I love it when newspaper editors lecture, especially when they can’t punctuate:

Humor can be a dangerous thing as the line between funny and offensive can be a moving target as was certainly the case in this presidential campaign. In Sunday’s column Mr. Lewis pushed past that line, but only, I honestly and fully believe, in the pursuit of humor.

OK, your call: Did this push past the line between funny and offensive?

“Well we’re movin’ on up,
To Washington, D.C.
To a deee-luxe pimp pad,
Painted whiiiite.
Yeah we’re movin’ on up,
To the White House.
I’ll be jetting with P. Diddy cross the sky.

To be sure, the editor of the Murfreesboro Post (”giving a voice to Tennessee’s most dynamic city”) notes that author Stephen Lewis, identified as a columnist, “is not a journalist but a citizen of the community who writes a weekly column, again in his case a humor column.”

When you’re in a hole? Stop digging.

Oh, well. You can read the rest of it at the link above. Rush Limbaugh used to use “The Jeffersons” theme for his regular Carol Moseley Braun updates, so I guess it’s not without precedent.

The NYT reminds us that in the most recent election, most of Tennessee went even redder than it did in 2004. Enjoy cultural exile, Murfreesboro. And learn to use the comma.

I said yesterday I wanted to turn my thoughts to art in this post-election period. Well, OK. Here are the conditions insisted upon by a certain celebrity mother, on the occasion of her sons’ visit to their father on the other side of the Atlantic:

If I were running a newspaper I would strive for content like this every day.

Speaking of commas and punctuation and writing, I made a Wordle the other day. A Wordle is a word cloud; it analyzes text and makes a graphic representation of the words used, with the size of each word determined by its frequency in the text. Here’s one for Obama’s acceptance speech on election night, to give you an idea what they look like; I’m not going to bother screen-capturing a Java Applet thingie when you can make one yourself. Of course I used the text from the index page you’re looking at, and there in the middle was a big fat hulking JUST. Oy. It’s a word I use too much, a potato-chip word, one that I’m always stuffing into the cracks in my sentences. Just because I like it so much. But it’s wrong to use it so much. So I’m starting a campaign called Kill the Just, for my own writing alone.

Make your own Wordle, and find out what your darlings are. Then kill them.

I have work to do, and not enough time to do it. So have a good day, and I’ll be back later.

With the post-election afterglow quickly curdling into the usual nastiness, let me state a few things for the record today:

I think Sarah Palin knows Africa is a continent, not a country. Given that the lady is one of those people whose words, verbally, tend to become — I think in terms of the verbal expression, you know, she could be expressing, word-wise…

You get the idea. Also, I’ve heard many, many people refer to Africa as a country, and I know they know better. It’s just one of those things.

The NAFTA thing, I could go either way on. And I believe every word about the clothes and the shopping. I can’t say how, except that I’ve seen otherwise sensible people make utter fools of themselves when they thought something was free. This is all I have to go on — a few hunches.

Also, I think the McCain we saw at his concession speech was the real man, and his failure to be that man throughout his campaign is one of those Greek-tragedy things he’ll carry to his grave.

We’re reaching the end of my graciousness toward American conservatism, but I’ll hang on a little longer, to say this P.J. O’Rourke piece is worth a read. Everybody likes funny Patrick Jake, although some like him better than others, and this piece has the advantage of at least sounding honest:

Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)

I haven’t always kept current on the O’Rourke catalog, but I assume someone here has; did he ever write this stuff at the time it was happening? If so, I don’t recall any of it, but maybe this is just his niche — truth-telling long after the fact, kind of like David Horowitz on the Panthers. Whatever. At least someone’s trying honesty for a change. Strategic honesty, anyway — there’s the usual abuse aimed at “liberals,” but I guess if there wasn’t at least a little bit of that, it wouldn’t be a Weekly Standard piece.

