This is what the precipitation map looked like all day yesterday:

I’m sorry this isn’t the animated version, so you could see the way those cotton-ball areas of snow park themselves over certain coastal stretches and stay and stay and stay. Some of you non-Midwesterners may not be acquainted with what we call “lake effect” snow, but that’s it, right there. It’s why western Michigan driveways and parking lots need three-foot day-glo sticks along their edges to guide the plows, like they have in ski-resort towns. It’s why the east side of Cleveland can get heaps of snow while the west side doesn’t. (Or maybe it’s the other way around. Borden?) It’s why snow in Buffalo and Erie can be nearly apocalyptic. It’s why, coming home from Milwaukee to Indiana, you can be all, like, what a beautiful day for a drive, round the southern end of Lake Michigan and suddenly realize it’s going to be a blizzard clear to South Bend.

Cold air races across rising warmer air from a large body of water and bingo-bango, precipitation. Lake-effect snowfall is a wash for lake levels, as it represents only a temporary relocation of water, and all melts back into the lake in spring. Last year, we had a snowy winter that came from storms moving south-to-north, and that was a good thing for the 21st-century Saudi Arabia of H2O. All ur waters are belong to us.

If you’re interested, western Michigan got 13 inches yesterday. We have the lightest dusting, not even enough to sweep, much less shovel.

Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice. That’s our state motto. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

Maybe not in January.

So much for fifth-grade civics. How was your day? It’s Friday, traditionally my Exhale Day, although there won’t be much exhaling today — I’m meeting a student later to cut some video, and tonight it’s the middle-school Christmas dance, known hereabouts as “the winter formal,” although it’s not. Girls must wear dresses and boys, ties. But it will require a Getting Ready pre-party, and I gather we’re hosting. So I’d best pull up my socks and get it in gear. Some bloggage? Oh, why not:

I’m not nearly as well-traveled as you might think, and certainly less than I’d like to be. For instance, I’ve only been to Los Angeles once, but the city has stayed with me. The hills and canyons were so strange to a flatlander like me; I found it fascinating how you could be in an unmistakably urban area one minute, take a right turn and two lefts, and be in some cleft in the hills that felt entirely off the map. Ever since, I’ve wanted to live somewhere that strange. And while the Grosse Pointes are hardly L.A., Detroit offers enough strangeness and off-the-map feel for years of exploration.

All of which leads to a couple of Sweet Juniper bonbons, in which Jim and the kids find the country in the city and also the prairie.

All that talk of cutout cookies yesterday prompted Lex to send along instructions for making your own mad gingerbread men.

Tiger Woods nude photos? As one of my FB friends says, he needs to start talking, and the words he needs to say are SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY.

Via Fark, the headline I never got to write: Snowball the overweight hedgehog is running and swimming his way back to health

Costco awaits. Have a good weekend.

I’ve been so discombobulated of late I lost the thread of the Tiger Woods story. Last I checked, we were talking about an essentially nice guy who’d stepped into it by “having affairs” outside his marriage.

Yesterday afternoon I finally had a minute to hit Gawker, which sent me to Deadspin, the sports blog, where I discovered that the story is now about a sexual compulsive with a bottomless appetite for strange, whose “lover” is actually his pimp/personal assistant, netting major bucks for stocking his larder, not actually cooking the food. By the time I reached the part with the porn star, I started thinking that the precipitating incident in all this may well not have been a National Enquirer dispatch, but a closed-door session between a grim physician and Mrs. Woods, followed by a prescription for embarrassing drugs.

So yeah, I have to agree with Eric Zorn, who surmises that the reason Woods didn’t get out in front of this story is because there’s no getting in front of an avalanche of sewage, that the best — only — strategy is to take shelter under a rock, wait for it to pass and see what’s left of his image in six months.

And since I was in a sewage-y state of mind, I also foolishly followed the link Brian provided yesterday, to that Lisa Schiffren bilge in the American Thinker, which seeks to tie Woods to Barack Obama. Because why? They’re both successful and…what else do they have in common? I can’t imagine.

