For a Friday when I’m racing to complete a long to-do list ahead of leaving on a much-needed vacation, just some bloggage today. I’ll be in and out of here next week as the spirit moves me; it may move me a lot, or not at all, but I’ll be connected via e-mail and cell, and I’m sure you folks will think of something to talk about in my absence. Note to Chicagolanders — and yes, Peter, I’m looking at you — we’ll have a table Saturday evening at a tapas place in Lincoln Park, so if you want to come, e-mail me for the deets.

So, let’s get to it:

I’m not a fan of Caitlin Flanagan, but there were a few snickers in this piece, ostensibly looking at a new biography of Helen Gurley Brown. It takes a turn into more contemporary figures toward the end, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

A friend sent me this YouTube clip a few months ago; it’s part of a longer piece for Current TV (don’t do any work for them near the North Korean border), in which Ira Glass talks about storytelling, but as usual, it’s about something more — about soldiering on when you don’t feel like it — and you should invest five minutes of your time in it.

A friend of mine makes this sound effect when things don’t go well — MWAH-mwahhh. If he could read this story, he’d make it now. Just to entice you to click:

LOCKPORT, N.Y. (AP) – Police say a Buffalo-area tow truck driver was juggling two cell phones – texting on one and talking on another – when he slammed into a car and crashed into a swimming pool.

HT: Rob Kantner, FB friend.

Off to the bank, on the bike. Errands + exercise = multitasking.

John Dingell’s town hall meeting erupted in chaos, as the Journalese goes. Some guy pushed his son’s wheelchair up to the podium and extended a trembling finger at the 81-year-old congressman; he was so calm and reasoned, the police had to escort him out. But that wasn’t the worst of it:

“You may be dead in five years!” shouted Val Butsicaris, 60, of Taylor. “They may euthanize you!” She referred to concerns of government rationing of care for elderly people.

Where do these people get these ideas? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. Click through and look at some of those pictures — the faces contorted with rage, etc. Weren’t these the same people who fretted not long ago about the lack of courtesy in American life? Yeah, I thought so. Not to mention the cognitive dissonance:

“The government wants to control my body, my health care decisions and the doctors I see,” said Christine Wofford, 56, of Canton, who distributed literature from the Liberty Council, a Lynchburg, Va., religious civil rights law firm.

Where have I heard those phrases before? And hey, Lynchburg — the San Francisco of the right wing. Or is that Colorado Springs?

Everybody’s angry these days. George Sodini, verrrry angry. Smart operators know angry is a cash machine. Here’s Sodini’s guru, “John White, who uses the professional name R. Don Steele,” a man who calls himself…

According to Steele’s Web site, steelballs.com, he is a marriage, family and child counselor in private practice since 1976 and an author since 1984. The site indicates he attended Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Penn State University and the University of Southern California before earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from California State University at Fullerton and a master’s degree in psychology from California State University at Northridge.

Steele offers blunt instructions to would-be Romeos:

“The all time DATE DESTROYER is being a NICE GUY. You must be a Man of Steel Balls,” Steele insists.

Isn’t that comforting? It’s always useful, when looking at Sodini and his ilk, to consider that the healthier ones go out and buy a Russian or Filipino bride.

Makes you want to euthanize yourself, doesn’t it? Let’s take a left turn into calmer waters. I forgot to blog this earlier, yet another NYT OMG-I-have-problems piece from Wednesday, about the New York foodie equivalent of roughing it:

Part of me loves to navigate the culinary wilderness of rental homes: the stale McCormick spices, the speckled enamel stockpots in which countless visitors have boiled their corn. Another part of me wants to make sure I can pull the cork from a bottle of wine and turn pork chops with a pair of tongs and whisk mayonnaise when I get there.

[Broad wink] Mayonnaise!

…That was my revelation this June: one needs only a cast-iron skillet to survive. I used it to scramble eggs in the morning, and make grilled cheese for my children at lunchtime, and cook bacon for spaghetti alla amatriciana, and crust up diced, boiled potatoes, and fry breaded pieces of tender Chatham cod. Not for an instant did I miss the All-Clad arsenal in my Brooklyn kitchen.

