The 48 Hour Film Project awards were this weekend. The event was held in a loft with the sort of sci-fi-apocalypse-hello-America-this-is-your-future view Detroiters take for granted:

That’s the Packard plant, beloved of lazy photojournalists looking for a tragic symbol of Detroit’s industrial decline; Jim at Sweet Juniper (and many others) reminds us frequently that the plant’s been closed more than half a century, but don’t let that bother you, Mr. Parachuted-in Freelancer. Its history is long and complicated and — standard for around here — tragic, but the bottom line is, it’s been abandoned for decades, fell into receivership years ago and presumably belongs to the city. Yes, it should be torn down, but a conservative estimate on what it would take to demolish and haul away more than 3 million square feet of Albert Kahn-designed factory is in the eight figures, and the city doesn’t have that kind of money. A search on Flickr demonstrates the site is a favorite of urban explorers; it stands open to the world now, but even they’re getting bored with it, and it now belongs to the scrappers, who are busily trying to take it apart from the inside, with some success and occasional self-injury — here’s a pretty good Bill McGraw column on the state of things.

The latest craze is arson, and as we stood on the deck drinking and socializing, we could hear the sound of glass breaking, as restless vandals and scrappers worked out their excess testosterone on the few remaining windows. There’s a stripped car sticking halfway out one of the windows two or three floors up; for a while I thought the project was to push it out, but no, they were firebugs, too:

It wasn’t much of a blaze, and it didn’t last long. According to McGraw, the city fire department doesn’t even bother responding to many alarms there, and never at night — it’s just too dangerous. But 3 million square feet holds a lot of puzzlement, and some of it will burn:

Kirschner said Engine 23 and other fire companies responded to a fire recently during the day and discovered about 25,000 square feet of shoes burning. The smoke, partially from the shoes’ rubber and glue, was dangerous for the firefighters and anyone in the neighborhood who might have breathed it.

Hazardous-materials crews monitored the air Monday night and found no need for evacuations. The cause of the fire was not known, but firefighters were certain it was set. They called for an arson car, but none was available.

(I hope you get a sense of the weirdness life in and around this city is, on almost a daily basis. Twenty-five thousand square feet of burning shoes? Shrug.)

The fire was only the appetizer. The main course was the awards, and how did we do? Reader, we won:

(The award says Best Film, but I’m calling it Best Picture until someone tells me to stop.) This puts us in the running for the nationals, and enters us automatically in Filmapalooza, held next year at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas. I have very few illusions about our chances up against the fearsome teams of Los Angeles and New York, but on the other hand, I’ve never been to Vegas, and don’t you think I should go before I die? The NAB meets in early April, a little late for spring break, but what the hell.

Yes, I’ve never been to Vegas. Atlantic City, yes, but once you’ve seen “Casino,” do you even need to go to Las Vegas? I don’t think so.

We were lucky. Ideally, when you make a film, you start with a story and add your elements. In a challenge, you start with your elements (genre, prop, character, line of dialogue) and craft the story around them. The time constraints and guerrilla element means you have to work with what you have, and this lends a certain Mickey-and-Judy air of homemade chaos. Stories get shoehorned into places where someone had a friend who would let them shoot — a haunted house, a tattoo parlor or, in our case, the Theatre Bizarre, which was easy to work into our thriller/suspense genre draw. One team drew Musical and put on a fun show called “Love Between the Lanes” at the Ypsi-Arbor Bowl (which has one of the great names, and great signs, in Michigan business). Another, faced with a dud genre (fantasy), threw up their hands and did a “Princess Bride” takeoff that was pretty funny. But there was a lot of crap, too; I haven’t heard so much expository dialogue since, well, the last 48-hour challenge.

(Expository dialogue: “Hello, Bob, let me introduce my sister Sally Mae. You may recall her from last August, when she fell into the punchbowl at our other sister Julie’s barbecue, which required her to take an immediate shower. While she was rubbing the stains from her shirt, the door opened and our brother-in-law Simon came in. He was drunk. Sally, why don’t you tell Bob what happened next?” And so on.)

