My time as the Baghdad escort for my international colleagues isn’t quite over, but I have a break. I’d like to tell you more about the last two days — it’s been entertaining, to say the least — but I don’t want to step on their story, whatever it turns out to be. Let me just say that there’s no better way to spend a random Thursday than trying to sort our your droit turns from your gauche, and watching an urban European confront a drive-through ATM:

“You open your window to use the machine?”

“Yes, very convenient.”

“I won’t do this. Lazy country.”

And so we pulled into the drive-through lane, parked a few feet beyond, opened the door and walked three steps back to get cash. Because once you start banking from your car, a 42-inch waistline is just around the corner.

(On the other hand, I tried to buy Kate an Obama T-shirt at the Eastern Market last Saturday. The sizes started at L — on a slender 11-year-old, a large dress — and topped out at 5XL. So maybe it would do us all some good to walk back to the ATM.)

In other news at this hour, McCain is abandoning Michigan, Politico says. There’s a certain sense of all-over-but-the-shoutin’ in southeast Michigan, to be sure, but you can’t judge the rest of the state by our little tri-county area. At this point, however, the veep debate is shaping up to be topic A for the next 36 hours, with the Couric snippets — endlessly e-mailed and embedded and prefaced with I can’t stand it — acting as trailers. That’ll be the highlight of my night, anyway.

So consider this your Palin/Biden debate open thread, and I’ll be back on my reg’lar schedule tomorrow. Oh, and speaking of tomorrow: I have an appointment tomorrow, and neglected to write it down. There’s a lunch-adjacent thing on my calendar, but I know there’s something else, too, and for the life of me I can’t remember it. So just in case you’re reading this, whoever you are: Are we supposed to do something tomorrow? If so, please remind me so I can show up.

Meanwhile, Caribou Barbie v. Babblin’ Joe! It’s so on.

Yesterday I had a conflict, between a need for some vegetables and a little exercise vs. about a million unreturned phone calls. As you all know, when you’re waiting for a call, the phone waits until you’re out or mowing the lawn or in the bathroom to ring; this is the first rule of phoning. But what is all our technology for if not to serve us, so I forwarded the landline to the iPhone, mounted the bike and rode off to the vegetable stand a couple miles up Mack Avenue.

On the way back, “Spirit in the Sky” faded out, and my ringtone — the “old phone” ring, the metal-bell ring — faded in. I touched the “answer” button and coasted to a bench in the park strip about 100 feet farther down the road. Sat down, had a conference call and a little chitchat, using the earbuds and the mic attached to the cord, and we all heard one another just fine. When I hit “end call,” “Spirit in the Sky” faded back in from pause, and I rode on home. It was the fades that got me. I don’t argue with anyone who says Apple can be a little too twee in their product design, but let me just say, it’s nice to have a few things in your life that not only work well, but better than well.

Snowed again today, and probably for the rest of the week, which is good, because otherwise I might be reduced to staring at the wall and wondering what it’s going to feel like to still be working when I’m 85, probably cleaning toilets for the occupying Chinese army or something. (Relax: I intent to be a spy. No one notices the old cleaning woman. You might as well be invisible.) In the meantime, if you live in metro Detroit and have lost your house to foreclosure (but not your computer), you are instructed to e-mail me immediately. If not, enjoy a little bloggage:

Yesterday I was trashing graphic designers, but I hope it goes without saying they’re not all bad. My former employer once sent a reporter halfway around the world for a story, and ran two of the dumbest graphics I’ve ever seen with his reports — one showed the time difference between Fort Wayne and Central Asia, and the other detailed his plane connections traveling there. These ran every day for two weeks, and I winced every time. Needless to say, this wasn’t the New York Times, where graphics mean something. Here, an amazingly detailed and nuanced breakdown of the no votes on yesterday’s bailout package, by district.

An entertaining read on the retirement of a Detroit homicide detective, with the obligatory hard-bitten quote:

An envelope kept in his desk drawer is a collage of family highlights and back-alley insanity. There is a photograph of a fishing trip; his son in his naval uniform; Carlisle and his wife, Nancy, at their wedding. Then there is the one of the man with his face half shot off; a nude woman dead in an abandoned garage; a corpse under a Christmas tree. “More people are murdered around Christmastime in Detroit,” Carlisle said of that photograph, the tree shining in the window. “I think it’s to avoid buying Christmas gifts.”

