I swore I wouldn’t write another word about Tim Goeglein unless someone paid me for it, but this is too good not to note. Be not afraid, all is forgiven:

At the weekly meeting of center-right leaders at American for Tax Reform on Wednesday morning, he received three rounds of applause from the packed room, including one standing ovation, as he asked for their forgiveness.

I just knew he’d land on his feet. K Street, here he comes. A happy ending for everyone.

Patrick Swayze has terminal cancer, you say? I will take a moment to remember the man before he leaves. For a while, I was a student of his personal catalogue, and what a time it was.

My friend Ron French and I had a ritual in the late ’80s and early ’90s: We’d choose the worst movie in town, pick an off-peak screening and go to throw popcorn and trade snark from the audience. We tried to sit in a place where we wouldn’t disturb others, but we weren’t always successful; to the couple at the Holiday 6 whose enjoyment of “Point Break” we more or less ruined, I’m sorry. We had to see that one on opening night. The prospect of Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent and Swayze as a bank-robbin’ surfer was simply irresistible. (Talking in movies was a big pet peeve of mine at the time, too. I am a hypocrite.)

Swayze was to bad movies of the ’80s what Jack Nicholson was to good ones of the ’70s. “Dirty Dancing,” “Road House,” “Red Dawn,” “Ghost,” “North and South” (bad TV) and my personal favorite, “Next of Kin” — most of these were delightful to watch, so happily did they wallow in badness. What made them good-bad instead of bad-bad was, the people in them had a sense of humor about themselves. They knew it was bad, but they brought their A game, or at least their attention and energy. (The exception to the list was “Ghost,” which was bad-bad; Demi Moore’s personality is a black hole of dumb seriousness that sucks everything into its vortex.) “Red Dawn” was just plain hilarious, but was made funnier by its cultural impact; I remember seeing the program for an anti-communist function of some sort held in Fort Wayne, and “Red Dawn” was the afternoon’s entertainment. The thought of all those people coming off a morning of seminars and panel discussions about gulags and Stalinism, and into an afternoon of “Wolverines!” and Harry Dean Stanton bellowing, “Avenge me!” from behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp just kills.

“Next of Kin,” about a backwoods Appalachian clan taking revenge on the Chicago mob was a classic of the good-bad genre, combining elements of standard vengeance, gangster and fish-out-of-water plots. Ron pointed out the camera’s suspicious interest in an early family-picnic scene in which the elders of the clan practice their hatchet-throwin’ skills, and sure enough — I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone — someone gets a hatchet in the brainpan in the big fight climax. It was so awesome.

One of the joys of bad-movie fandom is, you get to see them on cable years later and squeal, “How the hell did I miss Liam Neeson in this the first time around?!” Check out some of the players in the IMDb listing, beside Neeson: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Ben Stiller, Michael J. Pollard, Ted Levine and that necessity for all bad ’80s cinema — a Baldwin brother (Adam). The character names are nearly as good, with a Patsy-Ruth, Aunt Peg, Old Hillbilly and, of course, Grandpa. (He may be the hatchet-thrower; can’t remember.)

But back to Swayze. What made him a pleasure to watch was his grace. He seemed to know he’d never be doing Mamet off Broadway, but he could dance the shoes off anyone, and didn’t mind wearing tight pants while doing so. It’s hard to dislike a man so masculine, and still so happy in a body built for hip-swivelin’ rather than football. Relax, I’m not going to compare him to Gene Kelly, but they shared a distant ancestor, maybe.

The TV commercial for “Next of Kin” featured Swayze, in an eastern-Kentucky accent, warning, “You ain’t seen bad yet…but it’s a-comin’,” a line I treasure to this day. If only we’d had some more of that kind of bad.

What’s your favorite good-bad movie? Discuss in comments.

P.S. As good as Swayze’s bad was, it really couldn’t match the all-time worst movie we saw together: “On Deadly Ground,” in which Steven Seagal saves the Alaskan wilderness by blowing up an oil refinery in the middle of it. (Sample dialogue, via IMDb: My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we’re dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can’t fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He’s the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire! You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he’s going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy’s a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we’re all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska. So let’s go find him and kill him and get rid of the son of a bitch!

