As sleepy as I am in the morning, there aren’t many reports coming out of the radio that make me stop what I’m doing and turn up the volume, convinced I’m experiencing audio hallucinations. Today was different.

I gather this was the reaction in Oslo, too, where the assembled reporters were said to “gasp.” I’ll say. Talk about a story that writes itself:

The committee’s choice of Obama from among 205 nominees appears in part to be a continued rebuke to the Bush administration’s go-it-alone approach to world bodies and alliances, including its decision to go to war in Iraq without U.N. approval.

No! Really?

It’s hard to know what to think. You don’t ask for a Nobel for yourself, and the WashPost story points out the deadline for nominations was February 1, not even two weeks after he took office. On the other hand, the Cairo speech was extraordinary, and just as necessary. I won’t say this was the right thing to do, but it’s at least somewhat defensible. Besides, it’s the Nobel committee’s award, not ours. They can give it to anyone they want.

That said, I look forward to February, when Barack Obama will be given an Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

And if Limbaugh, Beck et al stroke out over this, I say we put him on Mount Rushmore.

Let’s look elsewhere for commentary. Ah, Twitter. Trending topic: Noble Peace Prize. Comedy gold: RT: @tienmao: When awoken shortly before 6 a.m. with the news that he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama responded, “What? Shut the fuck up.”

That’s appropriate. The blowback from this could potentially be a bitch.

Is there anything else to discuss? Discuss!

I’m off to do the crossword and make it to my Friday morning meeting. Chilly, dreary rain today, so I won’t be getting there on the bike. Maybe the president will look in my direction and blow a gentle puff from his cheeks, parting the clouds and making the sun shine upon the land.

See you Monday.

The NYT reports on the New Jersey governor’s race, and states pretty baldly that the incumbent, Jon Corzine, is making his opponent’s size a campaign issue:

It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once. …Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.

The story includes a link to the slo-mo FatCam ad, and maybe I’ve been living in the corpulent Midwest too long, but I don’t see it. He’s a big guy for sure, but I don’t see the moving-in-different-directions part, although it could be my monitor. Like many Americans, almost everything I know about New Jersey I learned from watching “The Sopranos,” and let me just say, Christie is no Bobby Bacala. (Neither is Bobby Bacala; he wore prosthetic flab for much of the series.) But the story raises an interesting point: No language is as minutely fly-specked as campaign ad copy, and surely the ad, which says Christie “threw his weight around,” was designed as a poke in the spare tire.

There aren’t many groups of people you can pick on with impunity, but fat people are one of them, because it’s all their fault, you know. If they wanted to be thin, they could, if they’d just get some exercise, scrape half the food off their plates, park in the far reaches of the lot, have different parents, etc. I suppose, if Christie wanted to make an issue out of it, he could mention that Corzine nearly died in a car crash when the gubernatorial SUV crashed on the Garden State Parkway, and that his injuries were surely exacerbated by the fact he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The only reason it’s permissible to criticize fatties is because obesity drives up health-care costs, etc. — you’ve heard this before. So do car crashes with unrestrained human beings bouncing around inside.

Of course, that would be seen as extreme dirty pool. Better to fight back with humor, as former Baywatch baby Nicole Eggert demonstrates. On the other hand, humor is likely in short supply in any political campaign. Especially in New Jersey.

Fun fact to know and tell: New Jersey is one of the leanest states, according to CalorieLab Inc., which ranked it 42nd in obesity last year. So says the NYT. I’d never have imagined.

Living in Michigan resets many of your meters, including the Hard Times gauge. We’re in the midst of a California-style budget fiasco, and some of the nickels and dimes the state is looking to pick up are fascinating. There’s a proposal on the table to allow bars to stay open until 4 a.m., if they’re willing to pay $1,500 for an enhanced license. It’s estimated to raise $13 million and change, not enough to make a huge difference, but what the hell. The restaurant business says, “Great idea, but that’s way too much to charge.” Municipalities say, um, no. Just what a hard-drinking state like Michigan needs: More time to drink.

Fun fact to know and tell: The city commissioner of Royal Oak, a suburb with lots of bars and restaurants, is named Terry Drinkwine. I love reality. It’s so much more amusing than fiction.