I love the bravery this woman shows, don’t you? Even in the face of stale McCormick spices, she finds a way to soldier on.

If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I got nothin’ today. I’m prepping for a meeting, calculating end-of-term grades and looking forward to the rest of August, which I intend to spend working on Fun Writing, as opposed to the non-fun kind. I can’t identify with Angry right now. Maybe you folks would like to discuss the films of John Hughes, which I liked, but not as much as I did his National Lampoon-era fiction (“My Penis,” “My Vagina,” et al) — he’s sort of the male Nora Ephron, for me. Although they all pretty much blur together, don’t they? “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” — that’s my favorite. “The Breakfast Club” doesn’t hold up, never saw “Sixteen Candles,” and “Home Alone” boiled down to the kid slapping his cheeks and making an O face. I’m reminded of a friend’s summation of Robin Williams: Stop me before I warm your heart again. But if you liked him, that’s fine. We all have our enthusiasms.

Off to organize papers. Woo.

Slate has a story today on why vintage stoves are better than modern ones, and while the writer, Regina Schrambling, comes at the subject from a somewhat more oblique angle than I would have — she bought her ’50’s-era Wedgewood as “vintage” in the early ’90s — we arrive at the same place. Not long ago the New York Times ran a story on Jim Harrison, the poet/novelist, at his winter home in Arizona. Harrison is a famous gourmand, and one of the great pleasures of his writing are his descriptions of food and meals. But I was delighted to see, in a video accompanying the story, that he cooks on a plain old standard-size electric range that looks as though it came from Sears.

“Why spend $6,000 on a stove when you can spend $6,000 on food?” he said. Dean & Deluca thanks you too, Mr. Harrison.

I’m a dedicated home cook, and while I far prefer gas cooktops (I have electric), I have to admit my basic suburban kitchen setup is good enough for 95 percent of anything I want to do there. If I had my druthers, equipment-wise, it would be nice to have a second oven, but I admit it would only get used at Thanksgiving and a handful of other occasions. The one thing my modern stove has that Schrambling’s likely doesn’t — a self-cleaning cycle — is a pretty big plus. (I remember Easy-Off, which was neither.)

But we agree in principal principle. Here’s my popcorn popper:

It’s a Kenmore, and it’s older than me. My mother recalled it was a gift from our Aunt Charlene to my brother and sister when they were toddlers. Both qualify for AARP membership now. (So do I, but only on the early-admission program.) I have no great sentimental attachment to it, and will give it up without tears if it ever breaks, but it refuses to do so. Schrambling writes of her Wedgewood:

So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you’re asking for a crash. Google “I hate my Viking” these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.

My popcorn popper doesn’t have an on-off switch. You plug it in, and coils in the bottom unit — the stained, non-washable part in the photo — come on. Put one tablespoon of oil and one-third cup of popcorn on the bowl and replace the lid. In a couple of minutes, the popping will start. Keep your ear cocked to when it stops, unplug, empty and serve. If you like, you can melt a tablespoon of butter in the bowl after you dump out the popcorn — it takes about another minute. That’s it.

Popping corn is so simple, you wouldn’t think planned obsolescence would come into the mix, but it did — poppers where the lid doubles as the serving bowl, where the butter can be melted simultaneously, where you can dispense with oil altogether — all these have come and gone since Sears sold this antique to Aunt Charlene. And yet the Kenmore soldiers on, homely and dented, but still showing up for work. What more can you ask?

Some bloggage before gym time:

Detroit culled its 167 or so city council candidates to nine finalists Tuesday. The top vote-getter was Charles Pugh, whom I remember during his time in Fort Wayne, as a reporter for WKJG. He hadn’t started shaving his head, wasn’t openly gay and was, as I recall, sort of dim. Well, you could have made the same claim about me. People change, and let’s bloody well hope it’s true in this case, because Detroit has had all the dim-witted city council members it can handle. (I’m not completely confident in this case. Pugh was the subject of a fashion feature in a local magazine a while back, and confessed that his trademark glasses — he has 30 pair or so — are completely for show. Clear-glass Non-corrective lenses. What sort of serious person indulges a witless vanity like that?)

