It’s a big country, and what happens in one part of it doesn’t always make the front pages in another part. So those of you who live along the Mexican border will have to tell me — is the criminal unrest in Chihuahua and Sinaloa making the American papers down there? Because my night job involves farming news with the search term “drug,” I read something almost every night that makes my jaw drop and skin crawl.

Drug-trafficking organizations are warring for control in these and other Mexican states, and the corpses pile up like cordwood. The WSJ reports the body count for 2008 was 6,616, and 354 for the first three weeks — yes, weeks — of 2009. These aren’t just-business Mafia-style hits of a couple slugs to the head, either. In fact, many victims lose their heads entirely, a favorite way to send a message. The same WSJ story said one police commander’s head was left in a cooler in front of his police station, with a calling card from one of the cartels. Bodies routinely show marks of torture, and no one is immune — women and children are regular targets. Reuters moved a story last night about the appeal of the drug lifestyle to the poor but beautiful girls of Sinaloa, where beauty pageant audiences are filled with drug lords shopping for girlfriends. Sometimes, the story said, they take them directly from the runway to a life of indolent luxury:

Such high-profile murders did not deter 18-year-old beauty pageant winner Emma Coronel from marrying (high-ranking drug lord Joaquin) Guzman, who is three times her age, in a lavish secret ceremony in 2007, not long after he escaped from the prison where he and Hernandez were lovers.

Culiacan residents say they sometimes spot Coronel at the salons that do eyelash implants and decorate false nails with garish designs or photos of loved ones. Local reporters say her parents feel like they’ve won the lottery.

Of course, the concern is that this level of violence, so close to the U.S., could easily cross the border. (Needless to say, we’re the destination of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs being produced in Mexico, and these operations are well-established here.) A NYT story earlier this week offers this stark contrast: El Paso, Texas, is considered the third-safest city in the United States, while Juarez, right across the Rio Grande, had 1,550 drug-related homicides last year. The story said the Bush administration had a plan to send more agents and troops to the region, should the fighting spill over to the American side. But fans of “The Wire” and public-policy debate will appreciate this blackly comic detail:

The conflict in Juárez has led some in El Paso to propose radical solutions. In a symbolic resolution of support for Juárez, the El Paso City Council recently voted unanimously to ask Washington to consider legalizing drugs as a way to end the violence. “We think it should at least be on the table,” Councilman Beto O’Rourke said. On Monday, the Council backed down after the mayor vetoed the resolution and local members of Congress warned that the Council’s stance might imperil federal aid.

The council said: “Think about it.” Congress said: “Don’t even.”

That Wall Street Journal story quotes Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former drug czar, from his assessment of what Mexican police are up against:

“The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 cal sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.”

And my ex-congressman thinks the answer to this is: A wall. Good luck with that.

Well. Didn’t want to bring you guys down on a spectacularly bringin’-down sort of day. Seventy-five thousand jobs lost, justlikethat, yesterday. I tried to tally up how much of our discretionary spending could be curtailed in the very likely event we’re included in the carnage before year’s end, and came up with: Not bloody much. Cable, cell phone, gym membership, a few meals out — it doesn’t add up to more than a couple hundred bucks a month. The fixed costs aren’t lavish — our mortgage payment wouldn’t get us a two-bedroom apartment elsewhere in town, but they are fixed. You gotta have a roof and a couple meals a day, after all. I keep reading about how this is all the fault of “our” greed and “our” unwillingness to live within our means, but I’m not the one with an $87,000 rug or a frequent-flyer account at Hermes, so please — include me out.

I’m telling you: President Obama? A few public floggings? Would guarantee you not only a second term, but perhaps a rollback of the 22nd amendment and probably a jeweled crown.

Ah, I’m just another whiner in a nation full of them. We send our good thoughts to Deborah, our NN.C community member, facing a big announcement in her own office today. Fingers crossed all over for her.

Have I crushed your spirit yet? I don’t mean to. Every so often you look around and see the funniest things. In these long, dark winter evenings, Kate and I have taken to watching “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” again, a reprise of her third-grade year, before Zack and Cody co-opted her. (Also, my former colleague Lynne McKenna Frazier was on last week, and though she didn’t win, I send her belated congratulations on making the cut and answering some toughies.) Last night the winner on “Wheel” was a gay man, accompanied in his victory dance by “my fiancee, Chuck.” It was so sweet and normal you couldn’t help but smile.