Bicycle commuting at night is hazardous, particularly on Woodward Avenue, which is eight or 10 lanes across in this stretch; still, people have to get to their jobs, and some of them are poor, and sometimes they pay the ultimate price.

I may be scarce around here for a couple of days, but I’ll do my best. In the meantime, commence your bickering. Only 35 days before we can break into separate groups and commence gloating!

I just looked at my calendar for this week and groaned, although not entirely with misery. Any week with a to-do list including “build props for zombie movie” and “escort French journalists through bad neighborhoods” can be many things, but not boring. One of the things I wanted when I left Indiana was a more interesting life, and it looks as though I got it, at least this week.

On the other hand, I’m glad I stocked up on coffee last week.

My perambulations this week took me far from my east-side nest, which is always interesting. In any city that sprawls the way this one does, people tend to get a little dug in. Yesterday I went to Warren. Among the bumper-sticker descriptions of Warren: Second-most corrupt city in Michigan and Hometown of Eminem. I found myself in a dollar store, when three or four Eminem clones walked in: Elaborately carved but badly maintained facial hair (those multi-prong goatees), tattoos that climb up the neck, cocked ball caps, baggy everything.

One had a girl with him, who was apparently leading the shopping expedition. She wasn’t in a good mood, and it was easy to see why: Her boyfriend, one of the Em-ulators, liked to swat her with random objects. Not like he was seriously trying to hurt her, but not friendly, either. He’d pick up, say, a roll of wrapping paper and slap at her legs with it. “Whaddaya think of this? (slap) Huh? (slap) Huh?” She’s ignoring this, but with the pressed lips employed by parents trying to remember the baby-book advice on how to deal with toddler temper tantrums. I’m watching this, thinking, I don’t care what kind of union job that guy has, I don’t care what he does in bed, I don’t care if he has a nice car. You can do better.

What happened to young men? It’s like women got a little autonomy and they fell to pieces. I’m reminded of George Clinton’s comments, which I quoted here before but bear repeating:

Though he’s popular with rappers, Clinton says he doesn’t completely understand the hip-hop culture. “I can’t get used to [rappers] saying the things they say to girls and then expecting them to make love to that,” he laughs. “One guy was cursing this one girl out and I said, ‘Man, don’t talk like that to that girl,’ and she said, ‘Oh, here comes Captain Save-a-Ho.’”

Anyway, that was Warren. Dollar-store Warren, granted, but still.

Just got an e-mail from a reader:

Looks like the Chicago Tribune has redesigned its way into irrelevancy as unveiled today by Publisher Tony Hunter and Editor Gerould Kern. We’ve seen it all before: So many over-sized graphic elements that there is no room for the news, bullet points, “consumer” stories, Hollywood gossip, stories reduced to charts, graphs and other elements (except, of course, copy), etc. etc.

The “new” Trib’s take on one of the biggest stories of the decade, the bail-out plan hammered out by Congress? Well, you won’t find it on the front page (no space, what with the top half of Page 1 taken up by the two-line name plate, reefers and giant photo). No–this major story only merits Page 4. And after discounting the big photo, breakout box of bullet points, head and tagline (“News Focus”) you get — not much information, that’s for sure. The story is paired with a piece by the paper’s “On Money” columnist opining on how the Wall Street debacle will impact the nest eggs of soon-to-be-retirees. So much for actually informing the public.

It’s the second paragraph I want to discuss. I’ve had it up to here with redesigns, and did long before this. Every top management change I’ve witnessed seems to be accompanied by a sweeping redesign of the paper, and it took me years to figure out why: Because it’s easy. It’s easy for the people who order them, anyway. (It’s hell on the people who actually have to do the work and live with the result.) For the first year of the new team’s tenure, they get to spend large chunks of time doing what they like best: Going to meetings and marking up page proofs. It’s not that expensive, and then they get to write a big Page One column talking about how wonderful and reader-friendly the new design is, before collecting their MBO bonus.