The primary’s big loser: Martha Reeves, who sounds as though she’s losing her marbles. Or just criminally dumb. Sad.

Coozledad brought this to our attention yesterday: Your health-care vote or your life? This shit is getting out of hand.

Off to press and squat. Happy Thursday.

As you can imagine, yesterday wasn’t a very good day all around, even as we were all certain we did the right thing. Sprig started to fail on Sunday. At first we thought it was a repeat of the bad indigestion he had a couple months ago. But by Monday evening I was taking him to the animal ER for subcutaneous fluids and an anti-nausea shot, which the vet told me bluntly was “hospice care.”

Whatever it was, it gave him a good night’s sleep. Tuesday I rolled him onto his sternum and he tottered outside and peed like a man, but that was pretty much the end of his locomotion — he’s been growing steadily feebler over the last few months, and it was clear this was just about the end. We went to the vet later, and he said, “He’s working very hard just to stay alive,” and we made the decision. We all petted him, and I held my hand on him until I felt his heart stop. He didn’t move or stir; he just wasn’t there anymore.

Later on, I bought a six-pack of supermarket cupcakes and ate two for dinner. I bloody well deserved it, too.

I’m touched by how many people stopped by to leave comments, but not surprised — this dog made an impression on people. He liked to stick his head out the window when we drove, and there was something about that eyepatch and the mismatched ears that just slayed people, who would roll down the windows to tell him how cute he was. (We called them Spriggy Davidians.) Many times we remarked that if the same personality was in a much bigger, uglier dog, he wouldn’t have survived puppyhood. But when you’re under 20 pounds and adorable, people cut you slack.

I think the template for his life was set when, at 9 months or so, we took him with us when we visited a friend in the Upper Peninsula. He was at his most exhausting, and I was looking forward to taking him somewhere we could let him exhaust himself for a change. (My friend’s cottage is on an island with no cars.) For the most part, he behaved himself, but there was a moment when we looked around and couldn’t see him anywhere. I searched the property, calling him. Nothing. We started to worry; the island, while car-free, is vast and wild in its interior, and all I could think was, he’d seen a deer, chased it into the woods, and was now out of earshot, maybe bogged in a cedar swamp, porcupine quills protruding from his nose, scared and miserable.

We decided on one more thorough search. I went to one side of the property, Alan to the other. Five minutes later, Alan came walking toward me, the dog in his arms, free of swamp mud and quills. He’d found him in the Les Cheneaux Yacht Club, which was having its end-of-summer Bloody Mary brunch. Forget chasing deer; he was chasing spilled popcorn and tipsy ladies willing to feed cheese cubes to cute little dogs. He was recruiting Davidians.

When Alan spotted him, he said, “There you are!” and Spriggy looked over his shoulder, saw his master, and ran in the opposite direction. He cornered him in a dead end near the bathrooms (Gulls and Buoys) and scooped him up. Busted. The ladies all wanted to give him a final pet as he was carried out.

He repeated this behavior the year he slipped away from the Christmas celebration at my sister’s, climbed onto the dining-room table, and ate the remainder of the pork tenderloin. He saw me see him, grabbed one last giant mouthful of sliced pork, leaped off the table and ran to the laundry room, wolfing it down as he went.

I’ve told myself to wait a few more days before picking up the bowls and beds. And a few weeks before we start thinking of another pet. Big shoes shouldn’t be filled quickly.

And thank you for all your notes, public and private. The contributions to the humane society are much appreciated, too. I’m donating his leftover special-diet food to our own local chapter; among the many tragedies of our economic decline has been the number of families leaving the area and leaving pets behind, some of which are old and virtually un-adoptable. Whatever helps, I guess.

So, howsabout some bloggage? OK:

The silver fox does it again, conservatives disapprove. Roy has the roundup.