And because by then my nose was starting to get numb to the smell, I stupidly started reading the comments on the piece, and, well, that’s not something I can recommend. But I will remind you that Lisa Schiffren is not some fringe crank but Dan Quayle’s former speechwriter and a more or less respected member of the right-wing commentariat. If you can imagine Dee Dee Myers someday writing for the Symbionese Liberation Army newsletter, that’s the equivalent.

Ick! Let’s go for a palate cleanser, shall we? Two photo stories on hunting should do the trick. The first, from the NYT, on the Inuit of Greenland, all in black and white for those of you who are squeamish about seal blood. The other, from the Irish Times, on the Waterford Hunt, which goes after fox. No dead foxes in this one, because as all fox hunters know, a dead fox isn’t the point of a fox hunt. It’s galloping and jumping and drinking from stirrup cups and hound music, a sample of which is included in the audio portion of the slide show. Turn your speakers up — recommended for fans of Ireland, horses, hounds and the countryside, and who isn’t included in that group?

With that, I’ve opened the tavern and thrown sex, race and blood on the table. Surely we can have a lively discussion about that. I’m off to do the crossword and catch up on some reading.

Challenge filmmaking is perverse. Take something that has to be done slowly and painstakingly, and add the element of speed and deadlines and kitchen-sink required elements to it, and you’re virtually assured of a substandard final product. Add creative people to the mix, who never met a job they were 100 percent satisfied with, because if only they’d made this tiny change and tweaked this and rewrote that and how much time do we have left? Nine minutes? This’ll only take about eight, eight’n a half. Piece of cake… Well, you see how things can go.

That said, we have a great team this time. Fingers crossed. Gun’s at 7 p.m. Some tweeting/photoblogging will likely ensue, barring total disaster. Check back.

I warned you of a potential rant on the Asian carp issue. Another skirmish in this strange battle is taking place now in Illinois, where state and federal officials dumped more than 2,000 gallons of rotenone, a fish poison, into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (there’s a waterway with a romantic name, eh?) in a last-ditch effort to keep the bastards out of the Great Lakes. The kill has already netted 200,000 pounds of piscine collateral damage and a single Asian carp, although more way well turn up as the decomposition process continues.

I’ve been reading about this invasive species for a while now, never with anything other than dread. Like the three-eyed fish of the Springfield Reservoir — “Blinky,” and thanks, Wikipedia — they portend nothing good, even while an army of Mr. Burnses facilitated their journey up the Mississippi River system.

Here’s where the rant comes in. Eric Sharp, outdoors writer for the Detroit Free Press, raised the roof pretty well last month, explaining how the species was originally introduced to eat algae in Arkansas sewage lagoons, with this priceless, stomach-souring detail from a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report, that the original plan stipulated “carp raised in the sewage lagoons could be sold as food to people to defray some of the costs of treating the sewage.” Mmm, pass the drawn butter. The carp were also used by Southern fish farmers to clean their own facilities.

Of course there were escapes. Of course something could have been done when the problem was still containable. Of course nothing was done. Of course an unholy government-business alliance was responsible. Sharp writes:

I found a story I wrote nearly 10 years ago about Jerry Rasmussen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who by 1990 was trying desperately to warn people about the potential threat from the carp.

But he was called on the carpet by his bosses and told to shut up after the fish farmers complained to their friends in Congress, the “Arkansas mafia” of politicians allied with the Clinton administration. When Rasmussen refused to be muzzled, the USFWS tried to eliminate his job.

What’s the problem with Asian carp, besides the fact they’re imports? They grow to the size of monsters. They jump from the water at the sound of boat motors (this video is pretty amazing) and have actually broken boaters’ noses and caused other injuries. But their biggest threat is how they displace native species. It’s safe to say that once these behemoths reach the Great Lakes, it’s only a matter of time before they do serious damage to the trout, steelhead and salmon species that support much of our tourism. I’m trying to imagine these fuckers in the Au Sable or Manistee River, some of the greatest trout waters in the world, accessible to any visitor who can buy a fishing license. Actually, I’m trying not to. Because that would be the end of it, for sure.