Also: Drunken Eskimo: You are about to go on a sacred journey.

Do we have a little bloggage? We might:

Via Jeff, in comments above, How Hillary won Ohio.

Dahlia Lithwick explains Charlotte Allen to you. Well, someone had to.

For some reason, Detroit is fond of dressing up its large statuary in clothes. With opening day less than a month away, a Tiger in Carhartt.

Off to the gym. Guess what we have to look forward to this weekend? Yes, that.

If awards were given for press releases — and surely, there must be some — the one announcing the closing of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne has to be a nominee for something. Best Weaseling, maybe. For starters, there’s the headline:

Lincoln Financial Foundation to Make Its Lincoln Museum Collection More Accessible and Visible

Then there’s the lead:

Lincoln Financial Foundation, the charitable giving arm of Lincoln Financial Group, announced today it will take a two-pronged approach to make its Lincoln Museum collection more accessible and visible in celebration of the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial in 2009. The Lincoln Foundation currently owns one of the most extensive collections of Abraham Lincoln-related items including a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and a Thirteenth Amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln (see attached inventory overview list for more details). Specifically, Lincoln Foundation will: one, seek public partners with whom the Museum can explore exhibition options for its three-dimensional items and, two, digitize its documents in order to make the entire collection more visible and accessible to a greater number of people.

Wow, you’re thinking. They’re making the museum bigger? Finding a partner to increase the collection? What? Paragraph two:

The Lincoln Foundation embodies the principles of Abraham Lincoln who once said, “I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.” “By collaborating with other museums, the Lincoln Foundation hopes to make these items available to a greater number of people using Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial as a catalyst,” said Priscilla Brown, Vice President, Lincoln National Corporation.

OK, so it’s a press release. There’s always some fluffing.

Paragraph three:

The Lincoln Foundation is proactively pursuing a solution that benefits historical education and scholarship and exposes the collection to the largest possible audience. Through invitation, the Lincoln Foundation will host a national informational session with potential public partners in late March to provide an understanding of the collection items and, in turn, discuss options for increasing visibility.

A national informational session? Cool. Is the media invited to cover it? Not exactly. Paragraph four:

The Lincoln Museum has operated in Fort Wayne, Ind., for many years, first as a library and then as a museum. As a result of this new strategic direction, The Lincoln Museum will close to the public effective June 30.

Talk about burying the lead.

The next paragraph is the standard boilerplate about the company, its assets and services. They actually put the news in the final paragraph.

What a fine bunch of bastards these people turned out to be. For those of you unfamiliar with the company, for decades it was based in the Fort and was one of the proudest members of the corporate community. It treated both its employees and its city generously; the work week ended at noon on Friday, and Fort Wayne is dotted with public assets that would never have found or sustained life without its largesse. If they could be a little pushy sometimes — as a reporter, you really didn’t know rigidly enforced rules of media relations until you’d experienced it at Lincoln — at least it was in the service of a greater good.

Then the beloved, longtime CEO retired, and his replacement let little time pass before announcing the executive offices would move closer to a major financial center — Philadelphia. Oh, but don’t panic! they said as they backed out the door. Everything else is staying here! Don’t be alarmed! Well, you know what happened next. Bit by bit, Lincoln Financial Group is leaving the city.

Dismantling the museum, however, is truly vile. The Lincoln Museum is — was — a little jewel. A major refurbishment in the 1990s transformed it into a facility that walked a very delicate line between flashy-enough-for-the-interactive-age but still-a-serious-place. What could it cost to keep the doors open on a place that was largely staffed by volunteers, that didn’t require huge upkeep, that gave the city a unique, prestigious attraction? Especially when you consider LFG paid millions to get its name on a goddamn football stadium, this is just plain old, lowdown shittiness.

Priscilla Brown’s late mother-in-law has her name on a beloved institution in the Fort, incidentally — a fine high-school natatorium. I wonder how she’d feel if that was closed, and the water distributed to the “largest possible audience.”