Another gem from Detroitblog, via the Metro Times: A farm in the city, presided over by an 86-year-old woman who has seen it all:

A year later, just before the ’67 riot, (her son) Howard got into a street fight and police were called. They broke down the door of the King house to find him, and Mary wound up in a wrestling match with a cop.

“I was 260 pounds back then,” she laughs. “I got him right quick and I put him on the ground.” She grabbed his gun and nearly blew his brains out. “The devil was saying, ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!'” she recounts. Instead, Mary got up off the cop. Then she was thrown in the squad car, hit with a baton and bitten in the neck, which required a tetanus shot.

All wasn’t awful yesterday — it was also the premiere of my friend Rob Gulley’s short film, “Nikki & Eli,” at the Mitten Movie Project. It was, I’m pleased to say, very fine. Great job, Rob and all concerned. Remember me when you’re giving interviews in Cannes someday.

And life goes on. At the moment it goes down to the basement and folds the laundry.

Well, I finally read the Pollan piece in the NYT. Very interesting, lots of detail, mostly true, and yet, once again, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being lectured to. It’s not a good feeling. I think it was this passage that did it:

…Kitchen work itself has changed considerably since 1963, judging from its depiction on today’s how-to shows. Take the concept of cooking from scratch. Many of today’s cooking programs rely unapologetically on ingredients that themselves contain lots of ingredients: canned soups, jarred mayonnaise, frozen vegetables, powdered sauces, vanilla wafers, limeade concentrate, Marshmallow Fluff. This probably shouldn’t surprise us: processed foods have so thoroughly colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have redefined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food. Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff. So the shows encourage home cooks to take all manner of shortcuts, each of which involves buying another product, and all of which taken together have succeeded in redefining what is commonly meant by the verb “to cook.”

It’s the lumping of mayonnaise with Marshmallow Fluff that did it. Is this really an equivalency in Pollan’s special little foodie world? I know, I know, mayonnaise is so easy to make, and the from-scratch product so much better, that it’s simply a crime not to do it yourself. I have made mayonnaise many times, and yet, I have a jar of store-brand mayo on the refrigerator door, and what’s more, I use it. Sometimes all I want for lunch is a little canned tuna mixed with a single chopped scallion, a squirt of lemon juice and a fat teaspoon of Hellman’s. Saltine crackers. Yum. I would say “bite me, Michael Pollan,” but I don’t think he’d deign to — he might get canned tuna in the bargain.

I also like vanilla wafers. Too much. As for frozen vegetables, I don’t use them often, but as a resident of the frost zone, I reserve the right to.

Why do these people act like it has to be all or nothing? Why can’t we live in a world where we make soup from scratch and enjoy an occasional order of McDonald’s fries? Of course I’d like to see people cooking more at home, but honestly, I don’t think the fate of the nation rests upon it. And in many ways, I agree with “veteran food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer,” who tells Pollan:

“A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

Pollan found his interview with Balzer “somewhat depressing,” and given that Pollan supposedly once stalked and killed a wild pig so that he could call himself responsible for every morsel on his table at a particular meal, I’m not surprised.

There’s a long section on food television, ostensibly the reason for the piece, which boils down to a lot of sneering that it isn’t more uplifting and educational and has too much bacon. There’s the obligatory slam at the evil American corporate machine that crammed instant mashed potatoes and Bac-Os down our throats, literally. And then there’s the conclusion, which trots out the only reason any of us have a right to care what our neighbors eat: Health. Even without national health care, obesity and heart disease and other diet-related illnesses can be said to hurt us all. Granted and stipulated.

However.

We have many problems with food in this country; obesity and disordered eating — if you can call the way Americans eat disordered in general — are complicated issues entwined with science, psychology, tradition, public policy and probably a few other far-flung outposts of human endeavor I’m forgetting. Let’s have a conversation about it, certainly. But can we dispense with this Berkeley-based food fundamentalism? Can Alice Waters hold her tongue once in a while? Because listening to her is like listening to a more modulated but no less strident version of some Iranian ayatollah declaiming on jihad.

