequently remark to my long-suffering husband, “Someday I’d like to see a scene in a movie where a guy walks into an ER and announces he’s had an erection for four hours.” (He never laughs. I think we’re headed for divorce court.) Anyway, here’s Dickerson’s excellent Sunday offering: It’s been four hours. Now what? It answers the question everybody wants to know: Why four hours? And what happens afterward:

Q: So it’s like a heart attack in your penis?

A: Yes, I guess it would be sort of like that.

Now that’s service journalism.

Have you ever seen an Oprah’s Favorite Things show? I have, once. I found it equal parts compelling and repulsive. For those who haven’t, this is the giveaway show the big O does around the holidays, in which an unsuspecting lucky audience — it’s never revealed until it’s in progress — finds themselves gifted with a truckload, literally, of free stuff, thanks to Oprah. (Along with, I’m compelled to add, a huge tax receipt for the IRS.) You can’t imagine the audience reaction when they learn they’re the lucky ones. Really. It has to be seen to be believed.

Kenneth Jay Lane is selling knockoffs of Kate Middleton’s engagement ring. How did the company turn them around so fast? I’ll tell you how: They’re leftovers from the Diana-ring knockoffs. That’s one advantage to being old enough to remember Marabel Morgan. You remember other stuff, too.

Paul Krugman says: There will be blood. Oh, I don’t doubt it.

Off to the police stations. Let’s see what fresh hell our leafy Edens endured over the past week. My guess is: Not very much.

Not much time this morning, so let’s dig up a little snack platter of linkage, shall we? There is much to discuss:

The Center for Automotive Research said the bailout of GM and Chrysler saved more than 1 million jobs, and today’s GM IPO will return more than $13 billion to American taxpayers. (Thanks, American taxpayers!) Imagine the last two years with 1.14 million more people out of work. I’d be shooting squirrels out of the trees, like in “Winter’s Bone.”

It’s deer season in Michigan! Let’s check out the buck pole!

Kittens with kitten filling. And purring.

For locals and tourists only, Jim Griffioen from Sweet Juniper has the best Detroit guide evah. I’ve been to most of these places, and now I want to go back.

And with that, I have to run. Sorry, it’s been one of those mornings.

So, it seems we’ll have a royal wedding to look forward to next year. For what it’s worth, I approve. The couple has had a long time to get to know one another, presumptive sexual contact and enough mileage in the rear view that there will be no ugly surprises, or nothing they can’t handle.

Prince William seems to have been both well-raised by his parents and enough of his own person to learn from their mistakes. And his grandparents were obviously chastened enough by the disaster of Charles and Diana to finally revise the job description for the future queen. A royal or aristocratic bloodline is no longer required, nor is virginity. It’s a new century, your majesty. Women are different. And in a good way. It still astounds me that in 1980, Lady Diana Spencer was required to undergo a gynecological examination to ascertain her, er, soundness.

Obviously no one can know precisely what grammy told No. 2 as he set about making his choice, but as I said, he seems to have learned well. Some people say there are two kinds of women in the world, first wives and second wives, Dianas and Camillas. I was never much of a Diana fan, so forgive me, but I think he’s found a Camilla, with enough of Diana’s virtues to satisfy everyone. Which is to say, she will look good in a dress, produce an heir and a spare and not trail a string of caddish boyfriends who will loosen their tongues to the tabs. I like the way she wears her hair long and loose and a little messy, is beautiful in an entirely approachable way and doesn’t seem to make too much of a fuss over anything. In this, she is very much an English girl, and if she isn’t a blueblood, well, pfft. You see what shopping in the luxury section got his father. Teach her to ride and shoot and no one will be able to tell the difference in a decade.

This paragraph from the NYT story made me chuckle:

The romance has had its setbacks. The pair split for several months in 2007, amid speculation (always denied) that the royal family was dismayed by the lower status of Miss Middleton’s family and that Mrs. Middleton had chewed gum and used un-aristocratic words like “toilet” and “pardon” in front of Queen Elizabeth, William’s grandmother.