In the darkness, we see shafts of light. The days are getting longer. More layoffs ahead, but maybe we’ll survive it after all.

Off to the gym to sweat it all out.

Interesting story in the NYT yesterday with an irresistible headline: The Talented Mr. Madoff. With no new developments to add, the story took a look at the psychology of the man; it took a stab at the parts of the story that are interesting to me, and those are the parts that would be in the novel, not the Fortune magazine postmortem:

“Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,” says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the F.B.I. who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles.

Mr. McCrary cautions that he has never met Mr. Madoff, so he can’t make a diagnosis, but he says Mr. Madoff appears to share many of the destructive traits typically seen in a psychopath. That is why, he says, so many who came into contact with Mr. Madoff have been left reeling and in confusion about his motives.

“People like him become sort of like chameleons. They are very good at impression management,” Mr. McCrary says. “They manage the impression you receive of them. They know what people want, and they give it to them.”

Con men are a staple of fiction, and having never met one myself (other than the usuals — bosses promoted beyond their abilities, etc.), I take a writer’s word about what’s involved in the game. And so reading about Madoff sent me to my paperback-pulp bookshelf, where I found “Bright Orange for the Shroud,” and yes, folks, it’s time to get acquainted with ol’ Travis McGee again. On the trail of the crew who fleeced an old friend of a family fortune in a perfectly legal real-estate scam, he comes across their offices in a bland Florida complex, and meets the head of the gang. Together they admire Debra, his lovely assistant and protege. Even though Travis’ friend was a fat pigeon, like all good professionals they’ve got another one in the pipeline. The boss explains:

By falsifying records, bribing minor officials, making some careful changes in old group pictures — school and church — and with the help of some brown contact lenses, some minor changes in hair and skin texture we have given Debra an iron-clad identity as a mulatto, as a pale-skinned girl who actually did disappear at fourteen. This curious revelation has come as a horrid shock to her young husband of four months, and an even worse shock to her wealthy father-in-law, the ex-governor of a southern state, a fevered segregationist, a man with political ambitions. The positive rabbit test — also faked — is bringing things to a climax. The fat settlement is for divorce, abortion and total silence.

I suppose the biggest con in this is how John D. MacDonald flatters his readers into sympathizing with the crooks. A neat trick in 1965.

But that wasn’t the revelation of the business section this week; rather, this Ben Stein column was. I confess: I’ve been a reader of Stein’s since the 1980s, and my newspaper’s editorial page had a subscription to the American Spectator, which has been running the creepy Ben Stein’s Diary for years. All Stein columns are a version of Ben Stein’s Diary, and all Diary entries are roughly the same: Stein describes his life as a C-list actor in enervating detail that somehow matches his famous voice, with regular stops to marvel at how lucky, how fortunate, how unbelievably blessed he is.

When his days weren’t concluding with dinner at Morton’s, they ended with a description of Tommy, his adopted son (“We’re so blessed to have Tommy. Every day we thank Tommy’s birth mother for choosing life…”). Even at the gamboling-puppy stage of childhood, Tommy sounded like the world’s biggest spoiled brat, begging his dad, always successfully, for one indulgence after another, about which Stein sometimes pauses to feel bad, but never very long. He’s happy to be a rich Republican and to buy things for his boy. If it made Tommy happy, that was good enough for Ben.

Well. Now it’s 2009, and some chickens are ringing the doorbell at Stein’s multiple fabulous homes, asking where they’ll be roosting:

…my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.

I have been pondering what advice to give them about money. What I keep coming up with is this: Do not act like typical Americans. Do not fail to save. Do not get yourself in debt up to your eyeballs. Work and take pride and honor from your work. Learn a useful skill that Americans really need, like law or plumbing or medicine or nursing. Do not expect your old Ma and Pa to always be there to take care of you. I absolutely guarantee that we will not be. Learn to be self-sufficient through your own contributions, as the saying goes.

…I wish I could teach that work ethic to those close to me. I wish I could teach them that money is a scarce good, worth fighting for and protecting. But I very much fear that my son, more up-to-date than I am in almost every way, is more of a modern-day American than I am. To hustle and scuffle for a deal is something he cannot even imagine. To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that’s my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) And I hope to be able to leave him well enough provided for to ease his eventual transition into some form of self-sufficiency.