I count graphic designers among my best friends, but many are not journalists, and someone needs to ride them with a curb bit, lest they claim one-third of the front page with a great sprawling promo for “Spider-Man 3,” and yes I’ve seen it.

Anyway, it’s the part about the bailout package being buried inside that interests me. It seems newspapers are truly in a no-win situation with some of this stuff. At my old paper, we used to make fun of our competition, which was edited as though every reader had one source for news — the competition. When the first space shuttle exploded, it happened at 11:30 a.m. Our little afternoon daily was able to get something in the home edition, but it was badly outdated by 5 p.m., when not only did everyone know, but had been watching saturation coverage of the tragedy on TV all afternoon. The coverage continued all night, too If ever a story called for a second-day headline on a morning daily, it was that one. And yet, their head was? Yes: Space shuttle explodes. Duh.

Today it’s a whole new ballgame, and not only are readers looking for immediacy, they’re looking for expertise. I haven’t even glanced at the bailout stories in today’s Detroit News, because I’m reading the NYT and WSJ for my primary source. If there’s a terrorist bombing in London, I’m not relying on the AP to keep me posted — I’m going to the London dailies. And so on.

Granted, I’m an early adopter, and probably one of the savvier readers in the circulation base for a local daily. I have fast web access, and time to spend reading it. Others don’t, and what they read in the Detroit News or Chicago Tribune will be the bulk of what they know about the situation. The challenge for editors planning a news budget for today is, how do you edit for both groups? This has always been the challenge, but it’s much more profound now.

There are also staff-development issues. Ambitious business reporters dream of landing at the Journal or at the business desk of a national daily, but those jobs are scarce. Some very good ones are at large metros or regional dailies, doing a very good job, and think this is a story they should be covering. For all this talk you hear at journalism conferences — we stopped covering earthquakes in Tokyo, and now print all soccer team pictures submitted by readers, and it’s a huge success! — you have to ask what sort of reporter wants to spend their career writing cutlines for soccer team pictures. Answer: Not bloody many.

So I’m not so bugged by the bailout being inside — as long as a movie promo isn’t outside — but I’d be interested in seeing how good the story is. And I want to know what others think.

Meanwhile, I have to get to work. Perhaps you’re asking yourself: But Nance! Did you make a pie this weekend? Why yes, yes I did:

That’s apple, with a crumb topping. Dee-lish.

Armchair media critics welcome. Get crackin’.

That’s “the end of the world as we know it,” for you non-REM fans. Wouldn’t fit on one line.

I don’t know about you, but when a day opens with an account of the Treasury Secretary on bended knee before the Speaker of the House, continues with clips of the Republican vice-presidential candidate sounding like Miss Teen South Carolina, lurches on to another bank failure and it’s not even 9 a.m. yet, well…that’s not a good day. One should consider going back to bed. I did. Decided, instead, to read a movie review. Hey, it’s Friday. Is Spike Lee still the most overrated director since Steven Spielberg? Check:

The role that black troops actually played is an important story, and might have been a powerful one in Spike Lee’s hands. Indeed, a sense of that power can still be gleaned from the DVD version of Rachid Bouchareb’s “Days of Glory,” a magnificent French-language film that played here two years ago, and told essentially the same story with different skin shades — four Algerian soldiers in the French army fighting bravely against the Nazis for the nation they love while their fellow French soldiers treat them like scum, and their casually despicable racist officers use them as cannon fodder.

But the Bouchareb film allowed the awful ironies of the situation to speak for themselves, while Spike Lee keeps hammering them home with agitprop fervor and clumsy actors playing racist officers as crude cartoons.

Yep. Is Roger Ebert still his No. 1 fan and water-carrier? Hmm, three stars, but I know it’s in here somewhere…oh, OK. Here it is:

In a sense, the scenes I complain about are evidence of Lee’s stature as an artist. In a time of studios and many filmmakers who play it safe and right down the middle, Lee has a vision and sticks to it.