Watching the screenings, I was reminded of my pal Lance Mannion’s observation about the terrible dialogue in “The Deep”: No one gets out of here when they can get the hell out of here. One film had that intensifier in, seemingly, every other line: What the hell are you doing? Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Where the hell are we? And so on. I vowed to never, ever write that again. And then watched our film, where a character tells another, “Lady, you need to get the hell out of here.” Wince. Live and learn.

So, then, any bloggage to start the week? Not very much, but some:

Hank liked “Julie & Julia.” So did everyone else I know who saw it this weekend.

Overheard in the Newsroom, one in a series of Overheard blogs. Makes me miss the crazy places:

Intern: “I know what happens when I assume.”
Editor: “Yep. You run a correction.”

We had one crashing thunderstorm a few hours ago, with another one expected around dawn. Best sleep while I can.

Mama loves her some buskers.

A case of animal hoarding came to light here last week. Someone saw a loose kitten, which led to a conversation with T. Creepy Neighbor, which led to the animal-control people showing up, which is evidently the only agency that knows what the telltale smell indicates. Long story short: The kittens were forgotten in the David Lynchian scene of– are you ready? One hundred twelve live chihuahuas and 150 dead ones.

The dead ones were in freezers. Relax.

We’ve all seen these cases before. I certainly understand the attention paid to them — bizarre is newsworthy, after all — but they always make me uncomfortable. It starts with the unbearable TV coverage, where anchors who are paid half a million dollars a year to look good and act stupid furrow their brows over the teasers: “You’re not going to believe what they found in a Dearborn man’s home!” (Try me. I’ve seen it all, lady.) Then the piece itself, in which neighbors — are they all idiots? Everywhere? — tell the world what they “seen.” Also, what they told the police: “I seen it was looking bad over there, so I told them cops…”

This is followed by the newspapers, stories pitched only slightly more upmarket, filled with helpful, “reader service” details. Click here to download an application to adopt one of the rescued dogs. My personal favorite was “Chihuahua facts,” a sidebar of general information on the breed — size, description, history. Also, this line, which made me laugh out loud: “The live Chihuahuas, many of them shaking and traumatized…” Which would make them different from other chihuahuas how?

Through all of this is the guy’s lawyer, returning all his phone calls, trying to be heard, beating one drum: Hello? MENTAL ILLNESS! We’ll see how it works; most people don’t want to hear stuff like that. The neighbors will be dragged out before the TV cameras to opine he weren’t crazy, while the papers file more helpful sidebars:

Kenneth Lang Jr. simply couldn’t throw anything away – not trash, not feces, not dogs.

I like how she slips the feces in the middle of that series. And then, the Edna Buchanan jujitsu:

Not even the dead ones.

Enough. This poor man. I suggest the Witness Protection Program, perhaps to a place with a big yard, three chihuahuas and a vet who sees to it that everyone is spayed and neutered. Besides, all this talk of nervous little dogs distracts us from the real news of the day, yet another chapter in the long dick of Kwame Kilpatrick. Turns out the former mayor was personal-relationshipping with the federally appointed monitor overseeing the consent decree to clean up the police department. She’s been billing the city $287.50 an hour for years, to the tune of $10 million. Well, that’ll buy a lot of romantic weekend getaways — smart money says she was the woman who enjoyed a $500 “couples massage” with KK in Asheville, N.C., where he was keynoting a MLK Day thing.

Sadly, that also distracts the public from Martha Reeves’ latest antics:

Although Martha Reeves is internationally famous for being the lead singer of the group Martha and the Vandellas she has now decided to use her middle name on the ballot.

The flier reads Martha Rose-Reeves on one side of the flier and Martha-Rose Reeves, with the hyphen in a different spot on the back.

The flier also states, “Elect Martha-Rose Reeves and the Vandellas.”

When asked if the Vandellas were also running for council, she said, “Yes. They are running and dancing in the streets.”

Let me just say it again: I love this town.

So, a bit of bloggage?

Hank Stuever has some big shoes to fill. Congratulations. Also, scroll down to his Madonna entry. Stew bird!