Gerald Prokopowicz, pal of NN.C and occasional visitor to the GP, had his own thoughts in yesterday’s News-Sentinel. (Aside: Another fine effort by my alma mater. They really kicked the Journal’s butt on this one.) As the former scholar-in-residence at the museum, he was the logical source to call. It was even more depressing to note that one reason attendance is down is, fewer schoolchildren are being brought through on field trips. And why is that?

Prokopowicz said fewer students are going on field trips to museums, and it’s a trend that’s occurring in places other than Fort Wayne. He blames it on two factors: standardized testing, which forces teachers to spend more time in the classroom, and higher gas prices.

Even in our fancy suburban district, it’s maddening to see how much classroom time is taken up with prepping for our state assessment tests. Now you see the chain reaction of keeping kids in the classroom when they could be in the Lincoln Museum.

Grr.

So let’s change the tone with some upbeat bloggage, eh? Via Ashley, some news on Jill Sobule, best known for writing and performing that lesbian theme song. I saw her open for Warren Zevon in 1996, and she was fabulous — funny and ironic and all that. She won my heart with “Kathie Lee,” her song about her secret affair with Frank Gifford’s wife. Like lots of hardscrabble artists, she came out during the break to sell CDs. We had a little chat, and she was as charming one-on-one as she was onstage. (In case any of you filthy pervs are thinking there was some sort of zing! there, let me put your minds at rest: I was 8.5 months pregnant at the time, and unless she’s into fat girls in jumpers and clogs and wedding rings embedded in their swollen fingers, you are wrong.)

Anyway, it appears Jill is no longer under contract with a record company, and has gone unilateral to raise money for her next one. She’s set up a website where you can give, with some creative fundraising steps. It starts at $10, which gets you a free digital download, and ends….

$10,000 – Weapons-Grade Plutonium Level: You get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing – we can fix that on our end. Also, you can always play the cowbell.

I’m thinking I may go in at the get-your-name-in-the-liner-notes level. I want to leave cryptic footprints for my ancestors, so they can fight over the Thanksgiving table about whether I swung both ways.

Today’s only-in-Detroit story: Man comes home after alarm service tells him there’s been a break-in. Enters the house, looks around, realizes the burglars are still in the house. So he slips into a bedroom and calls 911 in a whisper. The police arrived…three hours later. He finally had to call his councilwoman, who called the police chief, who was able to rustle up a prowler. Best single detail:

He even tried the Northwestern District police station directly, but said he was told officers weren’t available because they were in the middle of a shift change.

In the New York magazine story about heroin tycoon Frank Lucas, which was the basis for the “American Gangster” screenplay, Lucas talks about the wonders of the shift change:

We put (the dope) out there at four in the afternoon, when the cops changed shifts. That gave you a couple of hours before those lazy bastards got down there. My buyers, though, you could set your watch by them. By four o’clock, we had enough niggers in the street to make a Tarzan movie. They had to reroute the bus on Eighth Avenue. Call the Transit Department if it’s not so. By nine o’clock, I ain’t got a fucking gram. Everything is gone. Sold . . . and I got myself a million dollars.

If only we could harness those powers for good.

OK, that’s enough for today. Have a good one. I’m off to enjoy what appears to be Steamboat Springs outside my window. Minus the mountains.

This was a shot from the weather radar yesterday. Pink = freezing rain. Freezing rain is the worst winter weather — it just sucks. Trees fall down, wires fall down, your furnace goes out, you wreck your car or, at the very least, you have to spend half an hour chipping ice off the windshield before you can drive down the road at 2 miles per hour.

I guess it will be Hillary Clinton’s favorite weather forever.

As you can see, we got a bit of weather ourselves, so we’re having a rare snow day. Snow days mean I get some extra sleep (good thing) but have a kid around the house — also a good thing, but bad for blogging. Check this space in a bit.

When Kate was wee and I was an energetic mum who believed in early-childhood education, my plan to make her a lifelong reader* involved going to storytime every week at the Allen County Public Library. It was always led by one of the several excellent children’s librarians there, but my fave was Miss Beth. Miss Beth had a knack with kids and many piercings. She was also funny, and said things like “right on” when she agreed with you.

