A thunderstorm rolled through around 6 a.m., maybe earlier. Shook the house, woke us all. Alan, who sleeps with a clear conscience every night of his life, drifted back under. Kate, the early riser discombobulated by the time change, got up and went downstairs for some surreptitious television. Me, I opened the Jim Harrison book on the nightstand and read a couple of chapters. It’s a funny one, and I chuckled a lot.

I started thinking what life will be like after tomorrow, and hoped it would be like this morning — a storm followed by the pleasant sound of rain on the window, a good book and less time at the computer. That’s the best I can wish for, you Republican assholes.

Just kidding!

Maybe the mood is catching. The NYT says John McCain is winding up the campaign in a jocular mood, telling Henny Youngman jokes. Henny Youngman jokes, yes. I’m middle-aged, and Henny Youngman was already on the golden-oldie circuit when I was growing up. Everything I know about him I learned from JoodyB’s husband, who spent senior year at Ohio University slumped in a chair in The Post newsroom, telling Henny Youngman jokes: “They’re a real fastidious couple. She’s fast, he’s hideous.” “A man goes to a psychiatrist. The doctor says, ‘You’re crazy.’ The man says, ‘I want a second opinion!’ ‘Okay, you’re ugly too!'”

Which is not to say Henny Youngman isn’t funny. It’s just that this campaign has been so awful all I can think is what the reaction would be if Barack Obama sat on his plane telling Richard Pryor jokes.

One thing I’ll sort of miss: Checking fivethirtyeight every day, and sort of regretting I paid so little attention to statistics, etc., during my formal education. How can a person stay interested in this stuff day after day? Probably by crunching subsets of numbers like the cellphone effect. Fascinating.

Let this be the last (very tall, equal parts amusing/cringe-inducing) word on the election. Although I’m sure it won’t be.

Because there’s this, too:

Don’t let that be the last word.

Let’s talk about cooking today, eh? I made Betty Rosbottom’s cider-roasted chicken last night, along with mashed potatoes and sauteed Swiss chard. For dessert, a crumb-topped apple pie made with Northern Spies. If you don’t think that’s a fine repast, well, then you’re my daughter, who did her usual pick-and-gag over everything but the pie. No, not everything. I would have had to splatter her brains with a shotgun to even get her to consider the chard. What sort of mutant child doesn’t like mashed potatoes, I ask? WHAT SORT OF CHILD?!? Mine.

Of course, you guys can talk about anything you want. And probably will.

I overachieved on the candy front yesterday. My lesson to you: Don’t ever shop for candy when you’re hungry. Ah, but trick-or-treat hours are promised to be more or less perfect, so I’m sure we’ll sell out. Yesterday’s DetNews had a story about trick-or-treat tourism, which is nothing new here or anywhere else, but may be exacerbated this year by foreclosure:

In several Metro Detroit neighborhoods battered by home foreclosures, the spookiest thing this Halloween is the dramatic numbers of empty homes and “For Sale” signs. With as many as 63,453 homes now for sale in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Livingston counties — many of them empty — once-well-lighted houses now sit vacant, and some parents say they’ll be seeking greener trick-or-treating pastures elsewhere. Several of those who stay behind are stocking fewer bags of candy.

Our neighborhood here, like our neighborhood in Fort Wayne, always gets a million outside kids — it must have that magical combination of middle-class stability, maximum density and young children in residence that rings all the cherries. This used to bug me, but doesn’t anymore. Not everyone can be from Leave it to Beaver-ville, and I wouldn’t want to take my kid door-to-door in many neighborhoods, either.

In the meantime, who wants a peanut-butter cup?

(Speaking of which, among the ten thousand irrational food fears my own little girl insists on cultivating is this one: She loves peanut butter, hates peanuts. The other day Alton Brown had a show on peanuts, and demonstrated how easy it is to make peanut butter. I paused it, called Kate into the room, and made her watch how peanut-butter is made: Throw some peanuts in a food processor, turn it on, presto, peanut butter. She watched, and said, “I still don’t like peanuts.” That’s my girl.)