And so begins the new era, and while I’m optimistic and hopeful, I’m not stupid, either. If you want to know what an abyss looks like, look at an abyss, so over the weekend I contemplated what might happen to this town if General Motors, et al, filed for bankruptcy. Our house, already worth tens of thousands less than we paid for it, would fall further in value. One of the papers would probably fold, and it would likely be the one my health insurance is tied to. The freelance market would either dry up or become so competitive, what with all the unemployed journalists on the market, that it wouldn’t pay worth a damn. When I was in college, a nearby power-plant cooling tower — one of those wasp-waisted structures you see in the non-picturesque parts of the country, and in Indiana, practically on the lovely sandy beach of Lake Michigan, and whose idea was that — collapsed while under construction. The workers, under pressure to make a deadline, had anchored their safety harnesses in cement that wasn’t fully set. The line gave way at one end, and took down a couple dozen workers in a motion not unlike water going down a drain.

It would be like that.

Still, we had dinner with friends Saturday night, and we all had a champagne toast to the new era. Someday we’ll look back on it and say, either, we should have saved those few dollars we spent on champagne or else, hey, at least we have our memories.

Hard times are hard times, but acting as though they’re harder than they are can make them worse. This is common sense. Rod Dreher is on one of his pants-wetting jags about “stockpiling food.” I may well lose my health insurance, my job and my house, but staying fed has never seemed much of a risk, not in this country. By the time the food runs out, most of your stockpiles will have been depleted too, so why bother trying to keep the mice out of the 50-pound bags of rice in the basement? Now that we have firearms in the house, I plan to feed us during a Depression the old-fashioned way — by killing and eating the neighbors’ pets.

Dreher goes on to quote some lady at his church: “The newspapers ought to be telling us how to prepare, but instead they talk about nothing but sports and entertainment and everything like it is normal,” she said. “It’s not going to be normal.” No, I don’t expect it’ll be normal, but running stories about how to make your own pemmican and squirrel jerky isn’t going to set well with the few advertisers you still have left, who are trying to sell wide-screen TVs and electric skillets.

There’s a lot of automotive-buyout money floating around town now, and I think it’s behind a lot of small businesses that are popping up in the oddest places. Two are on the commercial block nearest our house. One I suspect is doomed; there just can’t possibly be that much demand for a dog wash, aimed at that slice of the population that has a dog to bathe but doesn’t want to do it in their own tub. The other is a fast-casual restaurant called the Big Salad, which amuses me because I remember the “Seinfeld” episode where they got the name, and pleases me because they make a pretty good salad there. I try to stop in every week or two, if only because it’s good to get out of the house and without customers, the lettuce will wilt and there will be no more Big Salad on the block. Perhaps Dreher and his old-lady friend, eyes squinched shut in fervent prayer, haven’t thought of this.

Anyway, I’m sick of current events, and plan to be for a while. You guys talk amongst yourselves about whatever you like, but I’m going to turn my thoughts to art and Christmas shopping. Or that might just be the weather talking — snow is flying outside my window as I write this. Seems like a good time to study Russian instead of polling data, and for a good long while.

(This is also, I warn you, the “my website is a tar baby” spasm of disgust I go through from time to time. I can’t think of the last time I got a nickel from GoogleAds, those chiselers. Roy Edroso details the unintentionally hilarious goodbye-to-all-that of a one-time high-flying right-wing blogger, his finances destroyed by hours spent at the keyboard, along with gout and the expenses of “lap-band surgery,” for both the blogger and his daughter (so she could make the weight requirement for military enlistment). I was so embarrassed for him, reading this, that I had to look away for a while. I don’t want to be that guy. But I would like to write some other stuff. So I may redirect my time for a while.)