There was a quote that was plucked from an essay and trotted around the right-wing blogs a couple months ago. I can’t find it, but it ran something like this: Take two women of the same age, 50 years apart — today’s 30-year-old and her equivalent in 1959. Take two subjects: Food and sex. The ’50s housewife believes what you eat is your own business, but who you have sex with is governed by a strict set of social, religious and moral absolutes. The ’00s woman? Exactly the opposite. You can live in a polyamorous relationship, be homosexual, consider yourself transgendered and discuss your “top surgery” at the dinner table, and all that’s OK, but if that dinner table contains a dish of veal parmesan, something’s morally wrong with you.

Can we meet in the middle? Somewhere I can have my Hellman’s and humanely raised beef? Cook from scratch but occasionally reach for a can of Campbell’s Tomato? It will mean less work for Michael Pollan, but that’ll leave him more time for picking dandelion greens out of sidewalk cracks.

(One final note: I distinctly recall writing about this myself, back when I was being paid to. I sneered at supermarket checkout girls who had to ask me to identify the vegetables I was buying, so they could enter their UPC codes, and I’m not talking fennel or Jerusalem artichokes, I’m talking garlic and onions. I was onto this years ago, too. It never occurred to me there were New York Times Magazine cover stories and book contracts in it. Story of my life.)

So, a wee bit of bloggage? Sure thing:

She went to college, graduated and couldn’t get a job. So she asked the college for her money back.

Of Sarah Palin’s not-divorce, this is probably all that needs to be said.

WashPost writer calls out Gawker for journalistic parasitism. Makes some excellent points in the bargain.

New York magazine identifies the songs of the summer. I haven’t heard a single one. God, am I old.

So I was watching coverage of the beer summit last night, and wondered what they were really talking about. They looked so uncomfortable — how can you drink beer in a suit? And from those stupid mugs? If you’re going to have a beer summit, at least loosen the ties and get out some real pilsner glasses. Did they have another round, after the photographers were shooed away? One after that? I recalled some of my icebreakers for that particular social situation.

I can recite from memory the “famous” statement from the Budweiser label. Here goes; I’ll let Professor Google vet my accuracy later:

This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no other beer produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood aging produces a taste, a smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price.

(And…perfect. Although Anheuser-Busch spells it “Ageing.” And they use the serial comma after “smoothness.” Bah.)

Now, see, I’d do that. Then Henry Louis Gates, because he’s an academic, would stand and recite a poem. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” something like that. Sgt. Crowley, being a man of the people, would do the “show me the money” scene from “Jerry McGuire,” but only the Tom Cruise part, because if he tried to imitate Cuba Gooding Jr., that would be racist. Then I’d do my knock-the-matchbox-over-with-your-nose gag, if we could find a matchbox. And by then, we’d be singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” and peace would reign in the valley.

I wonder if they’ll ever figure out a way to show our brain hard drives in fragmented form, so we can really see how much space is occupied by stuff like the Budweiser label and the choreography to Gladys Knight & the Pips songs, while we forget key phone numbers and the date of our wedding anniversary.

What’s your best party gag? Please, those who have seen others in my repertoire? Hold your filthy tongues.

They screened the films from our part of the 48-hour challenge last night. It’s entirely possible our group — one of four — was aberrant, but if it wasn’t, I’d say we’re contenders. Having done it twice now, and knowing how difficult it is, I’m tempted to give everyone a pass just for showing up, but, well, hmm.

Technology is an amazing thing. For not very much money, you can own a fancy digital video camera, a computer and the software to put together a movie — a short, or even a feature — that looks a lot like the ones you see in theaters. The rest of it, however, is a different kettle of fish. Whatever else you can say about our story, at least it had a beginning, middle and end, at least it wasn’t acted by people who appeared to have been dragged in off the street, and at least it didn’t feature some hairy guy trimming his beard, dropping the clippings into a glass of water, and drinking the water. I don’t know what genre that was; maybe there was an Andy Warhol division I didn’t know about.