Because I have a lot to do today, short shrift but good bloggage for a lazy Friday:

While I enjoyed this piece on a mathematician who “cracked the code” of the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” I wish some editor would have reined in the writer who called it “the most famous chord in rock ‘n’ roll.” Oh reeeeeallly? Want to have that debate over a million beers? I’m sure it can be arranged.

In David Edelstein’s review of “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” he concludes with an unnecessarily complicated question:

Now, I could be wrong about this: Perhaps Rogen is catnip to the ladies, the Daniel Craig of sex farce. But this is not a man who appears to take good care of his body, and the movie doesn’t use his lack of physical appeal as a source of laughs—as Apatow sort of did in “Knocked Up.” The way Smith treats Rogen strikes me as the way he’d treat a young Tom Hanks or Jason Segel of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” or Justin Long (who has an overlong cameo as a gay-porn actor)—the quick-witted nerd who could also be a dreamboat. But when Rogen sheds his clothes and climbs atop the lovely Banks and the bells ring and the fireworks explode, well … Imagine if James Franco played Zack, and Miri was an out-of-shape woman with bad skin and a big honker. Can there be that much of a double standard when it comes to actors’ looks?

Answer: Yes.

Speaking of movies, the trailer for “Gran Torino” is online. This is the Clint Eastwood movie shot in and around the Pointes last summer (while we, ironically, toured Carmel, Calif., Clint’s hometown). The good news: It’s clearly the GP. The bad news: Looks like a fairly crappy movie, i.e. “Dirty Harry: The McCain Years.”

Speaking of McCain, why why why is the campaign doing stuff like this? I mean: Way to court the youth vote, gramps.

Anne Hull stops in at Liberty University to see how the war for McCain is being fought at the insular-right-wing-Christian-raised-in-a-bubble level. (Short answer: Who fucking cares?) Still a good read.

Off to bake cupcakes. Happy Halloween.

Great googly moogly, here it is the day before Halloween and I haven’t bought any candy. Must get some, if there’s any left. Anything other than Circus Peanuts, that is, the sad reject of trick-or-treat bags the world over.

Who am I kidding? Of course there’s candy left in the stores — that’s one advantage of living in an emptying metro area in a deep recession. There’s always inventory. It’s not always the inventory you want, but no one runs out. Yet. That’ll come. For the early warning, you need only travel a mile or two west of my neighborhood and check out our local mall, Eastland in Harper Woods. I walk through Eastland with a feeling of nagging familiarity, with another mall named for a compass point dancing just outside my cognitive lobes…oh, what is it?…Ah yes, Southtown. I can already see, Carnack-like, into its future:

It starts when you go to the mall’s big anchors — in this case, Macy’s, Sears and Target. You normally think of Macy’s as a full-service department store, but you can never find what you’re looking for there. When you ask a clerk, “Is this all the winter hats and gloves you have in stock? This is it?,” they look sad and say, “Oh, we don’t carry a full selection at this location. You have to go to (insert name of mall in more prosperous area).” The Sears is full — and I mean full, crammed, racks-in-the-aisles-full — of oddities like spangled cocktail dresses in some sort of weird polyester that looks like a science experiment and cost $14.99, but the Land’s End turtlenecks are nowhere to be found. Target soldiers on; it’s Target and it cannot fail, at least not this year, but the rest of the mall is a carbuncle on its ass. Management has decided its customer base is 99 percent African American, and every store has a name like Urban Scene and sells ghetto-fabulous gear along the lines of Apple Bottom jeans and those manic-embroidered jackets with the big fur-trimmed hoods, but there’s not a pair of Levi’s in the building.

Wait. Wasn’t I talking about candy a minute ago?

Yes, well. I’m thinking Reese’s Cups this year. I’m only staying open for the first hour, anyway. After that I’m going to a neighbor’s house for Girl’s Night Wine-or-Treat. I’ll leave the remaining candy in a bowl on the front steps with a sign reading, “Please take only one.” Some kid will empty the whole bowl into his bag before I’m out of the driveway. That’s the Detroit Way, and I’m not complaining.