Anyway, I think Brian Dickerson, easily the best remaining columnist at the Freep, sums it up well:

The wild-eyed Marxist revolutionary known as Barack Obama convened the first meeting of his economic advisory board Friday. Besides Michigan’s own Gov. Jennifer Granholm, those invited to participate included two former secretaries of the U.S. Treasury Department, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, and über-capitalist Warren Buffett. If this strikes you as an unlikely group to task with the radical redistribution of America’s wealth, you’ve stumbled upon the not-so-dirty little secret of American government, which is its frustrating (and enormously reassuring) continuity.

Not that any of this has occurred to yet another Hoosier asshole picking up on the fly-the-flag-upside-down meme, tacitly approved of by the newspaper columnist who detailed it. Get this guy to a Boy Scout, stat.

Off to the gym. Monday. Sigh.

Today in Gardening Galore, we have a question from a reader:

Dear Gardeners,

I recently bought yet another orchid — a phalaenopsis, your basic hotel-lobby, posed-under-a-pinpoint-halogen plant. It sits next to the chaise where I do a lot of my writing, and I like to contemplate its loveliness from time to time. “Easy to grow,” the man said. “Just ignore it, and it’ll do better than if you mess with it,” the man said. So I took it home, and for a while it was fine, and then all the blossoms dried up and fell off, and now the stem is drying up, and even though I’ve continued to water it — not too much! — I’m wondering if the thing is doomed. If I cut the stem off, will another one grow from it, or am I out another $20?

You’ll notice I’m trying to make a transition here, although I’m wondering if I should. Y’all want to talk about Rahm Emanuel in the comments, who am I to say you can’t? But in this blessed period between the conclusion of the election and the Confiscation of the Weapons and Opening of the Re-education Camps, maybe someone can answer my question about the goddamn orchid. I’m starting to wonder if these things are worth the trouble. But I need a little color in the gray Michigan winter. Is this so wrong?

As you can see, this week has left me tapped, and my house needs dusting. In the meantime:

Home page for the PuppyCam. Among the details there — all the puppy genders and names, which are Japanese-y and disappointing. I much prefer to call them by their collar colors. It should not surprise anyone to learn that Mr. Green is, indeed, a mister. Or a master.

The Chicago Tribune posted a few rejected election-result front pages. My favorite is the one about the Adler Planetarium.

I’m going to start letting Detroitist pick my morning Metro Mayhem stories; he does it so well:

Some pyscho fired shots at teenagers driving through Harper Woods. A bowling ball stopped a bullet from hitting one of the kids. Just like in the movies! And, ha ha ha, the Free Press said the gunmen “split.” Ha ha ha, just like a 7-10 split! The victims were from Detroit so naturally the Free Press message board klavern assumed they were no good black kids buying drugs in Harper Woods. It’s nice to know some people still cling to the old way and aren’t caught up in this “post-race America” thing.

It was the “message-board klavern” that got me. Word.

Off to dust. Have a good weekend.

I was one of the last Americans to learn about the dirty movie featuring the Sarah Palin lookalike, and I am grateful to the young man who told me, because if there’s one thing I need to have scratching around my skull on a long bike ride, it’s imagined dialogue sketches between a pretty woman with an updo and glasses and two Russian sailors whose rowboat has drifted ashore on the American side of the Aleutians.

At least, I think that’s the setup.

Now we discover that, as usual, truth is stranger than even Larry Flynt’s fiction:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

I guess I shouldn’t be suprised. She’s a natural for the take-off-the-glasses, shake-out-the-bun scene, too.

As you know if you’ve clicked around the web in the last 24 hours, this is part of an anonymously sourced Night of the Long Knives designed to place blame for the McCain campaign disaster where it properly belongs: Anywhere but on the anonymous sources’ shoulders. The Fox report going around (she didn’t know Africa was a continent, not a country), the NYT story today (her clothing was originally budgeted at $20,000 to $25,000, and her eye-popping overages were for such items as jewelry and luggage and outfits for the family) — these are to be expected. The entertainment factor, as Roy and TBogg and LGM point out, is just gravy. (And that’s not the entertainment of seeing Palin trashed, by the way; what fun is that? Rather, it’s the fun of watching Michelle Malkin, et al, threaten those who violate message discipline. Somewhere in Hell, Stalin chuckles.)