Sarah Palin leaves lesser humorists baffled, but Jon Stewart always seems to step up. (Video link is hosed; I’ll try to fix it when Comedy Central does.) Best single line goes to Gawker, however:

It’s like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann replaces Sarah Palin as the national sweetheart of crazy.

Breakfast time, then gym time. Then Russian time, then Hammer time!

For our 48-hour film challenge, we needed a car that might be driven by a creep. Of course, we turned to Detroit’s back catalog. (It helped that it was owned by our designated Car Guy, the guy who got us the stretch limo last year.) I became its caretaker, and drove it home overnight. It was a Buick Estate Wagon, seemingly far older than its 19 years. I marveled at its squishy handling, floaty ride and 25-foot-long hood:

It’s hard to imagine anyone was making cars like this in 1990. This was well into the era of the minivan, a veritable Ferrari in comparison. No wonder moms were already opting for Broncos and Blazers. Not that one of those could give you the design filigree of…oh, how about the driver’s-eyeline external turn-signal indicators? Talk about a detail made for the geriatric pilot.

Oh, well. As Kenan the Car Guy said, “You can put a four-by-eight sheet of plywood in back without folding down the seats.” That’s something. I thought about the name: Estate Wagon. It would be the perfect vehicle for a person with an estate, capable of fetching weekend guests at the train station, with all their luggage in the back. It can haul almost as much as a pickup truck, so you can truck lots of mulch to the cutting beds without making extra trips. And when one would like to repair to the lower pasture for a picnic, the servants can go on ahead with the fixings.

The prototype of this vehicle is called Country Squire, after all.

In our case, the car belonged to “Liam Butler, a painter,” the character that was one of the required elements in our challenge. The others were a book and “Why don’t you explain it to me?” and our genre was thriller/suspense. As usual, all I can see are all the script problems, but objectively speaking, I think our entry, “A Little Knowledge,” should be a contender. Our group screening is Thursday; I’ll know more then.

One thing I do know: I never ever ever ever want to shave a deadline that close again. We’re talking seconds.

And now I am exhausted. Having spent the entire weekend more or less ignoring the news other than the weather report for Metro Detroit, it seems I missed a few things. Sarah Palin’s fare-thee-well, for one. Good thing Roy didn’t:

She also attacked Hollywood, which enlists “delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets” in their “anti-Second Amendment causes,” against which “patriots will protect our individual guaranteed right to bear arms.” She warned against “enslavement to big central government,” because “it can’t make you happy or healthy or wealthy or wise,” which comes instead from “God’s grace helping those who help themselves.” She portrayed her resignation as another way of guarding Alaska “like that grizzly guards her cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own.” She also encouraged supporters to “enjoy the ride.”

What? Are you kidding me? Am I going to have to watch this thing, now? Evidently.

No wonder people stop paying attention to the news, if that’s the sort of people you find there.

My morning is crushing, but my afternoon looks better. Back then.

I see more of these around here than I did in Indiana. In Royal Oak the other day:

That is, a Ford Crown Vic Police Interceptor, still the best all-purpose cop car of the era, now retired to the private sector. I assume they’re great on the straightaway, less so in the corners, can idle until the cows come home and have lots of butt-funk and spilled coffee in the seat cushions. Alan and I went to a dinner thing earlier in the year, and sat with someone who drove one, decommissioned from an unknown p.d. somewhere in the area. It needed a good deal of work in the low four-figure price range, he said, but once he got it running right? Awesome.

Of course, like the example above, you always hope you can find one with the black-and-white paint job and cow catcher intact. I wonder if, like an old fire horse, it tries to respond when called for backup.

OK, then. It’s Friday, and my attention is preoccupied with the weekend’s activity, the 48 Hour Film Project, beginning today at 7 p.m., concluding, duh, 48 hours later. I guess this entitles me to display a badge:

Here’s something else I’ve been meaning to post for a while; it came up in my drug searching this week. It’s an AP story about the effective legalization of marijuana in California. If you read the New Yorker story a few months ago, little here is all that shocking, but it’s still…shocking. If you’re old enough to have lived through criminalization, decriminalization, recriminalization and now de facto legalization, it’s hard to believe what it’s come to. You can now get butt-kicking pot over the counter with nothing more than the additional bureaucratic step of getting a winking doctor to write you a scrip. Voters approved medical marijuana use in Michigan last year, so I’m paying close attention.