So what did we think of Barry O. last night? I tried to watch it with two sets of eyes — the critical, journalist-who-dabbles-in-video one, and the lizard-brain variety, and the verdict was the same. I wasn’t in tears, but I was impressed. As a piece of propaganda, it was a master stroke. Whether anyone was watching? We’ll see. If I were John McCain, I’d hire John Woo:

Quick bloggage today (LA Mary was having a slow afternoon yesterday and did most of the heavy lifting):

As long as there’s Larry Birkhead, we’ll always have Anna Nicole Smith. Note this fabulous shot of America’s luckiest baby daddy packing up the memento mori for an impending move to the ‘burbs. I was so taken by the pink bubble wrap I was sure it was Photoshopped, but a little Googling revealed the truth: Pink bubble wrap exists. (It’s the antistatic variety, for electronics.)

When Alan bought his shotgun a while back, I said I wanted one of these. It turns out there’s more to love about the makers of The Back-Up: They aren’t afraid to exploit high-profile tragedies for their own profit. It’s the American Way!

Finally, the program for Zombie Night is online.

I’m off to put on my winter cycling tights that I splurged on this year — the ones that make you feel like you’re wearing a big diaper, or 1960s-era maxipad — and punish myself.

Please, God, could it be true? The NYT, today:

After years of flooding Americans with credit card offers and sky-high credit lines, lenders are sharply curtailing both, just as an eroding economy squeezes consumers.

I realize there’s a hardship factor to this, that many Americans rely on plastic to pull them through dark times, but I’ve never been one of them, for which I’m thankful. I carry a balance from time to time, but never for longer than a few months. So when you tell me I may soon see fewer credit-card offers in the mail, this is good news to me. Although I suspect I won’t. Whenever I pay off a balance in full, I can usually look forward to another sheaf of offers arriving in the mail within a few weeks. You’d think paying off a card would send the message, “Done with credit, thanks,” but the industry hears, “Send me some more cards; I just don’t have enough.” Funny how that works.

Some months back, I did a story on credit cards for a business magazine, and had the refreshing experience of talking to an honest spokesman for the plastic industry, the sort of woman you might call “flinty.” As I trotted the array of complaints consumer advocates have against credit-card companies, she batted them away like big fat pitches over the middle, but one phrase stood out: “It’s an unsecured loan, what do you expect?” Meaning, if you’re willing to take out a loan to eat a nice dinner, you should expect to be nickel-and-dimed over it.

(As for me, I find it helps to think of what and where that restaurant meal will be in 24 hours. It almost always settles the credit-or-debit-card debate for me.)

I usually stay away from topics like this, because the comments swiftly devolve into self-administered back-patting and accusatory finger-pointing, perhaps at some neighbor or friend who abuses plastic. My sister said she knew mortgages were a scam when a friend was able to get a 100 percent mortgage, plus a five-figure sum in cash to pay off her Visa and MasterCard balances. That suggests a truly insane societal attitude toward debt. So in the comments, refrain from self-praise and tell us a time when you used plastic creatively, when it saved your life, or when you scammed the creditor, instead of vice versa. (Another story from my sister was about another friend who took out a zero-interest card for a full year, immediately got a four-figure cash advance, bought a one-year certificate of deposit, let it simmer for its term, cashed it in, paid off the card and pocketed the interest. She did this every year and used the profits for Christmas shopping. Yeah, too crazy for me, but if you have the fortitude…

Because it’s Halloween week, some scary bloggage today:

Hey, gents! Go to your happy place before you read this. Ah, medical-news research turns up some gems sometimes.

I don’t watch those “Real Housewives” shows. Maybe I should:

In the first episode, a shopgirl convinced Sheree to buy a purse by alleging that the cowhide—or snakeskin, or raptor pelt, whatever it was—had been treated with Botox. I dare you to imagine what the aesthetic qualities of a product boasting such a selling point might be. And I am secure in the knowledge that Sheree, owning one, knows that she’s better than me. “I was upper-middle-class growing up,” she says, “but I left that behind.”

One week from today, we’ll be post-election. Hold that thought.

I started writing a treatment for a feature-length screenplay yesterday. Why? Hell if I know; it’s hard to imagine a piece of writing with longer odds on ever earning a paycheck than a screenplay. My zombie colleagues have been talking about what it would take to make an ultra-low-budget feature hereabouts, and you can’t start without a script, but that’s not the reason. It just seemed time. I’m not one of those loony fiction writers who just claims to be a medium: “the story chose me to tell it,” etc. But every so often you get an itch, and it needs to be scratched.

