I don’t know what I could say about Roger Ebert that I didn’t say three years ago, when the extent of his injury, and his badly reconstructed new face, was revealed in Esquire magazine. I wouldn’t change a word, but in looking around the web in the late afternoon, I can see that I missed a lot.

This was maybe my favorite, the public spat between Ebert and Conrad Black, who owned the Chicago Sun-Times for a while. Black was a Canadian and believed all the good things in the world were made for him and him alone, and the correspondence between the two, carried out in public, is delightful:

Dear Roger,

I have been disappointed to read your complaints about the former Hollinger International management. I vividly recall your avaricious negotiating techniques through your lawyer, replete with threats to quit, and your generous treatment from David Radler, which yielded you an income of over $500,000 per year from us, plus options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your own Web site at the company’s expense. …

…which led to:

Dear Conrad,

One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind. I am not at all surprised by your letter to me, because I would assume that is how you would feel; what is refreshing is that you say so.

Let me just say in response that I have never complained about my salary at the Sun-Times, but to describe my lawyer as ”avaricious” is a bit much; he engaged in spirited negotiations, as he should have, and he and you settled on a contract. It goes without saying that any contract negotiation includes the possibility that either party might choose to leave rather than to sign. I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself. Since you have made my salary public, let me say that when I learned that Barbara received $300,000 a year from the paper for duties described as reading the paper and discussing it with you, I did not feel overpaid.

You really had to live through the newspaper business to believe it.

This, Will Leitch’s story about how he loved Ebert, then insulted him, instantly regretted it and came to be forgiven, is the talker of the hour, but it’ll be a few more hours before you read this, and something else may come up in the interim.

You might also like to read Neil Steinberg’s obit, which is very fine.

Oh, this is such a loss. He worked so hard, for so long, it seemed he’d never stop.

By the way, if you’re looking for some longform Ebert to read, I suggest “The Great Movies” collections, particularly Vol. 1. He really loved his work.

And Roger wins the New Yorker caption contest is worth your time, too.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, shall we?

While we’re on the subject of working as long as one is able, Elaine Stritch is playing her final shows, at the Carlyle, before retiring to Michigan. She’s 88. I hope to see her in a cafe somewhere around here soon.

And not to leave you with a total bummer, here are some squirrels, in some remarkable tableaux.

Oh, and the president, doing what he does, with the cutest kid ever.

Let’s all have a happy weekend, shall we?

ADDED: An editor (of Ebert’s) speaks. Some good stuff (for writers, anyway) on his process, and what he was like to work with:

He was a celebrity in the journalism and film world, but he never pulled the star act. He was quite amenable to editing. If you needed or wanted to make a change, he was fine with that. He just rarely needed it. The prose just flowed. He was a real wordsmith.

OK, one more:

One day an inspector from the Chicago Post Office came to our editor, James Hoge, with a puzzling discovery. Several hundred empty envelopes addressed to Ann Landers had been found in the trash behind an address in Hyde Park. With an eerie certainty, Jim called in Milton and asked him for his address. Milton, whose jobs included distributing mail, had been stealing the quarters sent in for Ann Landers’ pamphlet, Petting: When Does It Go Too Far? Discussing his firing after work at Billy Goat’s, he was philosophical: “Hundreds of kids can thank me that they were conceived.”

First (long) bike ride of the season was Saturday. Fifteen miles at a bit of a clip left me thinking:

1) God, am I out of shape.
2) Even for Detroit, this is a lot of broken glass on the street.
3) I need a road bike.
4) No you don’t. Get your ass in shape and stop thinking equipment is the answer to this scurrying-on-a-wheel feeling.
4) But I’m in my top gear and I’m scurrying! I need a bigger ring.
5) Shut up and look at the scenery.

So I did. It was a gorgeous, warm day, which in Detroit means all the snow is gone, but the detritus of the winter has not yet been cleaned up or overgrown. Belle Isle is not looking good, which makes sense in a bankrupt city I suppose, but a trash-strewn shame just the same. The conservancy folks haven’t gotten busy yet, so we’ll see what we have in another month. And even on a bad day, Belle Isle has the river and a breeze and lots of birds, so — did I say breeze? Whose idea was it to make eastbound the first part of this ride, anyway?

