How well I recall those hal­cyon days when news­pa­pers had space and occa­sion­ally put some­thing in it. The wires were like our own pri­vate inter­net, bring­ing the won­ders of the world to our desks. One day, it brought a lengthy Sun­day piece over the tran­som, an excerpt from a new book, “The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly Amer­ica Cheats the Childless.”

It was set up as a day in the life of a child­less woman, let’s call her Betty Bar­ren, as she nav­i­gates her hos­tile world. Ter­ri­ble things hap­pen to her. She has to cover for a co-worker who left early to watch her kid’s soc­cer game. Another one is out on mater­nity leave and it was recently announced that when she returns, she’ll be work­ing reduced hours, which equals more work for Betty. Betty finally is able to get away from this hor­ri­ble place — nearly suf­fo­cated by all the feath­erbeds lying around — and stops at a drug­store for headache relief. She pulls into a space, only to see the sign: Reserved for expec­tant moth­ers. Not that she has much money to spend on Tylenol, any­way, the par­ents hav­ing sucked up all the tax credits.

It went on at some length like this. Poor Betty! Is she the unluck­i­est child­less woman in the world? No, just typical.

As an intro­duc­tion to the nascent social move­ment some­times known as the Child-Free, it was an eye-opener. I did a lit­tle inter­net research, the inter­net being where a lot of them hung out, bitch­ing on Usenet boards about all those things Betty endured, and about a mil­lion more. They had their own vocab­u­lary. Chil­dren were spawn, sprogs or crotch­fruit. Par­ents are breed­ers, of course. There were long, long threads on whether this or that celebrity or super­model had lost hot­ness since she sprogged. (The con­sen­sus, inevitably, was that she had.) There were self-righteous rants about not tax­ing the frag­ile earth with more destruc­tive humans, inter­spersed with whin­ing about why they can’t stay home from work when their pets are sick. (They all had pets. They called them “fur chil­dren.”) There were even a few beefs I could absolutely get with, about mis­be­hav­ing tod­dlers at sym­phony orches­tras and the like. But the over­whelm­ing impres­sion was of a group of peo­ple car­ry­ing a dou­ble load of resent­ment and free time. Yes, even with all those unpaid extra hours at work, cov­er­ing for the parents.

“The Baby Boon” excerpt was of a piece with this, with the same tone of hec­tor­ing indignation.

(I should pause at this point and say that I don’t want to make this a debate over the choice of whether or not to have a child, which is about as per­sonal as it gets and, ulti­mately, not very inter­est­ing. There are rewards and costs for both choices. I enjoy many friends and acquain­tances in both camps, and love them all. And in case you’re won­der­ing, every anec­dote about Betty Bar­ren can be matched with one from the other side, about Patty Party and her ten­dency to show up for work late after a night on the town, etc. The tax pol­icy, etc. I’ll leave for another day, although the late jour­nal­ist Mar­jorie Williams took the book apart rather ably here.)

Any­way, after read­ing Betty’s sad story and a gloss over the ter­ri­bly unfair cul­ture and gov­ern­ment poli­cies that sup­port this state of affairs, I scrolled back up to see who had writ­ten this screed. Eli­nor Bur­kett. The name stayed with me.

So when the lady in pur­ple hip-checked her part­ner away from the micro­phone last night at the Oscars, surely the rud­est dis­play in some time, I knew there was a rea­son her name sounded famil­iar. Her speech was mush, by the way, but I love the look on his face. You will not be sur­prised to learn they’re not speak­ing. Salon has a back­grounder.

And if you’re still inter­ested, John Scalzi’s “Trolling the Child­free” is sort of mag­nif­i­cent. Oh, and I always park in those “reserved for expec­tant moth­ers” spaces. They’re not enforced by law, and my sore knee fre­quently both­ers me more than a late-term preg­nancy ever did. If any­one ever chal­lenges me, I plan to say, “The doc­tor just called. It’s twins! I’m so happy!”

So how was your week­end? Mine was OK, except for get­ting sick with some sort of chesty/bronchial thing. I swing between 100-degree fevers and soak­ing sweats, which isn’t pleas­ant. But I’ll survive.

I think.

Nathan Gotsch, one of those young squeaky-clean Fort Wayne guys for whom the phrase “you went to Con­cor­dia, didn’t you?” was coined, is try­ing to pro­duce a TV pilot far away from the Man, man. It’s an expan­sion of his Josh Jen­nings for Con­gress spoof of 2006 — he pro­duced a cam­paign com­mer­cial for a fic­tional char­ac­ter who decided a job in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives would be way bet­ter than one at Sub­way. He got a lit­tle atten­tion, if “being men­tioned on Tucker Carlson’s show” counts as “a lit­tle atten­tion,” and I think it does.

Any­way, Nathan got some atten­tion from the Man, and after con­sid­er­ing what going the tra­di­tional route would entail, decided to blaze an indie trail. He’s put together a bud­get for a $25,000 pilot pro­duc­tion, and is try­ing to raise the dough via Kick­starter. Here’s his fundrais­ing page.

I read the script and it’s pretty funny. (Fun­nier than “Reno 911,” any­way.) If you’d like to help Nathan, go to his Kick­starter page, watch the video, mar­vel at how much he resem­bles the absolute essence of a Con­cor­dia grad­u­ate, and, if you’re so inclined, kick him a few bucks. He has a week to raise about $15K. Goad to my fel­low Hoosiers, past and present — although the pilot script never explic­itly says so, the story’s set in Fort Wayne, and I can assume this would come up in sub­se­quent episodes. How­ever, if it gets picked up, I think we can expect to see Nathan’s crew in Michi­gan for exte­ri­ors shoot­ing, because we have the fat tax incen­tives. (For now.) So win-win all around for my Mid­west playas.