Anyway, Miss Beth is in Indy now, but she still reads NN.C, and checked in the other day when we briefly discussed the problem of library perverts — the men too cheap to get their own computer and broadband, and come to the library to surf for porn. It turns out Miss Beth also has mad skilz with the pervz:

There’s a system to catching a perv that I feel I’ve perfected lo these ten years. The rumor at my library is that I can smell a perv at 20 paces because of my success rate. The real tip-off? The subtle tilting of a computer monitor. No innocent person cares if you see their game of hearts or online dating profile. I give it about 20-30 minutes after I see the tilt and then do a fly-by. At this point, the patron is so engrossed (emphasis on “gross”) that he never even hears me approaching. It’s the heart-stopping jump and scramble that I love the most. The best line I ever heard? “I wasn’t looking at porn; those ladies were just missing clothes.” Hand to God.

It also reminds me of the summer I spent about a week (with the help of a few other librarians) combing and interpreting Indiana Code to aid in reprimanding a patron. This particular gent never actually whipped it out. Oh, no, nothing that crass. He would rub himself through his shorts. And when he would come up to ask for more time at his terminal, the evidence of his electronic love was front and center. I usually sat in a low chair and was confronted with his spreading stain enough to ask for help in getting him out. And wouldn’t you know? We found something (and since none of us are law librarians, we took great liberty with it) that suggested one could not self-pleasure through one’s clothes in public in this great state.

Just so’s you know.

How did librarians ever get tagged as shushing, severe, boring old maids? I’ve yet to meet one you wouldn’t want to have a beer with, just so you could hear their stories. On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason they turn into old maids. You can hardly blame a girl for swearing off men forever, after meeting a few like this.

*Obviously this plan has been a miserable failure. I just came downstairs to find her watching a Disney Channel show featuring a talking zit. Yes way.

I feel so much better today, I’m a new person. Still stiff, but no longer fatigued and miserable about it. Some things you just have to wait out. Even…the bloggage!

For Better or For Worse used to be one of my favorite comic strips, until Lynn Johnston embraced her inner conservative, the one that believes that while young ladies may dabble in these things called “careers,” there comes a time when they all have to come home, marry someone parentally approved and open the baby factory. The drawn-out final storyline leading to Johnston’s retirement — the marriage of Elizabeth and her unbelievably boring childhood friend, Andrew — has finally begun. The Comics Curmudgeon finds the turning point.

The reaction to Mr. F’Buckley’s death — I prefer Ernestine the Telephone Lady’s pronunciation — has been more tolerable than I expected, but then again, I’ve been avoiding the National Review. (Although Jeff forced me to read Tim Goeglein’s initial tribute, which was amusing. I’m keeping the bookmark close, to compare it with his inevitable News-Sentinel column.) A few lefty sources dug up this chestnut, which reads like it came out of a brandy-and-cigars conversation in the parlor at Twelve Oaks. Granted, the quote is old — older than me; that’s old — so I did the math and figured Buckley would have been 31 when he said it. Old enough to know better, certainly, but 1957 America was a different place, too. As a writer who’s produced millions of hastily churned words in thousands of forgettable pieces, my natural sympathy lies with the writer. What someone wrote then isn’t as important as what they’d write today. Writing has always been a form of thinking for me (and, I suspect, for Buckley), and part of the reason I do it all day is because it helps me clarify my own thoughts. Someone once asked, “What do you think of X?” and I replied, “Dunno. Haven’t written about it yet.” A sloppy thinker/writer like me might ramble all over the place before arriving at a destination, and if they did the same thing 24 hours later, arrive at an entirely different place.

From this NYT roundup of readers’ questions to Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, who’s writing a bio on the man (thanks, Jeff), we get this:

I never heard him make a personally disparaging remark about anyone, even adversaries like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Gore Vidal. He might describe something they did or the style in which they did it, but never in an insulting or even critical way. He had a large sense of the human comedy.

Also:

He said it was a mistake for National Review not to have supported the civil rights legislation of 1964-65, and later supported a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he grew to admire a good deal, above all for combining spiritual and political values.

So, see, Darwin was right. We do evolve.