But for real drama on the hard-times front, you couldn’t beat the scene at Cobo Center yesterday. The city had announced it would be making emergency grants of federal money to families in danger of losing their homes or utilities. They had the means to help about 3,400 families; 50,000 people showed up. The crowd got restless, then angry, and six people had to be taken away by ambulance.

Apparently the problem was rumors that they’d be handing out cash on the barrelhead. Well, that and the 28 percent unemployment rate.

OK, then. I have just enough time to try to beat Eric Zorn at the crossword before I have to go to the gym, in my vain attempt to stave off looking like Chris Christie. At least I’ll have rock-hard abs under all that flab.

I may have to take it all back, Michael Pollan. This very very long, very very stomach-turning New York Times piece is worth every minute it takes to read, and urp you stifle in response.

The story is about how one 22-year-old woman was left paralyzed and brain-damaged by e.coli, after eating a single hamburger made in a factory, from meat processed in a factory. The nut graf, simple and heartbreaking:

“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ”Ms. Smith said. In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.

In the next several thousand words, Times reporter Michael Moss attempts to trace precisely what happened to contaminate this burger with one of the most virulent strains of e.coli bacteria. That’s the stomach-churning part. It’s also infuriating, as you see how one industry, in pursuit of what we’ve been taught is the holy market’s greatest accomplishment (efficiency and cost savings), puts millions of Americans at deadly risk. I’m going to break my three-paragraph limit on quoting others’ work to pull out this one passage, which details only part of the problem, but does it fairly succinctly:

On Aug. 16, 2007, the day Ms. Smith’s hamburger was made, the No.3 grinder at the Cargill plant in Butler, Wis., started up at 6:50 a.m. The largest ingredient was beef trimmings known as “50/50” — half fat, half meat — that cost about 60 cents a pound, making them the cheapest component.

Cargill bought these trimmings — fatty edges sliced from better cuts of meat — from Greater Omaha Packing, where some 2,600 cattle are slaughtered daily and processed in a plant the size of four football fields.

As with other slaughterhouses, the potential for contamination is present every step of the way, according to workers and federal inspectors. The cattle often arrive with smears of feedlot feces that harbor the E. coli pathogen, and the hide must be removed carefully to keep it off the meat. This is especially critical for trimmings sliced from the outer surface of the carcass.

Federal inspectors based at the plant are supposed to monitor the hide removal, but much can go wrong. Workers slicing away the hide can inadvertently spread feces to the meat, and large clamps that hold the hide during processing sometimes slip and smear the meat with feces, the workers and inspectors say.

Greater Omaha vacuums and washes carcasses with hot water and lactic acid before sending them to the cutting floor. But these safeguards are not foolproof.

“As the trimmings are going down the processing line into combos or boxes, no one is inspecting every single piece,” said one federal inspector who monitored Greater Omaha and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The E. coli risk is also present at the gutting station, where intestines are removed, the inspector said

Every five seconds or so, half of a carcass moves into the meat-cutting side of the slaughterhouse, where trimmers said they could keep up with the flow unless they spot any remaining feces.

“We would step in and stop the line, and do whatever you do to take it off,” said Esley Adams, a former supervisor who said he was fired this summer after 16 years following a dispute over sick leave. “But that doesn’t mean everything was caught.”

Two current employees said the flow of carcasses keeps up its torrid pace even when trimmers get reassigned, which increases pressure on workers. To protest one such episode, the employees said, dozens of workers walked off the job for a few hours earlier this year. Last year, workers sued Greater Omaha, alleging that they were not paid for the time they need to clean contaminants off their knives and other gear before and after their shifts. The company is contesting the lawsuit.

And this is only one part of the process; the same batch also contained trimmings imported from Uruguay, and let me see the hands of everybody who feels hunky-dory about that. The picture that emerges is one of true mystery meat, a vile concoction of things you really don’t want to think about, which you then have the responsibility to cook to a safe temperature, only oops, umm…

In the wake of the outbreak, the U.S.D.A. reminded consumers on its Web site that hamburgers had to be cooked to 160 degrees to be sure any E. coli is killed and urged them to use a thermometer to check the temperature. This reinforced Sharon Smith’s concern that she had sickened her daughter by not cooking the hamburger thoroughly.

But the pathogen is so powerful that her illness could have started with just a few cells left on a counter. “In a warm kitchen, E. coli cells will double every 45 minutes,” said Dr. Mansour Samadpour, a microbiologist who runs IEH Laboratories in Seattle, one of the meat industry’s largest testing firms.