Here’s what I like about screenplays, though — the structure. A good script is a trip down a well-traveled road, but every drive is different. Unless you’re Charlie Kaufman or Quentin Tarantino, there are rules of beginning/middle/end that must be heeded. There’s not nearly as much time for meandering; in fact, meanders are strictly discouraged. Scenes need to climb a tidy staircase toward a climax. The plot must be moved along. As a writer, I get far more of a sense of forward motion writing a screenplay than I ever do with just plain fiction, as evidenced by the fact I have one completed feature-length script in my drawer and several shorts, and zero finished novels.

Also, writing scripts helps you appreciate movies. I still remember the night I came home from my rewrite class at Michigan, plopped in front of the TV, and found “The Fugitive” just getting underway on HBO. The class that night had been about the challenge of raising the stakes with every scene, and it’s hard to think of a movie that does it better than that one. Each turn of the action puts Dr. Kimble in greater jeopardy and goads him closer to the climax. Every question the books say a writer must ask and answer — what does the hero want? what is standing in his way? — is evident. My favorite scene is the one where he saves the kid in the ER with the broken sternum. Totally implausible, but so well-acted you don’t notice, and even it raises the stakes, as Tommy Lee Jones is left to consider that this wife-killer he’s chasing risked arrest to sneak a dying kid off to emergency surgery. Not that he says so; you just see it on Tommy Lee’s smart, craggy face.

What I hate about screenplays: The rewrites. It’s like giving birth, then stuffing the kid back in and doing it all over again. Although I must say, my rewrite prof, who was a working screenwriter himself, had a wealth of fascinating teaching material. Did you know that the early drafts of “The Truman Show” had the story taking place in New York City? That Truman was a fat, sweaty creep whom we see having sex with prostitutes? Now recall Jim Carrey making his way through Seaside, Fla., in the opening scenes. That was a movie that had some rewrites, I’d say.

Anyway, I have the first act down. Now comes the hard part: the rest.

Quick bloggage before I drag my lardass off to the gym:

Via Kevin Knuth: Stay classy, Harlan, Indiana! You ignorant putzes.

Richard Cohen on Jane Mayer on you-know-who:

Until two cruise ships steamed up to Alaska two summers ago, the record for the silliest statement by a journalist had been held by Lincoln Steffens, in his time a famous American radical. Sent in 1919 to see how Russia was doing under the communists, Steffens supposedly reported, “I have seen the future, and it works.” In 2007, several conservative journalists got off their cruise ships and met Sarah Palin. They saw the present, and she was a babe.

The cruises were sponsored by the National Review and the Weekly Standard, journals of significant influence in conservative circles. The ships disgorged some top conservative editors and writers, who on two occasions were invited at the governor’s mansion. Almost to a man, they were thunderstruck.

No! Really!?

Who thinks the story of the call-center walkouts is legit? Discuss. I’m off to work my flabby ass.

I was driving home from our boat haul-out chore when I saw a sign for an estate sale. I had an hour to spare, so what the hell. It was a house in the Shores with the usual For Sale sign; I’d seen the listing for it earlier and remembered the ad mentioned a wide variety of designer clothes. I was actually looking for my usual — a lovingly used copper gratin pan, some interesting glass for my sister, whatevah — and not the clothes. Designer clothes are bought by skinny bitches, not women like me. So I approached the closet expecting to find the usual size zero, 2 and 4. Imagine my surprise when I grasped the first item, an Escada shell of wool, cashmere and silk, and glanced at the size:

FORTY-FREAKIN’-SIX.

That’s a European 46. Size L/XL in the U.S. A rich lady of normal size! Oh, happy day!

Not only that, she also had either a shopping problem or was one of those women who motivates herself to lose weight by buying nice things in a smaller size and hanging them in the closet as a goad. Because her stuff ranged from size 12 to 20, and much of it was NWT — new with tags. As in, never worn. As in:

That’s a pair of Miu Miu satin platform heels, probably about $375 in the store, never worn. Regrettably, just a hair too small for me. Because while that’s not a pair of shoes a girl needs, exactly, that is a pair of shoes that can change one’s life. (Yes, yes, a broken ankle is life-changing, too.)