Rereading that first quote, I see the trap. “Having a large sense of the human comedy” can be another way of saying, “He was a bullshit artist who would say anything for a paying audience.” Someday, Ann Coulter is going to die of lung cancer, and someone will say that about her. I know people who’ve met her, and say she’s funny and charming and nothing at all like she appears in print, that it’s all a schtick to make a living, etc. Or it might just be that Buckley really did have a large sense of the human comedy. This no longer matters. There’s a reason we say “rest in peace.”

Something I never knew: John McCain was born in the Canal Zone.

And with that, I’m dragging my stiff ass (literally; Tuesday’s workout included a set of two-at-a-time stair climbs, and now my ass hurts) off to the gym in hopes of limbering things up a bit. Later.

Bill McGraw had a heartbreaker in the Freep today, about a fatal fire in southwest Detroit last week, one where the two closest pumpers were out of service for “staffing reasons.” They weren’t in service because the city couldn’t pay firefighters to staff them. A third pumper, also closer, was taken out of service permanently three years ago, for the same reason. You want to read some chilling statistics? How about these:

In May, the Free Press reported that 22% of the city’s 66 firefighting vehicles either were unavailable to answer alarms or were working with broken equipment.

On the day Marian Rembis died, 27% of the fire vehicles were out of service or working with acknowledged defects — such as ladder trucks with ladders that won’t rise. Ten rigs in good condition sat idle in their quarters that day because the department couldn’t staff them.

The problems play out every day, though mostly beyond public view.

Battalion chiefs, who supervise at fire scenes, sometimes can be heard on the radio begging dispatchers to send them a truck with a functioning ladder, even though their bosses discourage them from speaking so explicitly over public airwaves.

On Feb. 6, the first ladder truck — Ladder 10 — to arrive at the scene of what became a five-alarm fire at the Forest Arms apartment building near Wayne State University did not have a working ladder, but it was not needed to perform immediate rescues. Ladder 10’s ladder has been broken since at least early January, firefighters said.

If a city has any business collecting taxes at all, job one is public safety. Police and fire. In recent years it’s become fashionable for city government to venture into economic development, and I have no objection, but only as long as they’re still covering the basics. In some respects, the city’s police department has all the money they need, certainly enough to give the mayor a publicly funded security entourage that’s said to be the biggest in the nation for a mayor. I went out to dinner with the girls the other night, and one was talking about a Democratic fundraiser in Grosse Pointe Farms. The governor, a woman, showed up with one state police officer working as driver and escort. The mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, arrived a few moments later in a black Cadillac Escalade with a full complement of muscle. Because the GP can be a pretty dangerous place, I guess.

A few weeks ago, Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry chided those of us who were giggling over the text-message scandal, saying it was only lurid cover for real tragedy, the ongoing tragedy of Detroit and, in a larger sense, all of rustbelt urban America, and I’ve come to see he’s right. This is like the comic relief in Hamlet, but while you might smile at the Poor Yorick scene, there’s no denying the stage will be covered with bodies at the final curtain. It takes an event like this fire to remind us that one of the bodies will be a 37-year-old Down Syndrome victim, too scared to run out of a burning house and too far from a fully staffed fire station to get help in time.

The Metro Times lays out its case for resignation in this week’s issue, by the way.

Forgive me the late posting today. I’m having one of those days. The Committee has been working overtime this week, and I simply could not get over the hump without some extra morning sleep today, which I accomplished by skipping the morning coffee and going back to bed once Kate had been shuffled out the door. I got my sleep, but woke up with a caffeine-deprivation headache, which is pretty absurd when you think about it — you can’t sleep because you haven’t had any coffee. Also, my rededication to the gym this week reveals, once again, just how stiff and out of shape I am. So here I sit, headache-y, muscle ache-y, ache-y break-y. In a few minutes I’m going to get a shower, then head off to Starbucks for some medicine. An ibuprofen latte, please (aka triple espresso).

Hearing William F. Buckley Jr. has died is having no effect on my day, Danny. I can’t say anything bad about him. He started something, and others are ending it now, and I’ve got to think he’d disapprove of what’s become of his beloved conservative movement. Never cared for his twee affectations, but give him this: The man died in the saddle. At his desk. Writing something. That’s how I want to go. (If this headache gets any worse, that may well be my fate.)