With help from his laboratories, The Times prepared three pounds of ground beef dosed with a strain of E. coli that is nonharmful but acts in many ways like O157:H7. Although the safety instructions on the package were followed, E. coli remained on the cutting board even after it was washed with soap. A towel picked up large amounts of bacteria from the meat.

Here’s the problem: Into every modern American life, some processed food must fall. We might try mightily to hew to the straight, narrow, organic and local, but sooner or later you’re going to be served a restaurant meal that doesn’t draw its raw materials from the Niman Ranch, or your child is going to have to eat the school lunch for one reason or another, or you just aren’t going to have the energy to burn a cord of wood to make a couple of eggs (as Anthony Bourdain amusingly summed up Alice Waters’ breakfast for Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes.”). And goddamnit, but it is the government’s job to make sure food-processing facilities are as safe as can be, and are producing meat that doesn’t have to be handled like toxic waste. (If I hear one more industry dipshit telling me I need to clean my cutting boards with bleach, I’m going to throw one at their heads.) We’ve clearly seen — sorry, libertarians — that “market forces” aren’t going to shape up the various factory-food industries alone, at least not until we have a plague of paralyzed 22-year-olds, or something. The USDA comes across almost as badly as Cargill and the vast Omaha beef processors who put this poison into American supermarkets. Seizure, forced shutdowns, and a few corporate executives doing a perp walk in handcuffs — that’s what it’s going to take. (Although, based on what we’ve seen, or not seen, on Wall Street in the past year, I’m not holding my breath.)

If nothing else, it settles things once and for all: No more supermarket ground beef for this family, and I’m redeeming some of my Amazon kickback bucks for the meat-grinding attachment for my KitchenAid mixer. (Someone in our group, I think MichaelG, swears by his, but any ideas about getting the best meat-to-fat ratio are welcome.) I intend to remain an omnivore. But I’m no longer trusting my health to an industry that considers the time it takes to wash shit off the slaughterhouse knives wasted time.

I was going to call this post “Eat shit and die,” but I know some of you read this at work, so you’ll just have to enjoy it down in the text.

So how is everyone’s week starting? Hamburgers for lunch? Didn’t think so.

What to say about David Letterman? Cad? Sexual harasser? Sugar daddy? All of the above. My head hurts. I’m struck by this unsourced gossip, via Defamer, which implies a gig working for Dave was win-win all around, if you didn’t mind occasional sexual service in return for having your law-school bill paid. For the record, I disapprove. For all the good that will do.

A man I know once told an approving anecdote about an ambitious female journalist who got a coveted job by sleeping with the right people, that this is the way of the world, who are we to judge, etc. Well, I’m judging. Consenting adults aren’t always co-equals, and the more comely young assistants there are in the world willing to do kneepads work with the boss in return for graduating from law school debt-free, the tawdrier the world gets. I’m not after a perfect one, just one a little less tawdry.

Whatever happens to Letterman is obviously up to his bosses. My guess is, he’ll survive and thrive. He has a lot of fans, and he’s good at his job. He’s no hypocrite; while he mines his personal life for material, he’s never claimed to be perfect.

A topical Top 10 list.

Well, OK. Pals, this week has been brutal, and today dawned — if that’s the word for it — overcast, rainy and chilly. Which means it’s a perfect day to go to Costco and buy in bulk. Also, I’m looking forward to tonight, when I chaperone one of the middle-school dances our community is known for. I’ve been told by opposing parental camps that they are either a) fun affairs with lemonade; or b) dodgy dens of misbehavior approved of by short Polish-speaking film directors. I volunteered to help so I could see for myself, but I’m not expecting to see much beyond option A, above. If nothing else, it gives me yet another hammer to hang over a certain seventh-grader’s head: If you don’t do X, I will shake my booty on your dance floor. Talk about a motivator.

Now to do the crossword puzzle and try to beat Eric Zorn’s time. Have a great weekend, all.

Lazy morning, watching the bunny hop around. While Ruby will never claim her place in the pet hall of fame, it has been interesting having her live with us. Humanity’s deal with companion animals has always been that we’ll share our bounty in exchange for something of theirs — mousing ability, a nose that can find game or just a wagging tail when we come home after a brutal day among the other primates. I’m still figuring out what we get from Ruby, although Kate is thrilled every time she sees her slammin’ cuteness or strokes her cloudlike fur. I enjoy carrying on squeaky-voice conversations with her and hand-feeding her pieces of apple and banana. But on a quiet morning when I’m alone in the house, sometimes I just enjoy watching her explore her world.

