Some version of this story was on Page One of all three of our household’s daily newspapers this morning, and why not? The photo is irresistible — a sharply dressed gospel choir belting it out while arrayed around three heavenly white SUVs. (And yes, the opening number was a no-brainer: “I’m Looking for a Miracle.”) The name of the sermon at Greater Grace Temple? “A Hybrid Hope.” This is what Detroit’s been reduced to, America: Praying for money.

Although, honestly, who can blame anyone? You see what happens when you put your faith in representative democracy.

Among others who may be driven to their knees by current events: Employees at the Tribune Co., the recycling industry and, of course, everyone else:

This recession, which officially began in December 2007, now appears virtually certain to be the longest downturn — and possibly most severe — since the end of World War II, as evidenced last week by a demoralizing rat-a-tat of grim reports on jobs, sales and public confidence.

The reports signaled that even after 11 months, more than the entire length of the last two downturns, this recession has only now entered its fiercest phase, and economists say the pain will not end soon.

“For the average American it’s going to be devastating for the next 6 to 12 months,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a research and forecasting firm. He added, “I have not seen anything particularly hopeful right now, which tells me we have a ways to go.”

Well, thanks for that cheerful news, folks. Nothing like awakening on a dreary Monday to find that as bad as it was last week, this week it’s worse.

Actually, the church story interested me. One of the saddest things about the funerals we went to this year was seeing what remains of Alan’s family’s church, which we’re told is in a perilous state. It’s your standard Methodist congregation, as spicy as Wonder Bread, and I gather that’s part of the problem — Alan’s sister reports a large segment of the flock was lured away by “a holy-roller church” a few years back. I can scarcely believe Methodists would go holy-roller justlikethat, but on further questioning it seems the new joint was simply cast in the new mold of churches. That is, it had a band instead of an organist, video screens in lieu of felt banners, and a preacher who behaved as though he had an audience to please, rather than preach to. Not a megachurch per se, but leaning that way.

On the one hand, I don’t really have a problem with this. One of the things that most disappointed me during my brief attempt at reconciliation with the church of my birth — that would be the One True — was how lifeless it was, how rote, how dusty and oxygen-deprived. When the priest stepped away from the script in homilies, it was to complain that people wouldn’t put grocery carts in the cart corrals in the parking lot, or that birth control was like taking a drug to stop your heart. I would have welcomed an SUV rolling past the altar at that point, if only to maybe run him down and shut him up.

On the other hand, there’s just something wrong about going to church and expecting to be entertained. Sinners in the hand of a joke-telling God, etc.

But is there any doubt why these churches are in their ascendancy? If you want people to come back week after week, give them something to come to. Being prodded there at the point of an imaginary pitchfork isn’t a strategy for ongoing success.

I’d go to Greater Grace, but it would require a lot of new clothes and prayer with my hands in the air, a practice so divorced from my own tradition it would make me break out in hives. Plus, it would be totally obvious I was only there for the choir. I covered the funeral of a black civil-rights leader in Fort Wayne. By the end of the opening hymns, I was ready to make an altar call myself. That’s the power of a great gospel choir.

Running a little late this morning, and I still have Russian verb conjugations to drill myself on. Besides, I know this thread will belong to Jeff TMMO, so let’s let him take it away, and we’ll try for more later, eh? Eh.

An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today, about the tough decisions communities are making with their paltry share of the $4 billion Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a congressional grant to help mitigate the disastrous fallout of the foreclosure crisis. “Help” and “mitigate” are pretty ridiculous words, when you consider the extent of the damage and the fact $4 billion doesn’t go very far these days, not when it’s spread across the entire country.

The story focused on Avondale, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, where workers and activists are trying to determine which buildings are worth saving and which are bulldozer bait. One passage jumped out at me:

One house the officials would love to tear down is located in an area of the city that housed migrant farm hands. It’s a blue, wooden, 576-square-foot shack on a bare dirt lot. The owner, according to the city officials, was an unemployed woman with a history of drug abuse. In February 2007, at a time when the house was assessed at $50,100, a finance company gave her a $103,000 second mortgage on the house.

If someone with a keener business sense than mine — that would be, roughly, all of you — can explain why everyone connected with this transaction shouldn’t go to jail, please do so. There’s a picture of the place in the accompanying slide show, although the description does it pretty well — roughly a 20-by-30 shack sitting on bare dirt. This is why the top of my head threatens to pop off when I hear someone say the fix we’re in is the result of irresponsible borrowers getting in over their heads. Irresponsible lenders milking fees out of housing stock that ran dry a generation ago? Healthy profit-seekers getting their piece of the American dream!

In Detroit these guys went house-to-house, ringing doorbells, stuffing brochures in mailboxes, buying billboards, advertising endlessly on local radio and TV. Today there are entire neighborhoods that were hanging in there just a few years ago, poor but stable, now dotted with boarded-up homes and flapping tarps, scrappers circling like jackals. People say there should be consequences. Well, there they are — the consequences. Meanwhile, Angelo Mozilo still has his tanning bed. It’s things like this that make me consider becoming an anarchist.

Elsewhere, Editor & Publisher reports the speculation of a credit-rating firm that says, “several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.” Among the media firms in trouble are McClatchy and Tribune Co. McClatchy bought Knight Ridder, the chain we used to work for. I sold all my KR stock to buy our house, and Alan sold a little not long after we moved in to buy his boat. What remains is so worthless now that the last time we talked about it, Alan said, “At least I have my boat.”

My sister had a friend who went bust in the dot-com crash in 2001. He told her, “When the stock was high, I sold some and bought a BMW. People told me I was crazy, that I should have hung on and not spent it on such a frivolous purchase. Well, at least I have a BMW now!”

We’ll probably be living on that boat by the end of things. Look for the Mad Max couple with the sulky daughter and elderly dog, washing their clothes on the rocks.