Granted, a lot of what he wrote was crap, but Michael Jordan missed a lot of baskets, too.

What I’m mainly dreading is the reaction. After reading Ann Coulter’s eulogy for her daddy — Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me. — I can only imagine what they’ll say about Bill. I’m virtually certain we can expect a goo-fest from Tim Goeglein. He was a regular weekend guest on Bill’s piece of Connecticut waterfront. Huh — so was Rod Dreher:

Just this past weekend, Julie and I were talking about the time we went to the Buckleys’ Connecticut house on the water, and we were both kind of intimidated by the indomitable Mrs. Buckley. Then she sat down next to Julie and they started talking about gardening, and the evil of squirrels. Pat, with her smoker’s cackle, said she used to lie in bed upstairs at their place and take aim with her .22 rifle at the little bulb-eating bastards in the yard. It was hilarious to hear her this locked-and-loaded socialite talk about her adventures in gardening with gunpowder. Julie and I laughed in recalling the humanity of the Buckleys. That’s how they are.

Proof Dreher isn’t the Right Sort: Well brought-up girls have been taught hunting skills by their daddies for generations. Ask Ann Coulter.

Anyway, I never met the old gasbag, but I did meet his son, Christopher, who was easily one of the nicest and most charming fellows I’ve ever had the pleasure of making small talk with. Whatever part of that he owes to the old man, he couldn’t have been all bad.

We’re having a snowstorm. Very pretty. Every twig is outlined, all the dog poop is covered with a fresh blanket. I ran the blower around for a while and felt the strong need for another cup of coffee. Alan can finish it if he wants it done. Sometimes it’s fun to be the man of the house, but mostly it’s the same drudgery, only outside.

For the record, I am not yet tired of winter. I like this part of winter, the covering-up-of-dog-poop part. It’s the demi-winter that depresses me, when the world outside is brown, not white. But give me two weeks, and I’ll be ready for it all to be over.

[Sits for five minutes, stares at screen, wonders if it’s possible to be even more boring.]

For what it’s worth (noted: not bloody much), the Rolling Stone story on Britney Spears is up, in its entirety. It’s more interesting than I thought it would be, in that scab-picking kind of way. Fun fact: Paparazzi call themselves “paps” for short, which until now I’d always known as an archaic word for a breast, mostly used to apply to animals, in the Wild Kingdom sense: “[hushed voice] Let’s watch while the grizzly sow exposes her paps to her cubs, allowing them to suckle on this fine spring morning.”

Also, showbiz sucks:

There was a wig waiting for her by master coiffeur Ken Pavés, who created Jessica Simpson’s cascading fake tresses — it had been seven months since Britney shaved her head, and her real hair was less than six inches long. All she had to do was sit for the afternoon so the wig could be glued to her head, piece by piece, then remain very still for an hour so it could set, and she would be the old Britney again.

They say Madonna is using testosterone cream on her face as an anti-aging ploy, but it’s making her grow chest fuzz. I’m sure that goes really well with her dick, and makes her irresistible to her husband, but it’s times like this I’m glad a few wrinkles don’t make me want to stick my head in the oven.

Perhaps you’re wondering if I really spend time looking at this stuff all day. I don’t, but it’s inescapable. Just the other day someone told me Jennifer Lopez buys $2,000 jars of Créme de la Mer and rubs it on her ass. Some people consider politics inappropriate for polite conversation.

[Sits for five more minutes, stares at screen, wonders if it’s possible to be even more boring.]

OK, here’s something funny: “American Gladiators” wants you! The first time AG was on TV, the crew came through the Fort to recruit challengers. It was a festival of whining. Ninety percent of the applicants were eliminated at the pushups test, which they were astonished to discover had to be done on fingertips, not flat hands. (This makes pushups more difficult by a factor of a jillion.) “I’m a Marine, I can do pushups all day,” groused on rejectee. “This is ridiculous.” But that was nothing compared to the Gladiators themselves, who came in to sign autographs and pump up the crowd. Sit them down for an interview, and all they did was complain — their back hurts, they need knee surgery, their fingers are always getting broken, ow ow ow. For a celebration of physical toughness, it was like listening to the bingo players at a nursing home.