No pres­sure, just a chance to use a Web 2.0 idea for good, for a change. (You know how Kick­starter works, right? Nathan only gets the money if he reaches his goal. If not, you’re not billed. That way you aren’t giv­ing him cash to drink away his sor­rows because he didn’t get enough to make his pilot.)

Given the bum­mer tone of recent days, let’s make this Twin­kle Thurs­day, and strive for opti­mism in all things. It’s what Josh would do.

While this isn’t exactly a happy-news sort of thing, I’m call­ing it out because it makes me feel opti­mistic about the future — of jour­nal­ism, any­way. One of our read­ers, Kim, left it low in the com­ments of yesterday’s post, but let’s drag it out into the light of day:

Bob (not Greene) and all the other journos out there who have been accused of mak­ing it up: Here’s the story we used from a stu­dent jour­nal­ist who was at the bor­ing press con­fer­ence but pay­ing close atten­tion (and record­ing it) because she didn’t want to get it wrong. Note the link to actu­ally lis­ten to the state del­e­gate say­ing the words he now says were “poorly cho­sen” and mis­in­ter­preted. As you might expect, there’s been a fecal avalanche as a result. Rachel M., Huff­Post, Sally Quinn — everybody’s weigh­ing in. There’s a move­ment to skewer the stu­dent reporter because she is a stu­dent and because much larger, “actual” papers were present and totally missed it. Why’d they miss it? My guess is they were just mak­ing the dough­nuts, going to a con­ser­v­a­tive legislator’s press con­fer­ence about de-funding Planned Par­ent­hood and fil­ing that Sat­ur­day feed-the-beast story. Sim­i­lar to the rea­son a local del­e­gate who was present as a sup­porter of de-funding PP did not hear it — she admit­ted to not pay­ing atten­tion because she was talk­ing to another del­e­gate. Quite a les­son for the stu­dent. I’d say for pub­lic offi­cials every­where, too, but that would make me seem much younger than I am.

The story, if you’re not inclined to click through, quotes a state delegate’s inter­est­ing opin­ion about why there are so many dis­abled chil­dren in the world:

“The num­ber of chil­dren who are born sub­se­quent to a first abor­tion with hand­i­caps has increased dra­mat­i­cally. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the sub­se­quent chil­dren,” said Mar­shall, a Republican.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Mar­shall, well, he now says he didn’t exactly say that:

“No one who knows me or my record would imag­ine that I believe or intended to com­mu­ni­cate such an offen­sive notion. I have devoted a gen­er­a­tion of work to defend­ing dis­abled and unwanted chil­dren, and have always main­tained that they are spe­cial bless­ings to their parents.”

In other words: Shit. And you were record­ing? Dou­ble shit.

I love it when Roger damns with faint praise. In this case, review­ing “The Crazies.”

“The Cra­zies” is a per­fectly com­pe­tent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its inter­est for me, the Zom­bie Film. It pro­vides such a con­ve­nient sto­ry­telling device: Large num­bers of mind­less zom­bies lurch toward the cam­era as the hero wreaks sav­age destruc­tion; they can be quickly blown away, although not with­out risk and occa­sional loss of life. When suf­fi­cient zom­bies have been run through, it’s time for a new dawn.

“The Cra­zies” stars NN.C crush object Tim­o­thy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, two actors who class up the joint, although I watched the trailer and it uses the old “no sig­nal” cell-phone trope. As they say in that other zom­bie movie: One more for the bon­fire. (That link doesn’t go to an imdB page, by the way, but to a great “no sig­nal” mon­tage, via John August, which he cred­its to Four­Four. Has all due credit been passed around? I hope so.)

It’s 9:47, which means my Flex Appeal class starts in 13 min­utes and I must away. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beau­ti­ful, and so are you, dear read­ers. So I’m going out to play.

From the num­ber of times this story turned up in my Face­book feed yes­ter­day I have to assume everyone’s seen it by now, but not all of you stay online all day, so what the hell. It’s about Roger Ebert, and what his life is like now that he’s lost the abil­ity to speak, eat and drink. (He lost his jaw to can­cer four years ago, and recon­struc­tive surgery has been one fail­ure after another.)

Ebert posed for a pic­ture; with his imper­fectly fixed face, that requires no small amount of courage in and of itself. I’m glad he did, not just because it’s bet­ter to show one’s bro­ken face than to hide it, but because even a face that’s half-gone can still show the man within. Look at the eyes, squinched a lit­tle in what looks like mer­ri­ment, although you can’t say for sure at first glance — the mouth has been shaped by sur­geons into a sim­u­lacrum of a smile, and maybe that’s what leads your impres­sion. But once you read the story, you know: This is a man who smiles, who still smiles, who in fact seems to be smil­ing much of the time. He’s angered not by the fate of his phys­i­cal body, but by the same things he was angered by before, that anger us all — petty bull­shit, money-grubbing, spotty inter­net service.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one after­noon after some­one part­ing looks at him a lit­tle sadly. Look how happy I am.