Welcome to Surly Friday! Tapping the deep vein of rage in us all, since roughly an hour ago.

So let’s! Get! Surrrrrrly!

If your kid came to you and said, “Mom, when I grow up I want to be a makeup artist,” what would you say? “No, no, kitten — go to college so you’ll have some real earning power. There’s no money in makeup.” Well, you would be wrong, at least if the makeup artist in question works for Sarah Palin.

Hey, lawyers in the house: What was Clarence Thomas thinking when he cleared the way for the Obama-citizenship dispute to go to a conference of the entire SCOTUS? I’m aware there could be a back story that explains it better than, “because he’s jealous, bitter and crazy, duh,” so let’s hear it. Before we get any surlier.

Unemployment at 6.7 percent! Buy krugerrands! Dump your stock! Get surly!

Or just take to your bed with a sick headache, once you read about the guy who took his fiance out to the romantic Pacific promontory to pop the question, only to watch her get hit by a wave and swept out to sea. Presumably drowned. No kidding.

Actually, I remember reading once about a similar case. There’s a famous news photo of a man being carried into a hospital ER, impaled on a sizable length of wood. We’re talking landscaping-timber size, and it hit him a bullseye, right through the sternum. Only in the picture he’s awake and conscious, seemingly unsurprised that he has a huge chunk of wood sticking out of his chest. The story is, the impalement was a one-in-a-million shot, the timber effectively shoving his vital organs to the side. The stake was removed in a lengthy surgery, and the guy spent most of a year in the hospital recovering. Not long after his release, he was walking along a jetty on Long Island when a wave hit him and took him out to sea, never to be seen again. One is reminded of Faust. While it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the guy in Oregon is lying and he really dumped his girlfriend off a cliff somewhere — that’s just the mood I’m in today — let’s take him at his word and reach the inevitable conclusion: THE WORLD HATES US, AND WE ARE BUT PLAYTHINGS FOR THE GODS. Although I have a dirty house at the moment, and bright sunshine outside, so I’m going to take advantage of actually being able to see the dust bunnies, and go clean them up.

Have a nice day!

Can we take credit for this?

That’s GM CEO Rick Wagoner (in the passenger seat, or “at left,” as they teach us on the copy desk), en route to Washington in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Original story here. Original suggestion, by our own J.C. Burns, here, although the idea makes so much sense it may well be one of those cases of simultaneous light bulbs. As I reread J.C.’s comment, though, his is much better than a simple driving stunt:

Yeah, if I were doing PR for GM/Ford/Chrysler, I’d turn it into an event…put all three of them in a hybrid SUV and let them roll down the Ohio and Pennsylvania Turnpikes to DC, doing press avails by cell phone, stopping for mini news conferences at truckstops, and rolling triumphantly (with live shots) into the Capitol area. In the back seat: a UAW employee from each.

“These are the people you’re affecting. We’re just their drivers.”

I still think that’s a great idea. Put Wagoner behind the wheel, and hell yes, live shots. That’s what they do at the auto show every year. Have the Chrysler guy drive his Jeep up the Capitol steps, like they did at the Pontchartrain Hotel a few years back. Do something dramatic, anyway. It wasn’t so long ago that Detroit designs had mojo — do you see rappers customizing Hondas with hydraulics and rims? Do 45-year-old men wake up one day with an all-consuming lust for a vintage Datsun 210? Confidence, gents — get a little of it back. Honk the horn when you roll into D.C.! Turn on the four-ways! Have some fun! Stand up and tell ’em you’re from Detroit!

Fat chance. But here’s hopin’.

While we’re on the subject of J.C. luv, I found this in the comments of his wife Sammy’s blog — you following? It’s a recollection by the former editor of The Country Journal, a small weekly J.C. worked for in the 1970s, way up in Plainfield, Vermont:

My favorite J.C. memory involves sending him to Cabot to get a story — any story, so long as Cabot people were in the paper, because if they weren’t, no one in Cabot would buy a copy. All J.C. could find was adult night at the school gym, where basketball was in progress. He wrote a story that consisted almost entirely of the sounds of the game (THA-DUMP,THA-DUMP, THUNK! CLUNK-CLUNK … “Hey!” “Here!” “One More!” “All right, Harv!” “Hwup!” “Oh!” “Ow!” “I’m sorry!”). Classic.

David Mamet lives there now. I hear he was attracted by the quality of the local media.

OK, then. Thursday is the end of my week, more or less. Lately I have a standing Friday work-related thing, but mostly Thursday feels like Friday, and since the sun’s out today — for the first time in days — it feels a little special. No bad news allowed, today. Thanks to Brian for pointing out the overlooked story of the week, about a soured co-operative effort between the Cincinnati Zoo and the nearby Creation Museum:

The Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum launched a joint promotional deal last week to draw attention to their holiday attractions.

It worked, but not the way zoo and museum officials had hoped.

The zoo pulled out of the deal Monday after receiving dozens of angry calls and e-mails about the partnership, which offered reduced prices to anyone who bought tickets to the zoo’s Festival of Lights and the museum’s Christmas celebration, Bethlehem’s Blessing.

I mean, speaking of tone-deaf. How could an institution with at least one or two actual scientists reporting for work on a daily basis dream up something this dumb?

Others said a scientific institution shouldn’t link itself to a place that argues man once lived side by side with dinosaurs. “They seem like diametrically opposed institutions,” said Dr. James Leach, a Cincinnati radiologist who e-mailed zoo officials about his concerns. “The Cincinnati Zoo is one of this city’s treasures. The Creation Museum is an international laughingstock.”

Yeah, that’s one way to describe it. John Scalzi’s account of his 2007 visit remains the foundational text, however. The LOL Creashun thread is just for grins.