As for me, I went through everything and tried on a lot. But I restricted myself to things I would really, actually wear. (Just because it says Lanvin on the label doesn’t make it so.) Came home with the original Escada shell and a Max Mara black cashmere sweater, NWT, for fifty bucks. I passed on the Ralph Lauren black label evening skirt, 100 percent silk, for $65. I haven’t worn an evening skirt in seven years. Even at that price, I wouldn’t get my money’s worth.

I mourn those heels, though. One size up and they? Would be mine.

We need a little shopping talk on this dreary Monday, don’t we? It’s dreary here, anyway. Eight more days to you-know-what, and it’s like the last miles of a very long race — they’re just longer than all the ones that came before. Sarah Palin was in Fort Wayne Saturday, and the crowd got bitchy when they had to wait hours to clear security. (Please don’t read that story far enough down to see the TSA referred to as the “Traffic Safety Administration.” Don’t you know editors cost money? And everyone makes misteaks.) And the DetNews parachutes in to Angola, Ind., and calls it a “tiny college town,” which made both Alan and me say huh over breakfast; while technically true, a more accurate description of Angola would be “farm hamlet with a significant population of homesick Malaysian engineering students.” Anyway, it’s either the epicenter of an era of epochal change for the Hoosier state, or the closest town to the Michigan border that one could set a foot in and earn the dateline.

In other local races at this hour, I have the opportunity to vote on medical marijuana and embryonic stem-cell research, both of which I intend to approve. Medical marijuana may sneak through; lots of people are voting yes just because it sounds goofy, and by the time-honored polling technique of “asking people I know,” I predict a landslide. Besides, with the state circling the drain as it is, can anyone mount a credible argument for not staying stoned around the clock? Stem cells are a little harder-fought, and the opposition is targeting and fine-tuning their advertising: For farty old Republicans, it’ll cost taxpayer money. For religious conservatives, it’s about dead babies, and adding Welcome to the Island of Doctor Moreau to the signs at the state border. And for African Americans, it’s Tuskegee all over again.

I’m voting yes. I’m considering, for this very special election year and this year only, voting a straight bug-the-GOP ticket. That’ll mean giving my vote to lots of people who, quite frankly, don’t deserve it, but at this point my greater aim is to punish the opposition on every possible front. Congratulations, John McCain — it took a moderate Republican to do what even Newt Gingrich couldn’t.

So in that spirit, on to the bloggage:

Do you use FedEx? Might consider an alternative.

New York magazine assembles a Top 10 list of daffy old coots, complete with YouTube clips, here. The Cloris Leachman clip alone is worth the price of admission.

Meanwhile, here in Detroit, the former mayor checks into the Graybar Hotel tomorrow, but not after one last f-you to the city he claims to love — a dine-and-dash incident at a local club. He signed his name to the $126.16 bill, called “charge it to the city” over his shoulder, and walked out. We may not be a swing state this year, but does that ever happen in squeaky-clean Indiana? I don’t think so.

Finally, wassup? Wassup:

Call me heartless and quick to jump to conclusions, but here goes: I’ll put money down that the GOP has found its own Tawana Brawley in Ashley Todd, who claims the following:

That she stopped at a Pittsburgh ATM late Tuesday night, where a dark-skinned man standing six-feet-four robbed her and then, upon seeing the McCain sticker on her car, returned to beat her in the face and then carve the letter B upon her cheek. Here’s the photographic evidence of the crime:

That’s the short version. Among the oddities connected to the case: A Twitter feed in which young Ashley noted, “Stubbornly searching for a bank of america to avoid ATM fees,” and then, “Pretty sure I’m on the wrong side of pittsburgh,” followed a bit later by, “Oh the blog I will be making soon…Its been a rough night.” (I know when I’m looking for an ATM late at night, I also pull over a time or two to send a tweet into the ether, too.) There’s the fact she refused medical assistance, and that the Pittsburgh police want her to take a polygraph. And then there’s the photo, which has its own problems. The B is backward. The “black eye” looks less like a real black eye — which, if you’ve ever gotten one, you know to be more in the purplish range than this, which looks, quite frankly, like me after I’ve had a couple glasses of wine and tried to rock that “smoky eye” thing they’re always doing on the beauty shows. I also like how her mascara seems to have survived the attack, which must have been terrifying and wrung at least a few tears from such a tender soul. Give that girl an endorsement contract.