Despite their ability to use a litter box, rabbits make mediocre house pets, at least for people with nice houses. They’re too inclined to destruction, and while intelligent, they don’t really possess the brainpower to make the chew-this-not-that distinction dogs do. I’d hoped by this point Ruby would have lost her natural wariness around us, but she’s still one of the world’s tastiest and most abundant prey animals, and if I’m stroking her on my lap in the office, all it takes is the sound of Kate bounding up the stairs to send her under the bed for 20 minutes of trembling. The fading light in evening is always my cue to round her up and put her back in her cage, because otherwise she’ll pick her hiding place for the night and refuse to come out for love, money or carrot greens.

But one reason we keep animals in the house is to see the world through their eyes. Who isn’t thrilled by the dog who stares into the darkness outside the glow of the home fires and growls deep in his throat? To a rabbit, all the world is meadow and moor, the highest place in it is a vantage spot to watch for predators, the lowest a burrow for digging. I threw a couple of cheap blankets on the guest-room bed for her amusement, and she’s pleased to root through them for an hour at a time, pushing them with her nose and paws into a landscape that suits her. If I join her there with the laptop, sometimes she will put her twitchy nose up against my ear and kiss me.

It’s hard not to anthropomorphize, though. Note how I just turned a sniff into a kiss.

I’m starting to think we gave her the wrong name. Kate was commenting on her smoky-eye markings, and sang the Maybelline jingle. And I thought Maybelline would have suited her perfectly. She grooms more often than most supermodels.

God, I’ll be glad when this week is over. Funny how losing just one more hour of sleep at night can bollix up your productivity but good. Bloggage? A little:

Jim at Sweet Juniper keeps a Polaroid camera in his car for feral-dog shots. and has a new collection up today. I think I’ve seen that brindle pit bull bitch before. Or else one of her sisters.

Are salaries like Scott Simon’s the dirty little secret of public broadcasting? I’ve known a few people in broadcasting, and a few more in public broadcasting, and the model is the same in both places — a few bloated “personalities” at the top get a big pile of cash, while the rank and file work second jobs to afford studio apartments. But if I knew the guy was making $300K, I wouldn’t give them my $50, either.

If bloggers are going to do the work of paid journalists, they’d better grow some thick skins, as some learn what the people they cover really think of them. Living in Portsmouth (pronounced “Pors’muf” locally) should be good preparation, though.

If no one has used the term “Polanski-palooza” yet, let me be the first. If only I could collect a royalty — I think it’s a winner.

Have a good rest of the day. I’m getting going any minute now.

I’ve been scanning the usual sources, and it’s gratifying to see that condemnation of Roman Polanski among people who have never been offered entrance to a luxury lounge is pretty close to universal. Among the ahem artistic community — pinkies up! — not so much. I admire Martin Scorsese, and you’d hope a man with five daughters wouldn’t be afraid to take a contrarian position, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We separate the art from the artist, amen.

I agree with Paul Campos at LGM, who said the petition in support of Polanski “reads like a wingnut parody of degenerate France and degenerate Hollywood engaging in an orgy of amoral pomposity.” Let’s take a look at it, shall we?

Pétition pour Roman Polanski

Nous avons appris avec stupéfaction l’arrestation par la police suisse de Roman Polanski à son arrivée samedi 26 septembre 2009 à Zürich (Suisse), alors que celui-ci se rendait à un Festival de cinéma qui devait lui décerner un prix pour l’ensemble de sa carrière.

Cette arrestation fait suite à un mandat d’arrêt américain prononcé contre le cinéaste en 1978, dans une affaire de mœurs.

Oops, that’s the French. It sounds so…sexy, doesn’t it? The plodding, Puritan, Amur’can version:

Petition for Roman Polanski

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

It is astonishing to learn that arrest warrants are sometimes carried out. What is astonishing to me is to learn that someone actually believes the following:

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

Sundance as de facto embassy space? How charming. Imagine the possibilities for the diplomatic pouches.