The rest of the column’s even worse, if you can imagine. Actually, this has been a theme in the column for some weeks now, how “we” have gotten in over our heads through our profligate spending, etc. While I won’t argue with the broad outlines of this, I’d hope a writer who dares to call his column Everybody’s Business could spare a thought for those of us who have never set foot in Morton’s, who put large down payments on our houses and never once refi’d for vacation cash, who didn’t cave in (and, apparently, continue to cave) to our bratty children’s every whim, who saved and worked and who find ourselves equally screwed. What’s Tonto’s line? What do you mean “we,” white man?

I don’t generally wish ill on people I’ve never met and who’ve never done a thing to me, but I’m really hoping Tommy Stein meets reality one of these days, and that he skins his knee on it.

Now I’m off to study my Russian. Yes, that’s me — talented writer and editor, journalist with multimedia skills, working to add yet another skill to my repertoire, not that it will matter. No one’s hiring. Tommy Stein will always be better off than me.

Be good, all. it’s a new week, the sun is out, and although it’s very cold (6 degrees), I’ve had two cups of coffee and feel ready for anything. Onward to the new verbs, and the new year. Let’s talk about something other than Bill Ayers today, eh?

I don’t have anything else on my mind today, so I call your attention to two recent NYT stories with one thing in common — very cold water.

The first is about winter surfers on Lake Superior, people who greet the season with the infamous gales of November and spend the rest of the winter in dry suits and petroleum jelly, waiting for the Minnesota surf to come up and a singular experience to unfold:

By noon, a foot of snow was on the road, flakes blowing sideways in winds gusting up to 45 miles an hour. But a dozen surfers were suited up and in the water, paddling out with their heads down, over waves and into a whiteout, disappearing into an abyss.

The other story is about the scene at the Russian Orthodox Epiphany, when its members mark the end of the Christmas season by cutting cross-shaped holes in the ice of local rivers and ponds and then plunging in for a little new year’s baptism, described as:

…the trance-like preparation, the electric shock of the water and the 20- or 30-second wait for a feeling he described as “nirvana.”

In more proletarian parts of the country, this is sometimes called a polar-bear swim. I did it one year. Fort Wayne holds its official dunking in one of the filthy rivers, but my friend Mark the Shark started his own tradition at his lake house two counties away, and the idea of plunging into cleaner water finally convinced me to give it a try.

MtS is a somewhat disorganized person. The first year, he sent a notice to the local newspaper about the upcoming event, then forgot about it until New Year’s Day, when his wife looked out the window and said, “There are a whole bunch of cars pulling into the driveway. Do you know anything about that?” The first year’s swim attracted about five plungers, including Mark and his son, and many more spectators.

The following year was more organized, and the weather more dramatic — an early cold snap iced up the lake and laid several inches of snow everywhere. I called in the morning and asked what the plans were for making the hole. “Oh, I thought I might call the fire department, see if they could send over somebody with a chain saw,” Mark said. (This was two hours before the announced plunge.) Alan rolled his eyes and retrieved our Kubota from the basement, and he handled the chore. We learned how you cut a hole in ice big enough for a bunch of people to stand around while a bunch more people jump in — you saw grave-size pieces, then push them under the ice sheet with a pole. It made the fringe nice and stable. At one point Alan looked down and saw a very sleepy frog swimming near the surface; perhaps the noise of the saw awakened him from hibernation. A bunch of Amish people showed up to gape, and afterward we had mini quiches and mulled wine in the warm living room.

The following year was the one I finally got wet. It wasn’t as cold — the water was open — and I simply resolved not to think about it. Came to water’s edge wrapped in a towel, dropped it, thought BANZAI and dunked. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. I once went into northern Lake Huron in October, and that was worse — I remember my limbs twitching as all the blood made a speedy exit for the core, a freaky feeling. But the New Year’s plunge was almost pleasant, and had that baptismal effect that leads to the nirvana the Russian guy was after. You emerge feeling not half-dead, but alive and awake in a whole new way. I didn’t even take the warm shower afterward, because I already felt as clean as virgin bride.

I sometimes wonder, as the population moves south, if our fear of cold doesn’t increase by the year. People who think nothing of driving 85 miles an hour on the freeway quiver at the thought of a “dangerous” Minnesota winter. We’re in the midst of a tough one here, and I have done my share of bitching about it. But I’ve also noticed I do most of my bitching from inside the warm house, and once I’ve resolved to do whatever task is out there, and dressed appropriately, and actually walked outside into the great frozen maw, it’s not so bad at all. Sometimes I even get sweaty.

