I’ll say this for durable goods: There’s nothing like a brand-new major appliance to take your mind off your troubles, especially when it’s linked to the one activity that can always make me feel competent and in control — banishing dirt and clutter. Sears delivered our new washer today, a Bosch high-efficiency model. It uses about a tablespoon of water per load, and no more electricity than can be generated by a single stroke of a butterfly’s wings. The clothes are spun so thoroughly they come out practically dry. If I could, I’d move it into the living room and watch the clothes go ’round, which is more entertaining than the HGTV show I watched on the elliptical at the gym yesterday morning.

It reminded me of when we bought our first house, and got a brand-new washer and dryer. It was the first time I’d ever lived in a place where I didn’t have to shlep my laundry somewhere else, and along with the dishwasher, nothing before or since made me feel so rich, virtually overnight. All those nights spent in the Solar Sudser on Broadway in Fort Wayne left a mark — the dirty kids who would walk up to you and cough in your face, or the attendant with trichotillomania who would talk on the phone for hours, narrating events in her life, which lurched from crisis to crisis as she yanked her bald spot bigger and bigger. I’d sit there with my book and try to let the white noise of the swish swish swish do its job, but it could never compete with the cigarette smoke and the yelling and everything else. To do one’s own laundry, in one’s own basement, while you got something else done, too? Sheer luxury.

The delivery man was Croatian. Someday I’ll be able to hear an intriguing accent and refrain from doing an impromptu interview with its owner, but that day hasn’t arrived. Besides, when someone says they’re from “the good part” of Croatia, don’t you want to know which part that is? (It’s the part where the war wasn’t.) So what brings you to Detroit? The fact your homeland is entirely run by thugs? And how is that different from Detroit? Ha ha ha ha ha. Enjoy your new washer, you parody of a bored housewife, you.

Well, that may all change sooner than we think. Today’s the day we find out if the household can continue to afford detergent, and if so, for how long. I intend to be in my weightlifting class at the time. Good wishes appreciated, but our fate is already sealed. We just don’t know what it is yet.

Bloggage to take your mind off it all:

Those Brits really know how to write a headline, or at least a subhed: The worst christmas party injuries I see in my surgery / The comedy stuff, such as plucking shards of photocopier glass from revellers backsides, happens when the surgery is closed. Now that’s something to read.

Gay penguin soap operas. A good story, actually.

The Iraqi who graciously offered his shoes to our president? Is a folk hero.

My admiration for Roger Ebert’s blog grows with every entry. Today, one for you parents out there, likely to be the only ones who’ve seen a Tru3D movie (unless you really are a Hannah Montana fan, in which case I will back away slowly).

Off to wash away my worries. I’m doing darks.

From the Department of Whaddaya Mean We, White Man?, Detroit’s very own Mitch Albom has found a new vein of cheap sentiment to mine, and it is rich indeed, i.e., the so-called “open letter” trope:

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Huh? You do? Grease? Where did that come from, passing a tip to the masseuse? This piece is headlined, Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing. I suppose we should be grateful the editor didn’t try to channel the driving spirit behind the piece, and call it “t’anks for nuttin’!” But it’s bad enough as it is, a millionaire claiming solidarity with The People — worse, claiming to be a voice of the people. (One would hope that The People, if allowed to speak for themselves, could come up with a better turn of phrase than “the last gurgle of economic air,” etc. I do, anyway.)

The prose gets worse, too. You all know Mitch’s favorite rhetorical device: The single-sentence paragraph set off by lots of dramatic white space. Note the next passage; this may be a record:

And now you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?

They cut their salaries.

Or they resign in shame.

When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over a failed policy?

Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?

Who are you people?

I like that last one — Who are you people? It’s the latest way to say How dare you?, a phrase that always packs a punch. Why I never is another goodie, the verbal equivalent of a clutched strand of pearls. Albom is a short little guy, a fact that doesn’t come across on ESPN, which perhaps explain his effortless belligerence in print. If he actually walked onto a shop floor, they’d pull the old no-really-we-need-you-to-be-the-crash-test-dummy joke. And he’d believe it.

Last check: The story had been recommended 825 times by readers. Probably a record. Most popular? Yup. Most e-mailed? Yup. I smell…book contract!

Well, he’s going to need one. I assume you all heard the news that leaked over the weekend, which hasn’t been formally announced yet. As it stands, you all know as much as I do, including how it might affect our household. I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst, and if I can get something in between, I’ll be happy.

Of course, there are other ways to make money in this crazy world.

I’m posting this Sunday and spending Monday a) waiting for Sears to deliver our new washing machine, because of course no economic crisis can be complete without a major appliance throwing in the towel; b) studying Russian sentence structure; and c) writing and writing and writing and writing, in the hopes that someone might throw me a few coins for it, someday. I suppose Dwight has a lecture he’s about to deliver in 5,4,3…

You all have a good week.