And then there’s the carving. “Carve” seems to be the term all the stories and bloggers have agreed on, although the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (yes, the Scaife paper) is going for “etched.” Carve implies that skin was broken. This girl was scratched, not carved. And why a B? Didn’t the mugger get the memo? Message discipline requires that we settle on a single letter to describe our savior, and that letter is O. Everyone knows this.

Also, Ashley works for the College Republicans. Click this link, cntrl-F “boen” and see where they touched down in Fort Wayne. So sorry, Ashley — I may eat my words, but I bet I won’t. Hope that couple of hours at the top of the Drudge Report was worth it.

The end of boating season is at hand. I’m off to help pull “Lush Life” from the water. Back later, if I’m not divorced.

This one’s for the Buckeyes in da house, yo. I found it buried in a side rail over at John Scalzi’s site, and it’s old, so forgive me if you’ve already seen it:

On the October 15 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, (host) Bob Grant said: “[W]hat is that flag that Obama’s been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there’s a circle?” He then said: “Is the circle the ‘O’ for Obama? Is that what it is?” Grant later said: “[D]id you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. And that’s what that ‘O’ is. That’s what that ‘O’ is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now, these are symptom — these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” ‘

You want more? Sure you do. Grant went on:

Hey, I could be wrong. But I wouldn’t say this on this great radio station if I didn’t think there was some merit in this conjecture. And I stress conjecture. And so much of what we talk about is conjecture, is theory, is opinion based on intuition, based on some facts, based on some history.

Because, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that Obama had his own special stars-stripes-and-an-O flag made for him, because he’s an elitist, you know, and that’s what elitists do. Why, as I write this, my own personal NN.C standard is flying over the roof, as it always is when I’m in residence here at NN.C central. My subjects demand nothing less of their leader. Grant goes on:

I don’t want to overdramatize this. Being dramatic, I must confess, does come easy to some of us, because, maybe that’s why we’re in this business. It is show business, is it not? I know some of my colleagues don’t want to admit that, but they are the greatest showmen in the world. And I tell you this. I tell you this quite seriously. I am alarmed at the prospect of his election. I — I would hope that if he is elected, that I could come before you one day and say, “Hey, there was no need to be alarmed, I was wrong.”

If you knew nothing about Bob Grant at all, you’d know he was old by this point, wouldn’t you? Aren’t you already getting the smell of Dentu-Creme in your nostrils from that last part? I think it’s the “greatest showmen in the world” phrase that does it. It’s like Jerry Lewis in the 22nd hour of the Labor Day Telethon. You just know, any minute, he’s going to start crying.

Well, Bob Grant is old — 79. Because older people generally got a more classical education, you’d think at some point he might have caught a glimpse of the Ohio state flag:

I guess not. Back to gumming your food, Bob.

It’s always good to start the day with a big laugh, isn’t it? A big laugh and a huge cup of coffee. On Saturday I had lunch with three of my zombie colleagues, and the talk turned to the things we put into our bodies that are bad for us. The youngest person at the table said he was going to give up coffee for a while.

“Why?” asked the oldest person at the table, who was not me, I’m relieved to say. “You’ll get terrible headaches and you’ll feel awful.” That, in a nutshell, seems to sum up my middle-age attitude toward toxins of all sort: Why abstain? If one is not abusing them, if one uses them only for their mild mood-elevating properties, and in moderation, why fret? Sooner or later something is going to kill each and every one of us. It might as well be coffee.

I’d like to see what death by coffee feels like, some day. Maybe like the depictions of vampire-blood tripping in “True Blood.”

OK, then. When the campaign news becomes too oppressive for me — something that happens several times a day — I’ve become fond of clicking over to WeSmirch, which aggregates gossip blogs. In recent days it’s been led by news of the cross-table sniping in the Madonna/Guy divorce. The rundown: He’s cold, not “spiritual,” entitled. She’s cold, spiritual to the point of looniness, entitled. He wasn’t nice to her after she fell off the horse and broke her arm. She is too tired to have sex, sapped by her four hours of daily exercise, which leaves her feeling, in Guy’s arms, like “a piece of gristle.” In other words, about what you’d expect.