To be sure, I’m not crazy about this; the last thing the world needs is more impaired drivers. On the other hand? It’s pot. I’m reminded on a nice exchange in “Jackie Brown,” Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda:

ORDELL I’m serious, you smoke too much of that shit. That shit robs you of your ambition.

MELANIE Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.

In other news that turns up when one of your search terms in “prescription drugs,” an Australian daily is reporting Michael Jackson had a chemo port — essentially, a permanent IV site — in his neck. No link; story’s gone; it must be vile libel. Disregard what I just said.

Thanks to Hank Stuever, who posted it on his Facebook yesterday, this is my daughter’s new favorite YouTube video, and perhaps mine, too:

And finally, speak now or forever hold your peace. If ever a video deserved to go viral, it’s this one:

I remember how crestfallen my Catholic bride friends were, when the priest told them they couldn’t play “Here Comes the Bride” in the church. Wait until they getta loada this.

Off to obsess, worry and have stage fright. Starting gun at 7! Think I’ll go ride my bike.

This birther video was going around yesterday; you’ve probably already seen it, but here it is, if not. I can’t decide if it’s hilarious or frightening. The screechy speaker with her sense of wounded entitlement, the masculine YEAHS from the crowd, the hysterical Pledge of Allegiance — scary and funny. “I don’t want this flag to change, I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK.” You want to know who the bitter gun-clingers are? Exhibit A.

Sometimes you wish people could just summon the character to be overtly racist. At least it would be a position with a little risk attached, like Bruce Willis standing in his sandwich board at the beginning of “Die Hard: The One Where They Steal All the Money in the World.” This birth-certificate stuff is just chickenshit. Some of the analysis is so baroque it makes Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with Sarah Palin’s amniotic fluid look practically sane. I urge you to read Timothy Egan’s NYT piece of earlier this week, in which he notes:

When candidate Barack Obama made that comment about bitter people in small towns clinging to guns and religion, he was criticized as a clueless elite from the big city. No one paid attention to the first part of what he said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.”

Every president said he would do something about it, Obama continued, but never did.

Well, exactly. I can’t help but think that if everyone was making a living, we wouldn’t all want our country “back.” Back from what? But then, one should never underestimate the power of a good conspiracy theory. From my earliest days in talk radio, I remember Federal Reserve Frank, who called regularly to alert the world to the vast conspiracy of European bankers — gee, who would those folks be? — who were manipulating world currencies and business and I forget all what. Sometimes he would bring up Ezra Pound, which before this I had only known as a fairly impenetrable poet. Pound was “a very smart man,” F.R. Frank would say, so if he thought the Fed was a problem, why couldn’t I? I should have made him explain “The Cantos” to me.

Anyway, Birthers. Some of the comments at this LGM post get into the so-called nuances of the argument, if it can be called that.

Maybe it’s not the conspiracy, but the lost cause that’s the lure. Suppose, through some miracle, it was somehow found that yes, these people are right, and Obama isn’t qualified to be president, setting off a Constitutional crisis and probably widespread civil unrest. They’d be like the dog that caught the truck. They’re much happier chasing and whining.

Which brings us to another video, which I watched on Slate’s V site with a mounting sense of astonishment. It’s about a woman who describes seeking out the hardest-case shelter dog in L.A.’s hard-case shelter, only to discover, after a brief honeymoon period, that her abused pit bull/dalmatian mix (which she couldn’t keep, by the way — this adoption was only about “saving” it until it could be raised by someone else) was so unstable it wasn’t fit to live among humans. I had to watch it twice to absorb both the amazing quotes (“He had been everything to me in the two weeks I had him”) and the thread of her story, which boiled down to: Insane, abused dog saved from shelter death, attacks people, sent at great expense to “dog sanctuary” in Texas, where it continues to absorb her money at the rate of $50 a month until it dies. Happy ending! “It’s the best thing I could have done.”