I came late to my appre­ci­a­tion of Ebert. I was a Siskel par­ti­san, once upon a time. Siskel was like me — snooty, irri­ta­ble, a fan of Art. Ebert, the tabloid critic, was more of the hoi pol­loi, giv­ing three and a half stars to action movies, space epics and other crap. It was a while before I real­ized he was as dif­fi­cult to please as any dis­cern­ing arbiter, but he knew enough about movies and why peo­ple see them to judge them as indi­vid­u­als. “Con Air” is not “Cit­i­zen Kane,” but he didn’t see any rea­son to rub anyone’s nose in it if they pre­ferred action to Orson Welles. Mostly, I was in awe of his pro­duc­tiv­ity. It’s pretty com­mon — or was — for large news­pa­pers to have an A critic and a B critic, the lat­ter of whom was some­times a free­lancer. The A critic does the big-movie reviews and most of the related sto­ries, roundups and the like, while the B critic sweeps up behind him or her, or just light­ens the load. It’s not unusual for half a dozen movies to open on a sum­mer week­end, rang­ing from block­busters to art-house fare, and that’s a lot of stuff to see, con­sider and review in a week. Five years ago, I changed planes in Chicago on a Fri­day and picked up a Sun-Times. Ebert had bylines on six reviews, and I believe they cov­ered that range of ambi­tion. His take on the barrel-bottom straight-to-video entry was as con­sid­ered, and as respect­ful, as his thoughts on the $200 mil­lion tent­pole play­ing in all the multiplexes.

Respect­ful doesn’t mean boot-licking, by the way. Like my old screen­writ­ing teacher Terry, who was also a critic, he walks into every film expect­ing to enjoy him­self. (That’s what the audi­ence does, after all; why would you pay eight bucks to be pun­ished?) To the extent that the film ful­fills or dis­ap­points that expec­ta­tion is what he bases his reviews on. It seems like a small thing. It isn’t. You might think you’re a movie fan, but imag­ine what it would be like to be required to see every­thing, and then write about it after­ward, to have to form an opin­ion, sup­port the opin­ion, and then present it to a gen­eral audi­ence in a more styl­ish way than merely say­ing whether it was awe­some or sucked.

Now imag­ine doing it for 40 years or so, never los­ing your enthu­si­asm, and in fact adding to your work­load with extra assign­ments like his Great Movies series (which began as a Sun­day col­umn, swapped off every other week with the music critic, who wrote about the Great Albums), and the TV show, and the teach­ing gigs, and the film-festival work, and all the rest of it.

Now add can­cer and facial muti­la­tion, the lit­eral loss of your voice. Tell me how you feel about it then.

The fact Ebert is still at work in any capac­ity, much less at full speed, is noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle. His last extended leave, when he nearly died, he missed months of movies. When he came back, he resumed his old blis­ter­ing pace, and then watched the movies he’d missed, a few at a time, writ­ing reviews of them, so that the record would be com­plete. I think he knows what his opin­ion means to the moviego­ing pub­lic. I don’t see a lot of movies in the­aters, but I try to catch up with the bigs even­tu­ally, and I never feel like I’ve watched it all the way until I’ve opened the lap­top after­ward to see what Roger thought of it.

Lord knows he’s not per­fect. I dis­agree with him on many films, and his fond­ness for Spike Lee will always come between us. But in every other way — exper­tise, atti­tude, prac­tice — he is noth­ing short of a hero.

Ebert is dying in incre­ments, and he is aware of it.

I know it is com­ing, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is noth­ing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a jour­nal entry titled “Go Gen­tly into That Good Night.” I hope to be spared as much pain as pos­si­ble on the approach path. I was per­fectly con­tent before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grate­ful for is the gift of intel­li­gence, and for life, love, won­der, and laugh­ter. You can’t say it wasn’t inter­est­ing. My lifetime’s mem­o­ries are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eter­nity no more than that lit­tle sou­venir of the Eif­fel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Years ago, I was watch­ing the cul­tural ker­fuf­fle over “The Pas­sion of the Christ,” prob­a­bly on Amy Welborn’s blog, because that was the sort of thing she wrote about a lot, back then. Ebert gave the film four stars, but the review is hardly wor­ship­ful, and he states out­right that “it is the most vio­lent movie I have ever seen.” I men­tioned this review some­where in her com­ments sec­tions, and some­one else retorted, Roger Ebert is an old man and he’s dying. His opin­ion no longer mat­ters, or words to that effect. This was before his ill­ness had taken its most seri­ous tolls (he’s fought it for years), but I was amazed by not only the cru­elty of that remark, but its utter igno­rance. Roger Ebert’s opin­ion not only still mat­ters, it will mat­ter for a long time after he’s gone. If that isn’t the best epi­taph a writer can hope for, I don’t know what is.