I bring this all up not because this case is so interesting; ultimately — and it’s important to keep this in mind — this is about a grubby little crime, not artistic freedom and puritanical American…what’s le mot juste? Une affaire de mœurs, yes. I bring it up because you watch, it won’t be long before someone tries to hang this on “the left,” or the Democrats, or Obama’s secret teenage-girl rape teams, or whatever, and I just want it on the record now that I ain’t havin’ it. I don’t know what Scorsese was thinking, but I suspect it’s more along the lines of, “if I ever want to do business with Harvey Weinstein again, I’d better get on board with this” than “sure, she was asking for it.” Not that the former is any better than the latter, but at least we can all understand filthy lucre as a motivator, whereas the other is just gross.

OK. As you can see, I’m late getting started today. I took an extra-long sleep last night, didn’t rise until 9:30, and friends? It felt good. I see the previous comment thread has taken a left turn into discussion of “Valley of the Dolls,” one of my favorite novels of all time. I read it as a teenager, and learned so much from it, I hardly know where to start, from New Haven openings to El Morocco, where everyone waits for the early editions to see what the reviews are like. I’ve been looking for one of those “frownie” plasters Jennifer North wears in an early scene; it’s sort of a glue-on thing that pokes you in the face if you dare to furrow your brow and invite wrinkling, Botox-before-Botox. Also, I’m all about the Nembutals. I think I took one last night.

So no bloggage today; I’m still barely ambulatory. At least I’ll be well-rested for work tonight. I did try, as an experiment, doing the L.A. Times crossword puzzle within 30 minutes of rising, pre-coffee. I finished in 7:18. Anyone care to take me on?

Roman Polanski will, as they say, “face justice” in a child-rape case so old the victim is perimenopausal. Good. There shouldn’t be a statute of limitations on that sort of thing, and no matter what the victim says today, there needs to be a reckoning, 76 years old or not, great artist or not, friend of Jack Nicholson or not.

I saw the documentary about the case. I have read opinions from both sides, those who call it “brilliant” and those who argue it was a cleverly constructed propaganda job (which, in documentaries, is a little like accusing water of being wet). No question that the case was seriously flawed, the judge a fool, etc. No question that the victim wants the case to be dropped and Polanski officially forgiven, as she says she has done. Admirable of her, but has anyone asked if the forgiveness was accompanied by a cash payment? I can’t recall. No question that Polanski, at 76, is likely no menace to society, or even to young girls, anymore. (Although you never know. I remember reading a story pegged to one of the big anniversaries of “Chinatown,” in which screenwriter Robert Towne described doing a rewrite with Polanski at the latter’s house, and how easily distracted Polanski was by the scene out the window, where several young girls frolicked poolside. He liked having girls of that vintage around. If only so many didn’t have mothers who thought that was just swell.)

The older I get, the more comfortable I am with situations that are muddy, complicated, filled with icky people on both sides but still have a clear right/wrong distinction, and this is one of them. Polanski needs to answer for, if nothing else, his flight to Europe. And that’s all I have to say about that, other than this: Like David Edelstein, I’m dreading the resolution of this case; he notes in a brief blog post, “Now, there will be a lot of grandstanding by idiots.” Yep.

If the Achilles heel of the right wing is their seemingly endless supply of family values-bleating, boy- and/or mistress-buggering Republican hypocrites, Hollywood plays the same role on the left, providing their private jets, their money and their glittery stardust and then getting that what? look when someone catches them being a little too artistic in the morality department. I haven’t said anything about Mackenzie Phillips yet, mainly because I couldn’t wrap my head around the nearly overlooked detail of that sordid story: Phillips asks us “not to judge” her father. It takes a very specific sort of showbiz birdbrain to say something like that, to tell us something vile and stomach-turning and them demand our stomachs not turn.

No real practical purpose will be served by locking up Polanski at this point, but (shrug). And if Mackenzie Phillips’ sordid overshare serves any practical purpose at all, let’s hope that it sets the bar so high for celebrity memoirs that fewer get published. The way I look at it, if the next starlet can’t top this with, oh, cannibalism, then the next starlet doesn’t get a book contract. Win-win.