Today’s high: 39 degrees. Tomorrow’s high: 15.

Back to the mangle. And the bloggage:

Roger Ebert writes about Steak & Shake with the glee of a (formerly) fat man:

My Steak ‘n Shake fetish is not unique. On an early visit to the Letterman Show, during a commercial break, I said to David:

“I hear you’re from Indianapolis, home of the head office of Steak ‘n Shake.”

“In Sight, It Must be Right,” he said. Our eyes locked in unspoken communion.

“Four Ways to Enjoy,” I said.

“Car, table, counter, or TakHomaSak,” he replied.

“Specializing in Selected Foods…”

“…with a Desire to Please the Most Discriminating.”

“Thanks for Your Liberal Patronage…”

David didn’t blink an eye or miss a beat. We had both obviously memorized the original menu. “…signed, A. H. (Gus) Belt, founder,” he said, and we shared a nod of great satisfaction.

I love S&S, too. I allow myself about one milkshake a year, and I never regret it.

The Prayer of the Mac User is basically the text of this story.

Science pokes its head out into the sunlight.

And I must edit a big wad of copy. So have a great day, and stay warm.

Forget Michelle’s dresses. You really want to know where Aretha got her hat, and today we have the answer: Mr. Song Millinery on Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. The phones started ringing within moments of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and the details are this — you can buy versions of the hat in 15 colors for $180, but the original is “exclusive to” Aretha, and you probably expected that, didn’t you?

The Free Press story goes into greater depth about millinery designer Luke Song, son of a Korean immigrant, whose humble storefront conceals a business with national, and now international, range:

Mr. Song Millinery’s clientele is 90% African-American, churchgoing women, Song said. His wholesale business supplies hats to shops in other cities with large African-American communities, and the merchandise sells especially well in California, Houston and Dallas. He designs 100 hat styles every six months.

…By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Song had sold hundreds of hats. A store in Dallas had sold 500 more, and the material was running out.

“People are calling from England, asking for the hat,” said Luke Song, who designed Franklin’s chapeau. “I’m shocked. I had no idea. We did not expect this.”

He should have. Aretha looks about five minutes away from a major coronary, but she can still sing a song, and she can definitely rock a hat. This is a black city and a church-going city, which means it’s a hat city; I told Alan I knew we had moved to Detroit when I noticed our local Macy’s had a men’s millinery department.

(Men have their own version of Mr. Song — Henry the Hatter, also downtown, where Kid Rock buys his lids. I urge you not to click that link unless you have about an hour to kill. The Borsalinos alone — oy. I reread an Elmore Leonard novel during the most recent cold snap; a Borsalino appeared in one scene. The character called it a “Bosalini.”)

Anyway, I call your attention to this for two reasons — just in case you want to buy Aretha’s hat (even though I suspect that ship has sailed), and to introduce you to the comment section that the blogger Detroitist calls the Free Press Klavern, the chorus of ugly, anonymous racists who can always be counted on, in any story featuring black people, to make ignorant-ass comments like this:

Jig up your own songs-not ours.

I used to wonder why the paper didn’t moderate their comment queues better, and someone told me it’s a legal thing — if they make any attempt to treat the comments as actual content and not as randomly sprinkled turds, they open themselves up for a lawsuit. Doesn’t make sense to me, either, but hey. Anyway, there’s page after page after page of them. Warning: at the bottom of every page is picture of Winkin’ Sarah Palin:

Which seems like a good transition to the bloggage, which today includes The Poor Man’s Golden Winger Awards, and they include a reference to None Other. So it fits.

You really don’t need to read more than the lead —

A dive team in Port Huron is fishing a car out of the Black River today after a man who drove onto the ice accidentally locked his keys in the car, and the running engine melted ice beneath it.

— to get the awesomeness of this story, but there’s the link, anyway.

Bye, Caroline. You’re free to go back to being deeply private, and I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. Someone who can’t even make up their mind about quitting is clearly not cut out for the hurlyburly:

After frantic talks between the governor’s operation and Ms. Kennedy’s camp Wednesday evening, Ms. Kennedy appeared to waver on whether to withdraw, and was preparing a statement reasserting her interest in the job. But just after midnight, she decided to make clear she was taking her name out of consideration and released the statement saying so.