No. No, it’s not. The best thing would be for the dog to have been humanely destroyed while still at the hard-case shelter, and for you to be sending $50 a month to a children’s charity. When I used to ride, every so often a girl (always a girl) would get attached to a hard-case horse, a bucker or bolter or biter or spooker or whateverer. Most horses are sweet or at least tractable on the ground, and the rider/owner would anthropomorphize that the animal was fixable, kind of like an abusive husband who only punches when he’s drinking. The cycle of misbehavior would continue until the rider became permanently fearful, which fed the misbehavior, and never mind the idea of taking this beast to a show, ostensibly what everyone was working toward. Finally, it would be time for the trainer to make the Speech, which boiled down to: With no shortage of good horses in the world, why waste time on the bad ones? Put out the For Sale sign, get it done and move on. Some people responded to this, others clung to the lost cause.

Some people like being on the losing side. It explains the romance of the Confederacy. In the case of the Birthers, maybe it all comes from the same root of racism. Or maybe it’s unconscious: I’m a loser, and I deserve to be in accord with other losers. If you spend your days paging through websites that reflect your opinions, or poring over documents with a magnifying glass, it reinforces and distracts you from reality.

Meanwhile, why won’t Sarah Palin offer a sample of her amniotic fluid for DNA testing? What is she trying to hide?

Man, I’m late today. Bloggage? Not bloody much:

Wow. Video link.

I want this garage door. The one with the crocodile.

Jim at Sweet Juniper’s got some great summer ivy pictures, here, here and here. Nature is patient that way.

And Detroitblog features a poor man’s bank, i.e., a pawn shop.

Step away from the keyboard, Nance. I have errands to run.

A lovely Friday in Ann Arbor, it was. Who said liberals don’t know how to run anything? The tax rate there is approximately the same as it is in this Republican stronghold, and every time I go over there the place is running like a Swiss watch. I rolled in off the freeway, parked in a high school field, climbed aboard a city bus (which, its signage helpfully informs, runs on combination biodiesel/hybrid technology), and was carried to the downtown art fairs in minutes. I’d like to tell you I spent the day absorbing the hundreds and hundreds of booths in the fine, sunny weather, featuring artists in every imaginable medium, but the truth is, I pretty much went straight to a bar and spent a couple hours there, drinking Bell’s Oberon.

I didn’t drive an hour just to drink alone. My buddy Rob Daumeyer, drove all the way from Cincinnati. Rob is one of those people who’s always telling you how stupid he is, how slow-witted, how thick and dull and sludgy between the ears. I guess that way, when he says something really funny, which he does about once every 80 seconds or so, you think, “He’s pretty funny for a moron,” and then he can steal your wallet. Or something. Needless to say, he is no dummy. Rob was my companion during our wonderful year in Ann Arbor, ’03-’04. He summed up the post-Fellowship experience thusly: “Everyone is so smart here. They’re always talking about literature and art and world affairs. Where I live, people say, ‘You ought to buy a boat,’ and that counts as sparkling conversation.” Maybe it was the Bell’s Oberon, or maybe the delivery, but that cracked me up. And so true — whenever I go to Ann Arbor by myself, I eavesdrop. One day in an Indian restaurant, I tuned my ears to three different tables, where the lunch conversations were: Hugo Chavez, monetary policy at the Fed, and the plight of Iraqi Kurds. No wonder no one there worries about their crabgrass.

Walking back to the bus stop, waiting for the third Bell’s to burn off, I bought a pair of earrings for Kate. I’m wearing them now. What the hell, she already has three times as many as I do.

Note that I have changed the book on the nightstand. Besides Hank’s “Tinsel,” I’ve added T.C. Boyle’s “The Women.” You’d think one of the country’s most respected novelists, writing for a respected publisher, could afford a decent copy editor, and yet, there it is, page 32:

And then someone said, “Here, here,” and they were all lifting glasses…

Groan. I see this mistake so often it makes my head hurt. And no, Danny, we haven’t had a DNA ruling yet — it’s “hear, hear,” not “here, here,” and if anyone wants to mix it up over this one, well bring it on. I’m right.

I bet they don’t make this mistake in Ann Arbor. Where everyone is so smart.