The bike will only come when the right Craigslist bargain drops into my lap. But for now, I think another couple of padded-crotch shorts are definitely in order. Plus a lot more time in the saddle.

All in all, it was a grateful-to-be-alive sort of day. I needed it.

Saturday night was the dilemma of the season: “The Ten Commandments” on ABC or a gorge on “Homeland,” screening as part of Comcast’s free-everything weekend? I did a little of both, savoring just enough of the restored Technicolor cheese-fest and then three straight hours of watching Claire Danes do her face-crumple cry thing on Showtime. “Homeland” has grown on me, although I can see it painting itself into a corner this season, but if ANYone think they’re going to spoil the second half of the season for me in comments, I will CUT YOU. It’s better than any other Showtime series I’ve seen, by a mile. There are those who like “Dexter,” but I watched it a couple times and meh. “Nurse Jackie” had me for a time, but then meh. Dollar for dollar, I’m still an HBO girl. And I hope that soon I won’t be an anything girl, because I’ll be out riding my bike so much.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Easter. We went to Toledo for lunch with Alan’s sister, then to the museum for a couple of hours. It’s a very good museum for a city its size, thanks to the Libbeys and other responsible local tycoons. I spent a little time with “Alex,” a Chuck Close canvas.

I wish I could afford more art. If I won the lottery, my indulgences would be, in order: Travel, art, land. Not a house, land. All I really want out of a house anymore is a fireplace and a decent kitchen, and not even that’s essential. Art-wise, you go through our house, and you can see our starving-reporter days (framed posters), then less-starving (framed prints), then photos, and a painting or two. I still like everything we have on the walls, whatever that means.

Do I have bloggage before I make dinner and we watch “Game of Thrones?” Why yes, I do:

Laugh-out-loud funny is Anne Lamott, describing dating in late middle age, something I hope I never, ever have to do:

…91 percent of men snore loudly – badly, like very sick bears. I would say that CPAP machines are the greatest advance in marital joy since the vibrator. It transforms an experience similar to sleeping next to a dying silverback gorilla into sleeping next to an aquarium.

…Yet union with a partner — someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies, read together in bed, do hard tasks together, and to be loved by. That sounds really lovely.

Who is killing the prosecutors of Kaufman County, Texas? (Texas has a Kaufman County? Who knew?)

In Detroit, “garden supply centers,” particular those with “hydroponic” on the sign, is a nudge-wink that means “medical marijuana will be in your future sooner than you think.” Apparently this is the same elsewhere, too, although for one couple, it just meant fresh vegetables year-round. To the police’s embarrassment.

Monday awaits! Enjoy your week, y’all.

I wish something had actually happened over the weekend that I could write about today. I wish I had been struck by a thought, learned a new skill, did something different or unusual. But no.

I did my weekend shopping. Here’s what I bought:

Underwear
Groceries
Gasoline
Spinach, asparagus, spring mix, eggs (I break out Eastern Market purchases separately from groceries, because I enjoy the shopping so much more). Also, bacon and fuckin’ sausage. Sausage in our house gets the obscene modifier due to a private joke that wouldn’t be funny to you.
Two movie tickets.

OK, there’s something — the movie tickets. Went with some friends to the Redford Theater, one of those restored movie houses with an in-house pipe organ. They show classic films, on film, and beg for your change at the concession stand so they can replace the carpeting. The show: “Easter Parade” with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, one of those featherlight MGM musicals that everyone remembers in a pastel blur until you see it again. And you remember it for a while, until it all goes pastel again. Which isn’t to say it’s not enjoyable; watching Fred Astaire dance is one of those great gifts Hollywood gave the world, and Judy’s singing likewise. The second bananas, Ann Miller and a very young, pre-Kennedy pimp Peter Lawford are less memorable, but Ann got some great costumes and Lawford was…well, he was young and handsome.

Something I noticed this time: Judy has a song just for us.

Irving Berlin wrote “Easter Parade,” which I didn’t know. That means two beloved songs pegged to Christian holidays came from a Jewish American. I love this country.

I don’t love this weather. I can’t believe I bought sunscreen a month ago. Pout, pout.