Which brings us to Mitch Albom, who has a new book out this fall, another slim, small, wide-margined, born-to-be-a-bestseller volume called “Have a Little Faith.” The Free Press assigned a freelancer — that’s what “special writer” in the byline indicates — to do their Q-and-A, a wise move even if it produced the usual bootlicky crapfest, accompanied by two photos of the elfin Albom looking dark and broody. If I read the story correctly, the book examines Mitch’s return to Judaism? No, he doesn’t do that. He just has “faith,” preferring to play the piano at an inner-city black church and meet weekly with his old rabbi, who inexplicably has asked Albom to give his eulogy, even though he’s still hale and hearty. So much for rabbis being wise and learned. (I think it was Judaism, or at least Philip Roth, who gave “learned” its two-syllable pronunciation, in fact.)

It may be a sign of my boredom with Albom that I can’t even get pissy about this book, although we’ll see how the publicity tour goes. He has the usual kickoff planned — a star-studded “and friends” weepfest at the Fox Theatre tomorrow night that sounds excruciating. Ernie Harwell will be there; nothing like the presence of a beloved public figure with a terminal cancer diagnosis to get a crowd leaking like a sieve. Maybe Dave Barry can lighten things up, but my guess is, Mitch will settle for nothing less than a two-hanky soaker.

Boy, you can tell I’m working until 2 a.m. all this week, can’t you? I’m a hangin’ judge, and I’m coming for you. Just as soon as I have a little more coffee.

Off to the gym, instead. The only thing that keeps me sane in a week of five-hour sleep is clean living. And naps.

My search for the ideal stimulant continues. I’m trying to find that elusive pick-me-up that I can down sometime around 10 p.m. that will keep me alert until 1 a.m., but still let me sleep afterward. Two cups of coffee handle the stay-awake part, but sour my stomach for sleeping. Energy drinks make me feel like a 51-year-old in baggy shorts, tryin’ to hang with the kids. Today I got a brainstorm — a memory, actually. Morning Thunder.

My friend Paul hated coffee but needed serious stimulation to get going in the morning, and used to drink a gigantic tankard of Celestial Seasonings’ Morning Thunder tea, with four or five bags steeping in there. It was a pretty vile drink, but it did the trick. I tried it for a while (one bag at a time), but dropped it when I got tired of people making poop jokes about my beverage. (What brings on the famous 10 a.m. session with the morning paper, anyway? Is it the alimentary canal making room for breakfast, the hot liquid or the caffeine? And why does it mostly affect men? I’ve never known one who didn’t need a little me-time at midmorning.) After a while, it made me associate Morning Thunder with boom-booms, and by then I had developed the obligatory journalist’s taste for rancid newsroom coffee, which was free.

But with this unusual need for a specific eye-opener, maybe it’s time to check out the M.T. again. So I stopped where I never do — the tea section at the supermarket.

It’s kind of depressing. Tea runs in cycles like everything else, and now we’re deep into the relaxation thing. With eye-opening delegated to Starbucks and dark-roast arabica beans, tea has to take the opposite tack, and the most common word is decaffeinated, along with calming and serenity. No Morning Thunder in evidence. Ah, well.

Last night a triple-e from Starbucks at 8:45 did the trick magnificently. Drowsiness arrived at 12:55 a.m. If I try it tonight, it’ll either be too much or too little.

Do the guys at Starbucks try to speak Italian to you, too? “Here’s your tripplio,” or whatever; I wasn’t taking notes. Sometimes, when I feel like making my triple a dessert, I’ll order it with whipped cream. Tripplio con panna, the baristas say. They’re probably the same wiseasses who refer to Detroit as day-twah. Blech.

What a pleasant weekend, made for long bike rides, a little weightlifting and a pass through the Nordstrom’s shoe sale. The Steve Madden boots I’ve been eyeing keep falling in price, but they’re still not a justifiable purchase. I don’t have the legs, or the youth, to stuff jeans into boots anymore. And Kate will give up her Ed Hardy sneakers when they pry them off her cold, dead feet. Best would be a cool pair of ankle boots, but the only ones like that they’re making these days have towering heels. My knees hurt just looking at them. Where is a woman somewhere between stilettos and Hush Puppies to find her footwear? Not at Nordstrom’s shoe sale, evidently.

As you can see, friends, I have very little today. I stayed away from my computer for a couple of days and strongly recommend it, except for the pile of e-mail that accumulates under the slot. And I didn’t get too much bloggage, but a little:

New York magazine looks at the birther/wacker far right. What a bunch of maroons.

And now off to begin manic Monday. Kate woke up with a sore throat and informs me it’s sweepin’ the schoolyard. Oh, joy.