If luck smiles on my sched­ule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The man­agers of the project haven’t announced its loca­tion yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s dif­fi­cult to keep an aban­doned house that has been care­fully cov­ered with ice much of a secret. They’ve sur­rounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get dis­turbed before the offi­cial project pho­tographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the tem­per­a­ture should be high enough that things should be a lit­tle drippy. High pres­sure promises preser­v­a­tive tem­per­a­tures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guer­rilla art projects going on around here — a pre­vi­ous cadre of hip­sters painted aban­doned houses, from roof to foun­da­tion, includ­ing win­dows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I won­der if we’re on the tip­ping point of becom­ing a play­ground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bar­tender become a real-estate devel­oper, but now it’s even eas­ier. In “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Bar­low remarks that Detroit is a pretty big can­vas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated con­cern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attach­ing a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while cer­tainly wor­thy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judg­ment until I see it. One of the very few con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big expla­na­tion text, that when an artist has to post a sign­board telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint sig­ni­fies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “ref­er­ence the con­tem­po­rary urban con­di­tions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look for­ward to see­ing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of say­ing, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Sat­ur­day, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban con­di­tions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, any­way. I’ve reached the stage of win­ter where feel­ing bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get out­doors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hiber­nate the sea­son away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stew­art on? And Stew­art said Fox has “taken rea­son­able con­cerns about this pres­i­dent …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next com­ing of Chair­man Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If every­one is hip to this, why do these things keep get­ting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to sud­denly read a mil­lion words to get up to speed, and sev­eral hun­dred of the words involve morons whin­ing that they should have to pay for some­thing and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last week­end seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announce­ment. Ama­zon is using cheap e-books to sell Kin­dles, and MacMil­lan is try­ing to hold the line on sell­ing its inven­tory at a loss, for obvi­ous rea­sons. Here’s Vir­ginia Postrel at the Atlantic with some­thing of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stu­pid things peo­ple are say­ing in the wake of last week’s events, includ­ing (in so many words), “it’s not like writ­ing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for any­thing I can steal with impunity.” (I’m think­ing this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those peo­ple say­ing, “E-books are great, because then the last bar­rier stand­ing between the ded­i­cated ama­teur and his vast read­er­ship will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile read­ers any any pub­lisher within dri­ving dis­tance. And please, in keep­ing with your views about the real work of pub­lish­ing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental pro­posal to help little-seen inde­pen­dent films get a lit­tle more-seen, offer­ing feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the com­ments have already started:

“The begin­ning of the end,” wrote one user in com­ments; “i thought the pur­pose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seri­ously [sic] sell­ing out,” appar­ently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where peo­ple think noth­ing of pay­ing $4 for a cup of cof­fee could they balk at the idea of pay­ing a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy break­fast, step one to improv­ing one’s per­spec­tive on win­ter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

A great time was had by me at the Mit­ten Movie Project last night (and prob­a­bly at least some oth­ers). The monthly fes­ti­val of short films fea­tured the director’s cut of “The Mes­sage,” our Decem­ber 48-hour chal­lenge short, and please don’t laugh — unlike most director’s cuts, this one really was bet­ter than the orig­i­nal. (Yes, of course it grew. By two minutes.)

The Mit­ten is curated by one of our pro­duc­ers, Con­nie Mangilin, who keeps a relent­lessly upbeat atti­tude about film in Michi­gan, large and small. She fre­quently works on the large pro­duc­tions, in part to finance her par­tic­i­pa­tion in the small ones. Know­ing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amaz­ing to see how many peo­ple even bother to do it, and grat­i­fy­ing that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the prob­lem was, and for­give them for it. When you can’t pay peo­ple, you get peo­ple will­ing to work for noth­ing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Ama­teur actors are more likely to have grat­ing upper-Midwest eeac­cents that can reduce even well-written dia­logue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hip­ster types, which becomes a prob­lem when you’ve writ­ten a role for, say, a gang­ster. A word to direc­tors: Putting sun­glasses on a guy with a soul patch and a vis­i­ble pierc­ing doesn’t make him look par­tic­u­larly threat­en­ing. He just looks like an arty hip­ster douchebag. By the way, many pro­fes­sional actors have voice prob­lems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska south­ern Mis­souri, but has a per­sis­tent con­tem­po­rary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludi­crous in many roles, par­tic­u­larly as Achilles.)

Among the high­lights last night: “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” a short about Toby Bar­low, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Cov­ing­ton, the inspir­ing soul behind the Geor­gia Street Com­mu­nity Col­lec­tive, a recla­ma­tion of a bat­tered neigh­bor­hood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has fea­tured the GSCC a time or three, and when I men­tioned it here some months back, one of you fab­u­lous NN.C read­ers hit their Pay­pal but­ton and donated $50. I learned of this some­time later, and while I know who­ever did it wasn’t look­ing for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doc­tor but an awe­some karaoke singer — in Tel­ugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actu­ally worked in var­i­ous Telugu-language films; it’s the one spo­ken in south­ern India, and the videos play­ing dur­ing his karaoke per­for­mance fea­tured him­self in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance num­ber. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Pee­wee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The exis­tence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our eas­ily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a final­ist in the com­pe­ti­tion (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bit­ter tears.

So, then, blog­gage? There must be some:

I was struck by this pic­ture of she-who, pre­sum­ably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she def­i­nitely has the Fox Paren­the­ses, the styling of the hair into punc­tu­a­tion marks fram­ing the face. For some rea­son this is the pre­ferred hair­style of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pic­tures and be care­ful how often you kiss them. I pre­dict we’ll start see­ing a lot more caramel-colored high­lights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The for­mer Sen. Coats was one of the bird­brains behind the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Decency Act, an early attempt at reg­u­lat­ing smut on the inter­net, a stag­ger­ingly dimwit­ted piece of leg­is­la­tion that was over­turned by the Supreme Court unan­i­mously. When you can get Jus­tice John Paul Stevens and Jus­tice Antonin Scalia to agree on some­thing, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a bet­ter tomorrow.

A story in Sunday’s NYT makes the case for George Clooney, movie star AND actor. I agree 100 per­cent. As a with­ered crone, of course my hubba-hubba inter­est in him is, in a word, gross, so I lay that aside and con­cen­trate, like the writer of this piece does, on how he does it. We saw “Up in the Air” over the week­end, and there were sev­eral points where I noticed what isn’t appeal­ing about his phys­i­cal­ity — he’s a lit­tle too thin, and has the big Hol­ly­wood head first pointed out by LAMary some time back. (As an Ange­leno who has seen many in the flesh, she called actors “the lol­lipop peo­ple.”) There was an angle here and there where you could see his neck is get­ting crepey, although he retains the Clooney sparkle and will until he dies.