I thought all Brits said “toilet.” In fact, I thought calling a spade a spade, and a toilet a toilet, was a hallmark of the British upper classes. Euphemism, especially about bodily functions, is a middle-class trait. Excuse me, but can you direct me to the powder room?

So, bloggage? Not very much:

Lisa Murkowski, throwin’ down with the mean girl.

Via one of my Facebook pals, the Westboro Baptist Church meets the Winter’s Bone demographic. Guess who won?

A website I’d fallen away from, and am now back in love with — Cute Overload. I think “cute” is one of those very current concepts, like “soft,” which Hank explores at one lengthy paragraph’s length in “Tinsel” (which by the way is out in paperback, with an excellent cover, which you should stuff into stockings up and down your gift list). We swing between extremes in so many things in our discourse; you’re red or blue, the president is a saint or a Marxist, people you’ve never met read something you wrote and send you an e-mail informing you you’re a shithead who should die in a fire. And yet we can join our hands at the table of brotherhood over LOLcats and pictures of hamsters. Go figure. Crazy world.

And with that, I have to skedaddle. Much work to do today, plus I have to make a birthday cake. It’s November 16, the day we honor the arrivals of Alan, Kate, Adrianne from our peanut gallery and Alan’s late elementary classmate, Elvis Whitehead. So I’m off to buy chocolate.

Have a great day, all.

My old pal Mark the Shark — a lawyer, a Great White — once worked on a recount case. It’s pretty simple, he explained; basically, you recount the easy ones (submitted by machine) and then fight over the absentees one by one. It’s tedious, but it’s like moving a pile of rocks from one place to another. Keep at it, and it’ll get done.

I’m hoping, however, that the Alaska vote-counting takes a good long while. And it likely will, what with ballots arriving via snowshoe-wearing carrier pigeons from above the Brooks Range and all, and the little problem of Joe Miller and his own tea party sharks. Here’s a post from the Anchorage Daily News’ Alaska Politics blog. Scroll down to the bottom, where they’ve posted photographs of a few of the write-in ballots already being challenged by Miller’s sharks. They clearly say “Lisa Murkowski,” every one of them correctly spelled. The only possible problem I could see is perhaps a certain roundness to the lettering that makes a few letters rub up against one another. Also, Miller has imported one Floyd Brown to help him out, Brown being the warlock who conjured the Willie Horton ad for George Bush. Sayeth Brown:

“The stories of manipulation are just almost mind boggling,” Brown said at a press conference called this afternoon by the Miller campaign.

The only evidence that the Miller campaign would provide was an affidavit from a poll watcher in Fairbanks, Rocky MacDonald, who complained that the ballot box at the Tanana Valley Fairgrounds “was unsecured in that the electoral judges had access to the inside of the ballot box with a key.”

“The electoral judges opened the ballot box several times to clear jammed ballots and rearrange by hand the ballots in the box to make space for new ballots,” MacDonald wrote.

Mind-boggling, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The entire process will be tied up in the courts for a good long time, I’m sure. Slate has a pretty good outline of Miller’s arguments. Irony alert: This tea partyin’, states-rightsin’ renegade is relying pretty heavily on federal precedent, particularly Bush v. Gore:

Miller wants election officials to count only those ballots for Murkowski in which the oval is properly filled in and her name is properly spelled. How strong are his arguments? Whether the statute requires proper spelling is a difficult question of statutory interpretation. The reason that Alaska election officials said it did not, and instead adopted the looser standard of “voter intent,” which allows for misspellings, is the Alaska Supreme Court’s long-standing use of a rule of interpretation which reads ambiguous statutes in favor of the voters. (I’ve dubbed this rule the Democracy Canon.) In this case, throwing out minor misspellings would disenfranchise voters for a technicality. I’ve traced use of the voter intent standard in state courts back to 1885, and Alaska has a particularly strong version of it. The state’s courts say that election statutes must be read in favor of allowing votes to be counted unless the legislature has made it unmistakably clear not to read a law this way.

Yes, it’s clear Alaska wouldn’t want a man’s vote negated because he lacks letterin’ skills. But we’ll see what we can do.