You might have gathered I’m not a fan. Fortunately, Spike Lee’s movies are easy to avoid and, in the grand scheme of things, not much of an irritant. However, one of the great periods of Hollywood flowering came during the Depression, when our parents, or our grandparents, escaped from their dreary lives an hour or two at a time at their local movie house. Now that it looks like we’re in for a sequel to the Depression, it might be nice to have a few decent movies in town, too.

(Well, there’s always “Nights in Rodanthe,” in which, I read, “an elusive band of wild horses shows up for a symbolic gallop on a beach” [WSJ]. Can’t! Wait!)

I’m invited to a small debate gathering tonight at JohnC’s house, but given that we don’t know if the debate is actually happening, maybe not. Hey, John — maybe you should make it a Depression-themed gathering. Have everyone bring a donation to a soup kitchen, or a cake made without flour or eggs. I hear things are tough all over. Mrs. Fuld (nee: Mrs. Lehman Bros.) is even selling her art. I hope Uncle Sam has the guts to seize the checks.

If you guys are looking for something to discuss in the comments, maybe everyone could take a stab at describing an economy in which the credit lines are frozen. Hardly anyone has done so publicly, or if so, they say, “You wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage or car loan.” Since most people are, at any given moment, not shopping for either one, it makes it easy to turn the page and say, “not my problem.” I don’t think most people know how credit works, how lines of credit and short-term borrowing affects, literally, every segment of the economy, how business relies on short-term credit to stock their shelves and longer-term instruments to install new equipment, etc. So Econ 101 for any dummies who might stumble through here and need the education. I figure it can’t be any less useful than more ranting and gloating.

So, bloggage?

“It really is true what they say: Those who do not study the past get an exciting opportunity to repeat it.” — Jon Stewart, national treasure. It gets good at the one-minute mark:

Well, at least you’ll be able to get some decent pot around here without risking your neck.

Finally, when was the last time you heard someone say, “I thought I’d be wearing a jet pack by now. Where’s my jet pack?” Well, it’s here!

Have a good day and weekend. I’ll be casting zombies.

Well, this has certainly been an …interesting campaign season, hasn’t it? Two weeks ago, I thought there was a good chance Obama was finished. Last night, it’s looking as though McCain is toast. All of it — “suspending the campaign,” Palin’s foreign-affairs cram course (which, unfortunately, brought the “Caribou Barbie” image home — world leaders and colorful native costumes sold separately!), the Letterman thing — makes him look desperate and weak, and that’s a very bad thing to be when you’re running for president at a time like this.

(“The Letterman thing,” I realize, makes me sound like one of those “low-information voters” who votes based on who did better with Ellen and Tyra, but the truth is, no one has aged into his Jack Paar elder status quite as gracefully as Dave. Doing the late-night chat shows is as important as doing “Meet the Press,” and McCain should have known that.)

Today, though I know the chat about this will be lively, let’s try to give one another a break. One reason I’ve come to hate the four-year election cycle is how easily I allow my buttons to be pushed, how culture war pushes everything else to the side. Deb spoke yesterday of yelling like a crazy lady when she sees a McCain yard sign, and I know exactly what she’s talking about. I’m grateful there are so few signs of any sort on my block, because I really don’t want to start doing the same thing. For a while when the war was going very badly, one of the houses in the next block had a sign in the yard that was phrased as a command: SUPPORT PRESIDENT BUSH AND OUR TROOPS. I had to avert my eyes. I didn’t want to put a human face to the house. I wanted the social lubricant of neighborliness to remain intact as long as possible.

I bring this up because we’ve already had a player carried off the field here, our old pal Jeff the Mild-Mannered, who wrote me last night:

I seem to be provoking more unpleasantness than is my preference, and it isn’t a position i’m used to occupying; that, and at 47 i’m already on lisinopril, and don’t need to up my dosage, so i’m just going to gracefully bow out through the election week. When i’m tempted to be extremely un-mild mannered in response to others, it’s a sign i need to pause and reflect and (forgive me) pray.