Part of my mental malaise is due to the physical one moving through the household, and while I haven’t fallen to it yet, it seems like only a matter of time. Last week, I sat across a lunch table from a colleague who sounded like death. I thought frantic hand washing and squirts of sanitizer saved me, but then Alan succumbed on Friday. I promptly moved my pillows to the guest room, but it may have been too late. And this is a bad one. It’ll likely strike as soon as the weather warms.

Although that won’t be for another week. We might nudge 50 by Friday, but likely not.

This is all I do these days: Bitch about boredom and the weather. Well, next week starts [community-theater English accent] Game of Throoones.{/community-theater English accent]. It will be very different from “Easter Parade,” that’s for sure.

Hope you all had a wonderful Palm Sunday. Let’s see what the week again brings.

The weekend’s movies included “A Late Quartet,” which intrigued me with the trailer and sold me with the cast — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken. Plus, for a $4.99 rental via iTunes, it’s hard to go wrong.

And the film, while not perfect, was good enough. Too long by a tad, a little too much blah-blah, but these are people who deal with their problems via blah-blah, so hey, verisimilitude. It’s the story of a long-running, successful string quartet at a crisis point when their eldest member, the cellist, gets a Parkinson’s diagnosis. Artists are easy to caricature onscreen, but these people weren’t, and maybe one of the reasons I liked this is, I felt fully immersed in the classical-strings part of professional musicianship. They have money, but not a ton of it; they work very hard; they get on one another’s nerves. A lot like your job, maybe.

Kate’s bass teacher had an upright for sale for some time, a nice instrument he’d rescued and put a lot of work into restoring. Priced around $5,000, it was too rich for us, but at one point a concert player from Boston was interested, and sent a friend from the Detroit symphony to take it for a test-drive. The Bostonian passed, and decided to spend that sum on a bow instead. A $5,000 bow! I remember thinking at the time, but in this film you watch one of the characters build one from scratch, driving to a horse farm to buy hair imported from Siberia, and well — a $5,000 bow seems pretty reasonable.

If it floats by your on-demand menu, I think you’ll like it. Roger did.

I wish I had a more exciting report from my weekend, but eh. I spent much of Saturday feeling overall punky, not bad enough to be sick-sick but not good enough to do anything other than watch an iTunes movie and watch the snow fly outside the window. Didn’t even make it to the market.

Let’s hope for a better week ahead. In the meantime, some bloggage:

Because of the New York Times’ publication schedule, everyone was reading and commenting on the magazine cover story last week, but I didn’t read it until Sunday. It’s about the GOP’s continuing inability to hear what the world keeps trying to tell it. Here’s an account of a focus group in Columbus, Ohio:

When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

Anderson concluded the group on a somewhat beseeching note. “Let’s talk about Republicans,” she said. “What if anything could they do to earn your vote?”

A self-identified anti-abortion, “very conservative” 27-year-old Obama voter named Gretchen replied: “Don’t be so right wing! You know, on abortion, they’re so out there. That all-or-nothing type of thing, that’s the way Romney came across. And you know, come up with ways to compromise.”

“What would be the sign to you that the Republican Party is moving in the right direction?” Anderson asked them.

“Maybe actually pass something?” suggested a 28-year-old schoolteacher named Courtney, who also identified herself as conservative.

I know lots of Republicans who think gridlock is good, because it stops the Democrats from their onward march toward Marxism. Hmm.

The best story you’ll read about the end of the Jeopardy Teen Tournament. Olive long-sleeve!

We have black squirrels in Grosse Pointe. I’d like to send a delegation to Olney, Ill., so we can have a fully integrated squirrel civil-rights movement. And I’d like this guy to write a new song about it:

Take me there, I want to see the squirrels / Yeah, take me there, I hear they’re white as South Sea pearls…

Sooner or later Gawker will find this, but you heard it here first.

So, this weekend it was “Zero Dark Thirty,” at an actual cineplex. It became evident very quickly that I wouldn’t “enjoy” this film in the are-you-not-entertained sense of things, so I settled in to watch it with a certain detachment, trying to appreciate what was there to be appreciated. These things include:

Kathryn Bigelow’s always-arresting cinematography, which must have more to do with her than her directors of photography, because she seems to work with different ones on every film, but they all share a certain look. That is to say, very beautiful, with at least one shot or sequence you remember for a long time after — like the opening sequence of “The Hurt Locker,” or, in this film, the raid on the bin Laden compound, seen almost entirely in either underlit moonglow or in the green of the soldiers’ night-vision glasses.