UPDATE: For a lesson in how to say all the same things Mitch Albom said, only in less eye-rolling fashion, see the great Gretchen Morgenson in the NYT.

I didn’t trust my first reaction to Alex Kuczynski’s cover story in Sunday’s NYT magazine. The story is about how she, a very rich woman with a “successful investor” multimillionaire husband, had a child with the help of a surrogate, obviously far less fortunate, although not the white-trash rent-a-womb you might be expecting. We know this because Kuczynski, in explaining her reasons for choosing Cathy Hilling to be her designated vessel, makes an issue of it:

When we came across Cathy’s application, we saw that she was by far the most coherent and intelligent of the group. She wrote that she was happily married with three children. Her answers were not handwritten in the tiny allotted spaces; she had downloaded the original questionnaire and typed her responses at thoughtful length. Her attention to detail was heartening. And her computer-generated essay indicated, among other things, a certain level of competence. This gleaned morsel of information made me glad: she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it.

See? She lives in a house with a computer and knows how to use it. So much for any class guilt.

But what am I talking about? Alex Kuczynski suffers from no such thing. If she did, she might have hesitated at posing for the remarkable photos that accompany the piece. For starters, there’s the cover…

…which sort of suggests someone thought stretch marks and fat ankles would totally not go with that black sheath dress. The copy contradicts that — Kuczynski did indeed try to get pregnant herself for years before hiring Hilling. But then there’s the real money shot, inside:

That was taken “at home in Southampton, N.Y.,” just one of the couple’s fabulous homes. Note the “baby nurse” standing at attention, waiting for Mistress to hand off little Max, about two months old, should he need something only a nurse is qualified to provide, like maybe a diaper change.

I’m aware that my reaction to these photos seems pretty by-the-book. I can scarcely believe Kuczynski is so clueless that she didn’t know what the pictures would suggest. (There’s another porch shot, of Hilling on her own. You should not be surprised to learn it isn’t nearly so grand. Go ahead and click to see it, because I’m done hot-linking.) So I have to believe she planned it this way, for the “buzz.” As long as I’ve been doing this job, I’ve always held my most toxic contempt for people who say or do things they don’t believe, just to get the phones ringing.

So I’ll refrain from taking the bait, and hope little Max Dudley Stevenson is soon kidnapped by loving fairies who will spirit him away and raise him far from his horrible parents, perhaps on a farm in Iowa, like Clark Kent. (Kuczynski is her husband’s fourth wife, and Max either his sixth or seventh kid.)

I asked a bona fide member of the eastern media elite what he thought of this, and while he hadn’t read the story yet, he offered an interesting observation I hadn’t thought of:

Before the great weeding out of newsrooms, didn’t every shop have (or should have had) a pampered richie-bitchy? Whom all the male editors could not wilfully ignore? In features? (Or metro g/a? If nothing else, I’ve seen it in ingenue photogs, who just arrived from the Eddie Adams Photo Workshop and had long blond hair and only weeks or months into their extended internship do you learn she’s, like, a Rockefeller or something.)

I think he’s right. One of my first colleagues in Columbus used to speak of a former secretary, who cashed her paycheck every Friday and promptly took the loot next door to an upscale boutique, where she spent every penny on a new outfit. There was a columnist at the other paper who gave the accountants fits; they had to remind her to please cash her paycheck, because she always had half a dozen stacked up in her drawer, and they needed to get them off the books. And now that I think of it, I recall a copy editor in Fort Wayne who had married well and was passionately devoted to the cause of animal rights. She refused to wear leather, although she made an exception for the upholstery in her Mercedes.

And Caroline Kennedy interned at the New York Daily News. So I guess it could be worse.

My Monday-morning moping went away almost as soon as I expressed it yesterday. On my way to the gym, I returned a missed call to my cell phone. A man with a heavy Indian accent answered, and when I asked who had called me, said he represented something like Tech-Ar Corporation, and if I’d share a little personal information, he’d be happy to tell me about their exciting financial services.

“Please put me on your no-call list,” I said.

“We are not selling products or telemarketing,” he protested.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I am …Don …Junior,” he said. I started to laugh. In the background, I could hear another Indian accent saying, “Ma’am? Ma’am? I am not harassing you!”

I finally told Don Junior that if he made another call to a phone I have to buy minutes for, I’d be reporting him to the attorney general. Total b.s., but I figure they have their hands full in Mumbai these days, and really don’t need to be calling me.

One of the things I’ve learned from this blog after nearly eight years of keeping it daily, or nearly so:

Sometimes you’re just not that into it.