Next stop: The city awards, a week from Saturday. Fingers crossed.

So, a bit of bloggage? Let’s see what’s out there.

I was reading about Annie Leibovitz’s financial problems — good lord, how many houses does one woman need? — when I remembered a charming story an editor of my acquaintance told me: He saw the world’s most famous celebrity photographer in an airport, approached her, slobbered the usual praise, then handed her his cheap point-and-shoot digital and asked if she’d snap a picture of him. She was amused and said sure. Now he has an Annie Leibovitz picture of himself. Do you?

Michael Pollan on the rise of cooking as entertainment — for the viewer. I’ll be reading “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” but not until this weekend. Because that’s when Sunday magazines should be read. On Sunday.

Journalists! I think I found the all-purpose four words that precede every bullshit trend story. Ready? For many, it seems… Click if you dare!

Something else I’ll be doing this weekend: Making mango margaritas. I found a local source for cheap, soft Mexican mangos, and I’ve been making mango agua fresca all week. Now that the weekend’s here, time to add a little tequila. Happy Hour starts at 7. See you there.

This is the time in summer when my body clock finally readjusts to not having to get up at 7, and I frequently manage to sleep clear ’til 8. Woo. I will have five weeks of this until I have to start getting up at 7 again. Alan sometimes wonders why I don’t sleep until 9 or later, and the answer is: I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t. That’s the insomniac’s torment: It’s not that you don’t want to. It’s not that you’re not tired. You just can’t.

Lately I’ve been noodling around with a short story about a man who starts to hate his otherwise wonderful wife because she can sleep and he can’t. I worry that it would seem far-fetched to readers who aren’t sleep-disordered. But as one who has for years lain [Crusty Old Editor — is that the correct form of the verb?] beside a man who is troubled by sleeplessness only once in a blue moon, I don’t think so. You lie there, the day’s obligations already settling on your shoulders like a hod full of bricks, and think, Are you going to keep doing that? That steady, rhythmic breathing? Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Is the roof leaking? What if advertising falls another 15 percent this quarter, then what? Can we afford private health insurance? WHY ARE YOU ABLE TO SLEEP THROUGH THIS?

A small market, perhaps, but I know my fellow insomniac.

OK, then. I don’t have much today (yet), but I do have some bloggage, so dig in and enjoy. First, however, a question for the green of thumb:

The books all tell me that if I want my Christmas cactus to bloom at Christmas and not Halloween, I have to put it in a closet on Labor Day, and leave it there until…when? This just seems like planticide. Can one of you plant people help me out? And what do I do when it’s in there? Keep watering? Take it out for a daily 10-minute walk around the yard? Mine has pretty much recovered from a near-death experience with a squirrel — the last time it was allowed outdoors — and this year I think we should go for the big holiday bloom. But this advice sounds crazy. (On the other hand, ignoring it always got me a bloom in October. So there’s that.)

You never notice how many Rs are in the lyrics of “Folsom Prison Blues” until you hear someone who has a little problem with R pronunciation singing it:

HT: Laura Lippman, who probably never shot a man in Weno, just to watch him die.

What would we do without Jon Stewart? I ask you, America. Why can’t the Republicans come even within 25 blocks of the ballpark? Is Dennis Miller the best they got?

Top 10 Foods That Cause Car Accidents. They always blame coffee, while paella acts all innocent and gets away with murder.

And now I must be wollin’ wound the bend myself. Back here later, I think.

A case of animal hoarding came to light here last week. Someone saw a loose kitten, which led to a conversation with T. Creepy Neighbor, which led to the animal-control people showing up, which is evidently the only agency that knows what the telltale smell indicates. Long story short: The kittens were forgotten in the David Lynchian scene of– are you ready? One hundred twelve live chihuahuas and 150 dead ones.

The dead ones were in freezers. Relax.