What I like about him is his (seem­ing) pro­fes­sional pluck, uncom­mon in a movie star capa­ble of phon­ing it in until retire­ment. He comes across as not only a nice movie-star guy, but one who really is all about the work. He takes chances, stretches him­self, is unafraid of both fail­ure and unflat­ter­ing cam­era angles that show his soft­en­ing neck. He has the self-effacement and good sense not to whine about how hard it is to be him, at least in pub­lic. I know a few peo­ple who’ve had per­sonal encoun­ters with him and say he’s pretty much as adver­tised, and if it really is all bull­shit and he’s just very good at snow­ing fan­girls like me, then, well-snowed, sir.

Ter­rence Raf­ferty gets it right at the very beginning:

He’s the kind of actor who could float along for­ever on his genial pres­ence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn’t. (Or doesn’t always.) That’s the mystery.

That is, indeed, the mys­tery. It’s hard to imag­ine another actor car­ry­ing “Up in the Air” as capa­bly as he does, even when you look closely and see where he gets help. He plays a son of a bitch who hap­pily fires peo­ple for a liv­ing, but gains our sym­pa­thy through the early intro­duc­tion of an even big­ger mon­ster, a young under­ling who wants to fire peo­ple for a liv­ing via tele­con­fer­ence. He makes a pitch for the com­pa­ra­ble dig­nity of doing such ugly work in per­son, and you almost for­get that he’s the guy who makes his liv­ing through out­sourced ter­mi­na­tions in the first place. It’s the Don Cor­leone trick; he’s happy to make his liv­ing from vio­lence, gam­bling, pros­ti­tu­tion and pro­tec­tion, but not from drugs. He’s the best bad guy in the room.

I try not to read too much about movies I intend to see in the­aters, but it was hard to miss the chat­ter about “Up in the Air,” par­tic­u­larly as it was par­tially shot here and touches the raw wound of job loss. I read before­hand about how Jason Reit­man, the writer and direc­tor, had to make a tonal shift in his script as the story was, as we say in jour­nal­ism, over­taken by events. But what­ever he had to rewrite or rethink, he did it excep­tion­ally well. It’s so sure-footed. I think one rea­son I liked this movie so much is, we don’t see enough sto­ries onscreen about people’s work lives (unless they’re doc­tors or lawyers or police, that is). We cer­tainly don’t see many about peo­ple who work in white-collar office jobs, and I found myself moved by shots that weren’t even par­tic­u­larly fussed over — the pans of offices already half-empty, the extra chairs pushed into a vacant cubi­cle, the phones piled up on the floor, the way every­one sees Clooney walk in and imme­di­ately cower in fear. I’ve been there; my office looked like that when I left, and one of the excit­ing new ad hoc com­mit­tees for 2005 was sup­posed to be the rearrange­ment and removal of fur­ni­ture so it didn’t look so tumbleweedy.

I also like Rafferty’s career assess­ment of Clooney, as he called out my two favorite per­for­mances — “Out of Sight” and “Michael Clay­ton,” and the best part of the lat­ter film. It’s the final, two-minute shot of the Cloon­ester in the back of a cab:

He flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cab­bie to drive, and it’s only then that you under­stand how elo­quent Mr. Clooney’s body lan­guage has been through­out the pre­ced­ing two hours — how tensely he’s been hold­ing him­self, how war­ily he’s been siz­ing up his dan­ger­ous world. As he sits in the cab, just rid­ing, the cam­era stays on him for two full min­utes. He does noth­ing, appar­ently. His expres­sion hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he’s been through in his blank­ness, his emptied-out eyes. You can’t stop look­ing at him. It’s a great, dar­ing piece of act­ing. Only a movie star could get away with it.

(I dis­agree with that last sen­tence, by the way. Bob Hoskins, “The Long Good Fri­day,” end of discussion.)

OK, then. Movie Mon­day it is, I guess. We also caught an oldie I’d never seen before, “Bound,” on cable Fri­day night. More on that when I recover from how good it was.

Blog­gage? Sure:

The Harry Reid story is lead­ing the week­end news cycle as “Game Change,” the new book about the 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, gets cir­cu­lat­ing. But don’t miss this excerpt in New York mag­a­zine, about the melt­down of another hand­some man, John Edwards, who fell for the old­est trap in the world.

Speak­ing of Reid, who still says “Negro,” any­way? Doesn’t he know the code word yet? “Articulate?”

This NYT Styles story was so stu­pid it made my brain hurt. Thank God for Ter­rence Rafferty.

I’m late get­ting to the big New Yorker pro­file of John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and, it would seem, the model for Steve Martin’s char­ac­ter in “Baby Mama.” Note well:

His belief in the power of the indi­vid­ual is such that blame falls on indi­vid­u­als, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat per­son that he or she is unhealthy or fat. Peo­ple just need to eat bet­ter. He told me, “If I could, I would wave a magic wand so that Amer­i­cans ate bet­ter, because the dis­eases that are killing us — heart dis­ease, can­cer, dia­betes, mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis, Alzheimer’s — these dis­eases have a high cor­re­la­tion with diet. And that is some­thing that most peo­ple do not understand.”