Others have written similar thoughts, and have taken shorter time-outs, and surely others have simply stopped commenting and reading without announcing it. One of my conundrums as a blogger has always been how I might “monetize” this site, and it reminds me of how I was always told to monetize my career when I was a columnist. People would say, “You need a niche, a cause, something people will associate with you,” but I could never do it. If I made this site all about politics I would doubtless pick up more outside linkage, and traffic, and maybe 35 more cents in my Google Ads account at the end of the month, but I’d hate doing it. I’d rather keep this blog about a lot of different things than one big thing, and attracting people who are interested in a lot of different things and like to comment on them.

One thing I like about Jeff is his willingness to take unpopular positions here, and I’ll miss him. Even though he’ll be back in six weeks or so.

Let’s keep talking about the events of the day. Let’s just try to remember that the other guy is not necessarily the enemy.

If you need to, when feeling overheated, you can play this video, and repeat as needed:

Puppies! All better now.

A little bloggage:

“Mad Men” fans, take note. Emma turned me on to this Flickr set of an artists’ images inspired by the show, but did you know this same artist has a shop at Zazzle? I’m getting the Betty-smashes-a-chair T-shirt as soon as I hang up with you.

Amy Welborn, Catholic blogger, left Fort Wayne earlier this year and has written about her impressions of her time there. You Fort people might like it. Or might not.

Gym-bound. Back later.

I’m behind on my e-mail. Funny how that happens. You get caught up, spend a day slacking and then, boom. At times I like this I remember the stories I’ve read about e-mail amnesty declarations, in which one purges the in-box and washes one’s hands. I also think of the early days of the fax machine, when the librarians (which is where our newsroom kept its main fax) would hand-deliver faxes to your desk the moment they arrived. Within six months they had installed a mailbox setup, and you picked up your own. And six months after that, the boxes were clogged with restaurant takeout menus and entries for some guy in the sports department’s NCAA pool.

E-mail’s getting like that. Now everyone wants to send you text messages, at 20 cents per. Wonderful. Something you have to type with your thumbs, can’t be much more than a few phrases and costs half as much as a letter sent via U.S. Mail. We’re always figuring out a way to do things better, aren’t we?

On the other hand, I’m always amazed, whenever a new communication technology emerges, how swiftly we figure out what it’s good for, which niche it fills. A text is perfect for a certain sort of message, e-mail for another. We even agree, sort of, on the etiquette of when one has violated the code somehow, how breaking up with someone via text or voice mail is tacky (and how sending takeout menus via fax should be).

However, the e-mail I have to return is from my BFF, with whom I’ve had a years-long correspondence, and deserves better than Im awesome!!!! on her phone.

So hang on, Deb, all will be revealed, eventually.

I’m trying very hard not to be upset by the news lately, but then I wonder: Isn’t denial of this sort a one-way ticket to the Stress-Related Ailments ward? Isn’t [Samuel Jackson voice] great vengeance and furious anger [ / Samuel Jackson voice] the logical, normal reaction to recent events? I thought I had it tamped down, and then Gretchen Morgenson, the NYT business reporter/columnist, was on “Fresh Air” yesterday — stream it here — and it came roaring back. “Why should I believe people who were lying to me five minutes ago?” she asked, quite reasonably, and it was all I could do not to load all the garden implements into the back of the car and set a course for Washington. Instead, I took a shower and wondered if I have the privilege of witnessing the end of the American era. I think so. It’s pretty clear the future belongs to our Chinese brothers, and our next part is to be the Fading Empire Rife with Corruption, Clinging to Outdated Ritual.

I just hope I can get a job. I hope the fading empire needs a few writers.

Which, before I set to work catching up on e-mail, seems as good a place as any to transition to the bloggage:

LGM’s Paul Campos in the Rocky Mountain News, on what Wall Street and the Detroit Lions have in common. Relax, it’s semi-amusing and not angry at all. (BTW, Fox Sports is reporting Matt Millen’s been fired.)

Suzanne Vega tells a few of the many stories behind “Tom’s Diner,” an a capella pop oddity that was influential far beyond its do-do-do-dos.

Hey, Detroiters, look what Matty Moroun’s up to now. Go down to Riverside Park and take some pictures. (Amusingly, when we did our film challenge last summer, this was the park where most of the teams got their obligatory Ambassador Bridge shots. Bastard.)

Off to work I go.