The Hoosier dropped the ball, but the refs allowed a do-over. I just find this story hysterical.

And that’s it. Short shrift today, but I have to get back to the gym before they forget my face. Have a swell day, all.

In the grand tradition of self-delusion looking at the bright side, let’s take a look at an interesting story from today’s Free Press:

Stacy Sloan, director of culinary education at Holiday Market’s Mirepoix (mihr-PWAH) Cooking School, says that because of the dismal economy, she had expected sales for this year’s cooking classes to be flat or worse.

But the opposite has happened.

Yes, basic cooking classes at this specialty market in Royal Oak are full, mainly with students who have never cooked for themselves before, and are using the recession as a motivation to eat out less and eat in more. The other day I was stopped outside Kroger by a market researcher, who offered me $10 for a five-minute interview on video; one of her questions was whether I’m eating out less. I said not really, that one pitfall of recessionary economies is their self-perpetuation, as people curtail their spending and by doing so make the situation worse. But I certainly understand the impulse, and to the extent it gets a few more adults comfortable around knives, cutting boards and saute pans, so much the better. There’s something amusing about seeing people learn the simplest things. Last quote:

“You can start out with a roast chicken as one meal and make other meals from it,” he says.

I imagine this guy, getting this idea, bathed in pure white light. I’m glad my mother was cremated, so I can’t hear her rolling in her grave.

But seriously: Home cooking = good. I’ve been doing my nightly news-farming for three years now, and one story I’ve seen grow from nothing in that time to something that alarms even me is the contamination of the U.S. food supply. We’re under another salmonella cloud, this one from peanut butter. Here’s what I find interesting: Most super-market peanut butter is fine, provided you’re not buying in five-gallon buckets. It’s the peanut-butter products that are transported in tanker truck-size loads that are the problem, which is why the recalls are for things like those neon-orange snack crackers you buy from vending machines, and not the jar of Crunchy in your pantry.

It’s best, if you eat processed food, not to think too much about it. I think I’ve told Alan’s many entertaining stories of his college years, spent working in various food-processing plants before. What they’ve done is made him unwilling to eat certain brands of canned soup and frozen pizza. Other people I’ve known have worked everywhere from commercial dairies to candy factories, and none of them eat the stuff they used to make, either. Best line, from my ex-candy making friend: “Chocolate is the opposite of scotch. You’ve got to learn to dislike it.”

But salmonella’s only the beginning. The other day I bought a package of ground chuck for the Derringer family’s dirty little dinner secret: Family Taco Night. As it was going over the scanner I noticed a package sticker I hadn’t read: Product of U.S.A., Canada and Mexico. Ewww. (I made sure that stuff was well-frickin’-done, believe me.) Globalization and open markets mean your supermarket snack cake may be made from ingredients gathered around the world, many in countries where food-safety regulation is, um, flexible. How did melamine get into the food supply? Chinese entrepreneurs found it raised protein levels while costing less than actual protein, with poisoning being merely an unfortunate side effect. This sort of corner-cutting is an established business practice in the Asian economy. Bon appetit.

I see Mark Bittman has a new book out, and unlike the more abrasive Michael Pollan and elitist Alice Waters, he seems to have an actual understanding of how average Americans actually live their lives. The diet he advocates — less crap, more plants — is one most people can manage, if they have rudimentary cooking skills. To the extent these classes are helping make that happen, huzzah.

I’m off to learn Final Cut Pro — be there soon, Rob — so here’s a bit o’ bloggage:

I see quite a few snarkers took note of Dick Cheney’s wheelchair and made the usual jokes, most of them about Dr. Strangelove. They’ve got it all wrong. This is the cultural reference you’re looking for:

Rich jerk suicide watch: Another one, this one a so-called Celtic Tiger. Tigers elsewhere call him a pussy denounce him as unworthy of big cat-hood.

What do you get when you knock on the door of a house with a “fresh coons” sign in the yard? Why, you get a recipe:

“You soak him in vinegar and water, soak it four, five hours, and that get the wild game taste out of it. After that you cut him up just like you cut up a rabbit, then you preboil it about a half-hour, let the water jump about a half-hour, then take him out, put him in a pan like that, get your seasoning on, then you put him in the oven, just like you do a roast.”

Yes, folks, it’s another gem from Detroitblog. (BTW, I can’t tell you how many reporters of my acquaintance would have failed to write down the best line of that passage — “let the water jump about a half-hour.” Poetry.)