I suppose it’s inevitable. The election nearly killed many of us, and even though the news has not stopped or even slowed down — economic meltdown, brink-of-disaster-Detroit, Mumbai bloodbaths, hello newspaper what horrors have you brought me today? — it lacks a certain frisson of late, and that frisson is: Opposition. You could get into the election because no matter who you were rooting for, there was a guy on the other side, and you were working toward the crushing defeat of that guy, and when it happened or didn’t happen, we had, what’s the word? Closure. I hate that word, because it’s bullshit, and because it implies that stories end. Stories never end, which we’re discovering now. To be sure, a curtain rang down on November 4, but on November 5 Sarah Palin was still with us and campaigning was giving way to governing and the narrative wasn’t nearly so clear.

It isn’t just me. Even Rachel Maddow is getting on my nerves of late. Keith Olbermann has gone back to being supremely annoying. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert keep their standards high, but if it weren’t for that Christmas special, who knows how I’d feel?

Anyway, it just seems like a little air has gone out of the balloon, and many days I sit down to the blinking cursor with one thought uppermost in mind: Meh. It’ll pass; it always has in the past. And this isn’t navel-gazing. I’m telling you so if one day you check in and see a sign reading, “Gone to Texas,” you’ll know it wasn’t you, it was me.

Texas. I should be so lucky.

So today the New York Times has a story on Page One, about the way cost-cutting is hitting local TV news, and that is: Farewell to the highly paid local-TV anchor. I am hearing the sound of the world’s tiniest violin, and it is playing a sad, sad song. While a part of me can empathize with any journalist who’s feeling a moving rug underfoot, anyone who’s worked in newspapers isn’t going to be moved much by hearing the local show pony down at Channel 6 is losing their six- or seven-figure salary. Especially those of us who’ve worked outside the big cities, and may have known a few of these lucky bastards personally, may have trouble empathizing. It’s hard to accept, sometimes, that simply by virtue of showing up every night at 6 and 11, they have the power to command advertisers, and hence earn their dough. You think: Even viewers in this town aren’t that stupid. And yet they are.

It’s the passing of an era, to be sure. How many entertaining stories have we heard through the years? The adulterous male-female anchor team, caught making the two-backed beast in a deserted state park somewhere. The blow-dried talking head, annual salary somewhere north of $450,000 a year, enraging the local stripper community with his attempts to tip with quarters. (They called the station to complain.) The female anchor, arrested for DUI after her car pinballed off the Jersey barrier one too many times. Another so thoroughly useless around the newsroom for any job other than smiling and reading, told by the news director that she needn’t bother trying to actually write any copy. Dinosaurs stumbling into their own version of the tar pits. All that will be left are the veneers and the toupees.

Off to start the day with a little exercise. Envy me, world: I have the metabolism of a 50-year-old 51-year-old woman.

I have to leave bright and early for the auto shop, which recently stopped offering an Ethernet connection for customers chillin’ in the lounge. I’m taking advantage of this turn of events by taking my laptop and working on the sort of stuff that e-mail and Web access only gets in the way of, i.e., writing. Which means not much of a blog today, but I snipped a few zinnias to put in this simple little vase:

Howell Raines always did get on my last damn nerve. Aaron Barnhart lays out only one reason.

When someone remakes “Charlotte’s Web” with an R rating, the writer will go by one name, and it will be Coozledad.

There’s news, there’s non-news, and then there are headlines like this: The Duchess of Cornwall plans to take up pilates or Tai Chi. Can’t you hardly wait to know the rest?!?

And while we’re reading the Telegraph’s health page, ohmygod: Boy, 12, dies from heart failure after using too much deodorant.

I swear, the Brits put out the best newspapers, page for page, in the free world. I can’t believe I get to read them every day through the magic of the internets. Cold comfort at a time when my retirement portfolio is withering like a beehive hairdo on a 90-degree day, but we take it where we can get it, right?

You all have a good Friday, and be kind to one another — we’re all going to be standing in the same bread line someday, and we’ll have plenty of time to fight then.

Perhaps in preparation for the Great Delamination, I went through one of my periodic stints of tree-shaking yesterday, scanning Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist for any freelancing opportunity I might be unaware of. I found one asking for freelance writers willing to turn out five 400-word pieces per week, for $2 per.

I e-mailed and asked for clarification. Surely, I asked, that $2 figure was a mistake?

No, it wasn’t, came the reply: “These are very simple articles that won’t require any research,” and that was the going rate. Two thousand words = $10.

I’m consistently amazed by the economics of this thing. To this day, when there’s a big layoff at a newspaper or some other catastrophe in the life of someone who writes for a living, someone will pipe up in the comments on a blog somewhere: They should start a blog and join an ad network, and then they’ll be working for themselves. Win-win!