We’ve all seen these cases before. I certainly understand the attention paid to them — bizarre is newsworthy, after all — but they always make me uncomfortable. It starts with the unbearable TV coverage, where anchors who are paid half a million dollars a year to look good and act stupid furrow their brows over the teasers: “You’re not going to believe what they found in a Dearborn man’s home!” (Try me. I’ve seen it all, lady.) Then the piece itself, in which neighbors — are they all idiots? Everywhere? — tell the world what they “seen.” Also, what they told the police: “I seen it was looking bad over there, so I told them cops…”

This is followed by the newspapers, stories pitched only slightly more upmarket, filled with helpful, “reader service” details. Click here to download an application to adopt one of the rescued dogs. My personal favorite was “Chihuahua facts,” a sidebar of general information on the breed — size, description, history. Also, this line, which made me laugh out loud: “The live Chihuahuas, many of them shaking and traumatized…” Which would make them different from other chihuahuas how?

Through all of this is the guy’s lawyer, returning all his phone calls, trying to be heard, beating one drum: Hello? MENTAL ILLNESS! We’ll see how it works; most people don’t want to hear stuff like that. The neighbors will be dragged out before the TV cameras to opine he weren’t crazy, while the papers file more helpful sidebars:

Kenneth Lang Jr. simply couldn’t throw anything away – not trash, not feces, not dogs.

I like how she slips the feces in the middle of that series. And then, the Edna Buchanan jujitsu:

Not even the dead ones.

Enough. This poor man. I suggest the Witness Protection Program, perhaps to a place with a big yard, three chihuahuas and a vet who sees to it that everyone is spayed and neutered. Besides, all this talk of nervous little dogs distracts us from the real news of the day, yet another chapter in the long dick of Kwame Kilpatrick. Turns out the former mayor was personal-relationshipping with the federally appointed monitor overseeing the consent decree to clean up the police department. She’s been billing the city $287.50 an hour for years, to the tune of $10 million. Well, that’ll buy a lot of romantic weekend getaways — smart money says she was the woman who enjoyed a $500 “couples massage” with KK in Asheville, N.C., where he was keynoting a MLK Day thing.

Sadly, that also distracts the public from Martha Reeves’ latest antics:

Although Martha Reeves is internationally famous for being the lead singer of the group Martha and the Vandellas she has now decided to use her middle name on the ballot.

The flier reads Martha Rose-Reeves on one side of the flier and Martha-Rose Reeves, with the hyphen in a different spot on the back.

The flier also states, “Elect Martha-Rose Reeves and the Vandellas.”

When asked if the Vandellas were also running for council, she said, “Yes. They are running and dancing in the streets.”

Let me just say it again: I love this town.

So, a bit of bloggage?

Hank Stuever has some big shoes to fill. Congratulations. Also, scroll down to his Madonna entry. Stew bird!

Sarah Palin leaves lesser humorists baffled, but Jon Stewart always seems to step up. (Video link is hosed; I’ll try to fix it when Comedy Central does.) Best single line goes to Gawker, however:

It’s like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann replaces Sarah Palin as the national sweetheart of crazy.

Breakfast time, then gym time. Then Russian time, then Hammer time!

For our 48-hour film challenge, we needed a car that might be driven by a creep. Of course, we turned to Detroit’s back catalog. (It helped that it was owned by our designated Car Guy, the guy who got us the stretch limo last year.) I became its caretaker, and drove it home overnight. It was a Buick Estate Wagon, seemingly far older than its 19 years. I marveled at its squishy handling, floaty ride and 25-foot-long hood:

It’s hard to imagine anyone was making cars like this in 1990. This was well into the era of the minivan, a veritable Ferrari in comparison. No wonder moms were already opting for Broncos and Blazers. Not that one of those could give you the design filigree of…oh, how about the driver’s-eyeline external turn-signal indicators? Talk about a detail made for the geriatric pilot.

Oh, well. As Kenan the Car Guy said, “You can put a four-by-eight sheet of plywood in back without folding down the seats.” That’s something. I thought about the name: Estate Wagon. It would be the perfect vehicle for a person with an estate, capable of fetching weekend guests at the train station, with all their luggage in the back. It can haul almost as much as a pickup truck, so you can truck lots of mulch to the cutting beds without making extra trips. And when one would like to repair to the lower pasture for a picnic, the servants can go on ahead with the fixings.

