Wow. Is it ever murky outside. Radar promises another day like Tuesday — i.e., all-day rain — and at the moment it’s about 8:30 p.m., light-wise. Lucky for me I have this glowing screen to make rod-and-cone destruction that much easier.

Moments in My Career When I Realized I’d Bet on the Wrong Horse, a continuing series: When I learned that the Boston Globe labor agreement with copy editors included two 10-minute “eye breaks” to preserve the rods and cones of those required to stare into computer screens all day. Although, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve never experienced so-called eyestrain in my life. Like heartburn, for me it’s essentially mythical.

The real toll computer work takes on your body is elsewhere — wrists (repetitive strain), shoulders (hunched and knotted in fury as you hammer out angry blog comments), back (connected to shoulders; see above). And you don’t hear much about Secretary’s Spread anymore, do you?

That’s because everyone has it.

Yes, it’s another one of those mornings, folks. Freaky dreams, grounds in my coffee, cascading rain. And then there was this story in the NYT, about a family of five that was killed in Montreal after a sinkhole opened under their house and swallowed it justlikethat. The incident, the story said, was “a stark reminder of a hidden menace under many parts of Quebec, one that dates back 10,000 years to an ancient inland sea.” What the what?

Michel A. Bouchard, a professor of geology at the University of Montreal, said the area around St. Jude rests on an unusual variety of “sensitive clay” that was originally the bed of an ancient sea. Lake Champlain is a remnant of the sea.

Because the clay formed in salt water, Professor Bouchard said, the molecular structure of its particles resembles playing cards arranged as an unstable house of cards, rather than stacked in a deck, as occurs with clay formed in fresh water. A variety of events can break the molecular bonds holding the clay particles together. When that occurs, the clay can spontaneously liquefy with little or no provocation.

“Even a fly landing on the surface can set it off,” he said.

I love it when experts describe these things as “reminders.” Like whoever built this house knew it was going on a “sensitive clay” with the molecular structure of a house of cards that could be collapsed with the additional weight of a fly, and just…forgot it, somehow. Look at that photo and note the tiny red dot near the bottom, where the road enters the sinkhole. That’s the truck owned by the world’s luckiest motorist, who suddenly found himself falling into muck and took an hour to crawl back to safety.

The whole thing was so silent and sudden, the story says, that neighbors were left wondering only why the power had gone out.

Someone should write a scene like this into a movie, and wait to be massacred by critics who would call it a wee too deus ex machina for belief.

In other news at this hour, the Freep presents the results of a reader survey on their Top 5 turnoffs in restaurants. No. 1? Being called “you guys” by overly familiar servers. Get used to it, I’d say. There’s a hipster-doofus outdoor store in our neighborhood called Moosejaw, where “you guys” is the height of formality. I haven’t been called “dude” there yet, but I fully expect it. I will roar Dentu-Creme breath at them when it happens. Sorry, grandma.

And that’s all I have today. What a lousy week. I can sense readers flowing away like rainfall in the gutters. Oddly freeing, somehow. And yet, sometimes the fields have to lie fallow for a while. This might be one of those weeks.

Sarah Palin has a new book coming. Via the AP:

It will include “selections from classic and contemporary readings that have moved her,” according to HarperCollins, along with “the nation’s founding documents to great speeches, sermons, letters, literature and poetry, biography, and even some of her favorite songs and movies.”

Anyone want to make predictions on the songs-and-movies selections? No fair going with the easy stuff; Lee Greenwood will probably be credited as co-author. And yeah, there will be the usual suspects: Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” speeches, etc. But I’m thinking Powers Boothe’s great paranoid right-wing fantasy description of the invasion of the U.S. by Russian/Cuban/Nicaraguan forces in “Red Dawn” will be a particular favorite:

Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico. Cubans mostly. They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas and wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I’m here to tell you. They opened up the door down here, and the whole Cuban & Nicaraguan armies come walking right through, rolled right up here through the Great Plains.

Henry Fonda at the end of “The Grapes of Wrath”? I’m putting that one at 50-1.

When Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Bob Bennett published “The Book of Virtues,” i.e., a bunch of public-domain fairy tales lightly dressed with moral highlights by a card-carrying member of the VIP Club at eight Vegas casinos, I thought I’d seen the ne plus ultra in gall. I guess somewhere in Alaska, a young mother was taking notes.

I was going through my iTunes collection the other day, despairing. I should have listened to J.C. back when he told me that metadata was as important as the data itself, and if I didn’t start tagging, sorting, playlisting and so on, I’d be sorry one day. John? I’m sorry. When it comes time for my sophomore book effort, the one where I offer moral lessons and patriotic inspirations from my favorite songs, I’m going to be well and truly screwed. On the other hand, I rather like the way it crashes up against itself from time to time. It just followed Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings with Merle Haggard (“Mama Tried,” my personal desert-island Merle track AND a moral lesson).

Eh. At least there’s a certain merry fun out of kicking Sarah around, as opposed to the numb bleakness of listening to the right wing discuss Elena Kagan. She has no judiciary experience, unlike, say, the well-seasoned Clarence Thomas, who was nominated to SCOTUS a whole 18 months after taking his first judicial post, on the D.C. Court of Appeals. We don’t know what she believes about anything! Unlike Thomas, who sat through his confirmation hearings steadfastly insisting he had no opinion whatsoever on Roe v. Wade. He hadn’t really given it any thought. Srsly. Oh, well. One of the rites of politics is this occasional charade we have to go through with judicial nominees. So it goes again.

I am amused by the speculation about Kagan’s you-know-what. I wish she were out, writes Jack Shafer, so we could get this debate over with. That could be worthwhile, although if that were the case, I’d want the debate to be retroactive, and John Roberts would have to explain this photo. And that sweater.

The new coffeemaker is installed — thank you, husband of mine — and working. It’s a Krups. It has a “coffee is finished” alarm, which strikes me as unnecessary and a little too Teutonic for our household. You know the coffee is done when the pot stops burbling. I turned it off. The death of the Braun was a little ahead of schedule, but acceptable — it had a specialized, hard-to-find Brita filter that had to be replaced every two months, and my goal was to have it die when I was smack out of filters, but I still have two left. If you need a box free of charge, holla and I will send them to you for the positive karma alone.

A little bloggage?

John McCain, shameless bastard. Once again, I find this border-fence stuff simply appalling. My loathsome former congressman, Mark Souder, was writing ham-fisted guest columns for my own newspaper for a while, and in one, mocked a city in Texas border country for not wanting the fence in their community, because it would ruin river views, among other perfectly good reasons. And now McCain is advocating 3,000 more cops down there, a “finished dang fence,” and, presumably, a moat, some razor wire and perhaps machine-gun nests. Weren’t these the same folks worried a about jack-booted thugs a few years back? It’s all in how you look at it, I guess.

This was a big story on the pharma beat this week — genetic tests for $30, to reveal your medical future mwa ha ha ha — and I can’t decide whether to do it myself. I’m leaning toward yes. I think I have the emotional maturity to handle bad news, and good news could be actually money-saving. You don’t need to take prophylactic drugs for conditions you’re at low risk for getting, for instance. If nothing else, it’s one of the most interesting stories I’ve read since those weight-loss fat-shedding pills went OTC. “Wear dark pants” — now that’s not a patient instruction you see every day.

OK, let’s bring this train wreck to stop, shall we? Time to get a little work done, and then clean the house. Yes, John McCain, clean the dang house!

The catering gig was a mixed bag. I miscalculated for lunch, and came up short by about three people. Of course it’s embarrassing and unfair; the people who come to lunch last are frequently the hardest-working of the crew, and you feel bad that they have to settle for peanut butter. But I miscalculated on two fronts — the weather (freezing) and the fact this is a war movie, and young men possess the sorts of appetites that make mothers all over the world put off buying new clothes, for fear of running short for the groceries. Should have doubled the chili.

But we did OK at dinner (lasagna), and I felt somewhat redeemed. When people are working for nothing — and with every one of these things we do, we get more people, and they work harder — the least you can do is feed them.