Someone asked me last night, “What’s the difference between the stuff you write and then this thing you call ‘bloggage’?” I said, well, I tend to write a little column-y piece with few or no links, followed by a few linky/comment sorts of things, but he didn’t see it that way, and maybe I’m just fooling myself, maybe that’s not the structure these daily entries take anymore. Maybe we’ve become an all-bloggage blog without even noticing. Whatever. It’s time to go to the gym. My thighs are a much bigger problem.

UPDATE: Nearly forgot: Happy birthday, Kirk!

Add to the lengthening list of the many business I would not want to be in at the moment this: Funeral homes. Their profit margin — fancy caskets, spare-no-expense funerals — is swirling down the drain with everything else.

It’s the damn boomers, of course, who ruin everything they touch. At Thanksgiving, we had a brief discussion of what we wanted for our last tribute on earth, and neither Alan nor I want a fancy funeral. Frugal Midwesterners we are (soon to be broke Midwesterners), we ask for nothing more than immediate cremation followed by some sort of meaningful dispersal of ashes. (The church of my birth would strenuously object to the scattering part, but I left that building a while back. The thought of my corpse being pumped full of chemicals and laid out for public display grosses me out far more, so that’s that.)

Of course, others have more ambitious plans:

The Royal Shakespeare Company will no longer use the real skull of Polish pianist Andre Tchaikovsky in its performance of Hamlet when it transfers to West End as it is “too distracting for the audience.”

The use of the skull had been kept a carefully guarded secret throughout the play’s four month run in Stratford until leading man David Tennant disclosed that the skull belonged to the late pianist Andre Tchaikovsky – who bequeathed his skull to the RSC for this very purpose.

Andre Tchaikovsky left his skull to the RSC in 1982 after he died of cancer to be used on stage in Hamlet. It took a quarter of a century to happen – and he posthumously appeared as Yorick in the recent production of Hamlet at Stratford.

Tchaikovsky — no word on relation to Pyotr Ilyich — always hated productions where they used a prop for the Yorick scene, his agent said:

“He hated the way it was done. When he saw (Hamlet) with the RSC, he (Andre) said, ‘I am going to leave my skull to the RSC, they really should have a proper skull. It doesn’t work with the plastic thing they have.’ And then we looked at his will, and there it was.”

Back into the prop warehouse for the late pianist; maybe in another 25 years they can bring him out again. If the bigmouth actors can keep their yaps shut, that is.

And so we begin all-bloggage Wednesday here at NN.C. But it’s beefy bloggage:

Remember how I told you you should be reading Roger Ebert’s blog? If you were listening, you already read today’s riposte to critics who accused him of not reviewing “Expelled,” the anti-evolution “documentary.” If not, baste in its sweet, sweet revenge here:

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, depending on their complexions, they will look sunburned, red-splotched, oily, pale as a fish belly, orange, mottled, ashen, or too dark to be lighted in the same shot with a lighter skin. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

It weighs in at about a million words, each one as sweet as candy. Bon appetit.

How often have you sat through a meeting at your workplace — Six Sigma blah blah blah pursuit of excellence blah blah blah best practices blah blah to the blah — and yearned for something…more? Thought, “the writer’s life for me!” and considered jumping out the window, or maybe walking out the door? If so, let me introduce you to the closest equivalent to a copy desk staff meeting, “The Right Word” blog at the NYT:

Careful readers, including some in the cement industry, are quick to point it out when we confuse cement and concrete.

What’s the difference, you say? Go back to kindergarten, bonehead. From the NYT stylebook:

cement. Use concrete instead to mean the material that forms blocks, walls and roads. One ingredient is cement, the binding agent that is mixed with water, sand and gravel.

You can almost hear the voice of Ben Stein, can’t you? Click through for more exciting hair-splitting over “podium” and “lectern.”

(All snark aside, I do think these distinctions are important, and I recognize the importance, and thanklessness, of the job of maintaining language standards. I only question whether the public gives enough of a fig to make it part of the NYT’s website.)

From the WashPost, a sobering story on how technology makes a better terrorist:

The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.

This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of information about the attacks — on TV, cellphones, the Internet — seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.

Fascinating story.

If you prefer gunplay more relaxed, less deadly and a whole lot funnier, try this piece on Detroit’s last surviving inside-the-city-limits gun store, written by the Metro Times’ own Detroitblogger John. (I’m reliably told the pseudonym protects an actual reporter for the more smugly self-satisfied of the city’s dailies, and why these excellent little sketches of city life aren’t running there is anybody’s guess, but I’d guess it comes down to the suicidal standards of corporate journalism.)

Anyhoo, some great detail about the dangers of ricochet on the indoor range:

He unconsciously shields his groin with his hand as he talks. “A woman was shooting, and I got hit right on the head of my dick!” he says. “But it didn’t hurt. It just come and fell. So about two, three months later a lady’s down here shooting, the damn bullet ricocheted, hit my damn dick. I said ‘What the hell’s going on here!'”

And finally, what the hell is going on here? General Motors needs $4 billion in cash just to get through the end of the month. Anyone want to buy a nice house in Grosse Pointe? I could probably make you a deal.

Off to whistle past the graveyard. Happy Wednesday.

One of the things I like best about living in a metro area this size is the way the various ethnicities assert themselves. Columbus, while no tank town, is (or was) a place where a certain mushy pan-European generic culture stamps out the details of what it means to be, say, of Greek heritage (except during Greekfest). Fort Wayne’s foundation of German bloodstock eclipses all but a few other early-immigrant groups. (One of these is the Macedonian community, but they sort of stamped themselves out by invading the restaurant trade, where they proved excellent hosts mainly by offering what you like, not their own tastes.) The preceding is obviously a little like painting a portrait with a whitewashing brush, and I’ll disavow all of it soon enough.