Otherwise, visually, the film seems to consist of 90 percent closeups, usually on Jessica Chastain’s clenching jawline. I’m indebted to David Edelstein for this observation:

There has been speculation that Maya was inspired by the same (covert) CIA agent as Claire Danes’s bipolar Carrie in Homeland. As Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.” The parts and actresses could hardly be more different. Danes is a skin actor. She’s soft: You read her pores. Chastain is a muscle and tendons actor: You read the tension in her body.

That’s exactly right. She doesn’t have a lot of lines in this script; you spend many moments watching her eyes scan computer screens or watch a colleague torture detainees. But you never doubt where her head is at, and despite her lack of blah-blah, you can see the change in her from 2003-2011, and it rests almost entirely in her body. Great acting.

The torture. Yes, it’s hard to watch, but it’s presented in such a way that what goes on in these dirty rooms — the Middle East we see resembles a hotter, sun-blasted, better-populated but essentially desert version of Detroit — is just part of what has to happen. Again, Edelstein:

The torture is efficient and gets results. The outcry alluded to over abuses at Abu Ghraib screws up intelligence-gathering. The anti-torture stance of President Obama — who made the hunt for bin Laden a priority after Rumsfeld’s military let him slip out of Tora Bora, and gave the go-ahead to proceed with a mission that could have brought him down the way the catastrophic Iran rescue mission felled Jimmy Carter — is presented (via a TV interview) as an impediment. Dan the ace torturer tells Maya, “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.” Crap: There go the dog collars.

The best you can do, going in, is be aware you’re being manipulated. This isn’t journalism.

Finally, I liked the way Bigelow avoided the easy audience-pleaser of letting us watch Osama bin Laden take the bullet that splatters his life on the wall. We follow the soldiers into the Abbottabad compound as though we’re the fourth man through the door — the camera jumps, the light is never where we want it, the kids are howling, the women are howling, the shots don’t go blam-blam-blam but pop-pop-pop. In the end, the best we get is an incomplete view of a Semitic nose and a gray beard, and Chastain’s face as she looks at what’s in the body bag. She doesn’t exult; she doesn’t even smile. Like many of us, she seems to know that even though this particular mission is accomplished, the war goes on and on and on.

It occurs to me that this is the second movie I’ve seen in about a year — the other one being “Contagion” — that manages to make problem-solving by smart people interesting and even exciting. The reality-based community shall prevail!

And now, it’s on to pot No. 4 of National Soup Month — roasted sweet potato.

And just one piece of bloggage today. How many of you live in a neighborhood or subdivision with a homeowners’ association? And how many of those homeowners’ associations have been taken over by petty tyrants? If so, you should enjoy this piece by the Evansville Courier, but you should especially enjoy the embedded audio clip of a telephone rant by said tyrant, who wants you to know that if the paper runs this story, there will be a legal lawsuit against them, and he wants to speak to the legal department right now, and rant some more, too.

May the Monday be with you, but not too much so.

You know what there is to do in January at this latitude? Not bloody much. Or a whole bloody lot, if you like to cook and just got a big-ass new TV. The third pot of National Soup Month soup (cream of cauliflower) is in progress on the stove, and I’ve been watching movies.

The soup report comes later. For now, two flicks that I enjoyed.

First, “The Queen of Versailles,” which is absolutely worth a use of your Netflix or iTunes account (or DVD rental, for you geezers). The story of David and Jackie Siegel, two of the nouveau-est of the nouveau riche, how they made it and how they lost it (although they still retain quite a bit) arouses my favorite movie emotion — mixed feelings.