In the 19th century, the Au Sable was populated by grayling, graceful native species with a fanciful, sail-like dorsal fin. Easy to catch and delicious to eat, they were wiped out by overfishing — they say the tourists piled them, literally piled them, on the riverbank, just because they could — and, of course, logging, Michigan’s original environmental sin. The clear-cutting of virtually the entire state in the 1800s provided the seed money for the industrial revolution that followed, but the use of the fast-running rivers of the north as logging chutes to the lakes were disastrous to grayling, scouring the bottom and destroying their hatcheries. Grayling only live in Alaska now, for the most part.

Nature keeps teaching us these lessons, and we keep refusing to learn them. The Burmese python is establishing a beachhead in Florida. Now carp in the north. Maybe someday they’ll all mutate, grow legs and lungs, and add us to their breakfast menu. It would serve us right.

Rant over. Now I have to put on my screenwriting head. I’m thinking sci-fi — giant, walking fish that glow in the dark and eat poodles. Whatever, I’ll be in and out over the weekend, and you are encouraged to check back. Action!

I hope your holiday was pleasant. Mine was, although at some point I shifted into hibernation mode — all I want to do is sleep, a condition that will likely last until we change the clocks again. Sleep and eat. You ask me, the bears have the right idea.

Maybe cutting back on carbs will help. She said as she finished the last slice of birthday cake.

If any of you doubt that I basically pull every entry on this blog from my nether regions on a daily basis, I offer as evidence the preceding two paragraphs.

I’m a little rusty this morning. Lots went on over the weekend, lots coming up. We had a production meeting/casting session for the upcoming 48-hour film challenge, and I took a moment to look around the table at all the smart faces there and reflect on what these Michigan tax incentives for filmmakers have wrought. The difference between what we brought to the party in June 2008 and what we have just over a year later is pretty remarkable. Not that the 2008 team was bush league, but most of the people we have now, from actors to crew, have serious professional filmmaking experience, and it shows. A year ago, casting the zombie movie, some of the people auditioning had trouble reading. Saturday, we had a 13-year-old girl who most recently worked with Rob Reiner. In fact, as I looked around the table and asked myself who’s the weak link in the chain? It’s me. Time to bring it, I guess.

We also had house guests, John and Sam, for Saturday night, when we finally celebrated my birthday. Lovely cake and presents. Pork tenderloin with an Indian spice rub on the grill, yum yum. We discovered that even though both John and Sam are plugged in net people, being childless they’ve missed many YouTube classics — Charlie Bit Me, the Panda Sneeze, and of course, the Dramatic Prairie Dog. John learns fast, however, and quickly threw together this video homage with his iPhone and one of my birthday presents, which we’re calling…

…Dramatic Horse Pen.

That’s a pen from some cowboy museum on John and Sammy’s recent trip out west. Punchline: It doesn’t work. Glad it’s good for something.

And now my attention is drawn by the events of the day — the president’s speech on Afghanistan tomorrow, the next phase in heath insurance reform, and, of course, Tiger Woods’ marriage, about which I could not care less. I am interested in human behavior, however, so before we go on, let’s stipulate something that is, to me, as plain as that Escalade wrapped around the tree, yonder:

Woods is lying. He’s lying about the accident, he’s lying about whatever preceded it, and he’s lying about the role his wife played in it. He probably started the whole chain of events by lying to her, too, the classic, “Who, me? I wasn’t with her! The National Enquirer is lying!” That’s OK — everyone lies sometimes, and none of us would want to live with a 100 percent truth-teller. Sometimes the greatest honesty comes out of gentle deception, etc. I’m thinking today of his wife, who I’m going to speculate was wielding that golf club not to rescue her husband, but to threaten him and perhaps knock his block off. Eric Zorn and I have been exchanging e-mail on the subject, and he contends her target was the car all along — nothing like a smashed window to punctuate your peril when you’re trying to escape the fury of a Swedish giantess. I think maybe she was aiming for the man himself, which would be pretty damn stupid on her part — any physical injury to the ATM machine she shares her life with would imperil its future smooth operation. But then, I doubt Woods married his wife for her brains. Maybe that’s what he found in the New York “social director” he was allegedly dallying with, an intellectual equal to his Stanford-educated brain.