It mat­ters less to him that our food sys­tem, for a dozen rea­sons, as Michael Pol­lan, Eric Schlosser, and many oth­ers have chron­i­cled, has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at arti­fi­cially low cost to a mis­guided pub­lic. Peo­ple have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on them­selves, and on every­one else. In his Wall Street Jour­nal col­umn, Mackey wrote of “the real­iza­tion that every Amer­i­can adult is respon­si­ble for his or her own health. Unfor­tu­nately, many of our health-care prob­lems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Amer­i­cans are now over­weight, and one-third are obese.” Inar­guable as this asser­tion may be, it struck a dis­cor­dant note. Peo­ple who may look to Whole Foods to agi­tate for changes in the food sys­tem, or who have been bank­rupted by med­ical costs despite eat­ing right, might won­der if it was quite the moment to be preach­ing per­sonal responsibility.

Worth your time.

And another week begins. At least it was a pretty week­end. Enjoy it.

Well, we got our snow. The world is white — I’d guessti­mate we topped out at three inches or so — and the neigh­bor­hood resounds with the blast of two-cycle engines. No, wait — the last one just stopped. That would be ours, and don’t give me any crap about it, Lance Man­nion, because we have a long dri­ve­way and this ain’t Atlanta. So now the world is white and quiet, and our lit­tle part of it is safe for pedes­tri­ans. Win­ter is on. Tem­per­a­tures remain low, and I’m hop­ing the snow is safe for a while. It’s been a while since I went out in my North Face and mir­rored Ray-Ban avi­a­tors. Winter’s own bad-ass.

But today’s ques­tion con­cerns indoor activ­i­ties: Do you buy movies on DVD? Why or why not?

I ask because I don’t. Or hardly ever, now that Kate is past child­hood and the time-for-mom tech­nique of park­ing her in front of a video. In Ann Arbor a few years ago I came across a tent sale for Border’s ware­house stock, a real Blondie-goes-to-Tudbury’s free-for-all, and they had unsold or cutout or made-obsolete-by-the-director’s-cut DVDs for sale for $5, the magic price point for me, and I think I bought three — “The Pro­duc­ers” (and if you won­der whether it was the orig­i­nal or the remake, you don’t know me at all), “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and “Taxi Dri­ver.” I have watched the first two once, and the third maybe three times, mainly for the fea­turettes. That’s the most DVDs I ever bought at a sit­ting, but I have maybe a hand­ful more, mostly Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion clas­sics, that I never or rarely watch.

I won­der because some­one must buy DVDs, beyond Block­buster stores. I see DVDs at garage sales. They’re never, ever, a movie any­one with half a brain would want to watch, even on cable. Being hood­winked into spend­ing $8 on a ticket before the reviews buried it, sure. And yet some­one said, “Ellen DeGeneres in ‘Mr. Wrong’? Yeah, that’s worth $20.” Most movies are crap, and most do their brisk­est DVD sales in the first month. And the only DVDs I’d buy are things like “Rashomon,” 60 years young.

A few years back I did a story on the great Amer­i­can paper­back book, and had a fas­ci­nat­ing chat with the author of a coffee-table book devoted to the sub­ject. The paper­back, he said, is truly a demo­c­ra­tic won­der, and pointed out that the stan­dard price point of mass-market paper­back has, over time, tracked amaz­ingly close to that of an hour of work at min­i­mum wage. Before paper­backs, Amer­i­cans who weren’t wealthy enough to buy hard­cover books — and there were mil­lions of them — patron­ized lend­ing libraries, which were not the same as pub­lic libraries, more like video stores for books. You paid a fee to check a book out for a few days, and brought it back. The paper­back dime novel, printed on cheap paper and easy to stick in a lunch pail or back pocket for a few min­utes’ break time, rep­re­sented a rev­o­lu­tion in bring­ing books to the masses.

Of course, the masses don’t always want to read the Har­vard Clas­sics, so then we got the glo­ri­ous genre of pulp fic­tion, about which I will one day write at greater length. It so hap­pens that in the last year I read col­lec­tions of two of my favorite writ­ers’ early work for the pulps (Elmore Leonard and John D. Mac­Don­ald), and boy was that inter­est­ing. Your Eng­lish teacher tells you fic­tion is art, but there’s a spe­cial kind of art cre­ated by hav­ing to get a lot of expo­si­tion up top, before the reader has to turn the page. I’ve always admired fic­tion writ­ers who could make their liv­ing entirely from writ­ing and not teach­ing, and you get a glimpse of how it’s done — by pleas­ing the reader. Those who can do it and make it fun to read are well and truly artists, if you ask me.

I guess buy­ing John D. MacDonald’s pulp col­lec­tion would qual­ify as buy­ing the DVD. (Although I didn’t. It was a gift.)

I am no longer mak­ing sense. I’m dis­tracted. I’ve been think­ing about a story I’d like to pitch, which really inter­ests me. Now to find a func­tion­ing pub­li­ca­tion that might pay me for it. That’s the challenge.

So, what do you have cued up for the week­end, besides get­ting out your shiny avi­a­tor shades?

One bit of blog­gage: I see John Good­man has been added to the cast of “Treme,” by our fave David Simon, now shoot­ing in New Orleans. Good­man will play a “col­lege pro­fes­sor,” I read. Let’s hope his char­ac­ter is named Ash­ley Morris.

That is all.

I don’t know if any of you had a chance to read J.C.‘s rant yes­ter­day, on his blog, about the pub­lic self-scourging news exec­u­tives are given to these days. In par­tic­u­lar, this pas­sage set him off:

Tom Rosen­stiel and oth­ers pointed out [that] those jour­nal­ists and news orga­ni­za­tions that don’t drop the pose of lec­turer and learn how to gen­uinely engage the audi­ence will be lost.