Anyway I find the whole thing sort of depressing. You wouldn’t think the ability to make William Kristol’s worm turn could carry a woman so far in the world, but never underestimate the power of a strategic flirtation. Or that of the so-called played-out, intellectually bankrupt, last-century MSM. Which brings us to our next topic today, when I called Alan at work yesterday and he said, “You’ll never believe what I’m looking at,” and began to describe people lined up in the street below his window. I thought maybe Barack Obama had parachuted in to the AFSCME offices across the street to spontaneously thank union members for their support, and word had gotten around.

No. They were there to buy a newspaper. Across the country, it’s the same story, as people lined up — at printing plants! — to buy dozens of extra copies. I think we’ve found a solution to our problems, comrades. All we need is…news.

Unfortunately, all the reporters have been laid off. Funny how that works.

Some quick bloggage today, because I’m well-rested, the sun is shining, and I plan to get both strength and cardio workouts in today:

Someone tell Joe the Douchebag his 15 minutes are up. HT: Detroitist.

“Heartwarming” + “unforgettable” + “opening on Christmas Day” = a movie you couldn’t get me to at gunpoint.

Weights class in 20 minutes. Must fly.

That was an amazing speech. I’ve been waiting a long time for it. I don’t mean the speech given by the first black president, but the speech that opens the nation’s arms and asks for the best in people. I know the coming weeks, months and years won’t be easy, but for just a few moments, I believed it was possible we’ll get through them more or less intact.

I still do. In a country where a black Democrat could carry Indiana — although not Allen County, har — anything really is possible.

So let’s see how the invitation is being taken in the losers’ locker room:

Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused hands”? When did he ever have callused hands? – John Derbyshire, The Corner.

Ah, well. Let us be magnanimous in victory. I always hated all that “get over it, loser” bullshit the more obnoxious wings of the GOP served on its mornings after, so let’s not serve it.

Let’s just chuckle wryly for a few days. And check the less-talked-about races:

Here in Michigan, medical marijuana won by an embarrassingly wide margin — 63 percent approved it. Embryonic stem-cell research, approved. The first Democrat in history will represent the Grosse Pointes in the statehouse. (He defeated a nice blonde lady who seemingly had a sign in every yard in the district, in line to be the first woman commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, which will have to be her consolation prize. We may be talking a reverse-Bradley effect today.) Over in Oakland County, Toilet Joe Knollenberg is outta here, along with the first sitting chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court to be voted out of office.

In the words of a Detroit city councilwoman: Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?

I didn’t sleep well last night — iChat was buzzing well after midnight. Today let’s discuss not the presidential race, but local ones in your various municipalities and districts, oddities that didn’t make the national-news roundups, but are worth mentioning.

And let’s speculate on the Obama family puppy. Given how stunningly photogenic the rest of the crew is, I expect nothing less than a yappy little rag bundle with an eye patch. Name of…Scamp, maybe. In other words…a Jack Russell! John Scalzi already has his reality-check post up, and wisely notes, Your president will not give you everything you want, when you want it. But I want that puppy, dammit.

I’m going back to bed for a couple hours. You kids play nice, now.

I’m going out on a limb here — 6:39 p.m. Eastern — and predicting a landslide, which my pol friends call 55 percent or more. The Hand of Fate is obviously engaged now. The grandmother dying, 70 degrees in Chicago on November? These are all signs of Destiny.

Anyway, use this thread as the results come in. Sorry about the puppies.

In the great tradition of Election Day journalism, I plan to sleep as late as possible and spend most of the day doing nothing other than voting and running errands. Consider this an open E-Day thread, to discuss anything from the weather to recipes to your experience at the polls.

Exercise the franchise, at least once.

First returns: Dixville Notch goes for Barry, 15-6.

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.