Let’s take a look at this TMZ item, though, one that says Tiger was shopping Zales (Zales? Yeah, that sent up a flag for me, too) for a “Kobe Special,” i.e., a big flashy rock to appease her feminine furies. I’m reminded of the female comedian who, after the original Kobe special was delivered, remarked, “Just what every woman wants — a big shiny reminder of her husband’s infidelity.”

Let me just go on the record here, and say I hope my child will grow to adulthood knowing that her mother never went after her father with a golf club. Good lord, Elin, one misjudged swing and you’re talking closed-head injury and the rest of your life being the next Dana Reeve. Suck it up.

Ten a.m. looms, dragging behind it a busy day. We’re back to the mangle, folks, and starting the long slog to Christmas.

Brother Rod Dreher comes in for a certain amount of abuse in this space, but when he’s right — or at least in the ballpark of right — I have to give him his due.

I saw this excerpt from She-Who’s recent interview with Barbara Walters, demonstrating her awesome foreign policy skilz:

“I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

The editor in me saw She-Who’s signature trait, the intellectual insecurity that leads her to blather, in the belief that if you throw a whole lot of words into an answer, it sounds more thinky. Before he was famous, Dave Barry occasionally worked as a writing teacher to private businesses, and he said something funny about memos — that they’re like balloons, and the game is to bat them around the room so that they land somewhere other than your desk. You bat them by adding a few more words and sending them on their way. Take a look at She-Who’s answer again, and take out the extra air:

“I believe that the Jewish [Israeli] settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people [Jews] will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead [future]. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Part of this is the difference between speaking and writing — tell them that instead of tell them, for instance. But it’s that “days and weeks and months” I find so telling; why not “days and weeks and months and years and decades and centuries,” Mrs. Maverick? Because she was following the rule of three; three puffs of air into the memo balloon and off it goes to become someone else’s problem. But also, well, let’s let Brother Rod pick it up from here:

When I heard that, I thought, oh, here we go.

Really? Why? He goes on to quote from a report on She-Who’s meeting with Billy Graham, from whom she wanted “his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq,” according to his son Franklin. Dreher goes on:

What the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq. That’s a tip-off that she reads the Bible as a guide to geopolitical events in the End Times. This is very common among a large portion of Evangelical Christians — according to a leading expert, between 50 and 60 million Americans hold Palin’s belief about the Jewish ingathering to Israel in advance of the Apocalypse — but can you imagine an American president making her foreign policy based on a belief that “The Late, Great Planet Earth” is a reliable source of information about the future?

I confess, I was so busy feeling smug and superior about She-Who’s speaking style I didn’t even consider what she was saying, beneath the surface, anyway. A lot of Christian conservatives lurve Israel and all that she does, even her fringiest residents, and I know that they consider certain events there key to their beliefs about the end of the world and the return of Christ, but I guess I didn’t know they thought it was coming so soon, in the days and weeks and months ahead. So for pointing that out to me, I’m grateful to Crunchy Rod.

I thought a lot of this millennial nonsense was swept aside by 9/11. I’ve spoken before in this space about Gershom Gorenberg’s marvelous “End of Days,” a book about the way the Big Three monotheistic faiths converge upon a single plot of land — the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But his book was published around the time of the millennial turn, the fears surrounding which look pretty silly compared to planes flying into buildings.

Or maybe not, when the person holding them has aspirations to high office.

I never read the “Left Behind” books; did I miss anything?

Well, as some of you have indicated, news that it’s my natal anniversary seems to have leaked to the world. Kate and Alan just left on a mysterious errand, and I’m guessing they’ll return with a cake. In the meantime, I still have some housecleaning to do, and then the real fun starts — the Wednesday-night pie-baking before the feast. Expect light-to-nonexistent posting for the remainder of the weekend, but rest assured, I am enjoying the celebration.

I had an errand downtown Saturday, but alas, the block I was trying to reach was closed off. Parked police cars with lights flashing sat at either end, and in between were what appeared to be either soldiers or the baddest-ass SWAT unit in the tri-state area. Bomb scare? I thought, but only for a few seconds. Because lo, we are in Michigan, and Michigan is Hollywood’s sugar daddy (for the time being).