(Elsewhere in the same chapter, Boyle has a female character’s hair sweating under her “caftan.” I guess that’s possible — lots of caftans have hoods — but given that the same character appears later with her head wrapped in a towel, is it possible he meant “turban?” That mistake is almost beyond belief, but you never know.)

Well, just look where all our prowess with the language has gotten us: Every so often, when we’re watching HBO, a promo for “Hung” will come on. The announcer says, “Critics agree: ‘”Hung” is big, wicked fun…'” and Alan yells, THAT’S MY HEADLINE. It is. This is what we cling to, we language wizards.

Meanwhile not all is perfect over there in A2. Street fashion:

She wore a 36C. I could read the size. My mother used to call visible bra straps “slovenly.” I think she got it right.

Maybe she was thinking of Huge Chavez.

Meanwhile, some tastycake bloggage today:

You know those makeshift memorials* left for Michael Jackson. A sizable one grew outside the Motown Museum after M.J. croaked, because if there’s one thing this city embraces like a squishy teddy bear left out in the rain, it’s craziness. You rarely know what becomes of them, but not in this case, because the whole shootin’ match was scooped up, loaded into two open-back limos, taken to the cemetery with a police escort, and buried under a headstone with a nice, tasteful, understated inscription that I think Joe Jackson would be proud of. In the only evidence I’ve seen that maybe someone in Detroit has two brain cells to rub together, the police now call the four-car escort “a mistake.” I’m speechless. Read all about it.

* “Makeshift Memorial” — still a great name for a band. Happy Monday, all.

If it’s a gorgeous day in midsummer, it must be time for the annual tour of the canals, and Nance’s report on how our wordplay skills are holding up. Your correspondent:

Yes, she’s one of those jerks who wears mirrored sunglasses, which anyone can tell you is a hostile act. Not every day, however. Self-portrait in the journo-kayak.

First up, a Chris-Craft:

Chris-Craft used to make beautiful mahogany boats. Maybe, for enough money, they still do. For everyone else, Go Go.

Detroit fish are so tough, we catch them with wrenches:

Swan family:

These birds are not to be messed with. They are excellent parents and the size of battleships. The one standing guard hissed at me, and I moved away fast. The cygnets are growing their adult plumage, and looked sort of tufty.

Go ahead, leave. Everyone else is:

For all the livin’ left undone on Imalivin II, I suppose:

When trompe l’oeil is a bad idea:

At least make it a freshwater fish.

The stern isn’t set up for it, but adding a comma to this name…

…would give it a note of poetry. The comma goes in the middle, of course.

Best name of the year, so far. And it’s frequently open for business. Not today, alas:

That’s it for today, folks. Condolences to Dexter, who left this comment a few minutes ago on the previous thread: My beloved 14 year old Labrador Retriever passed last night at around 8 P.M.
Her name was P-Dogg Princess. She went quietly as I stroked her head.

Sorry, Dexter.

Even a peaceful suburb grows interesting after midnight. I went to bed at 1:15 a.m. and laid lay for a while listening to the night sounds. A few blocks away, I could hear an animal in distress, and tried to figure out what it was. Definitely not a cat, not quite a dog. Coyote? Possible, but again — not quite canine. I finally pegged it as a mortally wounded rabbit, which scream like little girls under those circumstances. Maybe an owl or hawk dropped it en route back to the tree. And then…

Two shots fired from a large-caliber handgun, the throaty kind. Pop pop. Instant silence.

Oh. OK. Remind me not to play the stereo too loud. A few minutes passed, and just as I was drifting off, the wounded-bunny sound started again.

I let sleep take me down, and hoped whoever was policing the neighborhood had good aim.

The birds started at 6 a.m., by the way. By 9 a.m., they’ve all vacated the arbor virea under my window and are off doing their bird activities, and you can’t hear a peep. But by then the lawn equipment has started. As I speak, someone has one of those goddamn power washers idling nearby, and all I can say is, I’m glad I don’t have a large-caliber handgun.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead, as Warren used to sing. I didn’t know he meant it literally.

Little Miss Grumpypants on a beautiful summer day. More coffee, stat.