But I’m always pleased to do my holiday shopping here and see details of old-country culinary culture I thought had been long-forgotten — Easter cakes made in the shape of a lamb, corned beef by the truckload for St. Patrick’s Day, paczki for Fat Tuesday, kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola, tamales at Christmastime in Mexicantown. Of late the big meat mall at Eastern Market is selling chitterlings by the truckload. Every vendor is having a special, and hand-lettered signs are everywhere. (No one can agree on a spelling: chitterlings, chittlins, chit’lins, chittins.) It seems to be a seasonal thing, although whether it’s connected to Thanksgiving, Christmas or cold weather in general is hard to say. (I should learn to check the Google first — it is, indeed, a pan-cold-weather-holiday thing.)

I recall a passage from “Gone With the Wind” (the novel) where Scarlett, in the grip of post-war hunger at Tara, finds herself fantasizing over the bounty of years gone by, when at hog-killing time the results would be shared from the big house to the slave quarters. Obviously the white folks claimed the ham and bacon, but there was offal — the chitterlings, maws another other queasy-making parts — for the Negroes. It’s always interesting to me how many cultures still eat the foods of poverty and deprivation long after they no longer need to. (Someday I’ll publish this as a scholarly thesis called, simply, “Lutefisk: WTF?”) Personally, I think nothing short of starvation would get me to eat a pig’s intestines, but like Barack Obama and gay marriage, I’m always willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Thanksgiving is a great blank canvas for ethnic cuisine in general. I stood in line behind a black woman in September who was buying a bushel of assorted greens at a bargain prices, and told the seller she would cook and freeze it all for Thanksgiving. One of my favorite Sopranos episodes is the one where Paulie Walnuts lays out the typical Italian-American Thanksgiving feast, starting with antipasto, manicotti, “and then the bird.” So maybe chitterlings have a place there. All I know is, if you’re interested, they’re having lots of sales downtown.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings yesterday. The day was pretty average for my own natal day, which I’ve de-emphasized in recent years. I got a chocolate-raspberry cake, yum, and Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” Which I asked for. A good day.

Holiday-week bloggage:

Despite my brief sojourn as a sports copy editor, I didn’t know why so much attention was being paid to whether the disgraceful Lions would sell out Ford Field for their traditional Thanksgiving game. (That’s because my time reading sports copy ended when I stopped being paid to do so.) They finally did, barely, probably by handing out tickets to the homeless guys who panhandle on the freeway ramps. Now I know why: If they don’t sell out, there’s no TV broadcast, and that — the broadcast — is an important part of many Thanksgiving traditions, not only here but around the country. So, whew: We can still watch the Lions on TV tomorrow. At 0-11, they’re playing the Titans, who are 10-1. There was some hope Tennessee would win last week, so we’d get that symmetry thing going: 0-11 vs. 11-0. That would be the last symmetry such a matchup would yield, as the Lions suck so badly this year they need a new word for it, and the score will probably be 425-3. You can watch the game on TV, or let Detroitist live-blog it for you.

Maybe if he’d said “asshole” and “tyrant,” he could have killed the guy: Dubious Seattle Times story tries to draw a line between a heckler and the collapse last week of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Have a good weekend, all. I think I’ll take tomorrow and Friday off — unless the mood strikes me otherwise. I expect we’ll be seeing “Twilight” at some point, even though I’d rather take Kate to see “Milk.” Anyway, we won’t be seeing “Australia,” although I loved Hank Stuever’s capsule description via his Facebook status: “It’s a movie about Hugh Jackman’s chest, and some other stuff around him.” And what a chest!

Be thankful for something tomorrow. You know you have a long list.

One of my favorite things to pick up at Trader Joe’s is their carnitas-in-a-bag heat-n-serve deal. Nothing like putting that on a tortilla with a little chopped cilantro to make you feel you made the right choice. It was maybe the third time I did so before I thought, $5.99 is a ridiculous price to pay for two cups of stewed pork. So I resolved to make my own. I recalled a “Splendid Table” episode that spoke of the wonders of the pork shoulder, a poverty cut well-suited to slow-roasting. I went online, found the recipe — mmm, a “mole-inspired spice rub” — and set out for my own culinary adventure in make-your-own carnitas.

The first problem was with the “3-1/2-pound organic pork shoulder.” They must breed some wee little piggies for the organic trade, because at the Gratiot Central Market’s Temple o’ Pork, the very smallest pork shoulder I could find was eight pounds. Still, at $1.29 per, it only cost me $10 and change. If this thing dollars up, I’ll be way ahead. The recipe is maddening for someone as impatient as me — rub, entomb in a heavy dutch oven and cook for hours in a very slow oven — but now, at the three-hour mark, I’m starting to get some pretty good smells upstairs.

Yes, it’s another write-on-Sunday-for-Monday entry. School lets out at noon Tuesday; I expect the week to kick my ass.

After-dinner update: Mmmm, slow-roasted fatty pork. Poor people get all the good chow.

That’s one consolation, I guess. Although, even rich people have it rough these days. They’re scared, I tell you. Here’s Tom Friedman in Sunday’s NYT:

So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”

Tom Friedman, one week (one! week!) previous:

Now is when we need a president who has the skill, the vision and the courage to cut through this cacophony, pull us together as one nation and inspire and enable us to do the one thing we can and must do right now:

Go shopping.

I am a happy and satisfied New York Times subscriber — at least as happy as I get with any newspaper — but I’m starting to get frustrated with this phenomenon of rich guys panicking. Ben Stein, same paper:

The problem now, as in 1929 to 1940, is that the economy is not functioning normally. It is shot through and through with fear, even terror. Worse yet, and unlike the situation in the Depression, government miscues have been only a part of the problem. This fear is so pervasive that it has brought the credit sector to a virtual shutdown, even to borrowers with good credit. At this point, the lending sector is so panicked — largely from the government’s inconsistent behavior and failure to rescue Lehman Brothers — that it is frozen. Not totally, but way too much for ease of lending and maybe even for the survival of a robust economy. And if a colossal worldwide deleveraging spreads to Treasury debt owned by foreigners, the situation will be deadly serious.