So, anything else hopping this morning? Not much. We have pea-soup fog out there, and I’m headed out in a bit, driving closer to the lake. I’m hoping to hear some foghorns coming from the water. When conditions are right you can hear them all the way up to my unfashionable neighborhood, but they’re loud enough further east to awaken light sleepers. We’ll see.

Short shrift, I know, but I still feel like crap. So here’s something:

Not to keep coming back to Slate, but, well, Jack Shafer likes the Wall Street Journal’s series on internet privacy as much as I do:

And you thought the Web was “free.” You’re paying with your privacy.

If you don’t have the time, or the subscription, to wade through the WSJ series, he provides a nice summation.

A poem for fall, via Sweet Juniper.

And now I have to run. Have a great weekend, all.

You know how being sick with a subclinical malaise is — you feel fine until, all of a sudden, you feel awful. That’s me today. Let’s see how far fine can take me this morning.

As for my comments about “Winter’s Bone,” I keep coming back to a minor thread of the story — the main character, a 17-year-old girl, and her intention to join the army. The film is the story of this girl, Ree Dolly, and her quest to find her father, dead or alive. Charged with cooking meth, he bailed himself out by putting their house up for part of his bond. Now missing and presumed a fugitive, the family is days away from losing everything. And they don’t have much to lose. The Dolly family — Ree, her mentally ill, nearly catatonic mother and two young siblings — lives at the edge of the edge, in the Missouri Ozarks, in the sort of grinding, rural poverty where a neighbor stopping by with some venison and a few potatoes is the difference between being hungry that night or not. Career options seem to be limited to cooking meth or touring beautiful Fallujah. Ree’s inclination toward the service is covered in only a few lines, but it stuck with me.

She’s certainly qualified, with an interior toughness that you get only after years of the sort of things we see in the movie – poverty, criminal activity, an insular rural culture where women bond with men for the same protection it afforded Neanderthals, then learn to never, ever open their mouths. About anything. I’d hire her to be an army of one. And while I know that the armed service has always been a step into a sort of stability for exactly this level of society, it’s impossible not to think about our current military adventures overseas and think Ree might be no worse off dealing crank.

I was strongly reminded of Annie Proulx’s short story, ‘Tits-up in a Ditch,” two years old but surely in an anthology somewhere by now (and, for you New Yorker subscribers, in the digital edition), another story of just how hard hardscrabble can be.

Anyway, I had a late dissenter in Monday’s thread, calling “Winter’s Bone” a whole lot of wannabe Cormac McCarthy. I see the criticism, but I disagree, or rather, I don’t find wannabe-McCarthy enough of a charge to make it not worth your time. The story is smart about so much, and, like “Frozen River,” has the sense to show far more than it tells, and trust its audience to figure it out. There are some wonderful supporting performances, especially by John Hawkes and Dale Dickey, both of whom could have been cast on bone structure alone, but follow it up by actually climbing inside the skins of their characters. A truly haunting film.

And now I am racked with a coughing spasm. Looks like awful is just around the corner, so let’s get some bloggage out of the way, shall we?

Sarah Palin’s career as an economic policy critic, cut tragically short. Not that anyone would dare to tell her so.

Speaking of Alaska, Anne Applebaum makes a few points:

For whatever the reason, the hypocrisy at the heart of the (Republican) party – and at the heart of American politics – is at its starkest in Alaska. For decades, Alaskans have lived off federal welfare. Taxpayers’ money subsidizes everything from Alaska’s roads and bridges to its myriad programs for Native Americans. Federal funding accounts for one-third of Alaskan jobs. Nevertheless, Alaskans love to think of themselves as the last frontiersmen, the inhabitants of a land “beyond the horizon of urban clutter,” a state with no use for Washington and its wicked ways.

Duh.

And speaking of monetary policy, as someone who used to host a radio show where I heard from insane Fed-bashers on a regular basis, I was interested to read Bethany McLean’s explainer on how Fed-bashing has gone mainstream, in Slate.

Irresistible headline, funny column: For black men who have considered homicide after watching another Tyler Perry movie. Via Hank.