I suppose we can all say what we were doing when it happened. I’ll spare you my recollections; they’re unremarkable and who really cares? What I think about at this distance isn’t just what happened that day, it’s what happened after. A mental data dump in no particular order, with a media-centric focus:

It was the beginning of the end of John Bob Edwards on “Morning Edition.” (Yes, yes — trivial.) I remember driving to work, wondering why the hell NPR wasn’t live with this, when I had just heard a phoner with their correspondent in the Pentagon, who’d said, “I just heard something. I think I have to go now.” It was the plane hitting, somewhere on the other side of the building. (That’s the amazing attack, to me. It’s one thing for a half-trained pilot to fly into a building standing 110 stories high. But to essentially bellyflop into one with only five floors? Damn that guy’s luck, for sure.) But here it was, after 9 a.m., and “Morning Edition” had segued into Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and if there’s a voice you really don’t want to hear when your adrenaline is racing and you want information, dammit, it’s that one. I think Keillor would agree. NPR had no structure in place to go live for national breaking news. That would change pretty soon, and Mr. Sleepy Morning Avuncularity was shoved aside.

Flying went from bad to worse. I remember racing onto a flight in the ’80s, a remarkable flight that didn’t last long — Fort Wayne to Toledo on Delta. Fourteen minutes in the air, $14 one-way. That doesn’t seem possible, that price, but that’s my recollection. J.C. was in Toledo for a night, working on a station there, and I left work early to meet him. I was running late and blasted through the terminal with my carry-on, a newsboy’s delivery bag. Threw it on the machine’s belt and zipped through the metal detector, and was the last one aboard, while the stewardess tap-tapped her foot impatiently at the jetway. Total time from parking lot to fasten-seat-belts, about five minutes. Now when I have to fly, I rise hours early, remember to keep my ID handy and always wear slip-on shoes. I remember flying maybe a year afterward, watching a TSA agent wanding a septuagenarian in Newark, the wand beeping at his belt line, the old man plaintively barking, “It’s my artificial hip!” Well, at least we didn’t profile.

It was a dark, dark night for my section of the newspaper — features. Jesus Christ, but my brain nearly exploded, seeing what the features editors of the world came up with to help us process the pain. They made Sports look profound. I distinctly recall one around Christmastime on “the new comfort,” which quoted a Land’s End representative saying yes, they were selling more cashmere throws and other soft things this season than last, and yes, it seemed to indicate the nation planned to spend its first post-9/11 winter on the couch with the covers pulled up tight. Imagine if the Slanky or Bleeves or, what’s it called? Right, the Snuggie — imagine if we’d had Snuggies then. The mind reels.

But the worst was the Wall Street Journal features section, which ran a story saying more people were eating in as part of the new comfort and new austerity, but it turns out that’s not much of a savings over restaurants, because have you priced a set of All-Clad lately? Nine hundred dollars! And here’s some girl who invited some friends over for a dinner party, and was shocked at how much truffles cost, and don’t even get her started on lemongrass. One magazine had a short item on how the Carrie Bradshaws of Gotham were changing their fitness routines as a result of the attacks. One had started swimming laps, so she could make her escape from Manhattan by water, if necessary. I only wish I were making it up.

This marked the rise of the blogosphere, too. Everyone wanted a blog, so they could tell their story and share their feelings. I recall being amazed at how many people took the attacks personally, and by that I mean really personally, people in places like the Midwest who were convinced Muhammed Atta went to his death screaming, “You’re next, Bob Smith of Kansas City, you and your twins Jason and Jordan, and also your filthy dog Bingo!” If nothing else, 9/11 made me glad I lived in a Hoosier backwater no one would bother bombing. Alan had a job interview with a non-profit the following spring that would have taken us to Traverse City, Michigan, and that would have been even more suitable, being too far north to be downwind of Chicago, surely next on al-Qaeda’s list.

(I often wonder how many police agencies in places like East Methane, Tenn., went to the county commissioners with a wish list in those immediately-after months, in case terrorism came to town. I mean, they have an armored police vehicle in Defiance, Ohio, these days. Why?)

Oh, but that didn’t stop people in Fort Wayne from feeling very, very threatened. I sat next to the police scanner, and listened to it the Friday after the attacks. Call after call after call to investigate a swarthy individual seen walking on a downtown street. I really couldn’t blame them, though — we all went a little crazy. To this day, I forgive anyone who wrote or said something insane between 9/11/2001 and 12/31/2001. Crazy times provoke crazy responses. Four crashed airliners followed by anthrax via mail? Maureen Dowd was reduced to jibbering. (That’s a straight line for anyone who wants it, btw.) So were a lot of other people. Ego te absolvo.