The story begins as the account of how this couple set out to build the largest private home (under one roof, a qualification everyone seems to make, so I’ll make it here) in the country, in superclassy Orlando. They took as their inspiration the French palace of Louis XIV, although David Siegel is pretty upfront that the real design grandaddy was “the top three floors of the Paris,” i.e., the hotel in Las Vegas. Vegas is also where the Siegel wealth is undergoing an aggressive expansion, the latest of his time-share resorts “in a beautiful tower of blue glass.” I will credit the Siegels for affording the filmmakers a great deal of access to the sausage-making, not only of their family life but also of their business empire — we see rubes pulled in from their Strip-strolling to hear the pitch for their own little fraction of a piece of Vegas suite life. We also see the sales-staff whoop-it-up meeting, where sellers are told they are “saving lives” by peddling vacations.

But mostly we see the Siegels — he, a septuagenarian by turns smiling-and-indulgent and crabby-and-grouchy, and she, a long-legged former beauty queen (of the Mrs. Florida, not Miss, variety) with one of the most preposterous set of fake knockers you’ll see outside of a strip club. (She loves to serve them up in strapless and peek-a-boo styles, like cheese balls.) Oh, and their eight children and multiple dogs — one of the latter running around the house, two former ones preserved through taxidermy.

Now. Any household with eight children is going to have a default setting of Chaos, even with the squadron of staff the couple employs to help them live their lives, but good lord, these people make the Nall/Derringer house look like Downton Abbey. Piles of crap are everywhere, the dog poops on the carpet, the meals arrive in bags emblazoned with the Golden Arches. They have so much stuff — and an inability to part with much of it, even as Jackie admit she shops a little compulsively and doesn’t really know what, exactly, she has at any moment — they have already filled their 25,000 square foot house. Versailles, as planned, will come close to 100,000. So, you know (and I loved this part, because I’ve heard some version of it so many times in my own life), they need that bigger house.

Well, you can guess what happens. The financial crisis happens and the subprime timeshare crap they’re peddling goes into the toilet, down the sewer and out to sea, taking with it most of the Siegels’ fortune. The cash flow necessary to keep everything oiled is suddenly gone, work on Versailles is abandoned and the compulsive spenders learn how just regular old rich people live; they keep their big existing house, but have to lay off a few of the Filipino nannies and housekeepers, start flying commercial and enroll their children in public schools.

It’s hard to dislike Jackie Siegel, cheese-ball boobs and all. She seems brighter than she lets on, and she does have an inner toughness that keeps her smiling through her financial calamities. She’s not so bright that she doesn’t see the preposterousness in her pout that “the bank got us hooked on cheap money and then took it away,” as though the entire Siegel empire isn’t predicated on doing the exact same thing to those Vegas tourists. Her spending does extend to a childhood friend, whom she sends $5,000 in a fruitless attempt to keep her house out of foreclosure, and they support lots of charities. When she gets one of those chemical peels that leaves her skin looking like she witnessed a nuclear blast, and her husband tells her to get out of his office because he doesn’t want to look at it, she frankly states she’s worried about being traded in for a newer model. But the story ends, as they so often do, without a firm resolution. They’re still married, they’re still rich and they don’t seem to have learned much. Just like real life.

Dave Wiegel saw it, and recommends it, too. Link includes the trailer.

Joe Nocera points out some timeline problems, and the Siegels’ lawsuit, in the NYT.

The other was a much darker ride — “Big Fan,” starring Patton Oswalt as the world’s No. 1 New York Giants fan, with all that implies. At 35, he works the night shift in a parking garage, writing the script for his daily call to a sports-talk radio station, where he taunts a Philadelphia Eagles superfan. He apparently wants nothing more than this life of meaningless work and sports obsession. When he and his only friend, Sal, see a star Giants running back filling up his SUV on Staten Island one night, they impulsively follow him, and stuff happens.

If you only think of Patton Oswalt as the voice of Remy the rat in “Ratatouille,” prepare for a different side. Really well-acted and written.

Which, I suppose, brings me to today’s question for the room: Who should I root for — nay, for whom shall I root in tonight’s BCS game? How do you pick a lesser evil among the good ol’ boys of the SEC and that uniquely irritating brand of fan known as the Domer? Southern football worship vs. all that Ronald Reagan touchdown Jesus crap? I’ll leave it up to you.

From last week, but worth the read: Kevin Drum on environmental lead as a crime-rate driver. Don’t be put off by the fact it’s in Mother Jones — it’s interesting and worth your time.

And so the first full week of the year begins. It will feel very long, I fear. Let’s survive it together.