“Shot through with fear, even terror,” so he thought, what the hell, can a little more be all that bad? It’s always interesting to me how many different personas Ben Stein deploys in maintaining his fabulous career. In the pop-culture joke sector, he’s all about the voice and the “anyone? anyone?” gag. In the NYT, he’s the serious economist. And there’s always room for another face, as his role in “Expelled” demonstrates. But he’s a rich guy now, he’ll still be a rich guy if the whole economy falls into the toilet, and I wish he’d save the fear and terror for those who might actually be going hungry or turned out in the street if such a thing happens.

All I can say is, thank God for Gretchen Morgenson, who explains it isn’t necessarily “fear” that has frozen lending. After all, didn’t we all recently chip in $700 billion to get the system oiled again? Yes, but oops, there seems to be a hitch in the plans:

When the Troubled Asset Relief Program of the Treasury Department handed over $125 billion in taxpayer money to nine banks a month ago, they were supposed to lend to small businesses, home buyers and other worthy borrowers to keep the economy’s gears in motion.

At the time, the Federal Reserve Board and three bank regulatory agencies said: “The agencies expect all banking organizations to fulfill their fundamental role in the economy as intermediaries of credit to businesses, consumers, and other creditworthy borrowers.”

Alas, that admonition wasn’t accompanied by any real requirements to lend. When the Treasury gave taxpayer billions to the banks, it attached no strings. So is it any surprise that lending is tight?

But remember: It would be wrong to loan Detroit automakers 20 percent of that amount. Because some Senate staffer bought a Chevy Vega right out of college, and it went through oil like you wouldn’t believe.

So I guess we’re either screwed, or we’re not. I eat tuna fish in good times and bad, and I don’t think the solution is to stay home and wait for the inevitable. I always wondered, reading about apocalyptic events in history, how ordinary people weathered them, and the answer seems to be — they did what they always did. (There are exceptions. Pompeii comes to mind.) As for me, I’ll continue to buy local, put money into Salvation Army kettles, floss, pet my dog and only pull the covers up over my head when I’m really tired.

Cautionary note: I’m always confident and expansive after eating a good meal.

Some good bloggage for you today: A fascinating read in New York magazine on Bellevue, the city’s infamous psychiatric hospital. News peg: It’s on the verge of closing. (Now I’ll never get to check in in a straitjacket.) What does it take to get committed to Bellevue? A lot:

Bellevue is not for “some Upper East Side suicidal neurotic or whatever—they’d go to NYU Medical Center next door. Our patients were the ones with no money, no resources, and multiple stressors.”

That, or their behavior is so extreme—criminal or otherwise—that no other option presents itself. Merely wandering into the middle of Broadway while muttering incoherently? Probably not enough. “You know, the brilliance of the schizophrenics when they’re directing traffic,” says Covan, “is that they always direct it in the direction it’s already going, so their grandiosity is reinforced. But if they start to direct it in the opposite direction, or if they’re assaulting other people, or if you came in and said you really wanted to kill yourself, not just that you were thinking about it … You know, Bellevue is not the place for you if you’re just not feeling good today and you’re really worried about the stock market.”

Remember when I talked about seeing people in motorized wheelchairs driving on the city streets? I wasn’t kidding. Jim @ Sweet Juniper has photographic proof.

Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Coozledad are adding to their happy menagerie, newest member seen here. Actually, they’re getting two mules, and they don’t match. Coozle reports he’s learning to drive them, and their favorite command is whoa. As they are now the hands-down smartest critters on the spread, I expect his blog will be even more of a laff riot.

Ten o’clock already? Time to study Russian.

I have to leave bright and early for the auto shop, which recently stopped offering an Ethernet connection for customers chillin’ in the lounge. I’m taking advantage of this turn of events by taking my laptop and working on the sort of stuff that e-mail and Web access only gets in the way of, i.e., writing. Which means not much of a blog today, but I snipped a few zinnias to put in this simple little vase:

Howell Raines always did get on my last damn nerve. Aaron Barnhart lays out only one reason.

When someone remakes “Charlotte’s Web” with an R rating, the writer will go by one name, and it will be Coozledad.

There’s news, there’s non-news, and then there are headlines like this: The Duchess of Cornwall plans to take up pilates or Tai Chi. Can’t you hardly wait to know the rest?!?

And while we’re reading the Telegraph’s health page, ohmygod: Boy, 12, dies from heart failure after using too much deodorant.

I swear, the Brits put out the best newspapers, page for page, in the free world. I can’t believe I get to read them every day through the magic of the internets. Cold comfort at a time when my retirement portfolio is withering like a beehive hairdo on a 90-degree day, but we take it where we can get it, right?

You all have a good Friday, and be kind to one another — we’re all going to be standing in the same bread line someday, and we’ll have plenty of time to fight then.

There’s so much going on hereabouts, and so many good things I want to direct your attention to, that today will be an all-bloggage entry. Maybe we should make Thursdays the ADHD edition on a semi-permanent basis, eh? On with it, then:

One of the best meals of my life was in a long-dead restaurant in Columbus called L’Armagnac. It was in a converted house somewhere in a gentrifying neighborhood, and some weeks later I had occasion to see the kitchen on a reporting assignment. It was very easy to see the kitchen because it was the size of a broom closet — not much bigger than the one in my apartment, in fact. And yet, magic happened there, and happened on a scale large enough to share with several dozen people every night, and the only real accommodation anyone had to make was scheduled seatings and prix fixe. So I was amused to note this NYT blog piece called Mark Bittman’s Bad Kitchen, Bittman being everyone’s favorite food columnist. (Really. His recipes are worth the NYT subscription price alone.) Anyhoo:

Q: Okay Mark. What’s a popular food writer like you doing in a kitchen like that?