Here’s a line I’ve been waiting my whole life to use: Sorry I’m late today. I was polishing my screenplay.

Which is the truth. It appears “The Cemetery Precincts” is a go, and if we all lived in the same town, I’d invite you all to be zombie extras, but at the moment, finding locations is a more pressing concern. It’s true that everyone wants to be in showbiz, but with the real, paying showbiz all over Michigan at the moment, the no-budget hobbyist has to go to the end of the line. With the state currently offering filmmakers the highest rebate on money spent in production in the country, you can’t swing a cat without hitting Drew Barrymore smack in the face. Alan came across a sizable shoot on a bike ride the other day; they’d taken over a mansion on Windmill Point Drive down in the Park. I suspect this is “The Prince of Motor City,” a retelling of “Hamlet” set in the auto industry.

Anyway, they had streets blocked off. We’re just looking for a few places we can shoot guerrilla-style.

It was just as well that I was thinking of low-budget zombies and how to explain an uprising of the undead this weekend, because every time I thought of events in the real world, I felt like clawing someone’s throat out. At one point Saturday, as I waited at the gate for my flight home from St. Louis, watching CNN Headline News, we all watched a story about the federal bailout. A clip from our president featured him looking even more the dumb Irish setter than usual, and when he said, “It turns out the markets are interlocking,” lacing his fingers together for emphasis, I thought, How proud Harvard Business School must be of its most successful graduate. And I said, louder maybe than I’d intended to, “BullSHIT.” Up and down the row at the gate: Titters. Granted, maybe they were laughing at the crazy lady talking to the TV, but I like to think that if I’d risen from my seat, climbed up on it and said, “To the nearest federal building! Who’s with me?!” I’d have gotten a few followers. I don’t think Washington is quite aware of how incandescent the fury is out here in Deep Pockets-ville, and what will likely happen as a result, especially if stories like this…

The financial crisis that began in the United States spread to many corners of the globe. Now, the American bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensify scrutiny by Congress and critics. Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic American mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as United States banks.

…and this…

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it. Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

…become widely known and discussed. I’m also thinking that indemnify-the-CEOs stuff is a non-starter, too. But then, I’m an extremist; I advocate stripping them of their assets, and then their clothing, and sending them on a national tour of, say, Springsteen-size arenas, there to be chased through the rows and struck by audience members who will, further, jeer at their shriveled weenies. That sounds like justice to me. Or at least a good start.

You’ve probably seen this, which was going around this weekend, but if not, read and feed on the sweet, pure anger.

St. Louis was fine, if anyone wondered. After spending Friday night talking, I went over to my friends’ house to meet their new dog, who had moved in only hours before. She’s a skinny, undersized golden rescued from a puppy mill who nevertheless seems to be adjusting well. At eight months she’s unlikely to get too much bigger, but she’s got the blonde silky coat thing going on, and that’s all you can ask from a golden. Name’s Frankie. She came from an all-female litter, and they all were given men’s names. I called her Francesca, Francine, Francie, etc., which is what I do with my loved ones. My own pooch has more diminutives than a Russian novel, enough that it’s a wonder he answers to his own name at all. (Of course, he doesn’t anymore, but that’s because he’s deaf.) Saturday was spent touring the city — such a prosperous-looking place. I can’t figure if that’s because the local economy is strong or my eye’s been Detroit-ified; I suspect the latter. But the inner-ring neighborhoods are blossoming with money, and it was heartening to see. Not everyone wants to live in a subdivision. It’s nice to see a few reaching critical mass.

Not much bloggage today, but a question: Who let America’s aging sweetheart, a star beloved by all who know her, one possessed of the rare talent of sincerity and the ability to laugh at herself, wear this horrible dress to the Emmys? It doesn’t matter how skinny you are — past 70, a woman should wear a sleeve.

Happy Monday to all of you.