The pose of lec­turer!? Per­haps you’re con­fus­ing that with, uh, report­ing the news.

We’ve all known one of those peo­ple who’s inclined to be apolo­getic — takes all the blame, defers all credit to oth­ers, calls her­self no great beauty, calls him­self only half-bright. And sooner or later, we all dis­cover there’s a very fine line between self-effacement and cring­ing, just as there’s one between bold con­fi­dence and Don­ald Trump. I think John found it in the news exec­u­tives who fret over “lecture-based jour­nal­ism.” I can’t remem­ber where I first heard that expres­sion, of “old” report­ing as a lec­ture and “new” report­ing as a con­ver­sa­tion, but it was a few years ago, and I think it was from none other than Jimmy Lileks, who only took a few more years to allow com­ments on his own blog. Heh. Indeed.

But that’s not impor­tant. The idea is that some­how jour­nal­ists aren’t really jour­nal­ists until they engage read­ers in “the con­ver­sa­tion” and stop “lec­tur­ing.” Well, OK. I mean, I get it. But I think, in get­ting it, too many edi­tors and pub­lish­ers are for­get­ting about professionalism.

I swear, I don’t think for even a minute that I’m a screen­writer, but of late I’ve been in a screen­writ­ing state of mind, and have redis­cov­ered John August’s fine, fine screen­writ­ing blog. Yes­ter­day he had an item about a startup com­pany called Scripped, prompted by an inter­view with one of its founders, who seemed to be say­ing that the prob­lem with screen­writ­ing today is that the peo­ple who do it make too much money, and the way to fix this “prob­lem” is to make free screen­writ­ing soft­ware avail­able to all, and open it up to real-time “col­lab­o­ra­tion” with other users who fancy them­selves the next Richard LaGrave­nese. Sunil Rajara­man says:

Two prob­lems are solved with web-based screen­writ­ing soft­ware. The first is col­lab­o­ra­tion. Many of the scripts of the films we see in movie the­aters have under­gone dozens of rewrites before they make it to the screen. For exam­ple, for the orig­i­nal of Good Will Hunt­ing, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck put the screen­play together with more anec­do­tal sto­ries about South Boston and friends they grew up with. Char­ac­ters were elim­i­nated from the screen­play and it under­went a very detailed rewrit­ing process. Who knows how many writ­ers had their hands on that screen­play before it was made — and it even­tu­ally won an Oscar. Col­lab­o­ra­tion is made eas­ier with web-based soft­ware.… That goes for peo­ple col­lab­o­rat­ing across dif­fer­ent loca­tions. Let’s say you are work­ing with writ­ers in China or India and you are here in the U.S. Scripped makes it eas­ier to share drafts, track real-time changes and so forth.

The sec­ond prob­lem online soft­ware solves is access to writ­ers. If you give the soft­ware away for free — it is very cheap to pro­vide the soft­ware — you can attract all sorts of tal­ent that would have oth­er­wise not been inter­ested in screen­writ­ing. All of a sud­den, they are look­ing for free screen­writ­ing soft­ware on Google. A plethora of options are avail­able. By cre­at­ing access to more writ­ers, the soft­ware becomes a mech­a­nism to aggre­gate talent.

I don’t know much about screen­writ­ing. I took two uni­ver­sity classes, wrote one feature-length screen­play for one class and rewrote it for the other. I’ve writ­ten four short scripts for which no one will ever give me an Oscar. I’m at work on another feature-length piece, which faces the usual over­whelm­ing odds of even being read, much less pro­duced. I’ve never earned a dime from it. It’s strictly a hobby that I do to give me and my friends some­thing to goof around with. But if every­thing I know can be car­ried in a very small bas­ket, I must know more than Sunil Raja­ma­ran, who appar­ently raised ven­ture cap­i­tal based on the idea that the cost of screen­writ­ing soft­ware is some­how a major dis­cour­age­ment to peo­ple who might oth­er­wise be inclined to try it. I paid $49 for my copy of Final Draft, the industry-standard soft­ware. Granted, that was at steep uni­ver­sity dis­count, with fur­ther mark­downs for a com­ing new ver­sion, but even today, full retail is only $200. Apple’s word proces­sor, Pages, con­tains a screen­play tem­plate and, as August points out, you can write a script on any­thing from MS Word to a typewriter.

What’s more, August fur­ther points out, the “Good Will Hunt­ing” story is untrue, and even if it were, what’s the rev­e­la­tion? That many peo­ple get their hands on a script under con­sid­er­a­tion? You don’t say. Writ­ing is rewrit­ing? Stop the presses. It’s not uncom­mon for a script headed for pro­duc­tion to be rewrit­ten a dozen times or more. I learned this from read­ing the New Yorker, not as a secret handed down by the fac­ulty man­darins at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. Some­times a rewrite improves a script; other times it ruins it. My rewrite pro­fes­sor liked to pass out early drafts of “The Tru­man Show,” when the story was set in New York City and Tru­man was a greasy creep who jerked off in pub­lic. By the time the cam­eras rolled, it was set in Sea­side, Florida, and starred Jim Car­rey as a sunny charmer. Hooray for Hollywood.

But this idea, that col­lab­o­rat­ing with other Scripped users in China or India is the key to your suc­cess­ful career, touches on some­thing else I found through August’s site, and wraps up with what the news exec­u­tives are say­ing, too — the dif­fer­ence between pro­fes­sional and ama­teur. August posts the text of a lec­ture he gave three years ago on the sub­ject. It’s long, but it’s worth read­ing, because he makes a pow­er­ful dis­tinc­tion between the two, to wit:

When we say “pro­fes­sional,” I think what we’re really talk­ing about is “pro­fes­sion­al­ism,” which is this whole bun­dle of expec­ta­tions about how a per­son is sup­posed to act.