I notice the application asks for “a Poem or rap.” Good luck with that, glads.

OK, I’m going to go pump some iron. Never know when they’ll add a seniors edition. Later.

Who says the newspaper isn’t a bargain? Mitch Albom, turning up his nose at the Oscars, shares the secret of his success:

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna. I enjoy films. I collect them. And I understand that not every story ends with music swirling and heroes walking off into a sunset.

But lately there’s this sense that unless a movie is dark, violent and hopeless, it can’t be “real.” It can’t be “art.” It can’t truly “matter.” I put these words in quotes because it feels as if critics and awards committees define things that way.

So instead of praise for, say, “The Bucket List,” a film that everyone I know has loved and which has a positive message about getting old and sick, most critics attacked it as too “sentimental.” Meanwhile, we get an Oscar nomination for “The Savages,” a movie about getting old and sick that is so depressing, you want to jump off a building.

If only the crusty old dad in “The Savages” had taken the time to share some of the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime, it might have worked for Mitch. But take heed, America — if you want to be as rich as Mitch, and he is vastly rich, be more like him. Go see “The Bucket List” and don’t be afraid to smile through your tears at the end. Because that’s entertainment.

(Just a writerly aside here: Does any newspaper column these days fail to contain a qualifier? Now, I’m not a Pollyanna. I’ve learned to look for it. I’m not saying Obama is an empty suit, but… I see it because I’ve done it myself, and I know exactly how it happens. First, you state a strong opinion. Then, the imaginary editor reading over your shoulder says, “Christ, I’m going to be talking to pissed-off readers all morning tomorrow. I have better things to do.” And so you pull your punch. If Mitch Albom thinks “The Bucket List” is a better movie than “No Country for Old Men,” the spineless tool ought not to be afraid to say so. On the other hand, that might be an unpopular opinion, and the cycle continues.)

I didn’t really watch the Oscars last night, but I had it on in the next room while I farmed health-care news. My overwhelming impression: Tilda Swinton has never actually been out in the sunlight, has she? I know Great Britain is famously cloudy, but she’s as pale as one of those fish that only lives in the Marianas Trench. I’m a child of the pre-melanoma ’70s, but I never see skin that pale and think “luminous English rose.” Only “fish-belly.”

But I can’t hate her, either. She’s a great actress. I saw “Michael Clayton” Saturday night, and she did such a fine impersonation of a former boss of mine — ruthlessly ambitious, high-strung, brittle, murderous — that I nearly had to squinch my eyes when she came onscreen. I loved her white pantyhose, too. Dressing for success is the same in Omaha as in Fort Wayne, apparently.

So how about some Oscar bloggage? David Mills followed the action with underachieving crazy-lady — and Detroiter! — Debbie Schlussel: “Self-hating, pro-Palestinian Jew Daniel Day-Lewis who stars in the very depressing, awful anti-Christian, anti-business, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ wins Best Actor. Predictable.” What a fun date! P.S. Thanks to the miracle of Safari’s command-F feature, I know the word “annoying” appeared eight times in her live-blog entry.

I thought Nicole Kidman was pregnant. Aren’t pregnant ladies supposed to lay off the Botox? She’s not.

I guess John Travolta overslept, and mixed up his hair product with a can of spray paint.

Sean what’s-his-name Combs charitably described as “entertainer.” That’s one way to put it.

Javy: Still smokin‘. Viggo: Less so. Isn’t covering a natural chin dimple like his with facial hair a crime against beauty? Yes.

Finally, I see the subject of could-Obama-be-assassinated is finally being discussed openly. I guess we know why Hillary’s still in the race, then: She’s still scrambling a team down in Arkansas.

To the gym! Because I’m paying for it whether I show up or not!

So you sit down to write and look what happens: Shh. “The Godfather” baptism scene is coming on AMC. I need to watch it for the seven millionth time.

Look at baby Sofia, playing the infant. So beautiful, hands like little starfish. Let’s see if I can spot a detail I missed the first 6.99 million times. …OK, here’s one: All the anointing, all the hands laid on other bodies — this I never noticed before. Cicci gets a barber’s shave with hot cream, the baby gets the holy oils, Moe Greene’s masseur rubs him down with…probably witch hazel, back then. No faggy essential oils in the ’50s.