Needless to say, irony didn’t end.

My favorite post-9/11 cartoon.

My second-favorite.

What came after for you?

Wow. The people calling this the “most astonishingly tasteless thing I’ve ever read in a newspaper,” are somehow …selling it short. For those of you too time-starved to click through, here’s the lead on Mark Whicker’s column yesterday in the Orange County Register:

It doesn’t sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.

Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.

She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn’t high-fived in a while.

She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.

Now, that’s deprivation.

The rest goes on to lay out the last 18 years in sports for this newly freed captive, who as you recall spent that time not in some wacky Rip Van Winkle state of suspended animation, but as a literal sex slave to a monster. Of course, now that she’s been out for a few days, she might want to, you know, catch up on the sports pages and have a few laffs:

Mike Tyson now makes fun of himself in movies. …For the most part, fans have stopped doing The Wave. …USC is one of college football’s elite programs, three coaches later.

And so on, until he winds up with this extended fart:

Congratulations, Jaycee. You left the yard.

I showed it to Alan. He said, “He probably turned it in six minutes before deadline. His editor was too busy to deal with it and punted it to the desk, where they ran spellcheck, slapped a hed on it and pushed the button.” I might add: And everyone who had a problem with it figured it had likely been approved from on high. And there were three copy editors handling a work load that was previously handled by 12. And anyway, we just had a meeting where we were urged to be “edgy,” and here goes nothin’.

There’s always the strong possibility he’s a dumb jock-sniffer who really thinks the worst part about such an ordeal would be missing the early career of Tiger Woods. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and credit him instead with profound cluelessness. Code of the Columnist and all.

OK, then. I’m not going to talk about the guy from South Carolina, but you all are welcome to. What’s to say, anyway? That he violated some code of conduct? Of course he did, but this is the same chamber that saw the caning of Charles Sumner, after all. (Technically, it was the Senate, also where Dick Cheney told Sen. Leahy to go fuck himself, but I don’t think bad behavior is confined to one chamber.) Again, though, it’s the strong b.s. factor, the fact that these very people were the ones wringing their hands over the death of civility and Bush Derangement Syndrome just a few short years ago. Obama can take a little trash-talk, although I find it amusing that it was Rahm Emanuel who put the word out that he wanted an apology on his desk, soonest. (I can’t find the cite for that, but I read it last night.) I wish he’d added, “and the motherfucker’s finger, I want that too,” and who knows, maybe he did, and that exchange is merely lost to the mists of time:

Politics aren’t for the weak of stomach. The Brits survive Question Time, and they’re famously polite.

Anyway, the first lady wore sleeves last night, so I hope we can all be happy about that.

Boy, I’m mellow and forgiving this morning, aren’t I?

Mellow bloggage: Bookmark 5 Second Films, and hit “random” a few times the next time you’re on hold. Today’s home-page film contains mild profanity. HT: Mr. Felsing, down Charlotte way, via FB.

Kudos to yesterday’s comments, which slaughtered, filleted, consumed and excreted California Assemblyman Michael Duvall so I didn’t have to, as well as whoever pointed out that the lobbyist who hauled his old-man ashes probably shouldn’t lose her job over this, as she’s pretty much just sticking to the job description. May I just add, however? Ewwww.

(A slight tangent: I was trying to decide if Kate could handle “The Hurt Locker” and watched a clip online of the first seven minutes. The soldiers are using one of those remote-control bomb-investigation ‘bots, and bantering over it: “Just stick it in.” “You stick it in.” “Pretend it’s your dick.” And so on. I asked a friend if men talk about anything else, and he pointed out, correctly, that he hardly ever talks that way with his friends. And yet, here’s Assemblyman Duvall chatting up bodily fluids with a colleague. Again: Ewwww.)

They can’t win, so they’re playing the dog card: The Detroit Lions produce a pet calendar for charity. Aw, what nice young men.

Now we’ve seen everything: Hef files for divorce, cites infidelity. Hers.

And now I’m off to write a short essay in Russian, using lots of past tense. I still can’t find the bathroom in Moscow, however.