And because monetary policy isn’t all we’re about here, some pop-cult — JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, via Roy. I see strong correlations with Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, i.e., a retro soul band with four white hipsters in the back row, playing in their stingy-brim fedoras, etc., with an ol’ skool African American vocalist out front. If anyone can name a third, I’m calling trendsies. Nevertheless, “Baltimore is the New Brooklyn” is quite the toe-tapper:

Finally, for those who weren’t paying attention in the comments yesterday, a note from MMJeff:

You’ve said it before, but your readers are truly awesome people; yesterday I learned from our LCCH staff that they wanted to know what “Nancy Nall” was or who she was, because through the link on the website we’d gotten a couple of donations that noted your name as the reason for the giving, and also a “Jeff.” A third is inexplicable and distant-ish (New Jersey) and may well fit with the other two.

Anyhow, I told them, and told them I’d thank you “personally” for the venue and the opportunity; I also took the liberty of posting a news story at the thread yesterday with general thanks. Your kind words a few days ago have spurred some help our way, and direct donations are very appreciated by our service coordinators because that big hunk o’ HUD money comes with a million strings on it — we love it, and would close (many of our units, anyhow) without it, but there’s no room for creative problem solving and social worker skills. You fill out the forms, you work the process, you turn the crank and out comes the sausage.

The $35,000 we raise is small next to our $1.2 million total annual budget, but it represents so much more than that, to the staff and those they can do useful, interesting, and cool things for. A few weeks ago, they bought some nice shoes for a woman who got a good outfit for a job interview, and the service coordinator decided her self-confidence needed some rocking heels with the donated clothes. Federal dollars cannot be used to buy rocking heels, apparently; “local” fundraising can.

Again, thanks! I come for the recipes, not the fundraising (and a little provocation, occasionally), but this was just so unexpected, and so timely. And you may have picked up a few more readers from the Newark OH area in our offices at the Coalition.

This has happened before, with other worthy causes. You guys? You are the best. Srsly.

OK, off to shower and Wayne State, there to spread my germs around campus. Which may well be where they originated, for all I know.

An illness has o’ertaken our house. I’m going back to bed for 90 minutes. See you sometime after that. Until then, discuss:

Is Lindsey Graham talking tough because he knows he’ll never have to dollar up? Or is this insanity President Palin’s 2013 No. 1 on the to-do list?

“The Walking Dead” — I do not like so much, Sam-I-am. I’m assuming this is the end of any sort of content restrictions on basic cable.

I could not bear to watch Jorge Bush last night with Matt Lauer. What did I miss? Did he offer any new details on his bloody baby brother? Like, among other things: How big a jar? And what did they do with it afterward?

If I’m going to be functional at all today, I must get more sleep. Later.

So how did you spend your extra hour Sunday? I read two stories that might have eluded me otherwise, the one about how the USDA is pushing cheese down our throats at the same time it’s fighting obesity, and the one about Courtney Love.

I enjoyed the latter. I guess ol’ Court is trying for a…whatever act this is. It’s not going 100 percent well. This is her after telling a New York Times reporter to wait for her in her hotel room and she’d be along directly:

Shortly after 8 p.m., Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked and leaning on Mr. Kiefer for support. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance — “Not you,” she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her — to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.

After failing in music and acting, Courtney is finding the fashion world is still interested in her, and with shenanigans like this, you can see why. If there’s one thing fashion demands from a woman, it’s total coolness with being naked in a room full of clothed people, and obviously she has that part nailed.

As for the cheese story, I am reminded of the observation of Elaine Benis, after confronting the stuffed-crust pizza: “Will we never run out of places to conceal cheese on a pizza?” Nope, don’t think so. Speaking of which, if there’s such a surplus of cheese, whatever happened to the old five-pound blocks, i.e., guvvamint cheese? Back when the cheese distributions were going on, I knew several people who came into some who weren’t, shall we say, poor enough to qualify. (Easy explanation: Elderly relative who simply can’t eat five pounds of cheese before it dries out, molds or otherwise becomes inedible.) They all said it was the best American cheese they ever ate, creamy and rich and nothing at all like Kraft Singles. Why not make some more of that stuff? Beats paying Domino’s to come up with a new iteration of Heart Attack Lovers’ pizza.