At first I thought it was more “Red Dawn,” which is seemingly everywhere these days. The “police station” is still wearing its wardrobe:

The red star with the whatever-it-is Chinese character is a logo throughout the film. If anyone speaks the language, I’d be interested in knowing what it means. Probably “tax incentives.”

Ah, but this is the conquered America of Barack Hussein Quisling Bow-down Obama, so this police station is well-fortified against the people it protects and serves. Street level:

And just in case you wanted to know what city our fair one is standing in for, the front door:

I tried to take a shot of the set that was working Saturday, but alas, the iPhone has no telephoto function. And I don’t think it was “Red Dawn.” The Guardian building is where they’ve been shooting this Wesley Snipes actioner, “Game of Death.” Imdb synopsis:

After a botched assassination attempt on a Diplomat, everyone from the Diplomat and his bodyguards to the group of assassins behind the attempt ends up at the same hospital where they fight it out.

Someone I know is working on this production. She calls it, “‘Die Hard’ in a hospital,” which is either the ten-thousandth or ten-thousand-and-first “Die Hard”-in-a-(fill in the blank) thumbnail. Did the people who made “Die Hard” v.1 know what they were doing? Maybe. I still stop to watch it, and all of its sequels, when I surf past them on cable, if only for a few minutes. Wouldn’t be the movie it was without Bruce Willis, of course, but he was well-served by the various British straight men they threw up against him, particularly Jeremy Irons. When Alan Rickman quotes Plutarch to the Japanese industrialist before busting a cap in his ass, well, that’s a moment that sticks with you, too.

But the genius of it was to simply ask the question everybody with half a brain asks when suffering through most action movies: Wouldn’t it hurt to pound someone in the skull with your bare fist like that? Bruce Willis stops from time to time to say “ouch” — that’s the ground broken by “Die Hard.” So simple. So successful.

That’s about the end of the verisimilitude*, however, and “Die Hard” was the beginning of action-movie loot hyperinflation. The first installment was about the theft of $600 million in bearer bonds, whatever those are. (Bearer bonds were very big in ’80s/’90s action movies, and that link explains why — they’re popular for money laundering — but I think their popularity is also tied to the alliteration of their name, as everyone from Alan Rickman to 50 Cent can sound cool saying “bearer bonds.”) By the third “Die Hard,” Jeremy Irons was plotting to steal all the money in the world, or at least all the gold held by the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan; he had to carry it away in a convoy of dump trucks. This raises so many questions in the mind of even a half-bright moviegoer — how does one launder a dump truck full of gold? (Bearer bonds!) Hell, how does one even get it out of North America? — you could even forget that this is a summer movie and you’re not supposed to think about it.

But it was too difficult to top, and by the last “Die Hard” I don’t even remember what the bad guys were after, only that Bruce brought down a helicopter with a fire hydrant, and it was awesome.

* My personal quibble with action-movie reality: The noise factor. People are always firing machine guns or having explosions happen five feet away, and no one ever stops to say, “I can’t hear you! My ears are ringing from that explosion!” I spent one measly hour on a firing range Friday, wearing foam earplugs and earmuff protection, and every round above .38 caliber still made me just about jump out of my skin.

Oh, well. Monday bloggage? Sure.

Lots of blogs are reading “Going Rogue” so you don’t have to, but few are striking the perfect tone that Lawyers, Guns and Money is. They’re up to Chapter 4 now, but it’s all on the main page, still, so just scroll down and work your way up. I was interested to read this note about Chapter 3, which calls out the She-Who/Lynn Vincent casualness with her chapter epigraphs:

So far as bungled epigraphs go, the third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

Our land is everything to us…. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember than our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.

Now, if that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that’s because, of course, he didn’t. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who — though a contemporary of John Wooden’s — was not the same guy.

Yes, yes — it’s absurd to expect much from Sarah Palin, but imagine if these sorts of gaffes had appeared in books by Hillary Clinton or Obama himself.

Exactly. Confusing John Wooden, the basketball coach, with John Wooden Legs, the Indian? That’s funny.

Ah, Monday. Police rounds, Russian lesson, followed by abs/glutes class in the evening. My life is sometimes indistinguishable from Paris Hilton’s.