So I’ve been reading about Senator Ensign, and wondering how things can get worse for him. The people who would have forgiven him for the affair surely have to be rocked back on their heels by the payoff to the paramour by…his parents? Mommy and daddy? Cleaning up after a 51-year-old man? And they say young people today are over-reliant on the ‘rents. They learned from the best. My mother bought a rug for me when I was starting out, a 9-by-12 raw-edged remnant, and I felt covered in shame. I told her I’d pay her back, and I never did, but still. The idea of her paying hush money to someone I’d shtupped would be unbearable.

This lesson keeps presenting itself over and over, and no one seems capable of learning it: Those who live by the “values” sword will die by it, and so let’s have mutual disarmament. I don’t know much about Ensign beyond that he’s a Republican with the usual Republican opportunism when it comes to lecturing others about family and marriage and so forth. Clearly these guys do it because they think it works, but when are they going to understand that when you do that, you are putting up big glass windows in your house, and when you act in conflict to your stated “values,” you are passing out a big basket of rocks.

So why not let it drop? Affairs happen. People are imperfect. We are all sinners. We live in a fallen world. Take your pick of platitudes, but mainly, cock your ear toward President Obama and recall his response to questions about Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy last summer: “My mother had me when she was 18.” Don’t just listen to the words, but also the subtext: Life is a messy business sometimes. Knowing that none of us get out of it alive and far fewer unscathed, why not stop making “family values” a cornerstone of your platform? Democrats get away with this not because of their enabling media stooges, but because they never claimed to be paragons in the first place.

And I don’t care how rich your parents are, any man who would let mom and dad pay off his mistress should just go ahead and put his balls in escrow.

Bloggage for the weekend:

Don’t read this Eric Zorn story if you’re in a place where crying is frowned upon. Yes, it’s a dog story. Meanwhile, Jim at Sweet Juniper found a dog clubhouse. Love the comment about how they all play poker and smoke cigars.

From the I Love Detroit file: 167 people are running for City Council, and in such a crowded field, have to find their own ways to stand out. Like John Cromer:

He’s basing his campaign on appealing to felons by promising to remove questions about criminal records from the city of Detroit’s job applications.

In Detroit, that may well be enough of a constituency to put him over the top.

Elitism watch! Mary Katherine Ham at The Weekly Standard gets a big yuk out of Anderson Cooper not understanding what Cool Whip is, and embeds the YouTube clip to prove it. Only it’s not Cool Whip, it’s Redi-Whip, dumbass, and even if he doesn’t know what it is at first, he catches on quick. Once Kate said, “I wish Spriggy could talk.” And I replied, “But what if he said stuff we didn’t want to hear?”

“Like what?” she said.

“Oh, like…’I don’t like it when you pet me that way, and I’ve never liked it.'”

She caught on fast. “Yeah. Or, ‘Kate was eating the Redi-Whip right out of the can with the refrigerator door open,'” she said, and then stopped, abruptly. Sometimes it’s best not to even let the dog in on your secrets.

Have a good weekend, all.

UPDATE: Google suspended my AdSense account. No, I don’t know why. Yes, I appealed. No, they didn’t accept my appeal. Have you ever tried arguing with Google? It’s like scratching your nails down the side of the Sears Tower, hoping to draw blood. In the meantime, I’m looking for a new ad network, because the loss of that TWO HUNDRED THIRTY SIX WHOLE CRAPPY DOLLARS is really going to put a dent in my income this year. Suggestions? I’m all ears.

It’s an all-pop culture blog today, because that’s what we have at the moment. The news out of China yesterday was about the so-called ethnic Uighurs, which the guy on NPR kept pronouncing “wiggers,” and wandering into the report halfway through, for about two seconds I wondered what Eminem had to do with China. It’s like the stupidity of Michael Jackson’s funeral was flying through the air on invisible wings.

So, then:

You know who also played at the Motown 25th anniversary concert, the one where — we have been reminded approximately eleventy jillion times in the last, GAWD, TWELVE DAYS — Michael Jackson unveiled the moonwalk to the world? Anyone?

Adam Ant.