I mentioned the weather. Boy, did it suck. A front blew through Friday night with tornado watches and violent thunderstorms, followed by temperatures that didn’t touch 50 degrees all day, with a steady 25-30 mile per hour wind, many stronger gusts. In other words: Suckitude. And I was inside all day. A memo ahead of time mentioned the need to keep lots of water on set, as some of the actors would be wearing rubberized costumes and would need to hydrate frequently. Ha ha. They were the lucky ones.

But that’s water gone by, and now we look forward. I had lots of down time between meals, and spent it catching up on my web-surfing. As Monday is my busiest day, I offer you plenty of bloggage:

Beautiful Lena Horne, gone at 92. I saw her a few months back in “Cabin in the Sky,” which TMC was showing during Oscar month. Fun fact from her NYT obit:

One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.

She had the va-va, and certainly the voom.

Why Two-Newspaper Towns are Good, this chuckle from the Detroit News. Short version: New pedestrian bridge opens in Detroit, is instantly hit by taggers. Surveillance cameras clearly show one of the taggers is a Free Press copy editor and blogger, whose blog frequently mourns the collapse in civility and good citizenship. Here’s the passage that caught my eye, from her spectacularly lame mea culpa:

I was excited when I saw the bench and that people had written on it and wanted to add my tag to it. That’s what we did in New York City when I was young: We put our tags on the park benches.

Social scientists speak frequently of “new norms.” There’s one, right there.

Deadspin has a remarkable document, a letter of castigation by the owner of a party lodge where the Miami University chapter of the Pi Beta Phi sorority had their spring formal. Short version: They arrived drunk, got drunker, puked everywhere, peed in the sinks, pooped in the bushes. Miami University had a reputation, when I was growing up in Ohio, as academically rigorous, preppy, snotty and very Greek. The Pi Phis at Miami would be 10 times worse, on all measures, than those at Ohio University, where I went to school. I guess that’s …changed.

Via Lance, Digby on the Kent State shootings. She quotes Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” on the reaction to the tragedy:

When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones – America – support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up? …”

…A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell. Another rumor was that five hundred Black Panthers were on their way from elsewhere in Ohio to lead a real riot; and that Allison Krause was “the campus whore” and found with hand grenades on her.

As Digby, and Lance, point out: Ann Coulter et al is nothing new in this country.

Hank Stuever on Betty White in the WashPost, and on his own blog, the SNL Homowatch. From the blog, after the Scared Straight sketch:

I would need several thousand words to dissect why America has always thought prison rape is so hilarious. (Not only hilarious, but acceptable. We are a culture that believes strongly in “don’t drop the soap” jokes as a normal way to taunt criminals; indeed, we seem to hope that our most offensive male criminals will in fact be repeatedly raped by other men in prison; “making” someone your “bitch” is recess playground vernacular now.)

And because I’m late getting to this, Hank, again, on why writers should tackle the subjects that scare them. Wise words, those. And now, I’m off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some rather startling photos from the funeral of Malcolm McLaren in London yesterday. The Sex Pistols’ manager was laid to rest in a coffin emblazoned TOO FAST TO LIVE TOO YOUNG TO DIE. I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing — the “fun” funeral, that is — as the generation-that-younger-people-wish-would-not-be-named starts heads down the Ghost Road in greater numbers.

I feel the same way about this that I do about all the other rituals my contemporaries found wanting, when it came to be their turn: [Shrug.] Every so often I meet a hand-wringer who frets that, by throwing out (insert number of years) of tradition, we have somehow ruined the wedding/funeral/christening/whatever. I reply that when a person has lived a full life and — in McLaren’s case, anyway — had at least a reasonable allotment of years, what’s the problem with turning their funeral into something other than damp hankies and hushed conversations? And if the old model was so satisfying, why did it suck so bad? It’s one thing to be laid to rest by a clergyman who knew you all your life. But I’ve been to many, many funerals where the officiant needed crib notes and all but mispronounced the decedent’s name. Bah. Throw it out.