Which reminds me of a story I forgot to blog, about a team of teenage burglars in Hollywood, who broke into various stars’ homes when they knew they’d be out partying. Among the victims was Paris Hilton, hit on multiple occasions, aided by this killer detail: She keeps her house key under the mat. No kidding.

Later!

Someone at the gym sent me one of the parody videos for the Shake Weight. No links here, as they’re about as difficult to find as Vi@gra spam, and I don’t want to be responsible for offending any of you. But it raises the question of what, exactly, the Shake Weight peddlers thought they were doing when they made a piece of exercise equipment that practically begs for parody, whose very own infomercials feature shirtless men exulting, “30 seconds into it, I was already covered in sweat.”

I guess what I’m asking is, is it possible to stake a business plan on an item that will be entirely sold as a dirty joke gift at bachelor/ette parties?

(She said, in a country that made fortunes for the inventors of the Pet Rock and Love Sheep.)

Now that we’ve kicked things off with our customary how-low-can-we-gooooo salvo, I just want to say that those of you who accuse liberals of being obsessed with Sarah Palin may have a point. On the other hand, take a look at this. I’ve been laughing over that picture since I first saw it a version of it on Facebook last night. It’s the reason I think political satire is impossible; how on earth do you compete with reality? Especially when reality gives you quotes like this:

City resident Mark Little said he’s so genuinely tantalized with Palin and her book that he said “it will be the first book I’ve ever read.”

Elsewhere in the same story:

“She’s got the common people’s touch, and we love her. She doesn’t sound like a highfalutin politician. She wants to save us from ourselves and she wants to give us the opportunities to be free.”

Somewhere. H.L. Mencken in smiling. No, he’s peeing his pants laughing.

And so we have arrived at Friday. Guess what I’m doing again in three weeks? Making another 48-hour challenge film! Oy vey. We’ve been invited to participate in the 48 Hour Shootout, for winners of the city competitions. Top prize: $1,000 and screening at the, no shit, Cannes Film Festival. Odds of beating the polished competitors from Los Angeles, New York and other dream cities? Pretty damn slim, but what the hell, we’re in. The rules are slightly different for this one: Everyone gets the same genre/subject and prop. Last year’s was “found money,” and the prop was a bag/suitcase/duffel containing $500,000 in prop dollars (or local equivalent currency, as this is an international competition). Nicely metaphoric for film hobbyists, I’d say. I only saw one of last year’s entries. It was about a guy who takes in a stray dog. The first day he takes it for a walk, and it finds a $10 bill. And so on.

So I’ll miss a weekend of Christmas shopping. So what?

And now it’s the last weekday of my husband’s vacation, and we are celebrating: First we’re going shooting, and then to the DIA to see the Avedon exhibition. Just try to put us in your demographic slot, Liberal Media! We are square pegs!

And I’m outta here. Have a great weekend.

Alan came back from a short fishing trip yesterday, which took him through western Michigan. Our many commenters who hail from that whiter, Dutchier, more pious part of the state can attest it has a lot in common with northeast Indiana — Fort Wayne with more blueberries, if you will.

Alan has a tolerance for commercial radio that I lack, so I rely on him to report on that front of the culture. He skipped around the dial, where every other talk station had a heavy Christian underlayment and a tone of barely muted hysteria and fury; the key phrase was “what can we do?” What can we do to stop them from bringing the terrorists to New York? What can we do to get Larry David arrested for pedophilia? (If you saw last week’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” you know what I’m talking about, although all of HBO came in for condemnation.) What can we do to stop the Communist/Marxist/Stalinist takeover of health care? And so on.

Someone was promoting this book: “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.” Hank Stuever made some funny throwaway comments about subtitles the other day, in the context of praising a nonfiction narrative that was so good, it didn’t even need one. (It was “The Good Soldiers,” if you’re wondering, and if you ordered it through the Kickback Lounge, I’d be obliged.) Green Hell’s reminds me of those idiot meetings we used to have in my newspaper days, when our overlords would pound into our heads that it’s not enough to simply tell a story, we must cover that “and what you can do about it” angle or risk endangering their end-of-year bonuses. I wonder if smart people on the right took enough MassComm or semiotics classes in between their MBA work to understand the pitch underlying “and what you can do about it.” Because the answer is right there on the book’s cover, although not spelled out: Buy this book, for starters. Or watch my show. I used to think Blue America was angry in the last days of the Bush administration, but that anger is like a demon that simply found another host. And a mouthpiece, but we will speak no more of she-who-must-not-be-named today.