A: I got a bunch of e-mails that say, “Can you believe all this stuff about your crummy kitchen?” But the whole idea is that you don’t need a fancy kitchen. You don’t need fancy equipment, and you don’t need fancy recipes. When I show people my kitchen, they believe it. But I hate my kitchen also. I bump my shins on the dishwasher. There is not enough room to put stuff. It’s a terrible stove. It’s a terrible dishwasher. I don’t have room for the pots I’d like to have. I’ve cooked in much worse, though. I’m used to it. Someday I’ll grow up and get a real kitchen.

Q: So why do so many people think a nice kitchen will solve their cooking woes?

A: Maybe it’s like what you said. You use your crummy kitchen as an excuse not to cook. Maybe it’s like saying, “I can’t exercise in the winter because I don’t have an elliptical trainer.” I once cooked for six months in what amounted to a basement with a hot plate, microwave and a refrigerator and sink.

Sorry if you’re OD’d on the current crisis, but you’re not going to be reading this stuff in your local papers, and some of it is good:

Pete Karmanos — local hero, hereabouts — takes on Alabama’s most irritating senator:

The intent of this letter, however, is not to take you to task for the inaccuracy of your comments or for the over-simplicity of your views, but rather to point out the hypocrisy of your position as it relates to Alabama’s (the state for which you have served as senator since 1987) recent history of providing subsidies to manufacturing. During the segment on Meet the Press, you stated that:

“We don’t need government — governmental subsidies — for manufacturing in this country. It’s the French model, it’s the wrong road. We will pay for it. The average American taxpayer is going to pay dearly for this, if I’m not wrong.”

I trust it is safe to say that when you refer to “government subsidies,” you are referring to subsidies provided by both federal and state governments. And if this is in fact true, then I am sure you were adamantly against the State of Alabama offering lucrative incentives (in essence, subsidies) to Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s to lure the German automobile manufacturer to the State.

As it turned out, Alabama offered a stunning $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. Additionally, the State also offered to train the workers, clear and improve the site, upgrade utilities, and buy 2,500 Mercedes Benz vehicles. All told, it is estimated that the incentive package totaled anywhere from $153,000 to $220,000 per created job. On top of all this, the State gave the foreign automaker a large parcel of land worth between $250 and $300 million, which was coincidentally how much the company expected to invest in building the plant.

[Insert Nelson Muntz HAW-ha here.]

One of my favorite — OK, my absolute favorite — local blogger is Jim Griffioen of Sweet Juniper, who covers Detroit, urban wastelands, parenthood and stay-at-home fatherhood from a perch somewhere near Lafayette Park. His piece on the events of this week is worth a read because it’s beautifully written, and because it captures the ambiguity so many of us feel about the situation:

I take pictures of the sad state of Detroit partly because I know there are people out there who can hardly believe places like this exist in their own country. From our greatest, most unique cities to our blandest, most generic suburbs, things have been pretty nice for a long time. It is easy to forget how our once-great economy was built (or what happened to the places that built it). Now it has been pointed out that this robust economic juggernaut we’ve believed we were for the last several years hasn’t actually been wearing any clothes. And winter is here.

Some of the people saying let them fail about Detroit’s automakers are the very same people who had no problem with the $700 billion bailout of the very “industries” responsible for the sudden evaporation of so many billions of dollars in equity and credit. I would like to show them the state of this city and ask them to think about how much worse it (and hundreds of other cities reliant on the auto industry) will get if any of these three employers were suddenly unable to pay their employees or suppliers. This isn’t Manhattan. We’re not talking about Goldman Sachs associates suddenly not being able to pay the mortgages on their $350,000 parking spaces in Tribeca for the Ferraris they bought with their 2006 bonuses. We are talking about the lifeblood of a region that has already suffered so deeply, and I can’t believe how many people are speaking so flippantly about allowing this great American industry to die.

I’m no apologist for the Big Three or their ridiculous missteps and lapses of judgment. But I do care about the regular people who work for these companies and who played no role in those poor decisions. Where is the compassion?

Jim used to live in San Francisco. Ahem:

They say a sustainable model for future economies will trend away from globalization and be based more on localization. The yuppies and hippies have sort of turned that into “I am better than the white trash at Wal-Mart because I buy my eggs from Farmer Brown the next town over,” but that doesn’t mean a movement towards more local economies is without merit. For Detroiters, of course, it is hard to separate all this talk of “buy local” economics from the misery of the auto industry, and not be frustrated with those Prius-driving yuppies in the Pacific Northwest calling for the death of this massive American industry while patting themselves on the back for buying butter made from the milk of organically-fed Oregon cows. It’s not a simple matter, and hopefully if there is some sort of “bailout” there will be plenty of strings attached: perhaps this could be an opportunity to start transforming manufacturing in the United States to a sustainable model that strengthens our economy and provides jobs here rather than just strengthening the portfolios of a privileged few at the expense of so many. But calling for the death of this American industry is callous and shortsighted, and I would add that slowly turning into a nation where no one knows how to make anything but hamburgers and silkscreened t-shirts can’t be good for national security.

Oh, and speaking of San Francisco, where else could a letter to the editor this stupid originate?

Missing from both Detroit’s pleas for a bailout and the national discussion of its pros and cons is any acknowledgment that the American taxpayer continuously subsidizes the automobile industry through the financing of local, state and federal roads.

If car companies were suddenly forced to acquire the land and maintain the infrastructure that its products need to function, the real cost of a car would be beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest people, and our national economy would come to a standstill until another form of transportation were subsidized and developed to take its place.