The last few days have been interesting on the parental-duties front. Kate got in the car after school a few days ago and announced the world was supposed to end tomorrow. (To my relief, she didn’t use this as an excuse to not do homework that night.) This was the first I’d heard of the Large Hadron Collider, actually, but I covered my ignorance with a “Don’t be silly” and opted to flip it into a discussion on the importance of skepticism. I remember junior high pretty well, how rumors swept through the student body like crabs in a bathhouse, and thought the best thing she could learn from this was, as stated so eloquently by Detroit philosopher Marvin Gaye, to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

That night, reading the British dailies, I learned about the supercollider and the fears of British schoolchildren that baby black holes would band together and suck us all into the abyss. I flagged the stories for her to read the next day, and she made it her weekly current affairs assignment, and that was that.

We haven’t been talking about Wall Street this week. She’s a worrier by nature, and the last thing I need is Mini-Me. I’ve mentioned before that I still carry the scars of the 1970s on my psyche, the cold and dark years when it seemed things were only going to get colder and darker. (And look, it’s like that “Twilight Zone” where the girl wakes up and discovers it’s not that at all, it’s the opposite — global warming, not a new ice age. Life imitates Rod Serling.) We are going to whistle through this one, we are. More cake for the table! More champagne! But make it the cheap Spanish stuff, please.

Oh, and read the Freakonomics guy (his colleagues, actually), and their readable explanation, here.

Friends, I have to skedaddle today. I’m catching a flight for St. Louis in 3.5 hours, and have yet to shower, so I’d best get that out of the way. I’m speaking at another conference — thanks, Tim Goeglein! — and will post from the road. Have a good weekend, all, and if the plane crashes, remember these final instructions: Someone stand up at my memorial service and say, “She always loved ’70s funk.”

Yesterday’s bike ride took me down Mack Avenue, past the Dodge dealership. Hey, gang! The 2009 Challengers are here. Try to contain your excitement:

My taste is famously out of step with the mainstream, so we’ll see whether it moves metal, as they say in Detroit. Fun fact: Guess how much those fancy wheels and low-profile tires add to the bottom line. Any brave souls? No? OK, I’ll tell you: $4,000. My first car didn’t cost much more than that.

In my entire stupid life, I have never been impressed by the tires and wheels of another’s car, although admittedly, I’m not in the target demographic. We caught most of “Tales of the Rat Fink” on Sundance the other evening, a fun documentary about Ed Roth, the original car customizer. I was interested in it mostly as a doc that breaks all the way free of the Ken Burns Bigfoot style — the story is moved along by several talking cars, their words indicated by flashing headlights, and no, I’m not kidding — but it left me thinking about Detroit, too.

The auto industry and Big Daddy Roth were yin and yang to one another, especially as Roth grew older and crazier in his designs. Roth imagined a world where everyone’s car would be unique in the truest sense of the word, thanks to customizing and easily moldable fiberglas. In this sense he was like a couture fashion designer, who imagines the entire world wants to express itself through clothing, when in truth most people just want their bodies appropriately shielded from eyes and weather. But the extremes feed the middle, and when it works we live in a world where a car is more than a rolling transpo-box and a jacket is a statement. My favorite part of “Tales of the Rat Fink” was the end, where the filmmakers draw literal lines between Roth’s innovations and things we take for granted today. (Did you know Roth was the first to paint designs on plain T-shirts? Now you do.)

I still think wheels like that are a waste of $4,000, however.

Quick bloggage, as I’ve got a full plate today:

Kwame Kilpatrick left office and the official mayoral residence today. Detroit is one of only a handful of cities to have a designated mayoral mansion, and today Freep.com ran a photo gallery of the Manoogian Mansion through the years. This was my favorite; how often do you see a one-lane bowling alley? Even Daniel Plainview had three or four.

You’ve all seen the Sarah Palin e-mail hack by now, no doubt. The most important takeaway lesson? If you’re running for vice-president, the whole world will know the answer to all your security questions. So tie up that loose end beforehand, ‘kthanksbai.

Sentences that do not inspire confidence: The financial crisis that began 13 months ago entered a new, far more serious phase as hopes that the damage could be contained have evaporated. Thanks, Wall Street Journal! Suggestion for comments discussion: In a collapsed world economy based on barter, what do you have to trade? I’m figuring a 10-second peek at my tits in a nice bra ought to be worth a few slices of bread to someone, but maybe not. What’ve you got?

Back later.