Except this: One of my Facebook friends says she-who is book-touring through the Fort today. I figured she’d be at one of the mall bookstores, or some other venue that could handle the crowds, and she is, sort of — she’ll be at Meijer. For you non-Midwesterners, Meijer is a regional Wal-Martish big box. I guess I knew they sold books there, but it’s not like it’s a big part of their product lineup. But they are indisputably Real America, and she-who’s not even going at the one I used to patronize, in the southwestern suburbs. She’s going to the north-side Meijer, even realer Real America. They may have a hitching post outside for Amish buggies; a lot of businesses up that way do. Photo op alert.

Ain’t gonna study culture war no more. At least not today.

In lieu of bloggage today, a question for the crowd: How are you coming down on the mammograms-at-50-not-40 question? I’m curious because I have long suspected what is being said out loud today, that for women without a family history or other high-risk genetic indicators, having yearly mammograms before 50 is like chicken soup for a cold — it won’t hurt, but it probably isn’t doing any good, either. However, I’m willing to accept that I could be wrong, and I’m wondering what the wisdom of the comment section might turn up. It strikes me as a perfect example of why health-care costs are so high — we all want the Cadillac, but at Yugo prices. So: Anyone?

The Los Angeles Times online crossword is easier than the New York Times’. It also has a faultless interface that never falters, making speed part of the experience and leading to my daily back-and-forth e-mail with Eric Zorn; if you can beat 7:23, you can beat me today. (Late-breaking reply from Eric: You’ll have to squeak in under 6:38 to beat him.) I’ll give you a 20-second head start if you’ve never done the LAT puzzle; puzzles have their own underlying logic and favorite wores, and it takes a few run-throughs to get the hang of a new editor. I frequently think that Uma Thurman will live forever, along with Nick and Nora’s dog Asta, for having a short first name that’s mostly vowels: 42 across: She killed Bill.

The NYT crossword is more difficult and has a suckworthy online interface. I figure if paying the outrageous monthly home-delivery price for the Times (59 tax-deductible dollars per, but still) qualifies me for anything, it should be a crossword experience to match that of its Tribune Media services competitor, but no — I had to download a craptastic Java applet, which was slow and stupid and didn’t work well. I tried the iPhone app for $1.99, but it’s also clunky, features only a few puzzles free and has the worst background music imaginable, yes, worse than Scrabble.

Also, maybe someone could enlighten me: We all know Will Shortz is editor of the NYT crossword, but what’s involved with “editing” a crossword puzzle? It either works or it doesn’t, right? Is he the one who tells the originator, “I think what you need here is an Uma Thurman clue,” or do people who sprinkle their puzzles with Uma, Asta and Oona just know he’s the one to sell them to?

Bonus fun fact for Hoosiers: Shortz is an IU grad. Degree is in “enigmatology,” the only known possessor of such a sheepskin, in a course of study he designed himself. Fun fact for all, via Wiki:

He says that his favorite crossword of all time is the Election Day crossword of November 5, 1996, designed by Jeremiah Farrell. It had two correct solutions with the same set of clues, one saying that the “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper (!)” would be “BOB DOLE ELECTED”, and the other correct solution saying “CLINTON ELECTED”.

I’ve had my problems with computer games in the past, but with the LAT crossword, I think they’re solved. It has a beginning, a middle, an end, and a crowing or cowering e-mail to mop up, and then I’m done. All my bad habits are now on the iPhone, encapsulated in one game (Wurdle, an electronic form of Boggle), and lo, it appears I am not alone. Fortunately, I can leave my phone on another floor and get some work done.