The prototype of this vehicle is called Country Squire, after all.

In our case, the car belonged to “Liam Butler, a painter,” the character that was one of the required elements in our challenge. The others were a book and “Why don’t you explain it to me?” and our genre was thriller/suspense. As usual, all I can see are all the script problems, but objectively speaking, I think our entry, “A Little Knowledge,” should be a contender. Our group screening is Thursday; I’ll know more then.

One thing I do know: I never ever ever ever want to shave a deadline that close again. We’re talking seconds.

And now I am exhausted. Having spent the entire weekend more or less ignoring the news other than the weather report for Metro Detroit, it seems I missed a few things. Sarah Palin’s fare-thee-well, for one. Good thing Roy didn’t:

She also attacked Hollywood, which enlists “delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets” in their “anti-Second Amendment causes,” against which “patriots will protect our individual guaranteed right to bear arms.” She warned against “enslavement to big central government,” because “it can’t make you happy or healthy or wealthy or wise,” which comes instead from “God’s grace helping those who help themselves.” She portrayed her resignation as another way of guarding Alaska “like that grizzly guards her cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own.” She also encouraged supporters to “enjoy the ride.”

What? Are you kidding me? Am I going to have to watch this thing, now? Evidently.

No wonder people stop paying attention to the news, if that’s the sort of people you find there.

My morning is crushing, but my afternoon looks better. Back then.

I see more of these around here than I did in Indiana. In Royal Oak the other day:

That is, a Ford Crown Vic Police Interceptor, still the best all-purpose cop car of the era, now retired to the private sector. I assume they’re great on the straightaway, less so in the corners, can idle until the cows come home and have lots of butt-funk and spilled coffee in the seat cushions. Alan and I went to a dinner thing earlier in the year, and sat with someone who drove one, decommissioned from an unknown p.d. somewhere in the area. It needed a good deal of work in the low four-figure price range, he said, but once he got it running right? Awesome.

Of course, like the example above, you always hope you can find one with the black-and-white paint job and cow catcher intact. I wonder if, like an old fire horse, it tries to respond when called for backup.

OK, then. It’s Friday, and my attention is preoccupied with the weekend’s activity, the 48 Hour Film Project, beginning today at 7 p.m., concluding, duh, 48 hours later. I guess this entitles me to display a badge:

Here’s something else I’ve been meaning to post for a while; it came up in my drug searching this week. It’s an AP story about the effective legalization of marijuana in California. If you read the New Yorker story a few months ago, little here is all that shocking, but it’s still…shocking. If you’re old enough to have lived through criminalization, decriminalization, recriminalization and now de facto legalization, it’s hard to believe what it’s come to. You can now get butt-kicking pot over the counter with nothing more than the additional bureaucratic step of getting a winking doctor to write you a scrip. Voters approved medical marijuana use in Michigan last year, so I’m paying close attention.

To be sure, I’m not crazy about this; the last thing the world needs is more impaired drivers. On the other hand? It’s pot. I’m reminded on a nice exchange in “Jackie Brown,” Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda:

ORDELL I’m serious, you smoke too much of that shit. That shit robs you of your ambition.

MELANIE Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.

In other news that turns up when one of your search terms in “prescription drugs,” an Australian daily is reporting Michael Jackson had a chemo port — essentially, a permanent IV site — in his neck. No link; story’s gone; it must be vile libel. Disregard what I just said.

Thanks to Hank Stuever, who posted it on his Facebook yesterday, this is my daughter’s new favorite YouTube video, and perhaps mine, too:

And finally, speak now or forever hold your peace. If ever a video deserved to go viral, it’s this one:

I remember how crestfallen my Catholic bride friends were, when the priest told them they couldn’t play “Here Comes the Bride” in the church. Wait until they getta loada this.

Off to obsess, worry and have stage fright. Starting gun at 7! Think I’ll go ride my bike.