Whether General Motors is “too big to fail” and therefore deserves a bailout ignores the fact that the company, along with every other carmaker in the world, is subsidized by our tax dollars. Giving the automakers more for abusing their unique standing hardly seems appropriate.

Do we need a palate-cleanser? We do:

Jon Carroll quotes an amazing fact about Tom Friedman:

The Nov. 10 issue of the New Yorker had a long and quite balanced profile of Friedman by Ian Parker. This paragraph caught my eye:

“A few years ago, the Friedmans bought a seven-and-a-half-acre plot in Bethesda, Maryland. They tore down the existing house, built an eleven-thousand-square-foot replacement, and planted 200 trees. (In a note at the end of [his new book] ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded,’ where Friedman explains his own ecological circumstances – geothermal heating, solar panels – he invites readers, perhaps unwisely, to regard his real estate move as an act of rescue: He writes that he and his wife bought the land ‘to prevent it from being developed into a subdivision of a dozen or more houses,’ which could sound like someone buying a lot of champagne to protect society from cork-related injuries.) Here, the Friedmans have started an art collection on a theme of reading, writing and the media, which includes a book by Anselm Kiefer and a bench by Jenny Holzer.”

“Perhaps unwisely” — snerk.

Finally, some comedy. One of the many, many shameful things about the way the city of Detroit rolls is the bloated Executive Protection Unit, the police-department detail that protects the mayor. The most recent former occupant of that office apparently looked into the mirror every morning and saw not a college football player going soft in the middle, but a TOTAL BADASS who needed muscle to get through his day without someone busting a cap in his ass. People said the EPU was staffed by his high-school classmates and was just another form of featherbedding, which isn’t hard to believe. Anyway, someone I know attended a Democratic fundraiser in Grosse Pointe Farms last year, and said the talk of the party was the way the governor, this 110-pound blonde lady, made a quiet entrance, her security consisting of one state highway patrolman, followed a few minutes later by Kwame Kilpatrick’s posse in two SUVs. (Because the Farms is a place where you take your life into your own hands after dark, I guess.)

When Kwame left the mountain headfirst earlier this year, there was some local comment that now would be an excellent time to dissolve the EPU as well. Not so fast:

City Council President Monica Conyers took along two police officers from the Executive Protection Unit last weekend to a National League of Cities conference in Orlando, Fla., which some colleagues say is a misuse of taxpayer dollars. Police spokesman James Tate confirmed the trip and said police have escorted Conyers during other jaunts out of town since she became president in September.

Of course, the best part is always the justification:

“She is next in line to be the mayor,” said Conyers’ spokeswoman Denise Tolliver, who added that Conyers took two officers because one requested that a partner come to share the duties. “She absolutely needs that security. She is a woman. She can’t protect herself in many instances. You have to be concerned with her safety.”

Let me just go on the record as saying that if any female can protect herself, it’s Monica Conyers, who can’t even check into a hotel without the police being called. Anybody who would mess with her deserves whatever they have coming.

Now I’m off to exercise until I look like a drowned rat. Mmm, sexy.

UPDATE: Wait! One more. Staffers at the Longmont Times-Call in Colorado have a unique opportunity to make some extra cash this Christmas: Working as valet parkers at the publisher’s holiday bash. If this isn’t the bottom, it’s hard to know what is.

I’ll say this for living in America’s most-loathed city (suck it, New York! we rool!) — local-media coverage of the auto-industry crisis is a cut above. You can’t really feed slogans and warmed-over talk radio calls to an informed audience, and so we’re spared “but if they’d only make cars people want, none of this would be happening.” For the most part.

My favorite of these is: America doesn’t want SUVs. Ha. Now they don’t. They don’t want them when gas is $4 a gallon. But until gas got that high, they wanted lots of them. Did everyone sleep through the ’90s and the first half of this decade? People not only wanted SUVs, they wanted them in all sizes, shapes and colors. They wanted big ones (Suburbans). They wanted little ones (Escapes). They wanted their Japanese brands tricked out to look more SUV-like (hello, Honda CRX). They wanted fancy-schmancy luxury SUVs (Escalade, Navigator). They wanted cheap ones for the entry-level market (Hyundai, Kia). Did O.J. Simpson flee in an Accord? I must have missed that.

Even now, they still want so-called crossovers, SUVs that drive and handle more like cars — Buick Enclave, Ford Edge, etc. You can pick many, many fights with the U.S. auto industry and make many, many good arguments against the government helping them, but you can’t change the facts to suit your prejudices, and the fact is, the Big Three invented the SUV, and for a very long time, the SUV was very, very good to the Big Three. So please shut up about that.

(On some right-wing blog I can’t remember, I heard the most stupido argument of all: The companies didn’t want to make SUVs, but were forced to by their onerous UAW contracts, which required them to make the highest-profit-margin vehicles possible. These people really live in their own fantasy world. I don’t want to wake them up. They’re like sleeping babies.)

Here’s the other thing you don’t hear so much here: Those greedy autoworkers. How dare they want stuff like health insurance and pensions. We really are crabs in a bucket, aren’t we? Again, go ahead and make informed remarks about certain work forces having to face the reality of higher co-pays and cost-sharing. But unless you’re willing to give up your own company-paid health insurance in solidarity, kindly shut up about it. Non-union GM retirees lost their health-care bennies earlier this year — replaced by a whole $300/month subsidy to buy private insurance in that marvelous free market, and good luck with that if you’re a cancer survivor or have heart disease. Spare a kind thought for them, eh?

What we’re seeing in Detroit is the death of the well-paid working class, and if that makes you happy, go be happy about it. Asshole.

Anyway, speaking of cars nobody wants:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

But…but…people want Toyotas! How can this be happening?