We saw “Lincoln” Sunday night, which wasn’t my first choice, until it was. I’d much rather see “Argo,” but OK, we’re all going, this is Important History, it’ll win Oscars, and I will ignore that voice in the back of my head that says, Steven Spieeeeeelberg, BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE, sucked it up and went.

And I’m 78 percent glad I did, which is saying something. More learned film critics than I can fill your ear with words upon words about this, that and the other thing, so let’s do this with bullet points:

* I have this little Steven Spielberg problem. We just don’t get along, and I’ve stopped worrying about it. I liked “Munich,” however, which was written by Tony Kushner. “Lincoln” was written by Tony Kushner, too. The 78 percent figure cited above is almost entirely due to him. But also because…

* Loved the cinematography and production design, the latter of which very deftly offered up a White House that’s sort of a dump in a smoky, cold, manure-smelling city. The former suggested dim corners and half-moon faces lit by candles and gaslights. (That this had the added benefit of hiding the prosthetic seams on Daniel Day-Lewis’ face had to be a big plus.)

* Daniel Day-Lewis. Whoa. I could watch him spin yarns, offer aphorisms, and tell his wife to hold the spending on the flub-dubs all day.

* Loved the character actors who filled the House of Representatives. Hey, it’s the guy from “A Serious Man!” And Gale from “Breaking Bad!” Is that…whazzisname, the “500 Days of Summer” guy, AND Boyd Crowder from “Justified!”

* A few things I hated. They included the John Williams score tapping you on the shoulder, saying “Pay attention to this scene, because it’s important.” Hated that expository dialogue, although I did my best to forget it, and mostly did, but come on, Tony: Why did Sally Field get all the clunky speeches?

* James Spader! You’ve put on weight, but you’re still my man.

Alan liked it, but Kate was bored out of her tree.

So. Here are some camels:

The big one in the foreground is a male, and he’s in rut. The slobber all over his face is a byproduct of his constant tooth-grinding. His spiky head hair is greasy from a scent gland on the back of his noggin. Every so often he would stretch his neck back and rub it on his hump to spread his sexy around. I was told that when he’s really getting his freak on, he squats, pees on his tail and then swings it around like a priest with an aspergillum. The female never got any closer because that male wasn’t going to allow his woman to get near another warm-blooded animal.

Men. Gotta love ’em. They know what they want, and they’re not afraid to slobber, exude oil, spray pee and grunt to get it.

Which seems about the only way to transition to this: Happy hump day. I’m out.

I didn’t go to TEDxDetroit this year, after attending the one two years ago. It was, shall we say, a mixed bag. Upside: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Downside? Hard to say. Maybe the woman who’d opened a fitness studio where they did aerobics to Bollywood movie-soundtrack music. That’s it? That’s the “idea worth spreading?” You can do aerobics to the “Slumdog Millionaire” score? Ohhh-kay.

But in the end, I think it was this:

I guess everyone who owns a smartphone has a love/hate relationship with it, but this was an eye-opener for me. I couldn’t imagine speaking to an audience where two-thirds were staring down at a screen while I was supposedly the object of their attention. And it’s encouraged! You’re supposed to be tweeting it, the official hashtag is announced, and everyone’s tweets fly by on the screen behind the speaker. I guess this is how it’s done now, but it would make me nuts.

Anyway, two people I’ve interviewed recently were speaking at TED this year, and it was held Friday, so I dipped in and out of the live stream. The first person I heard was described as an “awesomeness expert” who would instruct attendees in “how to be awesome.” Everyone had some snarky detail added to their introduction; one, named Charlie, got a Charlie-bit-my-finger joke, delivered in a British accent. I couldn’t help but notice how many “social media experts” work for firms that appear to have been named by a child — Tiny Fish Partners, or Sleeping Dog Design. (No wonder “Mad Men” is such a hit. Adults! Wow!)

As it turned out, both guys I tuned in for were good, and both told large chunks of stories they told me, so there you have it: If you were reading Bridge, you knew all this stuff weeks ago.