It’s the first day of the rest of the Obama administration. Mark it however you will.

I have nothing to say today, but I’m sure you do. Let’s make it an open thread for the last day and the first, to discuss the inauguration, open to NN.C-ers of all races, creeds and political parties.

Tomorrow the re-education camps will open, and some of us will just quietly disappear. But today, on this day of celebration? Everyone gets a pony:

Photo by Andy Piper; used under Creative Commons license, via Flickr

So have at it!

At some point during the HBO broadcast of Obama’s inaugural celebration — I think it was when Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi, of all people, took “A Change is Gonna Come” to a new place — Alan expressed relief that Obama had won the election. Otherwise, he said, we might have been watching Kobe Teeth, Hank Jr. and other Sarah Palin-approved entertainers kick out the jams for the Real America.

Say whatever you want about Democrats, but we generally put on a better show.

I’ll shut up now.

But I thought the “This Land is Your Land” performance was fantastic.

OK, now I’ll shut up.

My favorite verse in “This Land is Your Land”

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

Woody, you old Commie, you. Now I’ll shut up.

But where were the Dixie Chicks?

OK. Shutting up now.

Why should I shut up, after all? Out of sensitivity to my half-dozen Republican friends? Knowing they’re seething, watching all this? Their gloom is something to behold, after all; I look around at the blogs and see a range of emotions from grim resignation to outright hostility (with a few outliers like Jeff TMMO, who has the audacity of hope). Here’s my problem: I have empathy. I know just how they feel, although I like to think that if I were Peggy Noonan, and had previously embarrassed myself with a toe-curling passage about the beauty of Ronald Reagan’s foot, I’d hold off writing that presidents are just men, after all, and those feet turn out to be made of clay. For a while, anyway.

It’s no fun to see the wrong guy win. So now they get to see what that’s like. Although I wonder about their perception, frankly. The other day I noticed the Journal Gazette, the other paper in Fort Wayne, the one I didn’t work for, has a Facebook page. I was reading its Wall posts, and came across this comment from a reader:

To be honest, I am not really a big fan of this newspaper. The editorial board is a throwback to marxist ideology.

I checked the Marxist editorial page. In a random sample, I found approval of two police shootings of civilians, approval of the Republican governor’s State of the State address, and… oh wait, here’s some Marxism — an endorsement that lawmakers consider residents’ opinions in setting school policy, and disapproval of administering the death penalty to a batshit-crazy multiple murderer (who was, of course, found fit to stand trial).

In other words, I don’t trust these folks’ baseline brain power.

Oh, well. Let’s enjoy these special few days before we can return to the utter delamination of our economy and individual job situations.

So, bloggage:

Farewell to abstinence-only education, and good riddance. I mean, I hope the other drivers on the road are safe operators, but I still wear my seatbelt, too.

Michael Kinsley asks the whimsical question: Just who is the voice of God? Answer: James Earl Jones, with Morgan Freeman as an understudy. Hollywood always has fun with God depictions, at least post-“The Ten Commandments.” Look, God is George Burns, a little old man with a little old man voice! And so on. Tell me, though: Won’t you be disappointed if you go to heaven and discover God’s voice is that of Bradley Schlozman?

I know what it’s like to be out of work and I empathize, so this is reported straight-up: The Wingnut Welfare Train is fully booked, seek alternate transportation. That is all.

I’ll say this for 8 below zero — when the temperature finally rises to 20 degrees, as it’s forecast to do tomorrow, it’ll be time to go for a walk in shirtsleeves. Nothing like relativity to reset your head. Don’t ever say, “It can’t get any worse.” It can always get worse. (I learned this in the newspaper business, and look what’s happening — it’s getting worse.)

Today, after dropping the carpool off at school, I swung by the lake to see what sunrise looks like over fresh water at minus-8. It looks beautiful, it turns out. There was some sort of light-distortion effect going on, with a second, weaker sunrise in progress a few degrees north of the actual one. I groped in my coat for my camera, and discovered I’d forgotten it. Groped for my camera-equipped phone. Forgot that too. So no picture of this remarkable phenomenon. But it could have been worse — someone could have rear-ended me while I gawked, and I wouldn’t have been able to call for help.