What I didn’t read about: Keith Olbermann. Don’t care. Suspend him, don’t suspend him, makes me no never-mind, as Keith and I have sort of broken up. Of course the whole idea of finding him guilty of, what? Subjectivity? Is totally absurd. This has less to do with journalism than a tuna sandwich. Which makes me think this is about something else entirely. Like getting him to reconsider a contract demand, or something.

And now? I was going to ruminate for a bit on “Winter’s Bone,” an amazing film we caught this weekend, as well as “The Drummond Will,” which was that black-and-white English film at the film festival Friday, but a press release just fluttered over the transom. Police have made an arrest in a year-old home invasion and assault in Grosse Pointe Park, a pretty scary crime for these parts. It only took 11 months to get DNA evidence from the state crime lab. ELEVEN MONTHS. Remember that the next time you watch “CSI” and Marg Helgenberger tells some clown she’ll put a rush on it. So now I have to write a story.

“Winter’s Bone” can wait a day, I guess. But if you get a chance to see it today, take it. It’s that good. Bye.

On today’s to-do list:

Write a little.
Make apple crisp.
Clean at least one bathroom.
See some English film, “the first black-and-white feature shot on the Red,” at a bar in Ferndale, part of the Ferndale Film Festival.

I guess things could be worse. I work a full day (night, really) on Sunday, so I guess I can start drinking on Friday at lunchtime.

What’s “the Red,” you’re maybe wondering. It’s a camera system, and I think the actual name is RED, all caps, but meh. It’s a light, small, low-cost digital alternative to professional film cameras, very big among the indies and, increasingly, the studios. The FAQ. Because you care, right? Anyway, while this sort of thing — fussing over cameras and such — is not my part of the game, it’s a) free, b) includes pizza and c) takes place in a bar. Win, win, win.

Actually, rounding up today’s conversation starters, I see the internet is a rich and fruitful place this morning. Let’s dispense with the small talk and get to cases, shall we?

Sparky Anderson died yesterday, which means it’s time to check in with none other than Detroit’s favorite grief counselor sports columnist, li’l Mitch Albom. Jesus flippin’ Christ, guess what his lead is?

I had a dream about Sparky Anderson a few days ago. He looked old and his hair was brown, and I called to him, but he didn’t recognize me. Only after I said my name did he smile.

And then it ended.

Any armchair Freudians want to take a crack at that? I mean, no wonder the guy is a monster. Even his subconscious tells him that his name brings smiles to the world. Although Mitch doesn’t quite get it:

I’d been wondering about that dream because Sparky doesn’t usually show up in my REM cycle. And why was his hair brown? Sparky? The original White Wizard? Then, Thursday afternoon, I heard the jarring news: At age 76, Anderson, one of the most colorful, charming, perfectly suited managers baseball ever produced, had died in California.

Now he’ll start thinking his dreams are telepathic. Although can even a dream get through to Mitch? Who, once again, finds the death of an old man “jarring.” I ask you. Although, given how close Anderson’s death was to Ernie Harwell’s, he really can’t resist a different angle:

It would be fitting to ask Ernie Harwell — he and Sparky walked together every morning on road trips — but we lost Ernie this year, too, and it seems like some heavenly roll call is taking place in our town.

The Two Baseball Legends You Meet in Heaven — I smell box-office boffo! (Actually, Albom is at work as we speak on a play about Harwell. Which is probably why Sparky’s obit clocked in at under a million words.)

Moving on, has everyone heard the Cooks Source story by now? After all, it’s nearly 24 hours old, a graybeard in internet time. Here’s the gist: Writer discovers a piece of hers, published some years back on the internet, now exists in ink-on-paper form, in a magazine called Cooks Source. She e-mails the editor and asks for a) an apology, and b) a small donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. She gets, in return, the back of the editor’s hand, in one of the stupidest reactions to a reasonable request I’ve yet heard in journalism, and friends, that is saying something. Anyway, the internet got angry. You don’t want the internet angry. Edward Champion has a good one-page summation. Who edits this rag? Tim Goeglein?

Every boy should have a mother like this.