Meanwhile, Bossy, who gets 10 times the traffic I do — yes, 7,000 to 9,000 uniques a day — can’t make a living from her blog. (Even though she brought this reader great pleasure with her examination of “Something’s Gotta Give,” a film that made me insane, for many of the same reasons. I mean, sure, playwrights have kitchens like that. If their name is Neil Simon.)

Meanwhile, journalists, would you like to be insulted? Take note of the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Subhed: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.” Here’s the bailout: If you’re a recently severed journalist, TypePad will give you a free pro blogging account and access to their ad network, which “pays a lot more than simple Google text ads,” a retail value of about $150. After that, it’s all up to you! Take flight, little journalist! And if you learn that your TypePad blog, “while clever,” will not pay your bills, either, perhaps Starbucks is hiring.

Mommy’s in a bad mood today. Mommy thinks she should go lift weights.

So a little bloggage:

While Mitch Albom was pretending to be Woody Guthrie in the paper — a new low for phoning it in, I might add, and I don’t even want to think how much he makes — he was actually down in Florida hangin’ with his cool celebrity friends at the Miami Book Fair. (See video.) I also wouldn’t rule out the idea that he’s using makeup (man-kup?) or, possibly Botox. There’s something odd about the way his face moves, or doesn’t move.

Finally, a favor for a friend, another former colleague:

My oldest son Derek is a graduating high school senior, and he has been nominated to participate in a video scholarship contest. The scholarship could net him a nice chunk of college cash. ($20,000 to the first place winner). He created what I think (father or not) is the best on the site (certainly the “corny”-est), but the contest is decided solely upon popular vote, not on quality or creativity. (which right now seems to mean which student can get the most people to vote, and vote, and vote … oh yeah, and vote as many times as they can) … between now and November 28th.

The video is here, and it is indeed corny — I say that with love, because corniness seems to be the point. The scholarship is offered by King Corn, so no matter how you feel about high-fructose corn syrup, you can point your browsers in the direction of a good cause. You can vote as often as you like, and you don’t have to sit through the whole video to do so. And certainly, his dad is going to need all the college-finance help he can get, seeing as how he works in journalism.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I drift further from the newspaper business, I write about it less. Frankly, its stupid self-inflicted problems don’t interest me very much anymore, particularly as they — the managers who still have a) jobs; and b) offices with doors that close — seem intent on continuing to generate them.

Still, it seems a day doesn’t go by without a mention of the Tribune Co.’s reinvention officer Lee Abrams on Romenesko, the only media blog worth reading. Abrams, so cheerily clueless, is sort of a clown prince of the newspaper meltdown, an ongoing poor-Yorick scene that we turn to for gallows humor as we contemplate a life spent selling apples on street corners. As you newspaper people know, Abrams recently oversaw the essential project of any newspaper consultant, the first thing they always do, the No. 1 busywork job that can take the better part of a year and thereby puts off the great reckoning that much longer: A redesign. The Trib was remixed in the usual way, into a big, graphics-heavy load of crap that makes designers pee their pants with pleasure and readers say, “Um, where’s the news?”

(The introductory video on the Trib’s website featured a designer using the term “big, exciting promo,” a phrase surely only used by designers.)

The reviews are mixed, but of course Abrams is a big fan. Here’s one of Abrams’ trademark memos, linked on Romenesko, with the usual stylistic flourishes of exclamation points and all-caps:

Of course we get the “it looks like USA Today” comments. Well, USA Today is one of the few newspapers GROWING, so I’m not sure that’s so bad–but MORE importantly, all you have to do is read the Chicago Tribune and you’ll know it’s clearly NOT USA TODAY. IF a colorful and energetic looks that reminds some remotely of USA TODAY and it gets more people engaged in the content….good.

So this is an e-mail I recently received from a Chicago resident and former Trib subscriber. I pass it along not to rain on Abrams’ parade, but on the off chance he might actually want to read it. To make it more familiar to him, I’ve edited it in the new Trib style of eye-catching text. In other words, it’s been Abrams-ized:

We’ve decided to DROP the Trib and take the seven-day NYT. We feel like we gave the redesign A FAIR SHOT over the past two weeks, but we HAVEN’T taken to the new look. Here we are in the midst of the BIGGEST STORY of our LIVES — we really are on the edge of a potential GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!!! — and 70% of the front page is given over to GRAPHICS, TEASERS and HUGE ART. Plus, the geniuses folded the business section into the news section. These are serious times but the Tribune looks and reads decidedly UNserious. FUCK ’em. I’ll keep the Sun-Times for local news and sports and depend the the Times for EVERYTHING ELSE.

See you on the corner!