Of course, sometimes it could be worse. Ask all those people standing on the wings in the Hudson River yesterday: Will you be seeking a claim against the airline for the ruination of your shoes? I was reading the accounts of the non-disaster in my daily pile of newsprint, and reflected for the millionth time what a pleasure a well-edited newspaper is. When breaking news is doing so, most editors throw everything into the mix, flood the zone, and to some degree this is what you should do. But every battle needs commanders, and in situations like this, editors are more important than ever. This is one reason I’m not looking forward to the thousand-eyes-on-the-ground future of journalism; it reminds me too much of working for a lousy paper, when the main story went on and on and on with quote after quote after quote, and at some point you just didn’t care about another eyewitness account, you wanted information. I got more from this passage in this story than I did from all the yakking heads on CNN yesterday:

Ditching can be tricky. The first step is to extend the slats and the flaps, the movable surfaces on the front and back edges of the wings that allow the plane to fly more slowly and to descend to just over the water’s surface.

Another step is to hit the “ditching button,” which seals the openings in the plane. One is the intake, where the engines grab air to pressurize and force it into the cabin, essential to high-altitude flight. Another is the valve at the back that lets air out.

When the plane is flying low enough, it will generate its own cushion of air, a phenomenon called “ground effect,” that lets it fly even more slowly.

I have no particular interest in aviation beyond the obvious one of hoping my flight doesn’t crash, but that was interesting. I never knew of the ditching button, and now I do.

Yesterday Wolf Blitzer, that giant dirigible of atomized bullshit, asked a question of one of the passengers. It ran something like this: “Now that you’ve been through this incredible experience, crash-landing in this icy river, going through this rescue, seeing it all, a thought?” (It went on much longer, however, and droned in that Blitzerian way.)

A thought? The passenger said: “Wow.” Somewhere in heaven, Shakespeare weeps.

(The best after-a-near-crash quote I ever read ran something like this: “Two hundred fifty-three people on this airplane, and it wasn’t anybody’s day to die.” And that came from a regular-joe passenger, not a poet. So it’s possible.)

Speaking of regular joes, let’s segue to the bloggage with a Medal of Valor to Roy Edroso, tracking Joe the Plumber’s perambulations through the Middle East. By my count Joe’s handlers have now compared him to Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway and now, Roy discovers, Abraham Lincoln. I only wish I were kidding. My thought: Wow.

Via Jezebel comes word that Amy Poehler’s new sitcom will have her playing “a mid-level bureaucrat in an Indiana city parks and recreation department who’s looking to get ahead,” and who “finds her love of the democratic process tested as she faces defensive government workers, selfish residents and real estate developers.” Actually, that could be pretty funny. I know some people who would sign on as technical consultants in a Hoosier minute.

Finally, while I love Anne Hull’s work in the WashPost, I have to say this: Must every visit to rural America only serve to underline what Barack Obama meant when he made that “clinging to guns” comment? Tell me what you think.

I have a phone interview in five minutes. Later!

People tell me I should get Netflix. They’re always Netflixing some cool movie I can’t find at Blockbuster or on my eight million cable channels. It’s so easy, they say. I was a charter member and wouldn’t go back for anything.

What about the pop-under problem? I ask. They stare blankly.

I can’t support a company that is trying to kill me with stealth advertising, I say. Several times a night when I’m working, my laptop fan shrieks with fury: Too much Flash! My processors can’t take this! I hit F9, which instantly tiles all open windows, and find six Netflix ads, which I then have to close down one by one. Click, click, click, I, hate, Netflix.

There has to be a better way to do internet advertising. Disposing of the slicks that come with the Sunday paper is a pain, but it doesn’t feel like an encroachment. Also, it doesn’t feel stupid. Part of what I suspect investors in internet companies like about the whole business model is how hands-free it is. Set up a blog entirely without human help. Set up your blog to do your blogging for you, even. With the right scripting you can buy a book, participate in an auction, do all sorts of things without any unnecessary face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice contact. In the business world, this is known as efficiency, cutting those imperfect human beings out of the production process. What good are they? Computers don’t ask for health insurance.

And so it was that I was checking the forecast the other day, and noticed this:

Note the line under the green bar: Stay warm on the links. Weather.com is a virtual cavalcade of linky goodness, its main page clickable nine ways from Sunday, but that one took me aback. For one thing, 22 degrees hardly qualifies as golf weather. For another, every golf course within 100 miles is covered with several inches of snow. For yet another, even the ones that aren’t covered with snow generally aren’t open in the winter. Turf can’t repair itself when it’s dormant, and it doesn’t pay to staff the pro shop for a handful of lunatics who want to play golf in extreme conditions. Dude, unless you have tickets to Florida, the season is over.