Part of the problem with the Wall Street mess is, hardly anyone understands it. I was discussing this — in the sense that “exchanging instant messages” = “discussing” — with my boss last night, two reasonably smart people whose job it is to read the papers, and we both admitted we could just barely get our heads around it. It’s kind of like understanding precisely how large the universe is; just when you think you’ve got it, someone throws another intensifier at you. “Now multiply that by infinity, and that’s the answer.”

And yet, I still regularly come across the Grandpa Simpson explanation of the mortgage meltdown, from people who should know better: “Some dirtbags got in over their heads and didn’t make their house payments.” What a neat trick, shifting blame for a global financial disaster engineered at the very pinnacle of world finance onto the most powerless parties, the ultimate “you wouldn’t have gotten raped if you hadn’t dressed that way” hand-washer. Funny how that absolves a person of all those uncomfortable thoughts the current crisis arouses, the ones that whisper it’s even worse than you think and the people who are supposed to be overseeing this don’t have a clue, either. As long as you can blame some poor person in Cleveland, one’s hands and moral conscience remain clean.

If that’s true, if all the money extracted in second mortgages went for manicures and two-week cruises and cars, we ought to have some very rich manicurists and cruise lines and carmakers in the world, and I don’t see that’s the case.

Here’s a story I heard this weekend, and I can’t vouch for its veracity: On Labor Day, a few of us toured a grand old house in Palmer Woods in Detroit. It belongs to a friend of one of our little moviemaking crew, and he offered it to us as a spooky-mansion set, before restoration work really gets going on it. At one point I looked out a window in back and saw the real spooky mansion, another big house, not as magnificent as the one we were in, but a big solid house that once doubtless housed a well-to-do family. Unlike the one we were in, however, it was beyond salvation. It seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of a complicated renovation project. Tattered blue tarps and Visqueen flapped in the breeze. Particleboard walls had been exposed to the elements for several seasons and were bleached the color of bones. It’s a teardown now, and barely worth that. “Very sad,” said our host, and added that the house was at the center of vigorous fraud — that it had changed hands several times in recent years, each time delivering a tidy sum into the hands of someone, each time never welcoming a single soul who intended to live there. A lot of people had joined hands — buyers, lenders, appraisers — winked at one another, flashed their cufflinks and extracted cash from the house like an ATM.

I didn’t learn the punchline until this weekend, however: “Oh, that’s the old Romney house,” one of my dinner guests said. “When Mitt was campaigning in Michigan, they wanted to hold a fundraiser there, in the house where he grew up. And then they saw it.”

Certainly, that would have been very awkward, holding a GOP fundraiser in a house that stands at a living, tangible monument to what can happen when you turn greedheads loose in the world with no rules, and expect the invisible hand of the market to keep the playing field level, i.e., a very GOP, laissez-faire sort of economic policy.

So while, yes, it’s possible at this point to say the current crisis came from dirtbags not paying their mortgages and have it be technically correct, it’s equally possible to say that isn’t the whole story. Once again, for the best single explanation of the underpinnings of the current crisis, see “The Giant Pool of Money,” which you can download or stream free. (When you get to the part about 23 dead people in Ohio receiving mortgages, it should start to dawn that it’s a bit more complicated.)

And that’s only the beginning. What’s happening this week — the failure of Lehman Brothers, et al, and the bailout of AIG — is several steps beyond that, and sorry, but I can’t explain it, either. If you can, you know where to leave it.

Such excellent bloggage today. This is going around, but it’s too good not to share. Where I come from, this sort of thing is called poetic justice:

He met her in the bar of the swank hotel and invited her to his room. Once there, the woman fixed the drinks and told him to get undressed.

And that, the delegate to the Republican National Convention told police, was the last thing he remembered.

When he awoke, the woman was gone, as was more than $120,000 in money, jewelry and other belongings.

Actually, at this point it’s just called “getting rolled.” This — in which the victim is interviewed several hours before the fateful tumble into the honey trap — is what makes it poetic justice:

Live by the pork sword, die by it, feeb.

Now if we could only arrange the same treatment for the mortgage thieves, we might have ourselves some justice going on.

Have a swell day, all. Remember: Economic education in the comments. We all need it.