But the best part was when Guy was said to have “abused” Madge by telling her she couldn’t act.

Pause.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA. It’s worth walking away with a relative pittance for that kind of satisfaction.

I’m gym-bound. Fueled by coffee. Let them try to stop me today.

When I read the story about the RNC’s $150,000 clothes shopping spree for Sarah Palin, my heart sank. It was the usage of “appears to spend” that did it, which was in early versions of the story; I thought it was going to be like that “Cindy McCain wears a $380,000 outfit” story, which was, sorry, pure bullshit. Ninety percent of the figure was based on some jeweler’s estimate of what her earrings might cost, although the jeweler never got to check them out with the loupe. I thought the next line would be, “And that yellow Oscar de la Renta dress was spun from pure gold, it looks like. Let me redo the math.”

But this is a little better-sourced. In August, no expenses stated; in September, $49,425.74, plus $4,716.49 on hair and makeup, and isn’t it ironic that we all know there’s no way that much could have been spent on Grandpa Simpson, and Sarah Palin is actually a very pretty woman. Beautiful, even. And so you get the basic irony at the heart of femininity — the better you look, the more you have to spend to make people think so.

Let’s just talk makeup now. Some years ago, before Photoshop, some magazine — Harper’s, I think — ran a copy of the itemized bill submitted by the photo retoucher who worked on a famous magazine cover featuring Michelle Pfeiffer. It went on and on, dozens of places where the airbrush had been used to cover that wrinkle or smooth over that skin booboo. The joke of the list was that the picture had run under a cover line that read, “Michelle Pfeiffer is perfect exactly the way she is,” or something similar. There was another list going around at the time, a makeup artist’s detailed plan for giving Brooke Shields the no-makeup look on another magazine cover. It required 57 separate products costing about $450.

A person who can feel no empathy with another can’t be fully human, so here’s my soft spot regarding Palin: I know, looking at her, that when you’re a woman in the public eye, you just can’t win. To be sure, she looks sensational on the campaign. But if she didn’t, if she showed up for speeches in something she found at the Wasilla T.J. Maxx, there’d be another kind of hell to pay. You might as well look your best while you’re taking shit for stuff you have no control over.

And yes, maybe it’s true that this was all Palin’s doing, that the RNC staffers tried to get her to shop at Dress Barn and she waved her imperious hand in the air and said, “Designer or else, little missy, or you’re going back to D.C. on the next plane. You can take your chances with the Bushes and see how it goes.” But I doubt it. A job needed to get done fast; note how many charges are to department stores in the Twin Cities. The jaw does drop at the $150,000 figure, but my friends? That’s what happens when you pay full retail. They probably got nicked for a “personal shopping” charge, too.

Don’t Republicans know what Hollywood does? You pay a call on the designer and make an arrangement. You wear their clothing somewhere it’s guaranteed to get photographed, and the bill disappears. Well, wait a minute: Nancy Reagan did this and got called on it, so maybe not. Still. Someone at Neiman Marcus saw these folks coming and rubbed their lucky Rolex.

Here’s the ridiculous part, however: Instead of, y’know, owning it, the McCain camp made it worse:

“With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it’s remarkable that we’re spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses,” said spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. “It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.”

I want to know when that church rummage sale is going to be. (Even though Sarah wears a much smaller size.)

But as I said before: You just can’t win. We’ve become a nation of Robin Givhans, hunting the next Pulitzer in a piece about the semiotics of asymmetrical buttons. Much of her stuff rings a little too snarky for me — hasn’t she ever looked into her closet on a given morning and despaired? doesn’t she ever have PMS Wardrobe Madness? — I’m very glad she does what she does, because occasionally it serves as the national response to such sartorial oddities as the John Roberts family press conference. (I watched that one thinking, “Where do you even buy seersucker short-pants suits and saddle shoes for little boys these days? Does Nordstrom’s have a special department behind a secret door?”)