Have you heard about the president’s trip to India? Have you perhaps heard that “34 warships” are steaming there even as we speak? I have. I read it on the dumber conservative blogs. Guess what? It’s not true. I know how shocking that is to some of you, but there you go.

And with that, I’m getting dressed for a brutal workout, followed by a shower, followed by that movie in Ferndale, followed by apple crisp. Because it’s the weekend, suckas. And weekends are for apple crisp.

What are we doing back in Hampton Roads, twice in one week? Today, checking on the future of health care:

Amanda Rooker doesn’t pay for health insurance. Instead, she pays a monthly share to cover other people’s health bills.

It’s part of a medical bill sharing program called Medi-Share, which claims an exemption from federal health reform’s individual mandate. Under the exemption, members of healthcare sharing ministries — organizations where members share financial resources to pay one another’s medical costs — are not required to carry insurance by 2014 or face penalties, according to Medi-Share.

I was a member of a similar organization when I owned my first horse, as a way of refilling the pot if my appaloosa went hooves-up some day, a trick horses are too well known for. The group was 1,000 strong or so, and when anyone’s animal died, everyone paid $5 and the owner collected $5,000. It’s a crude form of insurance, as is Medi-Share, which works the same way. Rooker joined because she can’t afford to join her husband’s employer-provided plan. The photo with the article was instructive, with dad sitting at one end of the couch with the couple’s two little boys on his lap (safe on the insurance ship) and mom at the other end (paddling her tippy little canoe alongside).

But she’s cool with Medi-Save, because she’s now far more motivated to practice “self-care and natural remedies,” and has only had to submit one bill to the group. Of course, she’s also 35. Barring an unlucky accident, family history or other catastrophe, most people are in the best health of their lives at 35. Medi-Save is also overtly Christian, and has a few stipulations:

Members must sign a statement of faith professing faith in Jesus Christ and agree not to engage in sex outside of traditional Christian marriage, use tobacco or illegal drugs or abuse legal drugs or alcohol.

They also can’t use the service for birth control, abortions or boob jobs. And Rooker also acknowledges it’s not for everyone:

“I don’t think it would work well for people who have babies or small children who want to have their immunizations and well checks,” she added.

No, I guess not. In general, it sounds like it wouldn’t work very well for anyone other than an essentially healthy Christian married woman who doesn’t want new breasts. I wonder what the group assessment would be for, say, breast cancer. Story doesn’t say. Rooker thinks more people should look into groups like Medi-Save, because it’s such a good idea.

Mark my words: As we divide into two countries, haves and have-nots, we’re going to see more of this sort of thing. I’m simultaneously heartened that at least someone is looking at an alternative to outrageously expensive health insurance and depressed that this is what it’s come to in the wealthiest nation in the world. I once had a boss who wore a large scar on his jawline, the result, he said, of having a childhood laceration repaired by a veterinarian. Which was all his parents could afford when he was young. I’ve actually read conservative commentators saying this is as it should be, that we should be prepared to handle most non-traumatic health-care at home, the way the early settlers did. I look forward to learning basic suturing and bone-setting skills at a for-profit do-it-yourself school, maybe part of the Halliburton family of companies. Or maybe my vet can show me a few tricks.

So, a little bloggage on a morning when the sun is late to work but winter is right behind:

Jay Rosen, speaking the dang truth about Andrew Breitbart, and why news organizations need to stop being so goddamn stupid.

Meet the people who will be keeping Jon Stewart in high cotton for the next few years.

I need an OID palate-cleanser…OK, here’s one: We have the world’s stupidest criminals.

No, wait, a real one, from Coozledad:

We were fortunate she never walked in on us during a waxing October moon, but she did crash our marijuana-enhanced viewing of Around the World in Eighty Days- a fairly long movie, which she stayed for- and talked ceaselessly throughout.

Her speech was a hybrid of Southern Virginia glottal vowels and a unique fetal-alcoholic disregard of consonants that made me wish David Niven would leap out of the screen and throttle her for murdering his tongue.

Coozledad, the universe is telling you something, and it’s this: WRITE A BOOK.

And with that, I’m going to the gym, and then I’m going to write something I want to write. Dunno what, yet. Just going to turn off the modem and see what comes up.