Which I should go and do now. I was out and about all day yesterday and short on the bloggage, but you shouldn’t have to do bloggage on the day Sarah Palin appears on Oprah. Sounds like she did her usual. Let’s all say it together: Poor, poor bunny rabbit. Everyone is so mean to you! You thought Katie Couric would be just another mom, talkin’ teenagers and the gray hairs they give ya. But no.

You should have plenty to bat around today. Thanks for that sweet potato recipe, Mary — I think I’m going to be making that one this year. The week should ease up considerably by tomorrow. I’ll have more of my head in this game then.

Today is Alan and Kate’s birthday, and if birthdays aren’t a reason to get out your Fostoria square cake stand, I don’t know what is. Square cake stands require square cakes, however, and I didn’t have any square cake pans. We were at a mall on Saturday, so I stopped at Sur la Table.

There were millions of cake pans in all sizes. Every single one was flared at the top, just a little bit. For a layer cake, you need straight sides. I told the floor guy I needed straight-sided pans, and he ushered me into the “professional” area. The cost differential between an ever-so-slightly flared 8×8 amateur cake pan and a plumb-line straight professional pan? Two-point-six-to-one. Sometimes I hate cooking. The clerk suggested I make it in a 9-by-13 pan and cut it in half. This would yield two layers measuring 9-by-6.5 inches. This is not square. Sometimes I hate myself.

But the cake turned out OK:

That’s devil’s food with vanilla cream cheese frosting, by the way. I’m writing this before it’s cut, but I suspect it will be a little dry, based on its texture coming out of the pan. My cooking’s in a long slump these days; there are times when I just knock around the grocery store waiting for inspiration to strike, and it never does. The farmer’s markets are dwindling and I don’t have the effortless summer bounty, all of which tastes good with a little grilling, a little olive oil and a little salt. I cook for two people besides myself, one of whom doesn’t get home until 9:30 p.m. or later, the other essentially indifferent to everything that’s not an Oreo, pasta or bowl of cereal. I’m looking at another winter of soups, and I’m already dispirited.

Poor me.

(UPDATE: The cake was fine. As was dinner: Pork tenderloin with cranberry-rosemary sauce, au gratin potatoes and sauteed spinach with garlic. Perhaps my mojo is returning. And happy birthday to Mrs. Blonde Mannion, who also had pork tenderloin with cranberry-rosemary sauce for her birthday dinner.)

I guess we should run with the food theme, then. I ordered my Thanksgiving entree Saturday — a cruelty-free, pasture-raised, no-bad stuff, all good-stuff turkey from a CSA provider. They had pictures of the turkeys milling around their pasture pen. I expect I’ll be presented with the bird’s autobiography, attesting that its life was long and good out there in the pasture, and that it was ready to sacrifice its life for our harvest banquet. At these prices (don’t ask), it better. All I ask for is a little fat; the last chicken I bought from the “Amish” place at the market was so skinny it looked like it ran marathons.

I have my problems with the Amish, but the chicken place at the Eastern Market proudly advertises its Amish sourcing, so (shrug). I only object when I hear anyone claiming Amish poultry are somehow purer than that of your basic nightmare operation; my very own husband wrote about Amish chicken operations, and the only differences between them and Tyson’s are a) size; and b) the kid dumping the pharmaceuticals into the feed bin has a bowl haircut. If that makes you feel better, fine, but don’t delude yourself.

The rest of the menu is unplanned, but for the staples — potatoes, dressing, gallons of gravy. For four people I’m not going overboard, but hey, it’s Thanksgiving. Suggestions invited.

Bloggage: There’s no nerd like a typography nerd.

If you don’t like what they’re saying, just claim they’re lying. Repeat. Fact-checking the fact-checker of the fact-checker of “Going Rogue.”

Why I will never understand corporate finance:

In a positive sign that General Motors Co.’s restructuring is off to a good start, the company today said it would begin repaying U.S. government loans later this year, ahead of what is required, and that it lost $1.2 billion in the third quarter after emerging from bankruptcy.

No wonder this company got so screwed up.

Looks like Michigan is out of the race to house Gitmo detainees. Damn. One typical winter should have been enough to extract signed confessions from the lot of ’em.

Off to do what I do on Mondays. Whatever that is.