Michael Rizzi, will you be baptized? I will. I still get a chill.

The good-vs-evil Mafia montage is a cliché now. Done well, as David Chase did with the season-ending “Sopranos” episodes, it’s an homage, but mostly it’s just a cliché. But like the song says: The original is still the greatest.

As always, when I watch a little Godfather, I wonder what happened to Al Pacino. How did Francis Ford Coppola rein him in? His whole performance is delivered via the eyes, and look what happened when you took those away, made him a blind man — “Scent of a Woman,” that’s what.

It’s just as well cable TV delivered, because I have little for you today. The steady lengthening of the days is no longer a rumor — “be home by dark” gets Kate 45 minutes more freedom than it got in December, but, perversely, spring seems further away than ever. Fourteen degrees at the moment, bright sun, a glacier-glasses sort of day. I’m working on a piece that’s a real bolus, and every find-new-motivation strategy I deploy just feels like procrastination. Time to put the modem in the freezer.

But there’s plenty going on in the world, just the same. Out for discussion: Is Hillary finished? I’m especially interested in hearing from you Buckeyes, as that’s the next battle, and it’s make-or-break for her. Here in Michigan, the dumb-ass Democratic party is trying their best to start an insurrection; the power players are trying to figure out a way to deliver the now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t — all of Michigan’s perhaps-mythical delegates — to Hillary. The very hint of such a coup makes Alan kick the baseboards and vow to vote for McCain if they even dare to think such a thing, but then, he voted for “uncommitted” in January. I guess I don’t have a leg to stand on, having chosen a strategic Romney vote last month.

What is rickrolling? (This baby is not played by Sofia Coppola.) The Church of Scientology, rickrolled. A more clinical explanation. I used to dance to that song in aerobics class. Not as bitchin’ly as the original Rick, however. Ha.

John reveals his inner Hawaii Five-O fan. Also, a tribute to Adobe After Effects, with which, on his last visit, he demonstrated how they got “300” to look like that.

I don’t care how Barack Obama talks, as long as he can pronounce “nuclear.”

Time to return to my bolus. Sigh.

Like many who plan to vote Democratic in the fall, I’m not an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter. If she’s nominated, she has my support, but as I’ve stated before, I’d vote for a Paris Hilton-Wilmer Valderrama ticket over anyone the Republicans could possibly put up to the job. Just to, you know, send a message.

But speaking of messages, I’m also aware of what constitutes fair criticism of her, and what doesn’t. Like the black person who fails to be cheered by being called “articulate,” I know what hits me in the frontal lobes, and what’s tickling the medulla oblongata. I have a sense of humor, and I don’t think I’m overly sensitive. But to tell the truth, some of this shit is just getting on my last nerve. To make things easier and keep the tone light, let’s let Stephen Colbert ring ’em up:

That On Notice generator is fun to play with. As most of them are.

I have three days of work to do in two, so I’m letting you folks carry the conversation today. I will make a small announcement: Kate and I will be in Fort Wayne the 22nd, that is, a week from tomorrow. Kate will be off with her posse, but I’ll be at liberty that night, staying with Alex out in beautiful suburban Leo. He suggested we hold an open-table meetup “somewhere we can smoke,” although, to be sure, I’d rather it be somewhere we can’t smoke, but I’m flexible. Anyone interested? I favor Henry’s (can’t smoke) or Beamers (can smoke), but what the hell — maybe we should go all out and rent an Eagles hall. Make it a real Hoosier evening.

A short bit of bloggage: My ex-colleague Mike Harden did a moving column many years ago about a kid who needed human growth hormone injections to overcome a pituitary problem and give him something approaching normal height by adulthood. I recall that, at the time, HGH had to be gathered from cadavers, making it scarce and dear. The injections were very painful, and the kid fought them like a tiger. Now it’s synthetically grown in labs, much more available and less expensive. And now people like Debbie Clemens allegedly take it, to look good in a bikini. Is this a great country, or what?

OK, time to shut down the browser and get some real work done. Carry on.