And that was the weekend, although it also featured scallops, and that was very good. Pan-seared with lemon sauce, creamed spinach and oven-roasted potatoes, and “Sleepwalk With Me” afterward on the TV box. Roger gave it 3.5 stars, his readers, 3. I’m with the readers, but it was nice to see Lauren Ambrose again. The story is autobiographical, with the star, Mike Birbiglia, telling a story from his own life. Birbiglia is an average-guy shlump and Ambrose is a ginger-haired goddess, so it was strange to see him onscreen, falling out of love with a woman who so outclasses him in the looks department, but there you are. Hollywood has been asking us for years to swallow the idea that the hot young starlet of the moment wants to fuck, oh, Jack Nicholson, to use but one example out of zillions.

That’s one thing I loved about “About Schmidt,” one of Jack’s more recent films — for the first time since he hit 50, he was given a female partner his own age. She dies in the first 15 minutes, but while it lasted it was shocking.

So, bloggage:

In case you missed Basset posting this in the comments Friday, this is the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. Yeah, this guy:

And with the election just days away, he has not actually put that sign in a yard. Instead, it resides inside candidate Mark Clayton’s pickup. “VOTE FOR,” the sign says. The rest is hidden by the seats.

“Jesus did not have a campaign staff. And he had the most successful campaign in human history,” Clayton said recently, when asked if all this adds up to a winning run against incumbent Sen. Bob Corker (R). Jesus “didn’t even have pictures or a Web site.”

This may be America’s worst candidate.

Clayton, 36, is a part-time flooring installer, an indulger in conspiracy theories — and for Democrats here, the living personification of rock bottom. In a state that produced Democratic icons including Andrew Jackson and both Al Gores, the party has fallen so far that it can’t even run a good loser.

I’m late getting to this, but last week saw the death of Emanuel Steward, Detroit’s legendary boxing trainer. As I’ve mentioned here about a million times, I’m a latecoming boxing fan, and have come to appreciate “Manny’s” incisive commentary during many Saturday nights spent with HBO. Among his insights, according to the NYT: “You can’t feel quick in black shoes.”

Meanwhile, his sister says she has her “ass-kicking boots on,” and is stripping his gym of everything, including the ring, to “safeguard his legacy.” How leaving his fighters with no place to train does that, I’m not sure.

One more week until the election is upon us. Let’s see what it brings.

Such a lovely surprise this weekend: “Detropia,” a new documentary about our troubled neighbor, which played to a nearly packed house Saturday night hereabouts.

I understand this is of limited interest to those who don’t live nearby (or in similar cities), but for those of you who like film, documentaries, or who have any sort of connection to this place, I do recommend it. With some caveats.

They are: This isn’t a “news” documentary at all, more like jazz — meditations on a mood, improvisations on a theme, observations rather than commentary, although of course you’re free to fill in the blanks, and in fact are encouraged to.

The takeaway is that Detroit is the industrial age’s coal-mine canary, and that no one has sufficiently answered the question of what comes next. You may or may not agree, but the question — posed by one of the Detroiters whose activities serve as a through-line — is worth asking.

One scene features the UAW local president laying out the harsh reality for a room full of workers at one of the surviving plants, American Axle. It is a take-it-or-leave-it shit sandwich of 20-30 percent wage cuts across the board, and these are not good jobs in the first place — the top tier is around $18 an hour (down to $14), with the $14-per-hour folks knocked down to $11. The union moves to not even consider the offer, and it passes unanimously. The plant closes, a foregone conclusion.

I looked at these men and women, and thought, for the millionth time: What are we going to do with you? These aren’t lazy people. They want to work. They need to be paid a living wage. Twenty-two grand a year for life in an axle plant? Are you kidding me?

We say this over and over and over: Not everyone is cut out for higher education, but everyone can work. But where will the laid-off American Axle workers find it?

They are the 47 percent. By now, anyway. Neither presidential candidate has a concrete plan for their future. The Germans still have a healthy force of factory workers, don’t they? How do they manage it? (Don’t answer, I know. They take education and training a lot more seriously than we do.)

All is not grim. There’s a marvelous character, Tommy Stephens, a retired teacher who runs a blues club in a particularly bombed-out neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the urban farm site I wrote about earlier this year, although it’s a club in the street corner-in-Detroit sense, not, say, the House of Blues. But Stephens is funny and smart and won’t give up, and in that sense is the reason I like this screwed-up place so much.