It is more unusual to see a lot at the California port filled with thousands of unsold Mercedeses, most of them gathering dirt on the plastic white film that protects their hoods and trunks. Some appeared to have been stashed at the port for several months.

Last week, Mercedes delivered around 1,000 more cars to Long Beach on the Grus, a 580-foot container ship.

“A year ago, I was looking into buying one of these for my wife,” said Kurt Garland, the terminal manager overseeing the unloading of the white, silver and black sports cars, sport utility vehicles and sedans. “Now I’m not. I’m saving money, paying bills, hunkering down.”

Oh, the poor economy is to blame. Not those Mercedes SUVs nobody wants.

(Yesterday I wrote on my Facebook status that I felt “amorphous anger.” I’m starting to see why.)

So let’s lighten up, a bit, shall we? I hope somewhere out there in the ranks of working screenwriters, someone is crafting a script about pirates, and not the ones in the Caribbean. If you can’t get a movie out of Somali hijackers, rocket-propelled grenades, hijacked Saudi oil tankers and the Indian Navy (!!!They have one??!!), you’re not worth your union dues. Or you’re just not reading the newspapers. (I heard on NPR the other day that all the coastal fishing villages in Somalia have become pirate dens, and that all the women want a pirate boyfriend. Well, duh.)

My Great Books discussion group meets in three hours, and I still have a few pages of the reading material to get through (“The Man Who Would Be King,” if you’re interested), so let’s wrap it up with just a bit of bloggage:

One of the reasons I sometimes curse Roy Edroso is, he got me hooked on reading Rod Dreher, and a more entertaining correspondent of Wingnuttia you will not find. What I like about him is his lack of filters; so much of what he writes seems to come directly from an id-well in his brain, and so you’ll sometimes see, in the space of 36 hours, a plea for us to be kinder to one another (“because we’re all carrying a great burden”) and then a denunciation of a bride who wants her wedding dress to show a special tattoo as a slut. It’s so amusing.

Anyway, lately he’s all het up about the Prop 8 backlash in California. “Gay mob assaults peaceful Christians,” he shrieked on Monday, embedding a video clip that showed the reaction when a group of Christians went into the Castro, the most famous gay neighborhood in the whole frickin’ country, to try to pray the gay away. Astonishingly, it wasn’t friendly. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

The next day, he called for all of us to “stand by the Mormons,” because “a friend” tells him:

Things are pretty grim. On the ground pastors are worried, and for my Mormon friends it is very bad. No LDS person in their right mind who is not a man of courage would announce his church affiliation without knowing it to be safe.

Safe? From what? Disapproval? An argument? I must have missed the invasion of Salt Lake City by the drag-queen army. Even his Beliefnet commenters were unimpressed:

Yeah, it’s like Darfur out there what with all the pogroms and midnight roundups and mass executions of the Mormons out there.

Oh, well. On to Rudyard Kipling. I’m calling it the white woman’s burden.

Perhaps in preparation for the Great Delamination, I went through one of my periodic stints of tree-shaking yesterday, scanning Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist for any freelancing opportunity I might be unaware of. I found one asking for freelance writers willing to turn out five 400-word pieces per week, for $2 per.

I e-mailed and asked for clarification. Surely, I asked, that $2 figure was a mistake?

No, it wasn’t, came the reply: “These are very simple articles that won’t require any research,” and that was the going rate. Two thousand words = $10.

I’m consistently amazed by the economics of this thing. To this day, when there’s a big layoff at a newspaper or some other catastrophe in the life of someone who writes for a living, someone will pipe up in the comments on a blog somewhere: They should start a blog and join an ad network, and then they’ll be working for themselves. Win-win!

Meanwhile, Bossy, who gets 10 times the traffic I do — yes, 7,000 to 9,000 uniques a day — can’t make a living from her blog. (Even though she brought this reader great pleasure with her examination of “Something’s Gotta Give,” a film that made me insane, for many of the same reasons. I mean, sure, playwrights have kitchens like that. If their name is Neil Simon.)

Meanwhile, journalists, would you like to be insulted? Take note of the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Subhed: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.” Here’s the bailout: If you’re a recently severed journalist, TypePad will give you a free pro blogging account and access to their ad network, which “pays a lot more than simple Google text ads,” a retail value of about $150. After that, it’s all up to you! Take flight, little journalist! And if you learn that your TypePad blog, “while clever,” will not pay your bills, either, perhaps Starbucks is hiring.

Mommy’s in a bad mood today. Mommy thinks she should go lift weights.

So a little bloggage:

While Mitch Albom was pretending to be Woody Guthrie in the paper — a new low for phoning it in, I might add, and I don’t even want to think how much he makes — he was actually down in Florida hangin’ with his cool celebrity friends at the Miami Book Fair. (See video.) I also wouldn’t rule out the idea that he’s using makeup (man-kup?) or, possibly Botox. There’s something odd about the way his face moves, or doesn’t move.

Finally, a favor for a friend, another former colleague:

My oldest son Derek is a graduating high school senior, and he has been nominated to participate in a video scholarship contest. The scholarship could net him a nice chunk of college cash. ($20,000 to the first place winner). He created what I think (father or not) is the best on the site (certainly the “corny”-est), but the contest is decided solely upon popular vote, not on quality or creativity. (which right now seems to mean which student can get the most people to vote, and vote, and vote … oh yeah, and vote as many times as they can) … between now and November 28th.

The video is here, and it is indeed corny — I say that with love, because corniness seems to be the point. The scholarship is offered by King Corn, so no matter how you feel about high-fructose corn syrup, you can point your browsers in the direction of a good cause. You can vote as often as you like, and you don’t have to sit through the whole video to do so. And certainly, his dad is going to need all the college-finance help he can get, seeing as how he works in journalism.