Frankly, Palin has been making such a mess of things on the trail, it’s probably just as well that she looks good doing it. If her hair was a mess at the same time, it would be too easy for the RNC to say, later, “Oh, that crazy lady…”

Sorry for the late start today, folks — another sleep deficit payback. Back to speed and ready to rock. So, rock on.

My NPR affiliate is doing a piece on the Free Press’ endorsement of Barack Obama. They’re running down its bullet points as I write this. It’s not a long piece — it’s over now — but still: I am agog.

Never mind the dog-bites-man element here. The Freep has a left-leaning editorial page; for them, endorsing the Democrat is like the Wall Street Journal editorial page touting free enterprise. OK, it’s Monday, slow news day blah blah blah — that is, if you consider the unraveling of world financial markets, coupled with a potential GM-Chrysler merger that will likely be the death blow to the local economy, just two of today’s stories, “slow.” Never mind that. I have worked for newspapers, and I know how the endorsement process works, and all I can say is, why should the public give a shit who any editorial board thinks should be elected to any office?

Endorsements made sense when there were more newspapers in the world, and they had real authority, and great people behind them. Then, you wanted to know who Charles Foster Kane was backing for job one. Whether or not endorsements actually changed a single vote has always been a pretty theoretical question, and even the most generous estimates put the number of endorsement-led voters at tiny-to-miniscule. And yet, newspapers continue to make endorsements, like Brits gathering for high tea nomatterwhat. Looked at one way, it’s sorta charming. Looked at another, it’s a symptom of the problem at the root of the industry — their maddening, “this is the way we do it because this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude.

As I recall, editors like making endorsements about as much as readers like reading them, i.e., not so much. People don’t realize what goes into them; they think it’s all about gathering around a pastry-strewn table and arguing, when what it really involves is weeks of interviews with some of the most boring candidates you’ve ever met. Because the paper doesn’t just endorse for the big races — those are only the ones that make the news. No one writes about the ones headlined: “For 4th District village council: Herminghausen.” And to get to that endorsement, the editorial board chatted up Herminghausen and his opponents, Schiller and Grubman. Before that, if there was a primary, they might have talked to Herminghausen, Schiller, Grubman, Czerny, Skolnik, O’Reilly and Killeen. Multiply that by however many races there are, and you see why endorsement season is extra-martini season on the ed page.

When you think about it, the endorsements that you should pay attention to aren’t the ones that make news. Really, do you feel the need for a second opinion to make up your mind about the presidential race? But how much do you know, really, about the Court of Appeals, or the township assessor, or the 4th District rep? That’s where an endorsement can help, to the extent it says, “This person appeared before us, didn’t wet his or her pants and impressed us with at least rudimentary competence.” There are always a few spots on any ballot you just couldn’t get to in your research. That’s when you need to know Herminghausen got the paper’s endorsement.

Or, as Alec Baldwin’s character said of marriage in “The Departed:” Marriage is an important part of getting ahead: lets people know you’re not a homo; married guy seems more stable; people see the ring, they think at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch; ladies see the ring, they know immediately you must have some cash or your cock must work.

Well, he delivers it better. But you get the idea.

The Detroit News’ editorial page leans right. Now, if they endorse Obama, that’ll be news. We’ll see.

“The Cemetery Precincts” wrapped shooting last night. That means all we have to do now is the editing, the sound, the scoring, the this and the that. Then we have to fight about it, and change it all around, and do it all again. Listen to me: “We.” Most of this stuff will be done by others, but when a production is this small, it’s everybody’s baby, and you sweat every step of the process. I volunteered to put on zombie makeup and be a back-rank zombie, but somehow I got recruited to be the lead in the big gross-out scene, which is so unbelievably gross I don’t think I’ll be able to watch it. The prep:

(I suspect there was a lot of K-Y in that mix.) Thanks to our genius gross-out guy, Dan Phillips, who crafted the effect and signs his e-mails, “Stay scary, Dan.” I’ll say.

Not much bloggage today, but this: One of the things I like about Jon Stewart is his willingness to talk back to one of the nastiest myths of red-state America (at the moment, anyway), that people who live in cities aren’t the real America, or pro-America, or whatever. And he does it so well.

The rest I leave up to those of you who paid more attention to the news this weekend. I’m off to study Russian.