Exactly. It’s not about whether you get paid. It’s about whether to take your work seri­ously enough to hold your­self to a cer­tain set of stan­dards. He points out the key dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who care enough to give a crap and those who don’t, in this passage:

When would you choose to be an ama­teur? Well, prob­a­bly the moments in which you obvi­ously suck, either because you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re just not very good at it. Or at least in the moments when peo­ple are crit­i­ciz­ing you. You’d say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m only an amateur.”

You’re basi­cally say­ing, “Don’t judge me.”

And here’s where this indi­rect proof falls apart: Peo­ple will always judge you. You can’t con­trol that. You can’t con­trol what scale they’re going to judge you on, or which cri­te­ria are most important.

Exactly. For years, jour­nal­ists who have been fol­low­ing the top “cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists” have noted this dif­fer­ence. Say one screws up, gets pinned to the wall on a mis­take or undis­closed con­flict or what­ever. Sooner or later, they try to wrig­gle out by throw­ing up their hands and say­ing, “Hey, I don’t get paid for this. I’m just a blog­ger.” They essen­tially under­cut their own sta­tus, while at the same time assert­ing their right to be both out­siders and insid­ers. Read my report­ing, but don’t hold it to your bull­shit MSM stan­dards, because I’m an ama­teur. They can assert what­ever they want. But a pro­fes­sional shouldn’t do that. (I say this fully aware that I’ve done it myself.)

So I guess I’d join with J.C. in telling the news exec­u­tives of the world to stop wor­ry­ing so much about chang­ing the lec­ture to a con­ver­sa­tion, and just do your damn jobs. Take pride in them. Man up. Lis­ten to feed­back, con­sider it care­fully, but stop cow­er­ing under it.

I’ve gone on way, way too long on this. This piece could use a rewrite, I see now. But I have to take a shower and get some work done. If you’ve come this far, how about a punchline?

Don’t judge me. I’m an amateur.

The film chal­lenge came right on time, and was pretty sim­ple: The end of the world. Free-choice genre, no prop or dia­logue, only a story about the end of the world. You can see why this would make a Detroit crew feel they were halfway there:

Yes, it’s our old friend the Packard plant. But how can you not use it? If you needed a vast, already-dressed set suit­able for the end of the world, duh. So we went there for a few shots.

Our main char­ac­ter is a teenage girl reduced to scav­eng­ing the ruined, depop­u­lated city. She lives in a hovel. Our art depart­ment con­structed one in the base­ment of another build­ing, a for­mer print­ing plant con­verted to lofts and per­for­mance spaces. For­tu­nately, the base­ment retains that “Silence of the Lambs” feel. I went down there as they were build­ing her pallet:

God, these peo­ple are good. (The art depart­ment.) It was simul­ta­ne­ously post-apocalyptic and human. That light over the pal­let felt pre­cisely like weak win­ter sun com­ing through a sky­light. It’s such a plea­sure to work with peo­ple who are good at what they do. Like our makeup guy, Dan Phillips:

Dan used to be an autoworker. Took the buy­out, went to makeup school, and is now work­ing pretty often on the many pro­duc­tions going on here. He has some good sto­ries. That’s Robert Young III, in his cameo role as Vacant Lot Corpse, show­ing off Dan’s hand­i­work. Photo by Con­nie Mangilin, another producer.

The film? Haven’t seen the final cut yet. I’ll keep you posted. This is the point in the process where I get crabby and it’s best that I keep my dis­tance. Oth­er­wise I might be strid­ing around the office like a tyrant, chan­nel­ing my inner news­pa­per cuss. One of our news edi­tors in Fort Wayne would, when the desk fell behind, call out in his rich south­ern accent, “Peo­ple! We ain’t puttin’ up a shut­tle here!” I don’t think that would be helpful.

I’m not help­ing out much here, either. I com­mend to you today some words by our own J.C. Burns, who has beheld one too many grov­els by broken-down, dispir­ited news exec­u­tives, and has some­thing to say to both the exec­u­tives and the bored-bored-bored news con­sumers they allegedly serve.

I’m off to encounter Busy Monday.

Never ask an idle ques­tion on a blog, unless you want it answered. In this case I did, and I’m grate­ful to my old pal Vince for check­ing with his own pal Eddie, a native speaker of…I think Man­darin Chi­nese, although it could be Can­tonese, and it may be both. (He’s a smart guy.) Any­way, I asked yes­ter­day if any­one knew the mean­ing of the Chi­nese char­ac­ter in the “Red Dawn” remake, seen all over town these days.

And guess what, Eddie does: “It’s the date when the Com­mu­nist Party told the Chi­nese peo­ple, regard­less of their party affil­i­a­tion, to stand up and fight against Japan­ese inva­sion” in 1935. (If you’d like to read Chair­man Mao’s state­ment in its entirety, it’s the sec­ond foot­note here, and let me warn you, Chair­man Mao did not write in bumper stickers.)

So: Inside joke to those savvy enough to under­stand, key to some plot point, or just some­thing the graphic designer liked? What­ever, thanks Vince, and thanks Eddie.

On edit: Vince writes: Eddie speaks Man­darin. (and Tai­wanese, Eng­lish & Japan­ese.) But read­ing the text has no regard for Man­darin vs Can­tonese. The sym­bols are the same.

Noted.