But I couldn’t resist. I clicked:

I was taken to a page of “content” so thin as to make a standard Gannett tip box look like a PhD curriculum. How to stay warm on the links? Dress in layers. Make sure you spend extra time warming up before you swing. And what tips page could be complete without this line: And since body heat escapes through your head—Grandma was right about that—wear a wool hat. It’ll help keep your whole body warm. Wow, thanks.

There has to be a better way to do commercial material on the web. There better be. This is worse than junk mail.

Bloggage:

Sadly, No tracks the perambulations of the Mission Accomplished lie, but I’m more interested in the language issues. “We were trying to say something differently,” the president said. Did he mean “different,” and added the extra syllable to sound extra-smart? Or does he understand that “differently” is an adverb that modifies “to say”? Your call. And note his lackey’s usage: ““[That’s] why he endears so much loyalty from people like myself and others who had worked for him.” You don’t endear loyalty, do you? He meant “engender,” right?

Steve Jobs does not have a “hormone imbalance,” he has something “more complex,” requiring a five-month medical leave. Apple stock doesn’t fare well and I don’t blame the market, for once. Surely Apple is more than Jobs, but how’d you like to hold stock in Martha Stewart’s corporate entity and discover Martha’s not feeling so well? There’s a fine line, in the business world, between a strong public face and a cult of personality. The solution: Replace Jobs with “Steve Jobs,” a virtual figure created by Pixar. Orville Redenbacher and Colonel Sanders have already paved the way.

Another charming essay by Roger Ebert, this one on goodness on screen.

Minus-one at the moment. Kill me now.

Sarah Palin neologism of the day: alikeness, n. the quality of, so to speak, sharing a characteristic or, I don’t know, maybe, trait with another. SYN: similarity. USAGE: “I would think we all tear up during the national anthem at the beginning of a baseball game, don’t we? That’s an alikeness between Alaskans and New Yorkers.”

If this lady keeps giving interviews, we might be able to make this a regular feature.

Current temperature: 9 Fahrenheit. Forecast: Light snow, followed by colder temperatures, with an overnight range of 4 above to -2. Just a warning: Mommy’s in a bad mood.

When you’re feeling this way, it’s interesting how everything you read in the papers seems to underline it. It’s really interesting to me how many of these Wall Street scumbags are opting for the Frankie Pentangeli exit, although, comically, some screw it up. There was an interview on NPR a few days ago with a financial historian who said the infamous suicides of 1929 are an urban myth, that close examination of newspaper reports and other contemporary records show no change in the suicide rate around the time of the stock-market crash, and the whole myth seems to have been based on a single report, later retracted.

Doesn’t surprise me. Bra-burning was the same way.

Anyway, this year it seems the fallen “wealth managers” of the Tarnished Age are convinced it hurts a lot less to fall on your own sword than to fall on some guy’s wand in the prison shower, I guess. Marcus Schrencker, the Indiana wussypants, crashed a perfectly good airplane before he was found trying to die in the ignominious venue of a KOA campground. He has one foot in the club of the successful suicides we discussed a few days ago and my guess is he’ll someday come to see he’s better off alive, but you never know. Just once I want to see one of these shitheads take a more medieval view of permanent redemption, cover his head with sackcloth and ashes and spend the rest of his miserable life in repentance, maybe dishing up beans in a soup kitchen.

I mean, Michael Milken gave up his toupees. Now there’s a sacrifice.

A bit o’ bloggage:

Ryan Seacrest tries to high-five a blind guy.

Someone asked the other day if I read that Albom thing in Sports Illustrated. Answer: Some of it. My eyes crossed when I reached the line, “(Detroiters) celebrate Sweetest Day” and I couldn’t go on. So no comment.

Leads that do not inspire confidence:

Timothy F. Geithner, the man tapped to lead the nation out of the greatest economic crisis in decades — and who would oversee the Internal Revenue Service — trekked to Capitol Hill yesterday to explain to senators how he made almost $43,000 worth of mistakes on his own tax returns.

These people cannot leave Washington fast enough for me. If only they were pursued by pitchfork-wielding mobs. More here, if you can stand it.

And now out into the cold and snow and too-much-to-do. At least I feel fortified with bitterness!