You could look it up. I just did, and ran across both the YouTube video (which I recommend for its excruciating badness) and this amusing recap from a blogger, c. 2006. He notices things — commercials for the Commodore 64 personal computer, and Anacin. (This was before we learned aspirin is pure poison for everyone other than middle-aged people expecting a heart attack.) And it wasn’t just Adam Ant. Two other acts of the future played. Get ready: DeBarge and High Energy.

I think it’s useful to be reminded of this stuff from time to time. Berry Gordy had his streak, for sure. He caught a big wave, surfed it perfectly, and rode it all the way to a nice beach in Los Angeles, and has spent the rest of his life telling people about it but not once even coming close to duplicating it. His best artists got out from under his grinding bootheel as quickly as they could, Stevie Wonder and M.J. among them. His new discoveries sort of define “forgettable.” While I remember DeBarge, a Jackson family with 78 percent less talent, it’s mainly for a story a hotel manager in Fort Wayne told me after they passed through town on tour, about how they ordered room service consisting of a $500 bottle of cognac and a six-pack of Coke, and yes, they mixed them.

High Energy is lost to the ages, or at least my creeping Alzheimer’s. As for Adam Ant, well, Berry was all about maximizing the audience, and that crazy English kid had that “Goody Two Shoes” song on the charts, and, what? You don’t remember “Goody Two Shoes,” either? Well, maybe Journey was busy or something. The early ’80s was a bit fallow, pop-wise.

Why am I talking about Adam Ant? Oh, right: Because Jon Mayer played at M.J.’s funeral concert — you know, the noted soul artist. In 25 more years, I think we’ll be saying, yes, he was the Adam Ant of his day, and dated Jennifer Aniston.

If you have but one Jackson-memorial story to read today, make it the WashPost’s:

Carey, wearing a long gown with a plunging mesh neckline — demure, for her — performed her version of the Jackson 5 hit “I’ll Be There,” and looked meaningfully toward Jackson’s casket.

The musician Usher also looked toward Jackson’s casket during his song, then walked toward it and placed his hands on it.

Jennifer Hudson did not interact with the casket but sang a from-the-gut version of “Will You Be There,” accompanied by a troop of backup dancers. Somber, funereal backup dancers, yes, but backup dancers nonetheless. No one tried to moonwalk. It would have seemed disrespectful.

…His transformation of his own face took more than 20 years, as did his journey from beloved, giggling child-star to bizarre, fragile child-man.

The public’s transformation of Michael Jackson, from mutant to messiah, took less than two weeks. “Michael . . . made us love each other,” Sharpton called out. “It was Michael that made us . . . feed the hungry.”

God, it’s almost like you were there.

Elsewhere on the beat, the New York Times has been running some odd culture stuff lately. A few weeks ago, they brought us the shocking news that many people who start blogs lose interest in them after a while. Today, get ready to be blown out of your chair:

Dirty movies just don’t have stories anymore.

Wha-? Huh?

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

I had no idea they had even a casual interest, but then, I think the last dirty movie I saw in long form was by the Dark Brothers c. mid-’80s, and while I don’t think I lasted even seven minutes, I did see what we amateur screenwriters like to call the first act. No plot or script was in evidence then, either.

This seems to be the peg:

Plot-centrism was in full bloom in 2005 with the release of “Pirates,” about a ragtag group of sailors who go after a band of evil pirates.

That movie, with a budget of more than $1 million, had special effects (pirates materializing from the mist), and, yes, lots of sex. Two years later, the movie’s studio, Digital Playground, spent $8 million on a sequel — a remarkable sum in an industry where the average movie costs $25,000, according to the director of the two movies, Ali Joone.

I missed the era of “plot-centrism?” Pirates materializing from the mist? I need to get out more.

Finally, a last bit of bloggage, in which Billy Dee Williams comes up in discussion at a Detroit City Council meeting. That august body takes on a serious issue — malt-liquor ads that imply it’s the fastest way to something, perhaps date rape — in their own special way:

Councilwoman Martha Reeves said her beef is the way the cartoon ads portray Williams: “He’s ugly.”

I need to go in search of my brain. If you see it, mail it home.