When things started to turn bad in the newspaper business, I had a fantasy: I would take my buyout money (ha!) and start a small business out of my bedroom, providing digital slideshows with musical accompaniment for funerals. These would play during visiting hours, and anyone who wanted one could buy the DVD. I even had a name: Kinflicks. I still think it was a good idea, although it would have made a lousy business, because it’s so easy to do now that most funeral homes prepare them in-house, or else it’s punted to a nerd cousin who knows how to drag and drop. (My slideshows would have been distinguished by the quality of music, I decided; none of that “My Way” stuff. Instead, maybe “Anarchy in the U.K.”) At the time, the idea of having a slideshow play at a funeral, even at a visitation, was sort of edgy. Now every Slumber Room has a flatscreen.

I don’t know what McLaren’s funeral was like, aside from the casket, but if you haven’t seen it, Roger Ebert has a fabulous remembrance of his intersection with the Sex Pistols, which includes a few scenes from a planned Sex Pistols film, to be directed by Russ Meyer. As always with Roger, it’s the details that sell it:

I’ve mentioned before that, for Russ, typing was synonymous with writing. If he didn’t hear the typewriter, no writing was being done. When I was writing “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens” for him, he located me in his living room (all office furniture) and listened from his upstairs office. When my typewriter fell silent, he’d call down, “What’s the matter?”

Which is as good a way as any to kick off the bloggage:

While Rome burned, the SEC…watched porn?

Look out, world, Monica Conyers is already planning her next chapter. I’m sure MMJeff will be pleased to hear what it is: Divinity school.

I haven’t had anything to say about “Treme” yet, I know. I’d like to watch a couple more episodes and let the vibe set in. But in the meantime, a story that gives background on one of the subplots — the disappearance of LaDonna’s brother in the Orleans Parish Prison meltdown/flooding. What does one do with a prison full of inmates in rising waters? Good question.

Can you give a dime, a dollar, or a pair of socks? Restore Stephen Baldwin!

So, what’s the tackiest funeral you’ve ever attended?

I got up with Kate at 7:30 this morning, made her lunch, saw her off to school, prepared the coffee stuff but didn’t press the button on the machine, and sat down with the laptop for the morning stretch. Stretched my legs along the couch, unfurled the afghan against the chill. Hmm, this is comfy.

Two hours later, I woke up. Ruby was staring at me. The laptop had gone to sleep, too.

So I lost my blogging time this morning. Fortunately, I had some stuff set aside.

I’ve avoided Nike products for some time, on the grounds that if I’m going to pay a huge sum for a pair of sneakers, I want the money to go to the Chinese serfs who made them and not the spoiled-brat athletes who endorse them, but now I have one more: The swoosh stands by its men. Even the creeps. Especially the creeps.

The dog cart built by Jim at Sweet Juniper for carrying his kids around town is a huge success. Chapter 2, plus a little appreciation of the beast of burden.

And because you can’t have some sweet without some bitter, a few-days-old piece by our own Coozledad: “The Neighbors.” Read. Some of you already have, but the rest: Read.

I’m told there was a time here when crossing the border from Canada to the U.S. here was no big deal, for most mainly a matter of friendly waves and have-a-nice-days. This was especially true for boaters; I’m told of waterfront restaurants on the St. Clair River where “customs” consisted of writing your name in pencil on a slip of paper dockside. Among the many things we can thank Osama bin Laden for is the fact some nice Canadian ladies can’t take a yoga class in Royal Oak anymore. It’s a teacher-training class, to be sure, but reading this can certainly chip away at one’s inner peace:

All the trouble began in early 2009, when the state of Michigan cracked down on yoga studios, licensing them as “proprietary schools.” Makowski complied, then described her school as a “licensed vocational school,” on her website.

That description, U.S. border officials say, triggered new problems at the border. Officials demanded the Canadian students get student visas to attend their Sunday class. The students agreed — until Makowski discovered she first would have to be certified by the Department of Homeland Security to accept foreign students — a process that could take a year or more — and that’s typically required of colleges, not yoga courses. It’s classic Catch-22.

It starts out being a rule about not letting more Arab students take flight training, it ends up being about yoga. Go figure.

And now off to work, lazy bum that I am.