Anyway, recommended.

And just in case you find all that too depressing, there’s this, from the Atlantic, on the booming startup culture downtown. It won’t be enough to save all 139 square miles, but it’s something.

So, bloggage:

Boy, is this story depressing:

A lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe.

“If they had Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama running, Barack Obama would be my last pick,” says Ray Morrison, 70, a retired steelworker and truck driver who lives on a country road west of the city. “If you want to know the true story about Obama, you have to watch Fox a little bit. I hate him.”

Here’s Cheryl Doran, 50, a waitress at the family restaurant Naples, speaking of Romney: “I think he’s the devil. I have no use for him.”

Al Fenner, 68, a bishop in the Shepherds Walk mission downtown, doesn’t think the president is “all-American” and believes that Obama once said that “he would stand more with the Islamic rather than with the American way.” Asked to cite a specific instance of Obama saying that, Fenner answered: “Go on YouTube and find it. I would not quote it if it were not true.”

I assume he’s talking about this, which I’ve seen referred to over and over again in the last few weeks. “But he’s a Muslim! He admits it!” etc. Watch the video, and you can see this admission in much the same way you see the cast of “Mad Men” sing along with Rick Astley.

Well, we still have five or six weeks to go, so why dwell? Hope your weekend was great. My apple pie turned out just fine.

I didn’t sleep well last night, due to a too-light dinner and a heavy workload. Nothing like waking up at 4 a.m. with hunger pangs and the usual dead-of-night conviction that ALL THE WORK YOU DO IS SHIT, AND SOONER OR LATER THE WORLD WILL DISCOVER THIS.

I read the iPad for a while, dozed off, got up for good at 5:30. It’s amazing how many people are updating their Facebook and Twitter at that hour. There are really only a couple of hours in the very dead of night when my stream is dead. I know this because one of my Twitter follows is @big_ben_clock, which does nothing but chime on the hour. When two or three of those stack up, I know the United States is sound asleep, coast to coast.

I should follow some Europeans. At that hour, the day is already moving at full speed over there. (And yes, I could simply try to go back to sleep like a normal person, but how can you do that when the world is thrumming with news and information?)

But as usually happens, my wee-hours fears were for naught, the day went well, and I just finished a salad-and-pasta meal with two glasses of wine. I would very much like to watch “Bachelorette” on demand, but fear I’ll be taken down before it’s over. Carbs + alcohol = an early bedtime for me.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about the fall movies I’m planning to see. Roger Ebert reported a bit from Toronto this week, and says he’s willing to bet “Argo” will be the year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. On the list? Why, yes. Also, “The Master” and certainly “Cloud Atlas,” because I lurved the novel so, so much. Roger says: Stirring and grand, and maybe great, but maybe not. Honestly, as usually happens with books I love, I’m less taken with the plot — although the plot(s) in “Cloud Atlas” are mind-boggling — than I am with the author’s prose style, which movies generally don’t deal with.

And yeah, I think “The Sessions,” but that will probably be a wait-for-DVD. And likely “Lincoln,” although if I can’t go as Brian Stouder’s and Jeff the MM’s date, what’s the damn point?

Did any news happen today? We had a little office chat about Nate Silver, who is so bullish on Obama’s reelection that he’s either going to make his career on Election Night or be struck with the urge to take a long vacation. He was scarily right last time, but who knows what that means?

I was perhaps too flip yesterday in dismissing Jonathan Kozol’s own too-flip observation about homelessness. At the time he made it, I recall a changing world in which great wealth was flooding into the nation’s large cities, closing the SRO hotels that had housed the addicted fringe. They were driven into the street with the freed mentally ill, and walking among this cohort in places like New York, Chicago and even Columbus, it was easy to get frustrated with anyone who suggested a simple solution. As many of you have pointed out, housing is the solution to homelessness, but it has to be the right sort of housing, and it has to be bolstered with appropriate support. If I oversimplified, I apologize.

Tom & Lorenzo have been at Fashion Week and critiquing actresses at the various Toronto film festival premieres, and I’m enjoying both very much. Adding to bucket list: Once, just once, inspiring a smart fashion eye to say, “Bow down, bitches.”

September 11, 2012 — an odd-year anniversary, but discuss if you like.